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as if this monstrous place were a snare for a vampire. If I bolted, I'd
send the entire ballroom into panic. As gently as I could I pushed to
the open doors. And against the far wall, a backdrop of satin and
filigree, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, like something imagined,
Armand. Armand. If there had been a summons, I never heard it. If
there was a greeting, I didn't sense it now. He was merely looking at
me, a radiant creature in jewels and scalloped lace. And it was
Cinderella revealed at the ball, this vision, Sleeping Beauty opening her
eyes under a mesh of cobwebs and wiping them all away with one
sweep of her warm hand. The sheer pitch of incarnate beauty made
me gasp. Yes, perfect mortal raiment, and yet he seemed all the more
supernatural, his face too dazzling, his dark eyes fathomless and just
for a split second glinting as if they were windows to the fires of hell.
And when his voice came it was low and almost teasing, forcing me to
concentrate to hear it: All night you've been searching for me, he said,
and here I am, waiting for you. I have been waiting for you all along. I
think I sensed even then, as I stood unable to look away, that never in
my years of wandering this earth would I ever have such a rich
revelation of the true horror that we are. Heartbreakingly innocent he
seemed in the midst of the crowd. Yet I saw crypts when I looked at
him, and I heard the beat of the kettledrums. I saw torchlit fields
where I had never been, heard vague incantations, felt the heat of
raging fires on my face. And they didn't come out of him, these
visions. Rather I drew them out on my own. Yet never had Nicolas,
mortal or immortal, been so alluring. Never had Gabrielle held me so
in thrall. Dear God, this is love. This is desire. And all my past
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amours have been but the shadow of this. And it seemed in a
murmuring pulse of thought he gave me to know that I had been very
foolish to think it would not be so. Who can love us, you and I, as we
can love each other, he whispered and it seemed his lips actually
moved. Others looked at him. I saw them drifting with a ludicrous
slowness; I saw their eyes pass over him, I saw the light fall on him at a
rich new angle as he lowered his head. I was moving towards him. It
seemed he raised his right hand and beckoned and then he didn't, and
he had turned and I saw the figure of a young boy ahead of me, with
narrow waist and straight shoulders and high firm calves under silk
stockings, a boy who turned as he opened a door and beckoned again.
A mad thought came to me. I was moving after him, and it seemed
that none of the other things had happened. There was no crypt under
les Innocents, and he had not been that ancient fearful fiend. We were
somehow safe. We were the sum of our desires and this was saving us,
and the vast untasted horror of my own immortality did not lie before
me, and we were navigating calm seas with familiar beacons, and it was
time to be in each other's arms. A dark room surrounded us, private,
cold. The noise of the ball was far away. He was heated with the blood
he'd drunk and I could hear the strong force of his heart. He drew me
closer to him, and beyond the high windows there flashed the passing
lights of the carriages, with dim incessant sounds that spoke of safety
and comfort, and all the things that Paris was. I had never died. The
world was beginning again. I put out my arms and felt his heart
against me, and calling out to my Nicolas, I tried to warn him, to tell
him we were all of us doomed. Our life was slipping inch by inch from
us, and seeing the apple trees in the orchard, drenched in green
sunlight, I felt I would go mad.
"No, no, my dearest one, " he was whispering, "nothing but peace
and sweetness and your arms in mine. "
"You know it was the damnedest luck! " I whispered suddenly. "I
am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go
home. " Yes, yes, his lips tasted like blood, but it was not human
blood. It was that elixir that Magnus had given me, and I felt myself
recoil. I could get away this time. I had another chance. The wheel
had turned full round. I was crying out that I wouldn't drink; I
wouldn't, and then I felt the two hot shafts driven hard through my
neck and down to my soul. I couldn't move. It was coming as it had
come that night, the rapture, a thousandfold what it was when I held
mortals in my arms. And I knew what he was doing! He was feeding
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