clothes she'd need for the day. As an afterthought, she took the little silver cross from her jewelry box.
"Till tonight," she said, kissing his cheek.
"Tonight."
For Sara, the daylight hours passed slowly. She had little to occupy her time since she dared not go outside alone. After eating breakfast and washing her few dishes, she wandered through the apartment, finally settling down on the sofa with a book. But she couldn't concentrate. She kept hearing Gabriel's words in her mind: Once you are truly mine, I'll never let you go.
Wasn't that what she wanted, to be his forever?
She sat there for hours, her mind replaying every moment they had spent together, weighing her love for him, her need to be with him, against her desire to continue dancing, to have a home and a family.
You'll never have a normal life if you stay with me, he'd said. But did she want a normal life if she couldn't share it with Gabriel?
How could she live with him, knowing what he did to survive? How could she live without him?
How would she feel as the years passed by and she grew old, older, while he stayed forever young? Would she hate him then? Would he turn away from her when she was no longer young and pretty?
She could become what he was...
She glanced at the bedroom door, and after a long moment of indecision, she did what she had been longing to do, what she had promised not to do.
One hand clasping the cross she had slipped over her head when she left the room earlier, she opened the bedroom door a crack and peered inside.
Gabriel had dressed and now lay upon his cloak, his arms folded over his chest, his eyes closed. His skin looked more pale than usual. She stared at him for a long moment, but he didn't appear to be breathing. He looked, she thought morbidly, like a corpse laid out for burial.
I'm not alive, he'd said, and for the first time she believed him.
A sound behind her made her start, and she whirled around to find Maurice standing in the doorway.
"What are you doing here?" she whispered.
Maurice glanced at Gabriel, then shook his head. "I knew it," he murmured. "I knew he had come back. There was no other explanation for the way you've been acting these past few days."
Sara crossed the floor toward the door, but Maurice held his ground.
"Now do you believe me?" he said, nodding in Gabriel's direction. "The man's a vampire, Sara Jayne. He must be destroyed."
"No!"
She tried to close the door, but Maurice grabbed her by the arm and half dragged, half carried her into the room Babette had used. Taking the key from the lock, he shoved Sara inside and locked the door.
"Maurice!" Sara pounded on the door with her fists. "Maurice, let me out!"
"No, Sara Jayne. He must be destroyed, now, while he's helpless."
"Maurice!" She screamed his name. "Don't!"
Ignoring her cries, Maurice went outside and retrieved the sack he'd left on the steps.
Reentering the house, he opened the sack, his hand clutching the cross he wore while he gazed at the contents, quietly praying for the courage to do what had to be done. And then, heaving a determined sigh, he withdrew a sharp wooden stake and a hammer from the sack and went into Sara's bedroom.
Gabriel lay as before.
Unmoving.
Undead.
Fear rose up in Maurice as he gazed at the man on the bed. Not a man, he reminded himself, a monster, a fiend who lived off the blood of others, a demon who must be destroyed before he turned Sara Jayne into what he was.
It was the thought of Sara that gave Maurice the courage to lift the stake. He could hear Sara Jayne pounding on the door, screaming for him to stop, as he positioned the sharpened end of the hawthorn stake over Gabriel's heart.
Holding his breath, he raised the hammer, his gorge rising at the mere idea of what he was about to do.
He was bringing the hammer down when Gabriel's hand closed around his forearm.
The hammer fell from a hand gone suddenly numb as Maurice stared down into the face of death. Gabriel's eyes blazed with an unholy fire; his lips were drawn back in a feral snarl, revealing sharp white fangs.
With his free hand, Gabriel tore the cross from the chain dangling down Maurice's chest. The silver burned his palm as he threw the crucifix across the room.
"Did you think to kill me so easily?" Gabriel asked