and shivering as he watched all this. Suddenly he pushed up his collar against the wind, and folded his arms. The snow was blowing all over him, like white powder, clinging to his brown eyebrows and his hair.
It belongs to this house, doesn't it? I said coldly. This house which you stole.
He regarded me with obvious hatred, and then flashed one of those awful evil smiles. I truly wished he'd lapse back into being the English gentleman. It was so much easier for me when he did. It crossed my mind that it was absolutely base to have to deal with him. I wondered if Saul had found the Witch of Endor so distasteful. But the body, ah, the body, how splendid it was.
Even in his resentment, with his eyes fixed upon the dog, he could not wholly disfigure the beauty of the body.
Well, it seems you've stolen the dog too, I said.
I'll get rid of it, he whispered, looking at it again with fierce contempt. And you, where do things stand with you I won't give you forever to make up your mind. You've given me no certain answer. I want an answer now.
Go to your bank tomorrow morning, I said. I'll see you after dark. Ah, but there is one more condition.
What is it! he asked between his clenched teeth.
Feed the animal. Give it some meat.
Then I made my exit so swiftly he couldn't see it, and when I glanced back, I could see Mojo gazing up at me, through the snowy darkness, and I smiled to think that the dog had seen my movement, fast as it was. The last sound I heard was James cursing to himself ungracefully as he slammed the back door.
An hour later, I lay in the dark waiting for the sun above, and thinking again of my youth in France, of the dogs lying beside me, of riding out on that last hunt with those two huge mastiffs, picking their way slowly through the deep snow.
And the face of the vampire peering at me from the darkness in Paris, calling me Wolfkiller with such reverence, such crazed reverence, before he sank his fangs into my neck.
Mojo, an omen.
So we reach into the raging chaos, and we pluck some small glittering thing, and we cling to it, and tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.
Tomorrow night, I thought, if that bastard has been lying, I shall split open his chest and tear out his beating heart, and feed it to that big beautiful dog.
Whatever happens, I shall keep this dog.
And I did.
And before this story moves any further, let me say something about this dog. He isn't going to do anything in this book.
He won't save a drowning baby, or rush into a burning building to rouse the inhabitants from near-fatal sleep. He isn't possessed by an evil spirit; he isn't a vampire dog. He's in this narrative simply because I found him in the snow behind that town house in Georgetown, and I loved him, and from that first moment, he seemed somehow to love me. It was all too true to the blind and merciless laws I believe in-the laws of nature, as men say; or the laws of the Savage Garden, as I call them myself. Mojo loved my strength; I loved his beauty. And nothing else ever really mattered at all.
Chapter 10
TEN
I WANT the details, I said, of how you pushed him out of his body, and how you managed to force him into yours.
Wednesday at last. Not a half hour had passed since the sun had set. I had startled him when I appeared on the back steps.
We were sitting now in the immaculate white kitchen, a room curiously devoid of mystery for such an esoteric meeting. A single bulb in a handsome copper fixture flooded the table between us with a soft rosy illumination, which lent a deceiving coziness to the scene.
The snowfall continued, and beneath the house the furnace gave a low continuous roar. I'd brought the dog in with me, much to the annoyance of the lord of the house, and after some reassurance, the beast lay quietly now like an Egyptian sphinx, looking up at us, front legs stretched straight before him on the waxed floor. Now and then James glanced at him uneasily, and with reason. The dog looked as if he had the