done with all of this, quickly -- now!" She nodded to coax me and she came closer and she tugged at my hand. "Look at yourself in the minor," she whispered.
But I knew. I had given her more blood than I had taken from her. I was starved. I hadn't even fed before I came to her.
But I was so taken with the sound of the syllables and that glimpse of snow falling and the memory of the singing that for a moment I didn't respond. I looked at her fingers touching mine. I saw our flesh was the same. I rose up out of the chair and held her two hands and then I felt of her arms and her face. It was done and I was alive still! She was with me now. She had come through that awful solitude and she was with me, and I could think of nothing suddenly except holding her, crushing her to me, never letting her go.
I lifted her off her feet. I swung her up in my arms and we turned round and round.
She threw back her head and her laughter shook loose from her, growing louder and louder, until I put my hand over her mouth.
"You can shatter all the glass in the room with your voice," I whispered. I glanced towards the doors. Nicki and Roget were out there.
"Then let me shatter it!" she said, and there was nothing playful in her expression. I set her on her feet. I think we embraced again and again almost foolishly. I couldn't keep myself from it.
But other mortals were moving in the flat, the doctor and the nurses thinking that they should come in.
I saw her look to the door. She was hearing them too. But why wasn't I hearing her?
She broke away from me, eyes darting from one object to another. She snatched up the candles again and brought them to the mirror where she looked at her face.
I understood what was happening to her. She needed time to see and to measure with her new vision. But we had to get out of the flat.
I could hear Nicki's voice through the wall, urging the doctor to knock on the door.
How was I to get her out of here, get rid of them?
"No, not that way," she said when she saw me look at the door.
She was looking at the bed, the objects on the table. She went to the bed and took her jewels from under the pillow. She examined them and put them back into the worn velvet purse. Then she fastened the purse to her skirt so that it was lost in the folds of cloth.
There was an air of importance to these little gestures. I knew even though her mind was giving me nothing that this was all she wanted from this room. She was taking leave of things, the clothes she'd brought with her, her ancient silver brush and comb, and the tattered books that lay on the table by the bed.
There was knocking at the door.
"Why not this way?" she asked, and turning to the window, she threw open the glass. The breeze gusted into the gold draperies and lifted her hair off the back of her neck, and when she turned I shivered at the sight of her, her hair tangling around her face, and her eyes wide and filled with myriad fragments of color and an almost tragic light. She was afraid of nothing.
I took hold of her and for a moment wouldn't let her go. I nestled my face into her hair, and all I could think again was that we were together and nothing was ever going to separate us now. I didn't understand her silence, why I couldn't hear her, but I knew it wasn't her doing, and perhaps I believed it would pass. She was with me. That was the world. Death was my commander and I gave him a thousand victims, but I'd snatched her right out of his hand. I said it aloud. I said other desperate and nonsensical things. We were the same terrible and deadly beings, the two of us, we were wandering in the Savage Garden and I tried to make it real for her with images, the meaning of the Savage Garden, but it didn't matter if she didn't understand.
"The Savage Garden," she repeated the words reverently, her lips making a soft smile.