"Yeah, yeah," I said impatiently.

He smiled at me so sweetly that I put my head against his shoulder. He tensed at the contact and I removed myself, but then he took my hand impulsively, pulling off the glove and touching the bare flesh. His dry smooth skin tingled against mine, as if trying to make it a part of him. I shivered. "Thank you, Ariane, for your promise," he said.

"Oh," I said, embarrassed, "no."

He pulled my glove back on, adjusting the fingers, and we walked along. The great black expanse of the Presidio was over the rise, looming up like something out of Joseph Conrad. "What makes you think I won't betray you?" I asked.

"Betray me? You cannot."

"No?"

"Who would believe you? And if they did believe you, I'd kill you. And then 'they' would kill me. That would suit everyone just fine. But I don't believe that is what you want, Ariane."

I said nothing.

"You will not betray me," Ricari said, pleased.

I got cold, and we left. Ricari adored my car. He was terrified of them, and didn't know how to drive, but he was as thrilled as a kid on a roller-coaster to be my passenger. He was fascinated by my CD player and piles of discs. "It's completely different from being in a taxi cab," he enthused. "I hate taxi cabs. I can walk faster than half of them can drive, what with them wanting to screw you for fares. What is this music-what is New Order? They sound very fascist."

"They are," I said, amused. "They aren't. They're just a pop band."

"Oh, I don't like pop music at all."

"What do you like?"

Ricari frowned slightly. "I like... tortured Russian composers," he decided. "And Debussy."

"Is there any music from the twentieth century that you like?" I asked.

"I don't know. I suppose I like the Beatles. I don't hate them. They're the only pop band whose name I can remember."

"I have Beatles," I offered.

"No, no, I don't want to hear them. There is too much music. Let us listen to silence, and car noise."

"I have Prokofiev at home," I said.

"Yes! I like that!"

We went to a late-night cafe and I had a mocha to keep me awake for the rest of the night, and then I drove him to my apartment. It was in disarray-I hadn't thought to clean it in the week or so that I had had Ricari in my life. I hadn't planned to bring him over, but I'd blabbed about Prokofiev, and I needed another sweater if we were going to be outside.

Ricari seemed to enjoy the mess. He moved quickly about the room, jumping between piles of cast-off cardigans and back issues of Pathogenesis Journal, the tails of his coat flying out behind him. He came to rest on my chair, peering out from under his flyaway bangs.

I put on Prokofiev, and water for tea to warm me.

"Ariane," he said, covering his cheek with his hand, "come here."

I approached him.

He took my face between his hands and gazed into my eyes. "I'm hungry," he whispered.

I pulled off my gray sweater and pulled up the sleeve of my shirt, exposing my wrist. The green veins sighed under the winter-paled, fine skin. Ricari looked at the wrist, and then he looked at me.

"Go ahead," I urged.

He took a few hesistant breaths, then lay his mouth against the skin of my wrist. His lips were icy cold and the inside of his mouth, when he opened it, chilled me where it struck. At first he only breathed against the skin, then kissed it, openmouthed, as you would kiss the lips of a lover. I closed my eyes.

The teeth hit me, plunging in between tendons, piercing me deeply. I gasped and staggered, and he pulled me firmly into him, bending my arm so that I had it around him and he could sip at the hot blood welling from the puncture wound. It would not be much-a puncture wound from a bite like that doesn't bleed until it's pressured. But then he sucked, turning the bites inside out, and how the fluid rushed from me into his mouth!

Then it was over. He was settling me back upon my couch; pressing his thumb, suddenly very hot, against the bite in the soft part of my wrist. I had fallen, I guess. I'd had my eyes closed, and so lost any kind of visual cue that I was losing consciousness. My body felt swollen with pleasure. Ricari kissed my forehead with blood-warm, blood-damp lips. I opened my eyes and looked up at him. He was radiant, his flesh a deep human rose, mouth red as berries. "Yes?" he said.

I managed a tired "Hm."

He got up and fixed the tea for me, and brought it to me, watching intently as I sipped at it while holding my wrist at a strange angle. "Look at it," he urged me.

I set down the mug and dared to peek at the wound. I am not a fan of puncture wounds-they are pretty gruesome, as opposed to the clean stern beauty of a cut. But there was only a trace of it there-some oozy plasma traces, rapidly hardening to a crust between the two cords of my tendons. "What?" I said. "How does that work?"

"I can heal you too," Ricari said. "My bite leaves no trace, if I taste. My saliva heals any small wound completely. You will, I'm afraid, have a slight scar."

It still hurt, but only vaguely now. I lay back and sipped my tea, praying it would replace my lost fluids. I had never given blood for blood banks, having indulged in unsafe sex with men of dubious heterosexuality in the past five years, and I had no idea how much blood I could lose before passing out. Not much apparently. Ricari stroked my forehead gently with his fingertips, the edges of his lethal claws lightly brushing my hair. Like an Irishman after too much ale, he began to speak to me in an intimate tone about himself.

"It's that you remind me of my sister, Elena. She was the eldest sister, with three sisters between us, but we were closest to one another. My mother was dusky, a southern woman, and some of the children turned out darker-skinned than others. Elena was one. She was dusky and had red hair, like you. Oh, she was beautifully tall, and strong-willed, and she wanted to take over my father's estate when he died, but since I was the only son, it was going to go to me. I didn't want it. I was irresponsible, I cared nothing about sheep or grapes or olives, and I still don't care anything about money. I wanted to lie around in the sun and listen to my sisters singing and paint and make up songs in Greek. Oh, don't get the impression that Elena was all bookkeeping and looking after servants and doling out responsibilities. She was also quite wild. It was the red hair-that Gallic influence-and she was the eldest, and she was very proud, and she felt slighted by my father, who was dense and very stern and always did what was right. Elena encouraged me to be the way I was, she thought I was pretty, I was her little darling, she had always been the one to carry me when I was a baby."

"What happened to her?" I asked Ricari softly.

He sighed. "Oh, dead, long, long ago. I think she married and took the estate, and she didn't love the man she married, of course. I broke my father's heart, you know. I ran away rather than be a man and take the estate and run the vineyards. I ran away to Geneva to be with the Shelleys."

"Did you get there?"

"Oh, I did, but I was too late. There was no news media in those days to keep one updated on which celebrities were where. I fell in with the other admirers, and we 'hung out' as you say, on the shore of the lake, and encouraged each other's childishness." Ricari looked down at me fading on the couch. "I shall leave you now. You should sleep. The sun will come soon."

"Not that soon," I insisted, rising off the couch. This time the visual warnings were right there-the world divided into chips of color and form-and I sank back onto the couch, my head resting on my green cardigan. I was so tired.

"Yes, soon. I will leave. It's stopped raining. I won't melt." He leant over and pressed his warm cheek against me-he was warmer than me now, his cheek glowing bright. His stubble was a pleasing texture. "Sleep. Sleep, little one."

"You're littler than me," I mumbled, and he sank away into the sweet dull depths of my sleep, and I could watch as he disappeared into the rising dark. I felt my arm slip off the couch and dangle, but I had no strength to lift it and set it to rights.

It had been less than forty-eight hours since I'd seen Ricari last, and he had supped on the blood from my wrist, but it didn't seem like enough and I wanted him to have more of me. I thought to myself that he must be terribly hungry now, poor moral creature, and it would be a whole night and day and night before he could attend Mass again. I thought of him in the church, pinching off his prayers with the words that must have been in his mouth like taste buds by now, and I wanted to arrive at Mass in a flowing white dress, and for him to ravage me upon the altar. Crimson spots on the white lace. Jesus Christ would weep to see his little girl so defiled.

I wasn't a Catholic and I never had been. My mother's family had been Catholics, that New Orleans brand of Catholic, weaving habit and superstition into a cloak that barred the cold wind of agnosticism, and kept my mother and her sister, Wilemina, out. My aunt was too skeptical for religion and my mother, too unstable.

I never knew my mother; she ran away weeks after I was born and nobody knew what had become of her. My Aunt Willie had her theories, sacks full of them-Mother in San Francisco, hippie consort of Hell's Angels, and dying alone by the side of the road gasping for junk and pills; Mother in the Southwest desert, schizophrenic, looking for angels and devils in the windswept mesas, finally dying alone of thirst by the side of Route 66; Mother, most likely, still in N.O., haunting the dank caverns where my father was last seen, trapped into a life of white slavery in one of the innumerable rotting hotels, dying alone and confused, schizophrenic, gasping for junk and pills.

I couldn't confess to Aunt Willie that all those prospects seemed hopelessly romantic to me, orphan mulatto child, bereft of religion and chemical releases. Aunt Willie, so patrician and practical and academic, caring only for the New Yorker and PTA meetings and dusty 78's of the Haskins Vocal Group, told stories designed to disgust and straighten me out. In a lot of ways they worked. I didn't so much blossom as shoot up like a brainy weed, a self-disciplined schoolgirl, a science freak who was allowed to dissect grasshoppers on the dinner table. I didn't touch drugs or alcohol or men until I left home and went to college.

At Tulane, when I was sixteen, I "went bad," as they say. I buzzed my barbecue curls down to a fuzz, dyed what was left poison-green, memorized the Dead Kennedys album Frankenchrist, started drinking whiskey and dropping acid. I was always alone. People thought I was awfully strange. I found myself strange as well-too young to be in college, but able to instantly transform myself into the freak I always felt myself inside. And on top of that, having a lineage that included madwomen and slick, untrustworthy pimps who slouched, Tom Waits style, along the swinging doors of N.O. dives-I was afraid of myself.

I had never even seen a photograph of my father. Aunt Willie told me that none existed. My father, she'd said, was an unwholesome specter, unphotographable as swamp mist, vague, flaky, yellow of skin and of character. My mother had fallen into his seduction as inevitably as dinosaurs fell into the La Brea Tar Pits. She had played around with bennies and reefers before she met him, and in the three weeks that they knew each other, he gave her smack, crabs, and motherhood, and vanished into the alleyways that spawned him. My mother dully endured the pregnancy in Willie's parlor, staring out the window to the street below, which was wilting with kudzu, then coughed me out painfully, pulled out her episiotomy stitches, and blew town in the middle of the night.

Aunt Willie never really minded having me. She was unmarried, homely, and uninterested in hearts or flowers; she mainly tended to vegetables, math, and little inquisitive minds. She told me on a spring break before I went to Stanford that she had enjoyed molding me. "You were a pleasure," she said, her teeth still white in the putty-gray of her face. Cancer had claimed her hair and mobility, but she still did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. "You weren't a little girlie, all Barbies and tea sets. You brought home dead birds and asked me why they went stiff, and when you had that compound fracture-remember?-you didn't cry. You looked at the bone sticking out and asked me why you couldn't see the marrow."

That was just how Aunt Willie was. She died that Christmas. I didn't go to the funeral-I had to study.

The semester was as dead as ancient Greek.

I sat alone in the room that was supposed to be my office and wasn't. When Ricari came and slaughtered the rats, all my things were moved down the hall, to a fallow room, and set up exactly the way they had been before. That was Dr. John's doing. He knew nothing of bereavement. I was bereft of the tiny crawling and snuffling life of my pet lab rats and of the sanctity of the space where Ricari had tasted me. He had pulled out of me not the concentrated cells and tissues of my painful month, but the very essence of who I was, who I had been, my lost potential to be, to create. I couldn't write, I couldn't read, I couldn't even doodle.

I had to get out of there.

I drove for a while, listening to the pop music Ricari despised. Joy Division, David Byrne, Husker Du; nothing cheerful or plaintive, but the roughest voices, the thickest rhythms. I knew where Ricari was. Was he asleep during these last moist hours of the day, or was he awake, watching California sink into mists? How terrible to never feel the hot Vitamin D of the sunlight penetrating your skin, or the smooth gouts of a latte in your stomach. But he had the blood. He had power; he could divine the workings of my mind, and change them, and he could take a bullet and stop it, and vomit it up later for inspection. I needed to see him and speak to him, reassure myself once again that he was real.

But I was too shy to actually come round.

Was I? I was driving around Pacific Heights now, the smooth curve between it and the sickly throbbing heart of the City, the blazing nexus of restaurants and shops and crime and leopard skin that was Chinatown, North Beach, Tenderloin, Nob Hill. Night was getting there. The sky was already blue rather than gray. Friday night-the streets were clogged. I stole a parking space from a fish van outside Go Ran Chow Market, and began doggedly walking toward the Saskatchewan.

The old man at the desk looked up at me rather sternly. "Yes? Can I help you, young lady?"

He made me feel like some grungy kid. I looked like some grungy kid-jeans and dirty hiking boots, and a sweater with holes between the knittings, hooking my thumbs agitatedly through the holes in the sleeves of my winter coat. "I was-" My voice croaked out, destroyed from lack of use. I hadn't spoken in two days and I'd Smoked six packs of cigarettes. "I was wondering if you could buzz Suite 900 for me, and see if he's in."

The desk clerk eyed me for a second, then slowly leant over and tapped a plastic phone console, which, though outdated by about ten years, was startlingly modern in the dull brown Victoriana. He held the phone receiver to his face. "Someone here to see you," the old man said after a time.

A pause.

"He don't want to be disturbed," came the old man's reply. He began to replace the receiver on its cradle.

"Wait! Tell him it's Ariane. Ariane come to see him."

He arched one white brow, then repeated, "She says she's named Ariane."

Another pause. I rubbed NCIT mud off the toe of one boot onto the back of my jean leg. There was no way I could face going home and being alone with the television and my tea and rolling papers and the lonely sound of rain on the windows.

At last the old man hung up the phone and settled back down to his magazine. Without looking at me he said, "Go on up."

I praised whoever, and ran for the elevator.

The door to 900 was unlocked again, and I came in quietly and shut the door as softly as I could. I turned the lock and slipped the chain bolt together, whisking silently along its carriage like the piston of an arcane train.

Ricari was not in the front room, and I had to walk along the wall to the inside room, intoning softly "Ricari?" beginning to doubt that he actually was there. He had become invisible. I was sure he had heard of my coining up, and slipped out one of the windows, dropping soundlessly and weightlessly to the street below, startling a bevy of Filipino tourists.

But no, he was in the back, in the bedroom, in bed, wrapped in a heavy gray silk robe, his hair finger-combed only, and his face thin and white. "It's you, is it?" he said. He looked ill and sad.

"Yeah," I said, embarrassed.

"You look filthy," he commented.

"I sort of am. Muddy out there. Cold too."

"Why don't you wash and get into bed with me," he said coldly, calmly. "There is a bath through there."

How intriguing. I moved into the bathroom and shut the door. White light bounced cruelly off the polished white tiles. I thought about John as I began unlacing my boots and shedding layers of sweaters and T-shirts. He hadn't called me, and I hadn't expected him to. John was terrible on the phone-inarticulate and heavily accented, and not at all filled with comforting pronouncements of love or social interest. He was a letter writer if anything, and I checked my box every day, waiting for his fat dull envelopes filled with scathing anecdotes about the food and the other professors. Was what I was doing immoral in any way? Was I betraying the special trust that we shared as lovers by bathing in the vampire's hotel room, and planning on getting into bed with him, and attempting to warm my cold toes against his inhuman body? At any time the vampire could kill me, I thought as I stepped into a hot shower and wet my hair; at any time Ricari could rescind his agreement and snack on me, leaving smears of me across the white froth of bedsheets, and the old man downstairs, probably his blood-bound ghoul, hypnotized to do his bidding, would bundle me up in the sheets and sell me to the organ banks.

I washed myself with hotel soap, dried off, and bound myself with a hotel-issue white terry-cloth robe, satisfyingly rough and impersonal, and walked back into the bedroom. It was dark in there, lit only by ambient street light and the shining whiteness of Ricari's face and the translucency of his eyes. I knelt on the bed, and he parted the covers for me.

We lay alongside each other. Ricari was wide awake, but languorous. He stretched out one spidery arm vertically along the pillowcase, the same paleness of his skin; only the pillowcase lacked the Nile of veins that merged up his gray silk sleeve. I touched his throat experimentally. He was very cold to the touch. No toe-warming here.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

"I just wanted to see you," I explained.

He sighed. "Why," he said.

"What have you been doing?"

"Nothing at all," he said with a sigh. "Reading poetry journals. Talking to vagrants in the park. To my lawyer, who may be a vagrant in the park soon enough. He's going to give up law as soon as I'm taken care of."

"Have you fed?"

"No. I have no interest." As he said this his jaw tensed, and a colorless vein rose at his temple.

"Are you going to stay in bed tonight then?" I asked.

"That was my plan," he said.

"Why do you want to die so badly?"

"Can't you imagine? How dull it is to be me! Nothing is new to me. It's all the same. Paris; Topeka, Kansas; Johannesburg-it's all the same, human selfishness and greed and stupidity. Yes, I'm staying in bed today, and not getting out of it."

"You're so filled with self-pity." I smiled. "Come on. Get up. Put on sexy clothes and we'll go out, see the town."

"I've seen it."

"Do you want me?"

The quick shock of what I'd said traveled through both of us, like a shared earth tremor. It came out of me so naturally, I wasn't sure afterwards how I'd meant it. He stared at me for a long while. His face was very cleanly shaven and smooth, the skin texture like powdered velvet, and he looked a few years older, his eyes prominent. He hadn't had blood since the last time, and he aged, ever so slightly, when he hadn't had the blood to keep him plump and keep his hair and skin lively. "You're mad," he said finally.

"No," I said. "I offer myself. I'm not selfish. I'm something other than that human greed and stupidity. I want to make you happy. I want to make you alive."

"No," he said. "This was not our agreement."

"It doesn't have to be. I would do no less for any stray cat."

He seemed to crumple, and he turned his face away and buried it in the pillowcase. I wanted him so badly then. The tensing of his wrists was like a religion to me, the curl of his fingers and his claws piercing the smooth cotton and tearing the fibers across, and the visible tension of his back like an African sculpture. How I wanted him. I touched the narrow stretch of tense gray silk with my fingertips.

He rose half up and picked up a small scalpel from the table beside the bed, where it had rested naturally, like a travel alarm or a bottle of pills or a set of earplugs. I lay back and closed my eyes. "No, watch me," he breathed, "see what you're getting yourself into." So I watched him bare my arm above the elbow, to the fat reservoir in the crook of my arm. He kissed and licked and sucked the spot, making it tender and sensitive, and making the pinkness rush to the surface. He set his lips and drew the scalpel across the vein with a quick expert stroke, opening an incision perhaps two millimeters wide. It didn't hurt until it was long over and the hot trickle ran out and caught in the spikes of terry cloth.

He clamped his mouth on the wound and drank the blood into his mouth. I moaned out loud, begging him for something wordlessly, meaninglessly. He sighed like a baby at the breast, moving closer to me, embracing me, snuggling his head against my rib cage, resting as he drank with slow calm swallows. Almost immediately joy rushed into me from my arm, quite warm and cold at the same time, as if the blood lost was replaced with pleasure. The longer he drank, the intenser the pleasure became, until he was gripping my body tightly with one knee and one arm, and I convulsed slightly beneath him, my disassociated cunt seizing up and shuddering down, gathering itself up in a great tensile knot and striking loose.

And he was done. He lifted his face with a great breath. His mouth was lipsticked in the bright vital orange-red that is oxygenated blood, and traces of it daubed his chin and the tip of his slightly upturned nose. He looked a good three or four years younger than he had when I came into the room, and his face was quite red, shading to a pale human tone. He smiled and licked his lips. Together we brought my arm up and rested my wrist against my shoulder.