I sat back, crossing my legs so that I could study him. I wiped the ashes out of my eye. "Why? Your themes are entirely familiar, but what is this realm of vampires in black monkly robes?"

"We are the Defenders of Truth," he said sincerely.

"Oh, who is not the defender of truth, for the love of Heaven," I said bitterly. "Look, the blood of your brother in Christ is stuck all over my hands! And you sit, the freakish blood-stuffed replicant of a human being staring on all this as if it were so much chitchat among the candles!"

"Ah, but you have a fiery tongue for one with such a sweet face," he said in cool wonder. "So pliant you seem with your soft brown eyes and dark autumnal red hair, but you are clever."

"Clever? You burnt my Master! You destroyed him. You burnt up his children! I am your prisoner here, am I not? What for? And you talk of the Lord Jesus Christ to me?

You? You? Answer me, what is this morass of filth and fancy, molded out of clay and blessed candles!"

He laughed. His eyes crinkled at the edges, and his face was cheerful and sweet. His hair, for all its filth and tangles, kept its preternatural luster. How fine he would have been if freed from the dictates of this nightmare.

"Amadeo," he said. "We are the Children of Darkness," he explained patiently. "We vampires are made to be the scourge of man, as is pestilence. We are part of the trials and tribulations of this world; we drink blood, and we kill for the glory of God who would test his human creatures."

"Don't speak horrors." I put my hands over my ears. I cringed.

"Oh, but you know it's true," he insisted without raising his voice. "You know it as you see me in my robes and you look about my chamber. I am restrained for The Living Lord as were the monks of old before they learned to paint their walls with erotic paintings."

"You talk madness, and I don't know why you do it." I would not remember the Monastery of the Caves!

"I do it because I have found my purpose here and the purpose of God, and there is nothing Higher. Would you be damned and alone, and selfish and without purpose?

Would you turn your back on a design so magnificent that not one tiny child is forgotten! Did you think you could live forever without the splendor of that great scheme, struggling to deny the handiwork of God in every beautiful thing which you coveted and made your own?"

I fell silent. Don't think on the old Russian saints. Wisely, he did not press. On the contrary, very softly, without the devilish lilt, he began to sing the Latin hymn ...

Dies irae, dies ilia Solvet saeclum infavilla Teste David cum Sibylla Quantus tremor estfuturus...

That day of wrath, that day will turn the earth to ashes. As both David and Sybelle have foretold How great a tremor there will be . . .