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“It felt wonderful,” Nathaniel’s voice came distant and dreamy, as if all he’d been having was good foreplay.

“Didn’t you feel it change?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“No,” he said, “I knew you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“I’m glad one of us was so sure.”

He raised up onto his knees, from where he’d half swooned. “Trust yourself. Trust what you feel. It changed when you tried to fight it. Stop fighting it.” He leaned in toward me. “Let me be your food.”

I shook my head, and clung to Damian’s hand, but it was as if I could feel the tide rushing back toward the shore. Feel the wave building, building, and when it came, it would sweep us away. I didn’t want to be swept away.

“If Jean-Claude told you to feed the ardeur, then feed it,” Damian said. “What I felt from you just now was closer to blood lust.” His face was very serious, sorrowful even. “You don’t want to know what blood lust can make you do, Anita. You don’t want that.”

“Why is it different tonight?” It was a child asking someone to explain why the monster under the bed has grown a new and scarier head.

“I don’t know, but I do know that for the first time when you touch me, I feel it. A dim echo, but I feel it. Always before, Anita, when you touched me, it went away.” He made a movement with his fingers like putting out a candle, “snuffed out. Tonight . . .” He leaned over my hand, and I knew he was going to lay his lips across my knuckles. One of the gifts of the ardeur is that it lets you look inside someone’s heart. It lets you see what they truly feel. When his lips touched my skin, I felt what Damian was feeling. Satisfaction. Eagerness. Worry, but that was fast fading under the feel of his lips on my skin. He wanted. He wanted me. He wanted to feed the hunger of his skin. The hunger of his body not so much for orgasm but for that need to be held close and tight, that need we all have to press our nakedness against someone else’s. I felt his loneliness, and his need, even if it was only for one night, not to be lonely, not to be exiled down in the dark, alone. I saw how he felt about his coffin down in the basement. It was not his room. It was not his in any way. It was just the place he went to die every dawn. The place where he went to die, alone, knowing that he would rise as he had died, alone. I saw the endless stream of women that he had fed on, like pages in a book, a blonde, a brunette, the one with a tattoo on her neck, dark skin, pale skin, the one with blue hair, an endless stream of necks and wrists, and their eager eyes, and grasping hands, and nearly every night, it was in public view, as part of the floor show at Danse Macabre. So that even his feedings were not private. Even that was not special. It was eating so you wouldn’t die, with no meaning to it.

In the center of his being was a great emptiness.

I was supposed to be his master. I was supposed to take care of him, and I hadn’t known. I hadn’t asked, and I’d been so busy trying not to be tied to another man through some weird metaphysical shit, that I hadn’t noticed that Damian’s life sucked.

“I’m sorry, Damian, I . . .” I don’t know what I would have said, because his fingers touched my lips, and I couldn’t think. His fingers held heat and weight that they’d never had before.

His eyes widened, surprised, I think, as surprised as I was at the sensation. Or did my lips give heat to his skin, too? Did my lips suddenly feel swollen and eager as his fingertips did to me, as if both mouth and fingers were suddenly more?

I moved my lips against his touch, barely a movement, just enough to press my mouth against the ripeness of his fingers; barely enough to call it a kiss, but it wasn’t his skin I tasted, or not the skin I was touching. It was as if I laid my mouth against the most intimate parts of him. There was the hard, solid press of his fingers, but the taste, the smell of him, was the perfume of lower things, as if I were a dog on the scent of where I wanted to be.

He drew his breath in with a shaking gasp, and when I rolled my eyes up to see his face,