you beyond all reason, and she -- why, the dark blood has made her even colder, has it not? But even for her, strong as she is, there will come moments when she fears to be immortal, and who will she blame for what was done to her?"
"You are a fool," Gabrielle whispered.
"You tried to protect the violinist from it. But you never sought to protect her."
"Don't say any more," I answered. "You make me hate you. Is that what you want?"
"But I speak the truth and you know it. And what you will never know, either of you, is the full depth of each other's hatreds and resentments. Or suffering. Or love."
He paused and I could say nothing. He was doing exactly what I feared he would, and I didn't know how to defend myself.
"If you leave me now with this one," he continued, "you will do it again. Nicolas you never possessed. And she already wonders how she will ever get free of you. And unlike her, you cannot stand to be alone."
I couldn't answer. Gabrielle's eyes became smaller, her mouth a little more cruel.
"So the time will come when you will seek other mortals," he went on, "hoping once more that the Dark trick will bring you the love you crave. And of these newly mutilated and unpredictable children you'll try to fashion your citadels against time. Well, they will be prisons if they last for half a century. I warn you. It is only with those as powerful and wise as yourself that the true citadel against time can be built."
The citadel against time. Even in my ignorance the words had their power. And the fear in me expanded, reached out to compass a thousand other causes.
He seemed distant for a moment, indescribably beautiful in the firelight, the dark auburn strands of his hair barely touching his smooth forehead, his lips parted in a beatific smile.
"If we cannot have the old ways, can't we have each other?" he asked, and now his voice was the voice of the summons again. "Who else can understand your suffering? Who else knows what passed through your mind the night you stood on the stage of your little theater and you frightened all those you had loved?"
"Don't speak about that," I whispered. But I was softening all over, drifting into his eyes and his voice. Very near to me was the ecstasy I'd felt that night on the battlements. With all my will I reached out for Gabrielle.
"Who understands what passed through your mind when my renegade followers, reveling in the music of your precious fiddler, devised their ghastly boulevard enterprise?" he asked.
I didn't speak.
"The Theater of the Vampires!" His lips lengthened in the saddest smile. "Does she comprehend the irony of it, the cruelty? Does she know what it was like when you stood on that stage as a young man and you heard the audience screaming for you? When time was your friend, not your enemy as it is now? When in the wings, you put out your arms and your mortal darlings came to you, your little family, folding themselves against you. . ."
"Stop, please. I ask you to stop."
"Does anyone else know the size of your soul?"
Witchcraft. Had it ever been used with more skill? And what was he really saying to us beneath this liquid flow of beautiful language: Come to me, and I shall be the sun round which you are locked in orbit, and my rays shall lay bare the secrets you keep from each other, and I, who possess charms and powers of which you have no inkling, shall control and possess and destroy you!
"I asked you before," I said. "What do you want? Really want?"
"You!" he said. "You and her! That we become three at this crossroads!"
Not that we surrender to you?
I shook my head. And I saw the same wariness and recoiling in Gabrielle.
He was not angry; there was no malice now. Yet he said again, in the same beguiling voice:
"I curse you," and I felt it as if he'd declaimed it.
"I offered myself to you at the moment you vanquished me," he said. "Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me."
I was shaken, more shaken even than I had been in the sad and awful finish with Nicolas at Renaud's. I had never once known fear in the crypt under les Innocents. But I had known it in this