"Your Master knew these things," he said regretfully. "He knew. But he was of a pagan time, obdurate and angry, and refusing ever the grace of God. In you, he saw God's grace, because your soul is pure. You are young and tender and open like the moonflower to take the light of the night. You hate us now, but you will come to see."

"I don't know that I will ever see anything again," I said. "I'm cold and small and have no understanding now of feeling, of longing, even of hate. I don't hate you, when I should. I'm empty. I want to die."

"But it's God will when you die, Amadeo," he said. "Not your own." He stared hard at me, and I knew I couldn't hide from him any longer my recollection-the monks of Kiev, starving slowly in their earthen cells, saying they must take sustenance for it was God's will when they should die.

I tried to hide these things, I drew these tiny pictures to myself and locked them up. I thought of nothing. One word came to my tongue: horror. And then the thought that before this time I had been a fool.

Another came into the room. It was a female vampire. She entered through a wooden door, letting it close carefully behind her as a good nun might do, in order that no unnecessary noise be made. She came up to him and stood behind him.

Her full gray hair was tangled and filthy, as was his, and it too had formed a shapely veil of beauteous weight and density behind her shoulders. Her clothes were antique rags. She wore the low hip belt of women of olden times adorning a shapely dress that revealed her small waist and gently flaring hips, the courtly costume one sees graven on the stone figures of rich sarcophagi. Her eyes, like his, were huge as if to summon every precious particle of light in gloom. Her mouth was strong and fall, and the fine bones of her cheeks and jaw shone well for the thin layer of silvery dust that covered her. Her neck and bosom were almost bare.

"Will he be one of us?" she asked. Her voice was so lovely, so comforting, that I felt I'd been touched by it. "I have prayed for him. I have heard him weeping inside though he makes no sound."

I looked away from her, bound to be disgusted by her, my enemy, who had slain those I loved.

"Yes," said Santino, the dark-haired one. "He'll be one of us, and he can be a leader.

He has such strength. He slew Alfredo there, you see? Oh, it was wonderful to behold how he did it, with such rage and with such a baby's scowl on his face."

She looked beyond me, at the ruin of what that vampire had been, and I didn't know myself what was left. I didn't turn to look at it.