I experienced a curious heat flush throughout my entire body as she fell back and pulled me down with her. Now I was on top, pinning her down to the bed with the weight of my body, my hands grasping her wrists. I stared down at her, taking it all in: the throbbing pulse at the base of her creamy throat, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s now slightly flattened and lolling indolently to either side, the rise and fall of her stomach, the warm, firm feel of her flesh, waiting, antic.i.p.ating. . .

"Love's mysteries in souls do grow," Donne penned in "The Ecstasy," "But yet the body is his book."

Harlequin, take me away.

"Take me," she murmured.

"No." I said it without conviction.

"Don't you want me?"

Oh G.o.d, yes! I wanted her like nothing I had ever wanted before. But. . .

"It isn't s.e.x," I said hoa.r.s.ely.

"I know," she whispered. "s.e.x is just foreplay for the real thing."

It was a l.u.s.t worse than concupiscence. It was appet.i.te beyond l.u.s.t. It was the Hunger.

"Bite me," she commanded.

And I might have. Surrendered right then and there. But: "I can't." I had not grown the necessary fangs. I came up on my knees, gasping for air and for need.

"You can." She sat up and fumbled in the pocket of the robe. "Here." She handed me a familiar box.

I opened it and stared at the dental appliance with its gleaming, razor-sharp fangs. "Put it on." She handed a small tube of dental adhesive to me.

It was silly.

It was sick.

"Put it on." Her voice was thick with need. "Now." Her tone, insistent, commanding. Pleading.

"Please!"

I was without the will to resist her. I did as she bade me, trying to bury the likeness of other memories-other times, other occasions, when I had to suspend pa.s.sion and fumble to put something on.

She shrugged the robe from her shoulders and leaned toward me. "Please," she whispered. "I need this as much as you do. More!"

Her hand was behind me head, pulling me down and toward her. Her shoulder rose to meet my lips.

"Bite me!"

Had I been more experienced, less reluctant, I would have done it quickly. Instead, I opened my mouth as if to kiss the smooth flesh over the trapezius muscle, catching her collarbone with my lower jaw.

As I felt the points of the teeth meet the resistance of skin, I hesitated, then brought my arms around her, my right hand cradling the back of her head. She stiffened, tilting her head back as the fangs dimpled her flesh. As the points broke the skin, she sighed. Tilting her head back, as I eased deeper into her shoulder, she shuddered. I could tell now that the slowness of the penetration was more painful, yet she seemed glad of it, welcoming the hurt.

As the blood welled up into my mouth she pushed against me with a languid movement. "Harder,"

she breathed into my ear. "Suck me. Drink me."

The heat of her flesh was like the sun, warming me, driving the winter from my bones. I could smell her, the perfume of skin and fragrance of perspiration and secret things filled my head like an olfactory intoxicant. The press of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against my chest carried the stroke of each heartbeat into my ownflesh with a maddening, rhythmic caress.

And the blood. . .

It filled my mouth like warm, meaty honey. I swallowed and it poured down my throat like boiling wine, sizzling and bubbling and burning a path to my very core. A furnace opened deep within me, filling me with divine brightness.

"Harder," she hissed, clinging to me with a frightening strength. "Bite me again. Harder, deeper."

I pulled back, tearing the wound a little. "I don't want to hurt you!"

"I want you to hurt me! I need you to hurt me!" She arched her back and pulled my head lower.

"Bite me! Here!"

I pressed my face to her glorious flesh; became blind.

And obedient.

There were no dreams this time: I slept like the dead. The nightmare came when I finally awoke.

Blood.

I came to myself lying in a pool of red. But there was no barn, no dying beast, no knife-wielding madman. I was in my room, on my bed.

Deirdre was beside me.

She lay in quiet repose, face tranquil, eyes closed, lips locked in a gentle smile. Her ivory skin seemed all the whiter, now, marked with red blooms where she had urged my kisses and surrounded by sheets, stained the color of her lips and hair. One arm was tucked up under the pillow, the other plunged beneath a corner of the bedclothes that lapped at her side like a tide rolling out at sunset.

There had come a moment of lucidity in the midst of the pa.s.sion, the madness, when I had paused, my mouth dripping, to ask, "Why?"

"I told you that I came to nurse you back to health," she had gasped. And then pulled me back to her breast to do just that.

Perhaps I had known the answer to my question even better than she. But all I could think of was the heat of her flesh, warming me like a hearth fire.

I reached down to cover her the rest of her nakedness, touched her shoulder.

It was cold.

And I knew.

Perhaps I had known in that moment when she first came to me. But I went through the pantomime, anyway: I searched for a pulse at her throat, pulled back eyelids, prodded pressure points. She was cold, lifeless. An empty husk, its former contents drained and flown.

The warmth that she had so recently gifted me was suddenly gone.

As I reached down to reclose her eyes, I tried to recall the pa.s.sage from Endymion.

But all I could remember were the words of Archibald MacLeish: Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever.

It is most deadly when most dead, and dead will stare and sting forever.

Chapter Eleven.

"You need to sleep."

"I don't want to sleep." I was irritated that I hadn't heard Suki come into the library.

"It's been three days. Abusing yourself like this isn't going to bring her back."

Maybe not, I thought. But maybe I can hold back the nightmares just a little longer. "I'll sleep when I'm d.a.m.n good and ready!"

"It's not your fault," she said. "It was something that she wanted to do and we had given her our blessing. No one thought she'd take it that far."

"We've already had this discussion." I moved the scanner down another page, the LEDs seeming to devour the text in a greenish glow. "By the way, the equipment's great. The optical character recognition software interfaces perfectly with the scanner and the word processing program. And where did you find a notebook computer with a two-gigabyte hard drive?"

She crossed her arms in front of her. "We have our resources and you are avoiding the subject."

"And you are stating the obvious: I already told you that I have no intention of discussing this further.

Case closed, thank you again for the equipment, and get out."

She went, slamming the door behind her.

I finished scanning a translation of M. Philip Rohr's 1679 treatise, Dissertatio de Masticatione Mortuorum, and set it aside. The stack of tomes left to be scanned was definitely dwindling and I would soon be done with this phase of my research. I opened a copy of Sir Richard Burton's Vikran and the Vampire or Tales of Hindu Devilry. This was an original first edition and I had to be careful of the pages as I began the scanning process anew.

They told me that I was completely healed.

My neck was smooth and unblemished and I felt strength and energy coursing through my body in unprecedented amounts.

Dr. Burton confirmed that I was obscenely healthy-in the physical sense, anyway. He was worried, however, about my unwillingness to sleep or talk about what had happened. After I told him that it was none of his d.a.m.n business, the Doman paid me a visit.

"I want to show you something," Stefan Pagelovitch said. And, as he looked into my eyes, I felt the full force of his will leeching my resistance. I accompanied him without protest.

We walked down a corridor I had never seen before. It led to the room that served as the morgue.

He opened one of the doors set in two of the four walls and pulled out the drawer. There was a plastic body bag on the slablike shelf and he pulled down the zipper. "Come here," he said.

I came and looked. It was the body of the woman who had distracted me in the parking lot a week before. The woman who had provided the switchblade that had opened my throat.

"This the one?"I nodded, swallowing. The expression on her face suggested that she might have been glad to die.

He opened three more drawers, three more body bags. "Recognize any of these?"

I shook my head. "It was dark." Not that it made a h.e.l.l of a lot of difference for two of them: the only way anyone was going to identify their remains was with dental records, and that would be a dicey ch.o.r.e, at best.

"A war has begun, I think," he murmured.

"What did this to them?"

"And why were you spared?"

"I lead a charmed life," I said bitterly.

The Doman opened a fifth drawer and pulled out the rolling shelf. "Here." He opened the plastic bag and pulled out an arm. "Look."

I looked from where I stood, too far away to see any real detail.

"Look!" the Doman repeated, commanding me this time.

I shuffled forward on reluctant feet. It was a pale, slender arm. A familiar arm. I did not look down: I did not want to look at the rest of her.

Pagelovitch turned and displayed the wrist. The flesh was torn and gouged in a deep trench from the base of the palm to nearly halfway up the forearm. "The other arm is the same."

I turned away.

"These are not bite wounds," he said, behind me. "You didn't do this to her. She did it to herself."

"I was there," I said, trying to remember, trying to forget.

"She waited until you were asleep and then removed the partial from your mouth and used it to do this to herself. Christopher, it wasn't your fault. She was unstable. After Damien died she didn't want to live. You should be angry that she used you in this way!"

"You're right," I said, turning away. "I am angry."

But it didn't do any good.

I was still being used.

She stood up, clasping her hands together nervously; a thin, wisp of a woman with mouse brown hair, wearing a floral print sackdress.

"My name is Merlene," she said, "and I'm married to a lycanthrope."

The rest of the people in the circle answered in unison: "Hi, Merlene!"

"I guess most of you know me from before," she continued with a wan, twitchy smile. "You were in my first support group back when Howard was bitten and we were trying to adjust to all the changes that were taking place. You all were great. . . ."

"So were you, Merlene!" someone called out from the circle.

She drooped a little less. "It was an adjustment. Actually, the children handled it better than either of us. They thought it was 'cool' that Daddy was a werewolf." She tried a little laugh. It took a little effort.

"I quit coming to group because I thought we had worked everything out. That was two years ago-"