Oh, it was easy to make this climb, to reach for his arm and then his shoulder. I broke the flesh of his neck. I drank. The blood washed through me, once again revealing my entire form with a shock against the blackness of my mind. I saw the boy's body that was mine, of arms and legs, as with this form I breathed in the warmth and light around me, as if all of me had become one great multipored organ for seeing, for hearing, for breathing. I breathed with millions of minute and strong tiny mouths.

The blood filled me so that I could take no more.

I stood before my Master. In his face I saw but the hint of weariness, but the smallest pain in his eyes. I saw for the first time the true lines of his old humanity in his face, the soft inevitable crinkles at the corners of his serenely folded eyes.

The drapery of his robe glistened, the light traveling on it as the cloth moved with his small gesture. He pointed. He pointed to the painting of The Procession of the Magi.

"Your soul and your physical body are now locked together forever," he said. "And through your vampiric senses, the sense of sight, and of touch, and of smell, and of taste, you'll know all the world. Not from turning away from it to the dark cells of the Earth, but through opening your arms to endless glory will you perceive the absolute splendor of God's creation and the miracles wrought, in His Divine Indulgence, by the hands of men."

The silk-clad multitudes of The Procession of the Magi appeared to move. Once more I heard the horses' hooves on the soft earth, and the shuffle of booted feet. Once more I thought I saw the distant hounds leap on the mountainside. I saw the masses of flowered shrubbery wobble with the press of the gilded procession against them; I saw petals fly from the flowers. Marvelous animals frolicked in the thick wood. I saw the proud Prince Lorenzo, astride his mount, turn his youthful head, just as my Father had done, and look at me. On and on went the world beyond him, the world with its white rocky cliffs, its hunters on their brown steeds and its leaping prancing dogs.

"It's gone forever, Master," I said, and how rounded and resonant was my voice, responding to all that I beheld.

"What is that, my child?"

"Russia, the world of the wild lands, the world of those dark terrible cells within the moist Mother Earth."