stars. Worse than a Van Gogh painting. You never know the palette of the one you kill 
until the mind disgorges its finest colors.
  
  Soon enough he sank down. I went with him. I had my left arm all the way around him 
now, and I lay childlike against his big muscular belly, and I drew the blood out now in 
the blindest gushes, pressing everything he thought and saw and felt down into only 
color, just give me color, pure orange, and just for a second, as he died-as the death 
passed me by, like a big rolling ball of black strength which turns out to be nothing 
actually, nothing but smoke or something even less than that-as this death came into me 
and went out again like the wind, I thought, Do I by crushing everything that he is 
deprive him of a final knowing?
  
  Nonsense, Armand. You know what the spirits know, what the angels know. The bastard is 
going home! To Heaven. To Heaven that would not have you, and might never.
  
  In death, he looked most excellent.
  
  I sat beside him. I wiped my mouth, not that there was a drop to wipe. Vampires slobber 
blood only in motion pictures. Even the most mundane immortal is far too skilled to spill 
a drop. I wiped my mouth because his sweat was on my lips and on my face, and I wanted it 
to go away.
  
  I admired him, however, that he was big and wondrously hard for all his seeming 
roundness. I admired the black hair clinging to his wet chest where the shirt had been so 
inevitably torn away.
  
  His black hair was something to behold. I ripped the knotted cloth that tied it. It was 
as full and thick as a woman's hair.
  
  Making sure he was dead, I wrapped its length around my left hand and purposed to pull 
the whole mass from his scalp.
  
  David gasped. "Must you do this?" he asked me.
  
  "No," I said. Even then a few thousand strands had ripped loose from the scalp, each 
with only its tiny blooded root winking in the air like a tiny firefly. I held the mop 
for a moment and then let it slip out of my fingers and fall down behind his turned head.
  
  Those unanchored hairs fell sloppily over his coarse cheek. His eyes were wet and 
wakeful-seeming, dying jelly.
  
  David turned and went out into the little street. Cars roared and clattered by. A ship 
on the river sang with a steam calliope.
  
  I came up behind him. I wiped the dust off me. One blow and I could have set the whole 
house to falling down, just caving in on the putrid filth within, dying softly amid other 
houses so no one indoors here would even know, all this moist wood merely caving.
  
  I could not get the taste and smell of this sweat gone.
  
  "Why did you so object to my pulling out his hair?" I asked. "I only wanted to have it, 
and he's dead and beyond caring and no one else will miss his black hair."
  
  He turned with a sly smile and took my measure.
  
  "You frighten me, the way you look," I said. "Have I so carelessly revealed myself to 
be a monster? You know, my blessed mortal Sybelle, when she is not playing the Sonata by 
Beethoven called the Appassionata, watches me feed all the time. Do you want me to tell 
my story now?"
  
  I glanced back at the dead man on his side, his shoulder sagging. On the windowsill 
beyond and above him stood a blue glass bottle and in it was an orange flower. Isn't that 
the damnedest thing?
  
  "Yes, I do want your story," David said. "Come, let's go back together. I only asked 
you not to take his hair for one reason."
  
  "Yes?" I asked. I looked at him. Rather genuine curiosity. "What was the reason then? I 
was only going to pull out all his hair and throw it away."
  
  "Like pulling off the wings of a fly," he offered seemingly without judgment.
  
  "A dead fly," I said. I deliberately smiled. "Come now, why the fuss?"
  
  "I wanted to see if you'd listen to me," he said. "That's all. Because if you did then 
it might be all right between us. And you stopped. And it is." He turned around and took 
my arm.
  
  "I don't like you!" I said.
  
  "Oh, yes, you do, Armand," he answered. "Let me write it. Pace and rail and rant. 
You're very high and mighty right now because you have those two splendid little mortals 
hanging on your every gesture, and they're like acolytes to a god. But you want to tell 
me the story, you know you do. Come on!"
  
  I couldn't stop myself from laughing. "Have these tactics worked for you in the past?"
  
  Now it was his turn to laugh and he did, good-naturedly. "No, I suppose not," he said. 
"But let me put it to you this way, write it for them."
  
  "For whom?"
  
  "For Benji and Sybelle." He shrugged. "No?"
  
  I didn't answer.
  
  Write the story for Benji and Sybelle. My mind raced forwards, to some cheerful and 
wholesome room, where we three would be gathered years hence-I, Armand, unchanged, boy 
teacher-and Benji and Sybelle in their mortal prime, Benji grown into a sleek tall 
gentleman with an Arab's ink-eyed allure and his favorite cheroot in his hand, a man of