them. He's hunted that way for hundreds and hundreds of years! It's only from those kind of people that he takes the life he needs! And he's too honorable to go against his given word to you..."
"Did he ask you to speak to me?" Lydia's voice was as cold to her own ears as the silver on her neck.
"No." Margaret sniffled and wiped furiously at her eyes, fighting not to break down in front of this slender auburn and white reed of a girl, this spoiled heiress- beauty with her waist unbuttoned to show the heavy links of silver chain, row upon row of them, around the stem of her throat.
"But I can see!" she sobbed. "Every day I can see. You beat him at cards all the time now..."
"I've had a week of continuous practice," Lydia pointed out.
"You could never beat him if he weren't fighting to keep the other powers of his mind intact! To preserve himself..."
"Thank you very much." Head aching with weariness-for it was close to three in the morning-Lydia stepped around her. It was true that Ysidro had grown very gaunt- true, too, that a week ago he would never have dropped the cards, never would even have allowed the girls to see him gather them.
He could not mask things from them as he had. Or was he saving his strength for other matters?
"Margaret, do we need to talk about this now? I'm tired, you're tired, I suspect you don't mean everything you're saying-"
"How can you be so blind!" Margaret went on frantically, unheeding, following her back to the bed. "Can't you see? He can't turn people's minds aside in the train stations like he used to, or listen down the train cars, reading their dreams..."
Lydia's overwrought temper snapped. "Or put little scenes of dancing the waltz- which wasn't even invented in the sixteenth century-into yours? I'm sorry," she said immediately, as Margaret burst into a storm of tears at this brutally accurate accusation. "I shouldn't have said that..."
"You don't understand!" Margaret shouted wildly. "You don't understand him! All you care about is finding your boring old stick of a husband and helping him play spies, and you can't see the great-souled, noble, lonely, tragic hero you're destroying!"
She blundered from the room like a bee trying to get out of a potting shed. Lydia heard the banister creak as she stumbled against it, heard the running judder of her footsteps descend the two long, C-shaped flights of stairs.
"Margaret!" She grabbed her spectacles from the dressing table and ran after her, catching handfuls of taffeta skirt to race down the steps, the tile of them cold under her stockinged feet. Below her she heard the door bang, and she followed, appalled, into the covered carriageway in time to see the heavy outer gate swing shut on its hinges.
"Margaret!" Through her concern she thought obliquely, Well, that does it for this pair of stockings-even in the relatively clean suburb of Pera the streets were nothing to explore unshod. Two small sconces illuminated the courtyard behind her, and the candle before a saint's icon in a niche flecked the underside of the carriageway's brick vault with wavering light. Past the gate the street was like a cave a thousand feet beneath the earth.
Lydia stopped on the threshold, as if that abyssal dark were a chasm gaping before her feet.
Margaret gasped somewhere, and there was a suggestion of movement, pale in blackness. The shred of moonlight picked out a white face, like a skull's, a scrap of spiderweb hair. A moment later Lydia's eyes, adjusting, made out the white hands, holding Margaret by the wrists. Margaret threw herself wordlessly to his chest, clutching and weeping.
Ysidro must have spoken, so softly Lydia did not hear. Lydia herself had been exasperated to the slapping point with Margaret's clinging, mooning, and silent reproaches, but she had never seen the vampire anything but patient and understanding with the woman he had made his slave. Of course he understood her, thought Lydia bitterly, watching as Ysidro bent his head to listen to some muffled, hysterical rant; watching Margaret's skinny hands grab at his sleeves, his shoulders, the long folds of his cloak. If he hadn't understood her, he couldn't have baited the trap.
Illuminated only by the frail gleam from the window above, they seemed figures in a distant stage show, almost like a dream. Margaret flung back her head, gazing up into Ysidro's face, then with a passionate gesture she ripped open her shirtwaist,