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“For a longti at me

“ ‘Consciousness in that state…’ I finally added, as I looked away frohtn’t there be consciousness in any other? Fire, sunlight… what does it matter?’

“ ‘Louis,’ she said, her voice soft ‘You’re afraid You don’t stand en

garde against fear You don’t understand the danger of fear itself We’ll know these anse find those who can tell us, those who’ve possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the earth That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us He earned his death’

“ ‘But he didn’t die…’ I said

“ ‘He’s dead,’ she said ‘No one could have escaped that house unless they’d run with us, at our very side No He’s dead, and so is that tre aesthete, his friend Consciousness, what does it matter?’

“She gathered up the cards and put the for me to hand her the books from the table beside the bunk, those books which she’d unpacked immediately on board, the few select records of vauides They included no wild roar Allan Poe, no fancy Only those few accounts of the vampires of eastern Europe, which had become for her a sort of Bible In those countries indeed they did burn the remains of the vampire when they found him, and the heart was staked and the head severed She would read these now for hours, these ancient books which had been read and reread before they ever found their way across the Atlantic; they were travelers’ tales, the accounts of priests and scholars And she would plan our trip, not with the need of any pen or paper, only in her littering capitals of Europe towards the Black Sea, where ould dock at Varna and begin that search in the rural countryside of the Carpathians

“For ris in e which Claudia did not begin to cos had been planted in o, seeds which cah the Straits of Gibraltar and into the waters of the Mediterranean Sea

“I wanted those waters to be blue And they were not They were the nightti to re ranted, that an undisciplined memory had let slip away for eternity The Mediterranean was black, black off the coast of Italy, black off the coast of Greece, black always, black when in the small cold hours before dawn, as even Claudia slept, weary of her books and the er, I lowered a lantern down, down through the rising vapor until the fire blazed right over the lapping waters; and nothing caht itself, the reflection of that bea constant with me, a steady eye which seemed to fix on me from the depths and say, ‘Louis, your quest is for darkness only This sea is not your sea The myths of men are not your myths Men’s treasures are not yours’

“But oh, how the quest for the Old World vampires filled me with bitterness in those moments, a bitterness I could all but taste, as if the very air had lost its freshness For what secrets, what truths had those ive us? What, of necessity, must be their terrible limits, if indeed ere to find them at all? What can the damned really say to the damned?

“I never stepped ashore at Piraeus Yet inthethe streets of those Greeks who died at Marathon, listening to the sound of wind in the ancient olives These were the monu dead; here the secrets that had endured the passage of tiun to understand And yet nothing turnedcould turn reat risk of our questions, the risk of any question that is truthfully asked; for the answer er Who knew that better than I, who had presided over the death ofall I called human wither and die only to form an unbreakable chain which held me fast to this world yetheart?

“The sea lulled ht in New Orleans when I wandered through the St Louis cemetery and saw my sister, old and bent, a bouquet of white roses in her array head bowed, her steps carrying her steadily along through the perilous dark to the grave where the stone of her brother Louis was set, side by side with that of his younger brother Louis, who had died in the fire of Pointe du Lac leaving a generous legacy to a godchild and namesake she never knew Those floere for Louis, as if it had not been half a century since his death, as if her memory, like Louis’s memory, left her no peace Sorrow sharpened her ashen beauty, sorrow bent her narrow back And what I would not have given, as I watched her, to touch her silver hair, to whisper love to her, if love would not have loosed on her rerief Over and over and over

“And I drea, in the prison of this ship, in the prison of my body, attuned as it was to the rise of every sun as no mortal body had ever been And my heart beat faster for the mountains of eastern Europe, finally, beat faster for the one hope that soht find in that pri was allowed to exist why under God it was allowed to begin, and how under God it e to end it, I kneithout that answer And in time the waters of the Mediterranean became, in fact, the waters of the Black Sea”

The va on his elbow, his face cradled in his right palruous with the redness of his eyes

“Do you think I’ with you?” the vampire asked, his fine dark eyebrows knitted for an instant