made me one of you, you did it to me!" My roars echoed one upon the other as I scrambled 
about in the dark till I found my sword, and then dancing back to gain my momentum, I too 
made the leap and cleared the spears and found myself high up on the floor of the church, 
and she hovering with glittering tears before the altar.
  She backed up into the bank of red flowers that barely showed in the starlight that 
passed through the darkened windows.
  "No, Vittorio, don't kill me, don't do it. Don't," she sobbed and wailed. "I am a 
child, like you, please, don't."
  I tore at her, and she scrambled to the end of the sanctuary. In a rage, I swung at the 
statue of Lucifer with my sword. It tottered and then crashed down, breaking on the 
marble floor of the cursed sanctuary.
  She hovered at the far end. She dropped down on her knees and threw out her hands. She 
shook her head, her hair flying wildly from side to side.
  "Don't kill me, don't kill me, don't kill me. You send me to Hell if you do; don't do 
it."
  "Wretch!" I moaned. "Wretch!" My tears fell as freely as hers. "I thirst, you wretch. I 
thirst, and I can smell them, the slaves in the coop. I can smell them, their blood, damn 
you!"
  I too had gone down on my knees. I lay down on the marble, and kicked aside the broken 
fragments of the hideous statue. With my sword I snagged the lace of the altar cloth and 
brought it down with all its many red flowers tumbling on me, so that I could roll over 
into them and crush my face into their softness.
  A silence fell, a terrible silence full of my own wailing. I could feel my strength, 
feel it even in the timbre of my voice, and the arm that held the sword without 
exhaustion or restraint, and feel it in the painless calm with which I lay on what should 
have been cold and was not cold, or only goodly cold. Oh, she had made me mighty.
  A scent overcame me. I looked up. She stood just above me, tender, loving thing that 
she was, with her eyes so full of the starlight now, so glinting and quiet and unjudging. 
In her arms she held a young human, a feeble-minded one, who did not know his danger.
  How pink and succulent he was, how like the roasted pig ready for my lips, how full of 
naturally cooking and bubbling mortal blood and ready for me. She set him down before me.
  He was naked, thin buttocks on his heels, his trembling chest very pink and his hair 
black and long and soft around his guileless face. He appeared to be dreaming or 
searching the darkness, perhaps for angels?
  "Drink, my darling, drink from him," she said, "and then you'll have the strength to 
take us both to the Good Father for Confession."
  I smiled. The desire for the feeble-minded boy before me was almost more than I could 
endure. But it was a whole new book now, was it not, what I might endure, and I took my 
time, rising up on my elbow as I looked at her.
  "To the Good Father? You think that's where we'll go? Right away, just like that, the 
two of us?"
  She began to cry again. "Not right away, no, not right away," she cried. She shook her 
head. Beaten.
  I took him. I broke his neck when I drained him dry. He made not a sound. There was no 
time for fear or pain or crying. Do we ever forget the first kill? Do we ever?
  Through the coop I went all that night, devouring, feasting, gorging on their throats, 
taking what I wanted from each, sending each to God or to Hell, how could I ever know, 
bound now to this earth with her, and she feasting with me in her dainty way, ever 
watching for my howls and wails, and ever catching hold of me to kiss me and ply me with 
her sobs when I shook with rage.
  "Come out of here," I said.
  It was just before sunrise. I told her I would spend no day beneath these pointed 
towers, in this house of horrors, in this place of evil and filthy birth.
  "I know of a cave," she said. "Far down the mountains, past the farmlands."
  "Yes, somewhere on the edge of a true meadow?"
  "There are meadows in this fair land without count, my love," she said. "And under the 
moon their flowers shine as prettily for our magical eyes as ever they do for humans by 
the light of God's sun. Remember His moon is ours.
  "And tomorrow night... before you think of the priest... you must take your time to 
think of the priest - "
  "Don't make me laugh again. Show me how to fly. Wrap your arm around my waist and show 
me how to drop from the high walls to safety in a descent that would shatter a man's 
limbs. Don't talk of priests anymore. Don't mock me!"
  "... before you think of the priest, of Confession," she went on, undeterred in her 
dainty sweet small voice, her eyes brimming with tears of love, "we'll go back to the 
town of Santa Maddalana while it's fast asleep, and we'll burn it all down around them."
  
  
  13
  CHILD BRIDE
  
  WE didn't put the torch to Santa Maddalana. It was too much of a pleasure to hunt the 
town.
  By the third night, I had stopped weeping at sunrise, when we retired together, locked 
in each other's arms inside our concealed and unreachable cave.
  And by the third night, the townspeople knew what had befallen them - how their clever 
bargain with the Devil had rebounded upon them - and they were in a panic, and it was a 
great game to outsmart them, to hide in the multitude of shadows that made up their 
twisted streets, and to tear open their most extravagant and clever locks.
  In the early hours, when no one dared to stir, and the good Franciscan priest knelt 
awake in his cell, saying his rosary, and begging God for understanding of what was 
happening - this priest, you remember, who had befriended me at the inn, who had dined 
with me and warned me, not in anger like his Dominican brother, but in kindness - while 
this priest prayed, I crept into the Franciscan church and I too prayed.
  But each night I told myself what a man says to himself under his breath when he 
couches with his adulterous whore: "One more night, God, and then I'll go to Confession. 
One more night of bliss, Lord, and then I'll go home to my wife." The townspeople had no 
chance against us.
  What skills I did not acquire naturally and through experimentation, my beloved Ursula 
taught to me with patience and grace. I could scan a mind, find a sin and eat it with a 
flick of my tongue as I sucked the blood from a lazy, lying merchant who had put out his 
own tender children once for the mysterious Lord Florian, who had kept the peace.
  One night we found that the townsmen had been by day to the abandoned castle. There was 
evidence of hasty entry, with little stolen or disturbed. How it must have frightened 
them, the horrid saints still flanking the pedestal of the Fallen Lucifer in the church. 
They had not taken the golden candlesticks or the old tabernacle in which I discovered, 
with my groping hand, a shriveled human heart.
  On our last visit to the Court of the Ruby Grail, I took the burned leathery heads of 
the vampires from the deep cellar and I hurled them like so many stones through the 
stained-glass windows. The last of the brilliant art of the castle was gone.