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I found a victim as soon as we had crossed the river, and as soon as I spotted theI had done alone I would noith her She would watch this act, learn from it I think the intimacy of it made the blood rush to my face

And as I lured the victim out of the tavern, as I teased hi off for her,it a little crueler, more playful And when the kill came, it had an intensity to it that left me spent afterwards

She loved it She watched everything as if she could suck up the very vision as she sucked blood We caain and I took her in my arms and I felt her heat and she feltof our gar statues in the dark

After that, the night lost all ordinary dihts I have ever endured in my immortal life

It was endless and fatho, and there were tiainst its pleasures and its surprises, arid I had none

And though I said her name over and over, to make it natural, she wasn’t really Gabrielle yet to me She was simply she, the one I had needed all ofThe only woman I had ever loved

Her actual death didn’t take long

We sought out an empty cellar room where we remained until it was finished And there I held on to her and talked to her as it went on I told her everything that had happened to ain, in words this time

I told her all about the tower I told everything that Magnus had said I explained all the occurrences of the presence And how I had beco to chase it down Over and over again I tried to send her i about it Neither did she But she listened very attentively

I talked to her about Nicki’s suspicions, which of course he had not mentioned to her at all And I explained that I feared for him even more now Another open , another eeness of it all

But never et some story that would ht by Nicki, to break the chain of suspicions that was binding him to me

She seemed dimly fascinated by all of this, but it didn’t really matter to her What mattered to her hat lay before her now

And when her death was finished, she was unstoppable There was no wall that she could not climb, no door she wouldn’t enter, no rooftop terrain too steep

It was as if she did not believe she would live forever; rather she thought she had been granted this one night of supernatural vitality and all things must be known and accomplished before death would come for her at dawn

Many tio home to the tower As the hours passed, a spiritual exhaustion came over me I needed to be quiet there, to think on what had happened I’d open my eyes and see only blackness for an instant But she wanted only experiment, adventure

She proposed that we enter the private dwellings of hed when I said that I always purchased my clothes in the proper way

"We can hear if a house is eh the streets, her eyes on the s of the darkened mansions "We can hear if the servants are asleep"

It h I’d never atte her up narrow back stairs and down carpeted corridors, amazed at the ease of it all, and fascinated by the details of the informal chambers in which s: fans, snuffboxes, the newspaper the , his boots on the hearth It was asinto s

But she had her purpose In a lady’s dressing rooe St Germain house, she found a fortune in lavish clothes to fit her new and fuller form I helped to peel off the old taffeta and to dress her up in pink velvet, gathering her hair in tidy curls under an ostrich-pluht of her, and the strange eerie feeling of wandering with her through this over furnished house full oftable A vial of perfuold pair of scissors She looked at herself in the glass

I went to kiss her again and she didn’t stopAnd that was the picture we ether, white-faced lovers, as we rushed down the servants’ stairs and out into the late evening streets

We wandered in and out of the Opera and the Coh the ball in the Palais Royal It delighted her the way mortals saw us, but did not see us, how they were drawn to us, and completely deceived

We heard the presence very sharply after that, as we explored the churches, then again it was gone We clidom, and afterwards huddled in crowded coffeehouses for a little while e secret glances, to laugh softly, tete-a-tete

She fell into drea of coffee, at the layers of cigarette s around the lamps

She loved the dark e else She wanted to cliain She h the city by es as we had done

Soht, ere in the desertedhand in hand

We had just heard the presence again but neither of us could discern a disposition in it as we had before It was puzzlingher still -- the refuse, the cats that chased the vermin, the bizarre stillness, the way that the darkest coer for us She remarked on that Perhaps it was that which enchanted her most of all, that we could slip past the dens of thieves unheard, that we could easily defeat anyone who should be fool enough to trouble us, that ere both visible and invisible, palpable and utterly unaccountable

I didn’t rash her or question her I waswith her and content and sohts about this unfahtly built young h the darkened stalls I watched hi fro into the land of the dead He reminded me of Nicolas because of his dark hair and dark eyes, and so in the face He shouldn’t have been in the er than Nicki and very foolish, indeed

But just how foolish he was I didn’t realize until she ht him down almost silently from the horse

I was shaken The innocence of her victiht ht thee her? Yet the ease hich she slew the younghis neck when the little drink she took was not enough to kill hi to watch

She was colder than I She was better at all of it, I thought Magnus had said, "Show no mercy" But had he meant us to kill e did not have to kill?"

It came clear in an instant why she’d done it She tore off the pink velvet girdle and skirts right there and put on the boy’s clothes She’d chosen him for the fit of the clothes

And to describe it arments, she becas and scarlet breeches, the lace shirt and the yelloaistcoat and then the scarlet frock coat, and even took the scarlet ribbon froainst the charar more the lion’s mane now than the lovely mass of woman’s tresses it had been e her I closed ain, ether I couldn’t endure being so near to the dead boy

She tied all of her blond hair together with the scarlet ribbon and let the long locks hang down her back She laid the pink dress over the body of the boy to cover him, and she buckled on his sword, and drew it once and sheathed it again, and took his creao, then, darling," she said, and she kissed o back to the tower, and just be close to her She looked at me and pressedahead

She had to feel the freedo to exert myself to catch up

That had never happened withAnd the sight of her flashing through the boarded-up stalls and the heaps of garbage ain I stopped

She came back to me and kissed me "But there’s no real reason for ht have been talking to a child

"No, of course there isn’t," I said Maybe it was a blessing that she couldn’t read s, so perfect in the creaathered at her small waist Her face was like a flame