almost died."
  
  He had me faintly curious, but I could never do what he wanted. Nevertheless he was 
honest, amazingly so, as far as I could measure, and therefore sincere.
  
  "Ah, so, I didn't mean literally I meant that you should tell me what it was like to 
climb so high into the sun, and suffer so much, and, as you said, to discover in your 
pain all these memories, these connecting links. Tell me! Tell me."
  
  "Not if you mean to make it coherent," I said crossly. I gauged his reaction. I wasn't 
bothering him. He wanted to talk more.
  
  "Make it coherent? Armand, I'll simply write down what you say." He made his words 
simple yet curiously passionate.
  
  "Promise?"
  
  I flashed on him a playful look. Me! To do that.
  
  He smiled. He wadded up the little dress and then dropped it carefully so it might fall 
in the middle of the pile of her old clothes.
  
  "I'll not alter one syllable," he said. "Come be with me, and talk to me, and be my 
love." Again, he smiled.
  
  Suddenly he came towards me, much in the aggressive manner in which I'd thought earlier 
to approach him. He slipped his hands under my hair, and felt of my face, and then he 
gathered up the hair and he put his face down into my curls, and he laughed. He kissed my 
cheek.
  
  "Your hair's like something spun from amber, as if the amber would melt and could be 
drawn from candle flames in long fine airy threads and let to dry that way to make all 
these shining tresses. You're sweet, boylike and pretty as a girl. I wish I had one 
glimpse of you in antique velvet the way you were for him, for Marius. I wish I could see 
for one moment how it was when you dressed in stockings and wore a belted doublet sewn 
with rubies. Look at you, the frosty child. My love doesn't even touch you."
  
  This wasn't true.
  
  His lips were hot, and I could feel the fangs under them, feel the urgency suddenly in 
his fingers pressing against my scalp. It sent the shivers through me, and my body tensed 
and then shuddered, and it was sweet beyond prediction. I resented this lonely intimacy, 
resented it enough to transform it, or rid myself of it utterly. I'd rather die or be 
away, in the dark, simple and lonely with common tears.
  
  From the look in his eyes, I thought he could love without giving anything. Not a 
connoisseur, just a blood drinker.
  
  "You make me hungry," I whispered. "Not for you but for one who is doomed and yet 
alive. I want to hunt. Stop it. Why do you touch me? Why be so gentle?"
  
  "Everyone wants you," he said.
  
  "Oh, I know. Everyone would ravage a guilty cunning child! Everyone would have a 
laughing boy who knows his way around the block. Kids make better food than women, and 
girls are all too much like women, but young boys? They're not like men, are they?"
  
  "Don't mock me. I meant I wanted only to touch you, to feel how soft you are, how 
eternally young."
  
  "Oh, that's me, eternally young," I said. "You speak nonsense words for one so pretty 
yourself. I'm going out. I have to feed. And when I've finished with that, when I'm full 
and hot, then I'll come and I'll talk to you and tell you anything you want." I stepped 
back just a little from him, feeling the quivers through me as his fingers released my 
hair. I looked at the empty white window, peering too high for the trees.
  
  "They could see nothing green here, and it's spring outside, southern spring. I can 
smell it through the walls. I want to look just for a moment on flowers. To kill, to 
drink blood and to have flowers."
  
  "Not good enough. Want to make the book," he said. "Want to make it now and want you to 
come with me. I won't hang around forever."
  
  "Oh, nonsense, of course you will. You think I'm a doll, don't you? You think I'm cute 
and made of poured wax, and you'll stay as long as I stay."
  
  "You're a bit mean, Armand. You look like an angel, and talk like a common thug."
  
  "Such arrogance! I thought you wanted me."
  
  "Only on certain terms."
  
  "You lie, David Talbot," I said.
  
  I headed past him for the stairs. Cicadas sang in the night as they often do, to no 
clock, in New Orleans.
  
  Through the nine-pane windows of the stairwell, I glimpsed the flowering trees of 
spring, a bit of vine curling on a porch top.
  
  He followed. Down and down we went, walking like regular men, down to the first floor, 
and out the sparkling glass doors and into the broad lighted space of Napoleon Avenue 
with its damp, sweet park of green down the middle, a park thick with carefully planted 
flowers and old gnarled and humble, bending trees.
  
  The whole picture moved with the subtle river winds, and wet mist swirled but would not 
fall into rain itself, and tiny green leaves drifted down like wilting ashes to the 
ground. Soft soft southern spring. Even the sky seemed pregnant with the season, lowering 
yet blushing with reflected light, giving birth to the mist from all its pores.