When I began to kiss her, careful to conceal my tiny fanged teeth from her, I felt no hunger because the blood of my victims had been more than enough. I kissed her with love and love only, my mind quickly plunging into heated erotic memories, my body surely demonstrating the urgency that it had had with her in the past. I wanted to touch her all over, as a blind man might touch a sculpture, the better to see each curve of her with his hands.
"Oh, you're not only well, you're splendid," Bianca said. "You and Marius, come in, come, let's go into the next room." She made a careless gesture to her guests, who were all busy anyway, talking, arguing, playing cards in small groups. She drew us with her into her more intimate parlor adjacent to the bedroom, a room cluttered with frightfully expensive damask chairs and couches, and told me to sit down.
I remembered the candles, that I must never get too close to them, but must use the shadows so no mortal would have an optimum opportunity to study my changed and more perfect skin.
This wasn't so hard as, in spite of her love of light and her penchant for luxury, she had the candelabra scattered for the mood.
The lack of light would also make the sparkle of my eyes less noticeable; I knew this too. And the more I spoke, the more animated I became, the more human I would appear.
Stillness was dangerous for us when we were among mortals, Marius had taught me, for in stillness we appear flawless and unearthly and finally even faintly horrible to mortals, who sense that we are not what we seem.
I followed all these rules. But I was overcome with anxiety that I could never tell her what had been done to me. I started to talk. I explained that the illness had abated entirely, but that Marius, wiser by far than any physician, had ordered solitude and rest. When I had not been in bed, I had been alone, struggling to regain my strength.
"Make it as near to the truth as you can, the better to make it a lie," Marius had taught. Now I followed these words.
"Oh, but I thought I'd lost you," she said. "When you sent word, Marius, that he was recovering, I didn't at first believe you. I thought you meant to soften the inevitable truth."
How lovely she was, a perfect flower. Her blond hair was parted in the middle, and a thick lock on either side was wound with pearls and bound back with a clasp encrusted with them. The rest of her hair fell down a la Botticelli, in rivulets of shining yellow over her shoulders.
"You had cured him as completely as any human being could," Marius told her. "My task was to give him some old remedies of which only I know. And then to let the remedies do their work." He spoke simply, but to me he seemed sad.
A terrible sadness gripped me. I couldn't tell her what I was, or how different she seemed now, how richly opaque with human blood she seemed compared to us, and how her voice had taken on for me a new timbre that was purely human, and which gently nudged my senses if she but said one word.
"Well, you are both here, and you must both come often," she said. "Don't ever let such a separation occur again. Marius, I would have come to you, but Riccardo told me you wanted peace and quiet. I would have nursed Amadeo in any state."
"I know you would have, my darling," Marius said. "But as I said, it was solitude he needed, and your beauty is an intoxicant, and your words a stimulus more intense perhaps than you realize." It had no tone of flattery but sounded like a sincere confession.
She shook her head a little sadly. "I've discovered that Venice is not my home unless you're here." She looked cautiously towards the front parlor, and then she lapsed into a low voice. "Marius, you freed me from those who had a hold on me."
"That was simple enough," he said. "It was a pleasure, in fact. How rank those men were, cousins of yours, if I'm not mistaken, and eager to use you and your great reputation for beauty in their twisted financial affairs."
She blushed, and I lifted my hand to beg him to go easy with what