"He feeds on energy, as well, but he doesn't have to take it away to amplify it. He can work directly within the life force of the other person. It's much less dangerous."

She stared at him. "I don't understand. How did he become 163 this?"

"He went without blood for nearly two centuries. He consumed the blood of a First Child-your previous Senior, who must have been Made by someone like me, one of the First Demons. Then he took Lorelei's blood, which contained the final catalyst, which I activated in her when she was six years old. It's all in the Book, though it didn't make sense to us at the time. When we wrote down the dreams."

"Does Julian understand this?"

"Yes. I spoke to him, told him how to work with it."

"That's good, because it makes no sense to me."

"It doesn't have to make sense to you. You only need to understand what you have become."

"What have I become?"

"You can make healers. Nicholas was your first as far as we know."

"Because I took the blood of so many cancer victims over two centuries."

"Yes. If you took the blood of, say, AIDS victims for a substantial amount of time, you could probably create a healer for that malady, as well."

"But two centuries..."

"It doesn't take that long. But, as I understand it, you've Made very few children, so you just didn't find out until you Made Nicholas."

"Why me? Can any vampire develop that ability?"

"No. Only someone Made by one of the First Demons."

She turned forward again. "So we're back to him." Her voice p.r.i.c.kled with bitterness.

Lucien set his hands against her shoulders again. "Yes.

We're back to him."

She closed her eyes, remembering the dreams. They hadn't taken her to that final memory, that place she didn't want to go.

But now, with Lucien's hands comforting her, it seemed almost safe. She drifted...

They had asked her to leave, and she went, but she had nowhere to go. Her family were all dead, the house where they 164 had lived burned to the ground in an attempt to ward off more infection. But, having been thwarted once, the Death seemed to want no more to do with her.

She went from house to house, nursing the ill where she could, rewarded with food, a blanket, a dipperful of water. At first it hurt her to watch her patients fade and die, but after a time the faces all began to look the same. She always did what she could, and it never changed the outcome.

And every Sunday, as if drawn there, she walked up the long path to the cloister door, stared at its wide, carved wood, fingered the bell pull. Then she turned around and walked back down the hill.

One day, on her way through the town, she had the feeling someone followed her. She stopped and looked, but saw nothing to confirm her fears. But the next Sunday, and the next, the same tickle of apprehension followed her.

The next week she brought a knife, taken from the kitchen of the family she'd just nursed along to inevitable death. It never occurred to her simply to not go. The compulsion was too strong, and she saw no need to fight it.

But on that day she discovered her pursuers were more than her imagination. They came from the bushes bordering the too-secluded path. There were four. The knife did her no good.

They stripped her and went through her pockets, finding the paternoster beads and a few meager trinkets she'd collected over the past months. Death hovered in a black cloud as one of them wrapped her own belt around her throat and squeezed it tight. What strength was left in her for fighting faded rapidly as her body fought to breathe. Death reached out to touch her face- A roar erupted from the bushes, followed by a form nearly human but perhaps not quite. The pressure on her throat eased suddenly, and she heard screams. She tried to see what was happening but her vision had gone blotchy, red and black with pain and loss of breath. Her body slumped to the dirt, fighting.

With breath back in her body she could smell now the coppery thick odor of blood. Pain stabbed through her. 165 Then arms lifted her, and she looked up into a face wrecked by scars. He cradled her close against his bare skin. He'd shed his robe, presuming, she thought, that the sight of his naked, ravaged body would frighten her attackers more than that of a cowled monk.

"My beautiful lady, what have they done to you?"

She looked up at him, her vision fading, and felt his warm tears touch her face. "I don't know. Do I die?" She remembered hands on her, vague pain, but her awareness had come and gone as the belt tightened around her throat. Whatever they had done, she didn't want to know.

He nodded.

"Can you save me? Like before?" Death stood tall and black right behind him. She had never seen Him so clearly, not even when the Plague had nearly taken her. Fear rose and choked her.

"I can save you, but not like before. There's not enough life left in you-" His voice was thick.

"Please-" It felt like the last word she would ever say.

"I have to tell you what it will be like-"

Death's long-fingered hand reached toward her face. "Just do it-please-"

She felt her breath stop, heard her heart sputter, and then nothing more.

Vivian's head jerked hard to one side, and she opened her eyes, realizing how far she'd drifted into memory. She hadn't fallen asleep-she only slept during the day and then it was the familiar vampiric coma. But she'd never lost herself this way before.

"Lucien?" she murmured. His hands steadied her head, their movement still gentle on her, soothing.

"Yes?"

"That was your fault, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

She pulled away from him and turned around, looking into his placid face. "Why? Why do you want me to remember?"

"Because you hate him so much." 166 "Why shouldn't I hate him? He Made me and then left me."

He studied her in silence for a moment, then lifted his hand to gently brush her cheek. "He had a reason."

"And how the h.e.l.l would you know?"

"The question is, do you want to know?"

The question caught her by surprise. She mulled. Her abandonment had haunted her for a lifetime, had colored everything she'd become in her six centuries of immortality.

Finally she nodded.

"If you can tell me, I want to know."

"Then turn around."

She did, and he set his big, scarred hands on either side of her face.

That part of her memory had been silent for her lifetime.

Stilled by the death that had nearly taken her then, she had a.s.sumed. A memory like that could never be recovered.

But as Lucien cupped her face in his hands, the images came back. They flittered along the edges of her consciousness, begging for her attention.

"Let go," said Lucien gently, and again she was certain she'd heard his voice before. She let her eyes drift closed, let the memories return.

They were strange memories, stored more in her skin than in eyes or mind. The scarred monk had cradled her in his strong arms, held her against his naked chest. She felt soft warmth on her face-his tears. The pain in her broken body had faded, separating from the main stream of her consciousness.

She was two people, two streams of feeling. One writhed along a ribbon of harsh pain, twisting toward death. The other lay curled in a wide, warm lap, reaching toward life.

His heart beat hard beneath his ravaged skin, the sound filling her head until nothing else existed. Her memory supplied all the sensations-the sound, the touch-but no sight, no odor.

She floated through it, no longer aware of the present except for the vague pressure of his fingers against her wrists. In the memory they had merged, she consumed by him. He must have taken blood-what remained of logic told her that in a barely 167 audible voice-but she didn't remember pain, only the soul- deep merging as her blood was taken away and given back.

She remembered so much, things she'd had no idea lived within her mind, and she wondered if the memory were truly hers, or half his, left behind with the blood he'd sacrificed to save her life. But he would have been able to see, to smell, and still all she remembered was the embrace of his whole body against hers, the pounding of his blood.

She felt her own life escape, slipping by her like a firefly in a black velvet night. But he grabbed it somehow and brought it back. It seemed he cupped the little light with hands of soft power and nursed it until it glowed bright again, then gently set it back inside her soul.

Then there was blackness again, this time the dark of sleep, and Vivian opened her eyes to look into Lucien's. For the first time she truly saw his face, the barely visible web of scars that still trailed over his features. The deep, clear, gray-blue eyes.

She caught a breath that tried to choke through her throat, and jerked her face out of his grasp.

"My G.o.d," she whispered. "It was you."

He sat silently, studying her face. How could he have done this to her? Bad enough he'd abandoned her then, but to insinuate himself into her life this way, without telling her- But he was talking now, and the soft movement of his voice made her listen.

"It was the only way I knew, then, to save you. Now...it could have been different." He took a long breath, then went on. "They found me there, with you and with the dead men. I was convicted of their murder, of your rape. They took me away in irons and hanged me the next day. I was in the ground nearly a month before I healed enough from the hanging to dig my way out."

She stared at him, barely able to conceive what he'd suffered.

"By that time," he went on, "you were gone. I looked for you nearly fifty years, but never found you."

"Maybe you didn't try very hard." She couldn't forgive him. Not yet. What he'd done had changed her too much. 168 "I didn't know where to look. But now I've found you, and really it didn't take that long-"

She shot to her feet, clenching her fists to keep from slapping him. "Six hundred years! It took you six hundred years."

He shrugged. "It's not that long. Not for me."

"For me it was a lifetime."

The tears burning on her lashes infuriated her. She spun on her heel and left him alone with the computer and the pile of nearly impenetrable, musty papers.

With a few hours left until daylight, Vivian walked. Or, for a time she thought she only walked. Then she realized the truth.

She hunted.

She hadn't hunted in centuries. But the memories had brought her back to those early days, when she'd awakened from death consumed with blood l.u.s.t. For weeks she'd hunted mindlessly, taking whatever blood crossed her path. With the world still surrounded by plague, the deaths disappeared in the ma.s.s of other deaths, but later she'd realized what she'd done and the guilt was more than she could bear.

But she hunted now. In the streets of New York City, the smell of blood and death everywhere, in these places where new kinds of plague took their toll.

She found her victim in a homeless man slumped against a Dumpster. He held part of a hamburger and a half-empty bottle of whiskey. Unconscious, he stirred not at all when she bent close to him. The reek of his body barely registered, drowned in the smell of his blood.

But as her fangs sank deep, she recognized the flavor of the blood. Yet another cancer victim, unconscious now not from drinking, but from the advanced state of the disease. The alcohol had blurred the pain, and as she drank deep she sensed the flow of his grat.i.tude. His last breath departed easily. He was ready to go.

When he was gone, and she was satiated, she arranged his body carefully, straightening his ragged clothes and his dirty hair. A peaceful expression had settled on his ravaged features.

Even then, she thought, in those first weeks, had she been 169 drawn to the dying? She'd been surrounded by victims of plague.

It wouldn't have been hard to take victims from those about to succ.u.mb.

It pained her that she didn't know, and would never know for sure, because the blindness of that time had blanked out her memory. And if he hadn't left her, if he'd stayed to guide her through those days, things could have been so different...

They'd hanged him. She'd had no way of knowing that. All these years-centuries-she'd hated him, and he had died for what he'd done to protect her.

She left her silent victim and wandered again, no longer hungry, listening to the sounds of the night. Sirens, squealing tires, screams. A baby crying. Laughter. A gunshot somewhere in the distance. She thought of the sounds of medieval England, the smells there which were nearly as dark and textured with rankness as the smells of this place.

Rounding a corner, she put a hand in her coat pocket. Smooth wooden beads rolled against her fingers-the paternoster beads they'd given her in the monastery. The beads she'd never let go of, because they reminded her of him.

She stood silent there for a long time. Someone brushed by her, then looked back over his shoulder, unable to quite make her out as she stood there so silent and so still she barely existed.

Her fingers moved along the smooth beads, the Latin of the prayer filling her head. She'd never even bothered to learn it in English.

She had loved him then. Whether she had realized it or not, she had loved him. She remembered the way he had responded to her touch, the way she'd responded when she touched him.

She remembered the softness in his eyes within the horrible scars on his face. Perhaps he had loved her, too. In any case, he'd died for her. And, coming back, had changed her.

She looked up at the sky. Not brightening yet, but she could feel the approach of the sun. She turned around and walked back the way she'd come.

Lucien lingered in Vivian's house only long enough to be sure the computers were all turned off, the papers put away. 170 Then he began the strange walk back to the Underground.

He took a wrong turn halfway there, but found his way nonetheless. Dawn lurked close when he arrived at the door outside Julian's office. The wide, sparkling chamber was eerily silent. He could feel the vampires that called the place home, their deep sleep a sort of soft, breathing sound in the back of his consciousness.

Julian was awake, though. Julian rarely slept, appearing to need it no more than Lucien did. He knocked on the office door.

Julian answered the summons. A deep line lay between his brows, and he waved absently to Lucien.