“We are death, ma chérie, death is the final answer.” I gathered her up in my arms, felt her tucked against me, kissed her, kissed her, and kissed her vampire skin. “There are no questions after that.”

Her hand touched my forehead.

The ambulance was speeding, as if the siren were chasing it, as if the siren were the force driving it on. Her hand touched my eyelids. I won’t look at you!

Oh, please, help me … the dreary prayer of the devil to his cohorts, as he tumbles deeper and deeper towards hell.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

YES, I know where we are. You’ve been trying to bring me back here from the beginning, to the little hospital.” How forlorn it looked now, so crude with its clay walls, and wooden shuttered windows, and the little beds lashed together out of barely finished wood. Yet she was there in the bed, wasn’t she? I know the nurse, yes, and the old round-shouldered doctor, and I see you there in the bed—that’s you, the little one with the curls on the top of the blanket, and Louis there …

All right, why am I here? I know this is a dream. It’s not death. Death has no particular regard for people.

“Are you sure?” she said. She sat on the straight-back chair, golden hair done up in a blue ribbon, and there were blue satin slippers on her small feet. So that meant she was there in the bed, and there on the chair, my little French doll, my beauty, with the high rounded insteps, and the perfectly shaped little hands.

“And you, you’re here with us and you’re in a bed in the Washington, D.C., emergency room. You know you’re dying down there, don’t you?”

“Severe hypothermia, very possibly pneumonia. But how do we know what infections we he got? Hit him with antibiotics. There’s no way we can get this man on oxygen now. If we send him to University, he’d end up in the hall there too.”

“Don’t let me die. Please … I’m so afraid.”

“We’re here with you, we’re taking care of you. Can you tell me your name? Is there some family whom we can notify?”

“Go ahead, tell them who you really are,” she said with a little silvery laugh, her voice always so delicate, so very pretty. I can feel her tender little lips, just to look at them. I used to like to press my finger against her lower lip, playfully, when I kissed her eyelids, and her smooth forehead.

“Don’t be such a little smarty!” I said between my teeth. “Besides, who am I down there?”

“Not a human being, if that’s what you mean. Nothing could make you human.”

“All right, I’ll give you five minutes. Why did you bring me here? What do you want me to say—that I’m sorry about what I did, taking you out of that bed and making you a vampire? Well, do you want the truth, the rock-bottom deathbed truth? I don’t know if I am. I’m sorry you suffered. I’m sorry anybody has to suffer. But I can’t say for certain that I’m sorry for that little trick.”