back. "Now you have power. Now your will shall be done!"
"To what end?" Rufo wanted, needed, to know. "I am dead. My flesh is dead. What pleasures might I know? What dreams worth fancying?"
"Pleasures?" the imp asked. "Did not the priest's blood taste sweet? And did you not feel power as^you approached the pitiful man? You could taste his fear, vampire, and the taste was as sweet as the blood that was to come."
Rufo continued to stare, but had no more complaints to offer. Druzil spoke the truth, it seemed. Rufo had tasted the man's fear, and that sensation of power, of inspiring such terror, felt wonderfully sweet to the man who had been so impotent in life.
Druzil waited a little while, until he was certain that Rufo was convinced to at least explore this vampiric existence. "You must be gone from this place," the imp explained, looking to the corpses.
Rufo glanced at the closed door, then nodded and swung about, dangling his legs over the side of the slab. "The catacombs," he remarked.
"You cannot cross," Druzil said as the vampire began stiffly walking toward the door. Rufo turned on him suspiciously, as if he thought the imp's words a threat.
"The sun is bright," Druzil explained. "It will burn you like fire."
Rufo's expression turned from curious to dour to sheer horror.
"You are a creature of the night now," Druzil went on firmly. "The light of day is not your ally."
It was a bitter pill for Rufo to swallow, but in light of all that had happened, the man accepted the news stoically and forced himself to straighten once more. "How am I to get out of here?" he asked, his tone filled with anger and sarcasm.
Druzil led Rufo's gaze to rows of marked stones lining the mausoleum's far wall. These were the crypts of the library's former headmasters, including those of Avery Schell and Pertelope, and not all of the stones were marked.
At first the thought of crawling into a crypt revolted Rulb, but as he let go of those prejudices remaining from when he had been a living, breathing man, as he allowed himself to view the world as an undead thing, a creature of the night, he found the notion of cool, dark stone strangely appealing.
Rufo met Druzil by the wall, in front of an unmarked slab set waist-high. Not knowing what the imp expected, the vampire reached out with his stiff arms and clasped at the edge of the stone.
"Not like that!" Druzil scolded, and Rufo stood straight, eyeing the imp dangerously, obviously growing tired of DruziPs superior attitude.
"If you tear it away, the priests will find you," the imp explained, and under his breath he added the expected, "Bene tellemara."
Rufo did not reply, but stood staring from the imp to the wall. How was he to get inside the crypt if he did not remove the stone? These were not doors that could be opened and closed; they were sealed marker blocks, removed for burials, then mortared back into place.
"There is a crack along the bottom," Druzil remarked, and when Rufo bent iow, he did see a line running along the mortar at the bottom of the slab.
The vampire shrugged his shoulders, but before he could ask Druzil how that crack might help, a strange sensation, a lightness, came over him, as though he was something less than substantial. Rufo looked to Druzil, who was smiling widely, then back to the crack, which suddenly loomed much larger. The vampire, black robes and all, melted away into a cloud of green vapor and swirled through the crack in the slab.
He came back to his corporeal form inside the tight confines of the stone crypt, hemmed in by unbroken walls. For an instant, a wave of panic, a feeling of being
trapped, swept over the man. How long would his air last? he wondered. He shut his mouth, fearful that he was gulping in too much of the precious commodity.
A moment later, his mouth opened once more and from it issued a howl of laughter. "Air?" Rufo asked aloud. Rufo needed no air, and he was certainly not trapped. He would slip out through that crack as easily as he had come in, or else he could simply slide down and kick the slab free of its perch. He was strong enough to do that he knew he was.
Suddenly the limitations of a weak and living body seemed clear to the vampire. He thought of all the times when