“Go on, Martin.”

“You look so beautiful.”

She thought, I don’t want to bear the child of a weak creature like this. I need the strongest blood now. She said, “But you haven’t finished your story.”

“Miriam, I have been captured.”

The words vibrated into Miriam’s shocked silence.

“They examined me, Miriam. They opened my jaw, they weighed me, they extracted fluids!”

“But you escaped?”

“They tried to make me think I had. It was a silly business, though—unlocked doors and such. I knew they had let me go.”

She could feel her heat beginning to rise. Her blood was flowing faster. If he had been let go, then there was danger here.

“What happened next?”

“I waited months—a full season of moons. Then I took something—a rat of a thing, half-starved, living under a bridge in the trackless neighborhoods beyond the Périphérique. I had not even opened a vein before they were there, falling on me from the roadway above, rushing up in automobiles—it was horrifying. I ran. All I could do.”

“But you must have been terribly hungry.”

“I tried again a few days later. This time I took the RER to the outskirts, to an area where live the brown ones that they call ratons. Again, I singled one out, cut it out of a little herd in a cinema, then started to have my dinner.”

“They appeared again.”

“Dozens of them! All around! This time I barely escaped. I came back here. I have remained within these walls ever since.”

“But, Martin, how could you have not eaten for—what—at least a year? It’s impossible.”

“ ‘Nothing is impossible when you must,’ that is the motto of my family. Miriam, I have drunk the feral cats, the mice, the rats. I have eaten the very flies that are spit by the air!”

No wonder he stank so. A Keeper could not live on such blood, or could barely live. She did not want to pity one of her own kind, especially not one she remembered with such respect. He had been a charming lover in his day. She remembered him in the flashing brocades of the last age, a powdered wig upon his head and a gold-knobbed stick in his hand. He knew the fashions of the age; he dallied with duchesses and played cards at the table of the king. Among the Keepers, he was known as an expert on the ways of man.

“You and I have always been kindred souls, Martin.”

“I have thought of you often, child. You still live among them?”

“I have a club in New York that is quite façonnable. And a human lover called Sarah.”

“That business of yours.”

“A human to serve you is most useful.” Or could be, if only she would answer the damned phone.

“I don’t even know the names of those who pursue me.”