laid her down inside, letting her pliant limbs arrange themselves naturally and gracefully.
Her face had already smoothed itself into sleep, her hair framing her face with a young boy’s locks.
Dead, she seemed, and gone, the magic undone.
I kept looking at her.
I let my teeth cut into the tip of my tongue until I felt the pain and tasted the hot blood there. Then bending low I let the blood fall in tiny shining droplets on her lips. Her eyes opened. Violet blue and glittering, they stared up at me. The blood flowed into her opening mouth and slowly she lifted her head to meet my kiss. My tongue passed into her. Her lips were cold. My lips were cold. But the blood was hot and it flowed between us.
“Good night, my darling one,” I said. “My dark angel Gabrielle.” She sank back into stillness as I let her go. I closed the stone over her.
4
I DID not like rising in the black underground crypt. I didn’t like the chill in the air, and that faint stench from the prison below, the feeling that this was where all the dead things lay.
A fear overcame me. What if she didn’t rise? What if her eyes never opened again? What did I know of what I’d done?
Yet it seemed an arrogant thing, an obscene thing to move the lid of the coffin again and gaze at her in her sleep as I had done last night. A mortal shame came over me. At home, I would never have dared to open her door without knocking, never dared to draw back the curtains of her bed.
She would rise. She had to. And better that she should lift the stone for herself, know how to rise, and that the thirst should drive her to it at the proper moment as it had driven me.
I lighted the torch on the wall for her, and went out for a moment to breathe the fresh air. Then leaving gates and doors unlocked behind me, I went up into Magnus’s cell to watch the twilight melt from the sky.
I’d hear her, I thought, when she awakened.
An hour must have passed. The azure light faded, the stars rose, and the distant city of Paris lighted its myriad tiny beacons. I left the windowsill where I had sat against the iron bars and I went to the chest and began to select jewels for her.
Jewels she still loved. She had taken her old keepsakes with her when we left her room. I lighted the candles to help me see, though I didn’t really need them. The illumination was beautiful to me. Beautiful on the jewels. And I found very delicate and lovely things for her—pearl-studded pins that she might wear in the lapels of her mannish little coat, and rings that would look masculine on her small hands if that was what she wanted.
I listened now and then for her. And this chill would clutch my heart. What if she did not rise? What if there had been only that one night for her? Horror thudding in me. And the sea of jewels in the chest, the candlelight dancing in the faceted stones, the gold settings—it meant nothing.
But I didn’t hear her. I heard the wind outside, the great soft rustle of the trees, the faint distant whistling of the stable boy as he moved about the barn, the neighing of my horses.
Far off a village church bell rang.
Then very suddenly there came over me the feeling that someone was watching me. This was so unfamiliar to me that I panicked. I turned, almost stumbling into the chest, and stared at the mouth of the secret tunnel. No one there.
No one in this small empty sanctum with the candlelight playing on the stones and Magnus’s grim countenance on the sarcophagus.
Then I looked straight in front of me at the barred window.
And I saw her looking back at me.
Floating in the air she seemed to be, holding to the bars with both hands, and she was smiling.
I almost cried out. I backed up and the sweat broke out all over my body. I was embarrassed suddenly to be caught off guard, to be so obviously startled.
But she remained motionless, smiling still, her expression gradually changing from serenity to mischievousness. The candlelight made her eyes too brilliant.
“It’s not very nice to frighten other immortals like that,” I said. She laughed more freely and easily than she ever had when she was alive.