He didn’t utter a word. His face registered those small changes which shock produces—the slight quiver of an eyelid, the mouth lengthening and then softening, a subtle clabbering look, vanishing as quickly as it appeared. He held my accusing glance all through it, and then slowly looked away.

“It was David Talbot, your mortal friend, who helped you, wasn’t it?” he asked.

I nodded.

But at the mere mention of the name, it was as if all my nerves had been touched by the tip of a heated bit of wire. There was enough suffering here as it was. I couldn’t speak anymore of David. I wouldn’t speak of Gretchen. And I suddenly realized that what I wanted to do most in the world was to turn to him and put my arms around him and weep on his shoulder as I’d never done.

How shameful. How predictable! How insipid. And how sweet.

I didn’t do it.

We sat there in silence. The soft cacophony of the city rose and fell beyond the stained-glass windows, which caught the faint glow from the street lamps outside. The rain had come again, the gentle warm rain of New Orleans, in which one can walk so easily as if it were nothing but the gentlest mist.

“I want you to forgive me,” he said. “I want you to understand that it wasn’t cowardice; it wasn’t weakness. What I said to you at the time was the truth. I couldn’t do it. I can’t bring someone into this! Not even if that someone is a mortal man with you inside him. I simply could not.”

“I know all that,” I said.

I tried to leave it there. But I couldn’t. My temper wouldn’t cool, my wondrous temper, the temper which had caused me to smash David Talbot’s head into a plaster wall.

He spoke again. “I deserve whatever you have to say.”

“Ah, more than that!” I said. “But this is what I want to know.” I turned and faced him, speaking through my clenched teeth. “Would you have refused me forever? If they’d destroyed my body, the others—Marius, whoever knew of it—if I’d been trapped in that mortal form, if I’d come to you over and over and over again, begging you and pleading with you, would you have shut me out forever! Would you have held fast?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t answer so quickly. Look for the truth inside yourself. You do know. Use your filthy imagination. You do know. Would you have turned me away?”

“I don’t know the answer!”

“I despise you!” I said in a bitter, harsh whisper. “I ought to destroy you—finish what I started when I made you. Turn you into ashes and sift them through my hands. You know that I could do it! Like that! Like the snap of mortal fingers, I could do it. Burn you as I burnt your little house. And nothing could save you, nothing at all.”

I glared at him, at the sharp graceful angles of his imperturbable face, faintly phosphorescent against the deeper shadows of the church. How beautiful the shape of his wide-set eyes, with their fine rich black lashes. How perfect the tender indentation of his upper lip.