“Why aren’t you afraid of me?” I asked. “Don’t you think I’m insane?”

“You only hurt people when you’re a vampire,” she said simply, “when you’re in your rightful body. Isn’t that true?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s true. But you’re like Claudia. You’re not afraid of anything.”

“You are playing her for a fool,” said Claudia. “You’re going to hurt her too.”

“Nonsense, she doesn’t believe it,” I said. I sat down on the couch in the parlour of the little hotel, surveying the small fancy room, feeling very at home with these delicate old gilded furnishings. The eighteenth century, my century. Century of the rogue and the rational man. My most perfect time.

Petit-point flowers. Brocade. Gilded swords and the laughter of drunken men in the street below.

David was standing at the window, looking out over the low roofs of the colonial city. Had be ever been in this century before?

“No, never!” be said in awe. “Every surface is worked by hand, every measurement is irregular. How tenuous the hold of created things upon nature, as if it could slide back to the earth so easily.”

“Leave, David,” said Louis, “you don’t belong here. We have to remain. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Now, that’s a bit melodramatic,” said Claudia. “Really.” She wore that soiled little gown from the hospital. Well, I would soon fix that. I would sack the shops of laces and ribbons for her. I would buy silks for her, and tiny bracelets of silver, and rings set with pearls.

I put my arm around her. “Ah, how nice to hear someone speak the truth,” I said. “Such fine hair, and now it will be fine forever.”

I tried to sit up again, but it seemed impossible. They were rushing an emergency case through the corridor, two nurses on either side, and someone struck the gurney and the vibration moved through me. Then it was quiet, and the hands on the big clock moved with a little jerk. The man next to me moaned, and turned his head. There was a huge white bandage over his eyes. How naked his mouth looked.

“We have to get these people into isolation,” said a voice.

“Come on, now, I’m taking you home.”

And Mojo, what had become of Mojo? Suppose they’d come to take him away? This was a century in which they incarcerated dogs, simply for being dogs. I had to explain this to her. She was lifting me, or trying to do it, slipping her arm around my shoulders. Mojo barking in the town house. Was he trapped?

Louis was sad. “There’s plague out there in the city.”

“But that can’t hurt you, David,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said. “But there are other things … ”

Claudia laughed. “She’s in love with you, you know.”

“You would have died of the plague,” I said.

“Maybe it was not my time.”

“Do you believe that, that we have our time?”

“No, actually I don’t,” she said. “Maybe it was just easier to blame you for everything. I never really knew right from wrong, you see.”