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I made a small accepting gesture.

“This incident in the village church tonight,” I said cautiously, “it was vulgar, I’m inclined to agree. My actions on the stage of theater, worse still. But these were blunders. And you know they aren’t the source of your rancor. Forget them for the moment and try to envision my beauty and my power. Try to see the evil that I am. I stalk the world in mortal dress—the worst of fiends, the monster who looks exactly like everyone else.”

The woman vampire made a low song of her laughter. I could feel only pain from him, and from her the warm emanation of her love.

“Think of it, Armand,” I pressed carefully. “Why should Death lurk in the shadows? Why should Death wait at the gate? There is no bedchamber, no ballroom that I cannot enter. Death in the glow of the hearth, Death on tiptoe in the corridor, that is what I am. Speak to me of the Dark Gifts—I use them. I’m Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.”

There was a faint moan from Nicolas.

I think I heard Armand sigh.

“There is no place where they can hide from me,” I said, “these godless and powerful ones who would destroy les Innocents. There is no lock that can keep me out.”

He stared back at me silently. He appeared sad and calm. His eyes were darkened slightly, but they were untroubled by malice or rage. He didn’t speak for a long moment, and then:

“A splendid mission, that,” he said, “to devil them mercilessly as you live among them. But it’s you still who don’t understand.”

“How so?” I asked.

“You can’t endure in the world, living among men, you cannot survive.”

“But I do,” I said simply. “The old mysteries have given way to a new style. And who knows what will follow? There’s no romance in what you are. There is great romance in what I am!”

“You can’t be that strong,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re saying, you have only just come into being, you are young.”

“He is very strong, however, this child,” mused the queen, “and so is his beautiful newborn companion. They are fiends of high-blown ideas and great reason, these two.”

“You can’t live among men!” Armand insisted again.

His face colored for one second. But he wasn’t my enemy now; rather he was some wondering elder struggling to tell me a critical truth. And at the same moment he seemed a child imploring me, and in that struggle lay his essence, parent and child, pleading with me to listen to what he had to say.

“And why not? I tell you I belong among men. It is their blood that makes me immortal.”

“Ah, yes, immortal, but you have not begun to understand it,” he said. “It’s no more than a word. Study the fate of your maker. Why did Magnus go into the flames? It’s an age-old truth among us, and you haven’t even guessed it. Live among men, and the passing years will drive you to madness. To see others grow old and die, to see kingdoms rise and fall, to lose all you understand and cherish—who can endure it? It will drive you to idiot raving and despair. Your own immortal kind is your protection, your salvation. The ancient ways, don’t you see, which never changed!”

He stopped, shocked that he had used this word, salvation, and it reverberated through the room, his lips shaping it again.

“Armand,” the old queen sang softly. “Madness may come to the eldest we know, whether they keep to the old ways or abandon them.” She made a gesture as if to attack him with her white claws, screeching with laughter as he stared coldly back. “I have kept to the old ways as long as you have and I am mad, am I not? Perhaps that is why I have kept them so well!”

He shook his head angrily in protest. Was he not the living proof it need not be so?

But she drew near to me and took hold of my arm, turning my face towards her.

“Did Magnus tell you nothing, child?” she asked.

I felt an immense power flowing from her.

“While others prowled this sacred place,” she said, “I went alone across the snow-covered fields to find Magnus. My strength is so great now it is as