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languidly, at the steamboatmen on the levee, the niggers toting their hogsheads, and all the richly dressed folk of the Vieux Carre. "It is not the blood that ennobles, that makes one a master. It is the life, Billy. Drink of their lives and yours becomes longer. Eat of their flesh and yours grows stronger. Feast on beauty and wax more beautiful."

Sour Billy Tipton listened eagerly; he had seldom seen Julian in so expansive a mood. Sitting in the darkness of the library, Julian tended to be brusque and frightening. Beyond it, out in the world again, he glittered, reminding Sour Billy of the way he had been when he first arrived with Charles Garoux at the plantation where Billy was overseer. He said as much.

Julian nodded. "Yes," he said, "the plantation is safe, but in safety and satiety is danger." His teeth were white when he smiled. "Charles Garoux," he mused. "Ah, the possibilities of that youth! He was beautiful in his way, strong, healthy. A firebrand, beloved by all the ladies, admired by other men. Even the darkies loved Master Charles. He would have had a grand life! His nature was so open as well, it was easy to befriend him, to win his undying trust by saving him from poor Kurt here." Julian interrupted himself with a laugh. "Then, once I had been welcomed into his house, easier still to come to him every night, and drain him, little by little, so he seemed to sicken and die. Once he woke when I was in his room, and thought I had come to comfort him. I leaned over his bed, and he reached up and clasped me to him, and I drank. Ah, the sweetness of Charles, all the strength and beauty of him!"

"The old man was damn upset when he up and died," Sour Billy put in. Personally, he'd been delighted. Charles Garoux had always been telling his father that Billy was too hard on the niggers, and trying to get him dismissed. As if you could get any work from a nigger by being soft.

"Yes, Garoux was distraught," said Julian. "How fortunate that I was there to comfort him in his grief. His son's best friend. How often he told me, afterward, that I had become like a fourth son to him as we mourned."

Sour Billy remembered it well. Julian had handled it real good. The younger sons had let down the old man; Jean-Pierre was a drunken lout, and Philip a weakling who wept like a woman at his brother's funeral, but Damon Julian had been a tower of manly strength. They had buried Charles out back of the plantation, in the family cemetery. The ground being so damp in these parts, he'd been laid to rest in a big marble mausoleum with a winged victory on top of it. It stayed nice and cool in there, even in the heat of August. Sour Billy had gone into the tomb many a time in the years since, to drink and piss on Charles's coffin. Once he'd dragged a nigger wench in there with him, slapped her around a little and had her three-four times, just so old Charles's ghost could see the proper way to handle niggers.

Charles had only been the beginning, Sour Billy recalled. Six months later Jean-Pierre rode off to do some whoring and gambling in the city, and he never did ride back, and it wasn't long after that when poor timid Philip got himself all ripped up by some kind of animal in the woods. Old Garoux was real sick at heart by then, but Damon Julian was by his side through all of it, helping. Finally Garoux adopted him, and wrote a new will leaving him just about everything.

There was a night not too long after that Sour Billy would never forget, when Damon Julian had demonstrated how thoroughly old Rene Garoux was in his power. It was up in the old man's bedroom. Valerie was there, and Adrienne and Alain as well, they'd all been living in the big house, since any friend of Julian's was welcome in the Garoux home. They watched with Sour Billy while Damon Julian stood at the side of the great canopied bed and pierced the old man through with his black eyes and his easy smile and told him the truth, all the truth about what had happened to Charles and Jean-Pierre and Philip. Julian was wearing Charles's signet ring, and Valerie