I sighed. “Yes, I see,” I said. “Would I have died had you left me in the hospital?”

“You might have,” she said. “I honestly don’t know.”

It was very pleasurable merely to look at her. Her face was large with few contours and nothing of elegant aristocratic beauty. But beauty she had in abundance. And the years had been gentle with her. She was not worn from care.

I sensed a tender brooding sensuality in her, a sensuality which she herself did not trust or nurture.

“Explain this to me again,” she said. “You spoke of being a rock singer because you wanted to do good? You wanted to be good by being a symbol of evil? Talk of this some more.”

I told her yes. I told her how I had done it, gathering the little band, Satan’s Night Out, and making them professionals. I told her that I had failed; there had been a war among our kind, I myself had been taken away by force, and the entire debacle had happened without a rupture in the rational fabric of the mortal world. I had been forced back into invisibility and irrelevance.

“There’s no place for us on earth,” I said. “Perhaps there was once, I don’t know. The fact that we exist is no justification. Hunters drove wolves from the world. I thought if I revealed our existence that hunters would drive us from the world too. But it wasn’t to be. My brief career was a string of illusions. No one believes in us. And that’s how it’s meant to be. Perhaps we are to die of despair, to vanish from the world very slowly, and without a sound.

“Only I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to be quiet and be nothing, and to take life with pleasure, and to see the creations and accomplishments of mortals all around me, and not to be part of them, but to be Cain. The lonely Cain. That’s the world to me, you see—what mortals do and have done. It isn’t the great natural world at all. If it was the natural world, then maybe I would have had a better time of it being immortal than I did. It’s the accomplishments of mortals. The paintings of Rembrandt, the memorials of the capital city in the snow, great cathedrals. And we are cut off eternally from such things, and rightfully so, and yet we see them with our vampire eyes.”

“Why did you change bodies with a mortal man?” she asked.

“To walk in the sun again for one day. To think and feel and breathe like a mortal. Maybe to test a belief.”

“What was the belief?”

“That being mortal again was what we all wanted, that we were sorry that we’d given it up, that immortality wasn’t worth the loss of our human souls. But I know now I was wrong.”

I thought of Claudia suddenly. I thought of my fever dreams. A leaden stillness came over me. When I spoke again, it was a quiet act of will.