"I can tip the odds, my child," he said. This time his lips moved. The pale sweet coral brightened in his face, and his eyes grew wide and unguarded, the old self I knew and cherished. "I can so easily take the last strength left in you." He leant over me. I saw the tiny variegations in the pupils of his eyes, the bright deep-pointed stars behind the darkening irises. His lips, so wondrously decorated with all the tiny lines of human lips, were rosy as if a human kiss resided there. "I can so easily take one last fatal drink of your child's blood, one last quaff of all the freshness I so love, and in myarms I'll hold a corpse so rich in beauty that all who see it will weep, and that corpse will tell me nothing. You are gone, that much I'll know, and no more."

"Do you say these things to torture me? Master, if I cannot go there, I want to be with you!"

His lip worked in plain desperation. He seemed a man, and only that, the red blood of fatigue and sadness hovering on the borders of his eyes. His hand, out now to touch my hair, was trembling.

I caught it as if it were the high waving branch of a tree above me. I fathered his fingers to my lips like so many leaves and kissed them.

Turning my head I laid them on my wounded cheek. I felt the throb of the venomous cut beneath them. But more keenly still, I felt a strong tremor within them.

I blinked my eyes. "How many died tonight to feed you?" I whispered. "And how can this be, and love be the very thing the world is made of? You are too beautiful to be overlooked. I'm lost. I cannot understand it. But could I, if I were to live from this moment on, a simple mortal boy, could I forget it?"

"You cannot live, Amadeo," he said sadly. "You cannot live!" His voice broke. "The poison's traveled in you too deep, too far and wide, and little draughts of my blood cannot overtake it." His face was filled with anguish. "Child, I can't save you. Close your eyes. Take my farewell kiss. There is no friendship between me and those on the far shore, but they must take what dies so naturally."

"Master, no! Master, I cannot try it alone. Master, they sent me back, and you are here, and were bound to be, and how could they not have known it?"

"Amadeo, they didn't care. The guardians of the dead are powerfully indifferent. They speak of love, but not of centuries of blundering ignorance. What stars are these that sing so beautifully when all the world is languishing in dissonance? I would you would force their hand, Amadeo." His voice all but broke in his pain. "Amadeo, what right have they to charge me with your fortune?"