The Vampire Armand Page 0,32

ever more keenly. It was only the life inside her, the workings of the flesh in her that made the mask of her face seem to move.

But horrid her hands seemed, knuckled and swollen, and the dust from her broom engraving every line.

I shook my head. She was too far from me for these observations.

In a faraway room, the boys talked. Time for work. Time to get up, even in the palazzo of the night Lord who never checks or prods by day. Too far away for me to hear them.

And this velvet now, this curtain made of the Master's favorite fabric, this was like fur to my touch, not velvet, I could see each tiny fiber! I dropped it. I went for the looking glass.

The house had dozens of them, great ornate mirrors, all with fancified frames and most replete with tiny cherubs. I found the tall mirror in the anteroom, the alcove behind warped yet beautifully painted doors where I kept my clothes.

The light of the window followed me. I saw myself. But I was not a seething corrupt mass, such as this woman had seemed. My face was baby smooth and starkly white.

"I want it!" I whispered. I knew.

"No," he told me.

This is when he came that night. I ranted and paced and cried out to him.

He didn't give me long explanations, no sorcery or science, either of which would have been so easy for him. He told me only I was a child still, and there were things to be savored which would be lost forever.

I cried. I didn't want to work or paint or study or do anything in the world.

"It's lost its savor for a little while," he said patiently. "But you'd be surprised."

"At what?"

"At how much you'll lament it when it's gone utterly, when you are perfect and unchangeable like me, and all those human mistakes can be triumphantly supplanted by a new and more stunning series of failures. Don't ask for this, not again."

I would have died then, curled up, black and furious and too bitter for words.

But he wasn't finished.

"Amadeo," he said, his voice thick with sorrow. "Say nothing. You don't have to. I'll give it to you quickly enough when I think the time has come."

At that I went to him, running, childlike, flinging myself at his neck, kissing his icy cheek a thousand times despite his mock-disdainful smile.

At last his hands became like iron. There was to be no blood play this night. I must study. I must make up the lessons I had scorned by day.

He had to see to his apprentices, to his tasks, to the giant canvas on which he'd been working, and I did as he said.

But well before morning, I saw him change. The others had long gone to bed. I was turning the pages of the book obediently when I saw him staring, beastlike, from his chair, as if some ravener had come into him and banished all his civilized faculties and left him thus, hungry, with glazed eyes and reddening mouth, the glittering blood finding its myriad little paths over the silky margin of his lips.

He rose, a drugged thing, and came towards me with a rhythm of movements that was alien and struck the coldest terror in my heart.

His fingers flashed, closed, beckoned.

I ran to him. He lifted me in both hands, clutching my arms ever so gently, and tucked his face against my neck. From the soles of my feet up my back through my arms and my neck and scalp, I felt it.

Where he flung me I didn't know. Was it our bed or some hasty cushions he found in another closer salon? "Give it to me," I said sleepily, and when it came into my mouth, I was gone.

Chapter 4

4

HE SAID that I must go to the brothels, learn what it meant to couple properly-not merely in play, as we did among the boys.

Venice had many such places, very well run and devoted to pleasure in the most luxurious environment. It was firmly held that such pleasures were little more than a venial sin in the eyes of the Christ, and the young men of fashion frequented these establishments without hiding it.

I knew of a house of particularly exquisite and skilled women, where there were tall, buxom, very pale-eyed beauties from the North of Europe, some whose blond hair was' almost white, deemed to be somewhat different from the shorter Italian women's which we saw every day.

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