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"May I kiss her before I go to sleep?" I asked

He cocked his head, and shrugged "If she doesn't like it, she'll never stop playing long enough to say so "

I went back into the parlor How clear it all was, the grand design of suolden clouds and cobalt skies, the Chinese vases on their stands, the h bronze rods of the narrow old s I saw it all of a piece, including the bed where I had lain, now heaped with fresh down-filled coverlets and pilloith embroidered antique faces

And she, the center dia white flannel, flounced at wrists and herand with agile unerring fingers, her hair a broad slow about her shoulders

I kissed her scented locks, and then her tender throat, and caught her girlish s back to brush my coat front

Down around her neck, I slipped ainst me With crossed arainst ers

I dared in whisper-soft tones with sealed lips to hu, and she hummed with me

"Appassionato,," I whispered in her ear I was crying I didn't want to touch her with blood She was too clean, too pretty I turned my head

She pitched forward Her hands pounded into the stormy finish

A silence fell, abrupt, and crystalline as the music before it

She turned and threw her arht and said the words I'd never heard aimmortal life:

"Armand, I love you "

Chapter 23

23

NEED I SAY they are the perfect companions? Neither of them cared about the murders I could not for the life of s, such as world peace, the poor suffering ho winter cold of New York, the price of medicines for the sick, and how dreadful it was that Israel and Palestine were forever in battle with each other But they did not care one whit about the horrors they'd beheld with their own eyes They did not care that I killed every night for blood, that I lived off it and nothing else, and that I was a creature wed by my very nature to human destruction