Notes: This story is a sequel to Forging a Fledgling: The Capture, but it can be read on its own. Major characters are Santino, Lestat, Louis, Daniel, and Armand.

Timeline: This story takes place several years after the events of MW4 and assumes that MW5 and everything afterwards did not occur. This story contains spoilers for the Vampire Chronicles through MW4 and also for Forging a Fledgling: THe Capture.

Disclaimer: I make no claim to characters copyrighted elsewhere and make no money from this piece of amateur fiction.


Chapter 1: A Mind of Her Own
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---Santino---

Nathalia was out on the terrace of my villa, staring out over vineyards bathed in moonlight. I studied her for a moment, entranced by her beauty. It was as I had always thought; the dark blood had intensified her loveliness to the point where it all but stunned me just to look at her. Sometimes, I fell to staring for hours at her blacker than black hair and her blue eyes. Once, I had thought them like sunlight reflected off the Mediterranean. My blood had darkened them, though, to a shade more like the depths of a stormy Atlantic. Like her. For she had stormy depths I'd never imagined when, determined to turn her into the perfect fledgling, I had first captured her.

Stormy depths, or maybe just a mind of her own, as Daniel had put it.

I didn't know what was in her mind, these days, but I sensed an inner discontent in her. A disquiet, and it had only begun since we'd moved to Italy some six months ago. For the half-year that had preceded the move, she'd seemed to be adjusting to her new life as a creature of the night. Of course it hadn't been easy, since she had never wished to be immortal, let alone a blood-drinker. She could hardly stand to hunt. For most of those six months in California, I'd basically done it for her, choosing her victims --always murderers, the only mortals she could bring herself to drink from-- and putting them into a deep, coma like trance before the actual kill. Then finally one night she'd said she would hunt on her own.

On her own. Well, I was delighted. I didn't want her dependent on me; I wanted her to be strong and capable in her own right. But Nathalia had meant more than I had realized, at first: I wasn't to accompany her, to follow her, or to watch from a distance. She wanted no help, and no witnesses to --now what exactly had she called it?-- oh yes, the sight of her committing murder.

"It isn't murder, for God's sake, it's just dinner!" I had tried to get through to her.

No chance of that. Mind of her own, remember? "I'll eat because I have to," she had shot back, "so don't worry on that score. I don't want to be too ill and weak to care for Nela. But it is murder, Santino."

Uh-oh, Santino. She called me Santo when she was feeling more at ease, and Santino when her thoughts were weighed down with troubles. At least it seemed to me that she did. Still, I had insisted, "But we've discussed this, time and again. If you feed from a murderer you'll save more lives than you take."

"Does the phrase, vengeance is mine, saith the Lord ring any bells in that medieval mind of yours?" she had challenged.

Oh, if she was going to argue religion, especially that one, she'd better study up first. "Yes, it does, although I didn't learn it first in English," I had answered pleasantly. In my day, you see, all the Church writings had been in Latin. Not that I'd known Latin as a mortal --what peasant did?-- but as soon as I had gained control of the vampire coven that lived in the Roman catacombs, I'd learned it so that I could study the Bible in earnest. Stolen copies of it, at that; the common man had no access to the holy writ. But I did; who could stop me if I chose to forage monastery libraries in the dead of night?

I'd based a whole theology of darkness on precisely the scriptures she was trying to use. Which only proved, really, that you could twist those writings to say what you wanted. What you needed. Once, I'd needed them to convince my legions of followers and covens across Europe that I was the authority they had to bow down to. I wrote the laws for our kind, and I enforced them. Power, I had needed them to build and keep my power. Now I needed the sacred writings for a much higher purpose: to help Nathalia overcome her instinctive moral reluctance to do that which was in her nature to do.

"How about this, Nathalia," I had challenged back, and since she favored Elizabethan verse, I quoted the same. "He that killeth any man shall be put to death; thine eye shall not pity, but life shall go for life, so shalt thou put the evil away from among you."

She had stiffened, her brilliantly dark blue eyes flashing in anger. "Oh don't morph into your old Coven Master persona with me! I may be your fledgling, but I'm not one of those mindless thralls you used to lead around by the nose! Because I know full well that you don't believe such dictates any longer! You don't believe you're God's instrument of recompense!"

Morph? Sometimes her vernacular was even more bizarre than Daniel's.

"No, I don't think that I'm God's instrument any longer," I admitted, ignoring the fact that she'd gotten it wrong. I'd never thought that. It had been Satan my coven had purported to serve, but that would hardly help her come to terms with killing, would it? "But I did believe back then that religion held a place for our kind. I was convinced of that for almost three hundred years. Who's to say I wasn't right? At least think about it, Nathalia."

"Oh, I will," she had retorted, tossing her head like an enraged mare. Fabulous, really, that she was so able to express her emotions instead of repressing them as I tended to do. "But I still intend to hunt alone. And that's completely alone, Santino!"

I had held my hands up as though in defeat. "Fine, my beauty, fine. Just so long as you actually do hunt, I'll leave you to it."

And so I had. Throughout our last month in Los Angeles, I'd said nothing when she suddenly disappeared for hours during the night. I'd even held my tongue when, once or twice a week, she would come back strangely disheveled, looking for all the world as though she'd been wrestling demons, or something. Even her clothes would be torn, and sometimes she'd have traces of bruises still healing, which could only mean that they'd been serious injuries to start with. It was truly odd. As vampires went, she wasn't strong, but there was no reason why she couldn't subdue with ease even the most muscular of humans. But I didn't question her about her hunting methods. I sensed quite clearly that she needed to work them out on her own.

And for all she termed it murder and tormented herself with visions of hellfire, she obviously was feeding, so I let her do it as she preferred: alone. In my opinion she wasn't feeding enough, I'll grant you. I personally thought from her feverish eyes and gaunt appearance that she must need to kill two or three a night instead of just one. Either that or she wasn't drinking from her one as deeply as she should; that made sense, seeing as I was no longer there to pull her away from the death-throes as I'd done while I had helped her hunt. She was probably terrified that the death would pull her under, and she was so weak that it well might, if she came too close; no doubt she stopped drinking sooner rather than later, and so cheated herself of some of the blood she needed.

I mentioned these concerns to her, of course I did, but I stopped short of criticizing her. I suppose I thought that if she managed to kill once a night, that was a good enough beginning; she was under enough stress without me demanding she commit yet more murders than was strictly necessary. And it wasn't like she was wasting away, or anything. She was too thin, and always looked hungry, her eyes glittering with thirst; but she wasn't getting so weak that she couldn't rise, or exhibiting the unmistakable signs of total starvation. I suppose the best I could say was that she was getting by.

I didn't exactly think she was taking to the life a the vampire like a duck to water, but she was adjusting, bit by bit, and I was downright grateful for it. At least she didn't talk of burning herself, as she had on the first night of her new life.

Then, one evening some five months after her birth to darkness, she'd suddenly demanded that we move to Italy. I want Nela there for her first birthday, she had said. She might have been born in California, but she's an Italian citizen. It's time she began to know her homeland.

Well, Italy was my homeland too, and Nathalia's adopted one by virtue of our marriage, so I was just delighted by my wife's request. Actually, delighted wasn't the word. I was astonished. I'd long since supposed that Nathalia would never wish to set foot in Italy again. It was the place where I'd mercilessly stalked and abducted her three years earlier.

But she said she wanted to live there, so I wasted no time in moving us to my villa outside Milan. Milan, where I had first seen her and determined to make her mine, regardless of her sentiments...

Almost as soon as we arrived, her depression had deepened. At first I thought it was jet-lag. I know, I know... a vampire with jet-lag? But Nathalia was weak, so maybe she didn't take the shift in sleeping patterns in stride like I did. Then I thought that memories of her first visit to Milan were making her morose. She'd been mortal then; she'd had plans for her life. Plans which I had torn asunder with my selfishness. And yet she said that she forgave me. Certainly, she seemed willing to stay with me, even to stay married, so how resentful could she be?

The truth was that I had no idea. I never had been able to predict Nathalia's feelings or her course of action with much accuracy. Mind of her own. Oh, definitely.

Six months we'd been here now, and her despondency had only grown ever deeper. And what was worse was that she wouldn't talk to me about it, so I couldn't help her, couldn't even know what was troubling her. With a vampire as young as she was, that normally wouldn't have posed any problem; I could read minds with ease. But not hers, not ever again, since she was my fledgling.

Yes, my fledgling. Sometimes I still couldn't believe it. Just a year ago, on the very night when she was born to darkness, I'd have told you that it would never come to be. So many things seemed to stand in the way, the most important of which was Nathalia herself. She didn't want to be a vampire, and over time I'd grown convinced that to force her would only result in tragedy. I had seen fledglings choose the fire before; I knew I couldn't bear to watch Nathalia do the same. And so I had resolved to let her live the life she wanted: a mortal one. Better that than to change her against her will, an act which would only precipitate her suicide.

But in one night, everything had changed. She'd been facing death --my fault, I will admit,-- and when it came down to a life like mine or no life at all, she'd chosen to cross over into darkness. Actually, it had been our daughter who'd helped her decide. Little Marianela Danielle, then not quite six months old. Nathalia hadn't been able to leave her daughter.

So she'd taken my blood. Yes, taken it. I was in no position to give it, not at that moment. But I was perfectly willing for her to have it, a fact of which Nathalia was very well aware.

And so she became my fledgling. We joked about that, sometimes, for in a sense she'd made herself. But in terms of bloodline, she was my creation.

Lately, though, we hadn't joked at all. She'd been depressed back in Los Angeles, too, but not like this. She had issues --didn't we all?-- but hers were fairly serious. She loved me, but only because throughout most of our second year together she'd had amnesia, and hadn't known that I deserved only her scorn. For you see, before that second year, things between us had been bad. Really bad. All my fault, again. I'd fallen for her and hadn't known enough about emotion to recognize the love that was staring me in the face. Too used to thinking in terms of possession, I tried to own her. And I did, for a while, but that mind of her own kept hammering away at me until I learned that ownership wasn't love.

Nathalia's amnesia had given me a chance to start over and treat her as she deserved. By then she was my wife, although not by her own free choice, not really. And I really did expect that when she regained her memories, she'd want to leave me. To seek a divorce, or better yet, an annulment, for while we had been very intimate, we'd never consummated the marriage in the strict mortal sense of the word. And too, Daniel and I had mesmerized the vows out of her in the first place, so I couldn't have blamed her for deciding they weren't worth honoring.

But she didn't leave me, let alone demand an end to our marriage. At one point, I knew she was considering it, but she never acted. I still didn't quite know why that was. I did know that she was confused at that time. Still mortal, her new love for me warring with the old hate. And too, there was Nela to consider. Marianela, that is. My daughter. Of course I couldn't father a child, not genetically, but Marianela was my daughter all the same. I was with Nathalia through her whole pregnancy and I'd loved and cared for our baby every night since the birth. And Nela loved me without reservation; her first word had even been Dada.

I didn't know if Nathalia had thought I needed Nela or Nela needed me, but I was sure that our daughter had helped hold us together as a family when the past might have torn us apart.

And then, before Nathalia had decided one way or another whether to stay with me, she'd been forced to choose between life --my kind, that is-- and death.

Once she was a vampire, I suppose it was a moot point, her leaving me. Her principal fear all along had been that I would break my promise not to force her into the night with me. And for a while there, I probably would have broken it. But then Daniel had come to visit us. Ostensibly, he'd arrived to talk Nathalia into accepting the fact that someday I'd make her. In actual practice, though, he'd counseled me instead of Nathalia. It was thanks to Daniel that I had ended up her husband instead of her captor and I had learned how to be a halfway decent husband, at that.

I often wondered what Daniel would tell me to do now that Nathalia was so depressed. Back off, give her some space, as much as she wants... That had been the gist of most of his lectures to me. Of course there had been the time that he'd called me the world's biggest moron because I hadn't realized Nathalia would rather share my bed than have her own, so I suppose that back off hadn't been the sum total of all his advice.

As to what he would say now, I could only guess. As far as I knew, he was off traveling with Armand, trying to repair their fragile relationship. So when it came to fixing my marriage, I was on my own.

I'd tried to do what I thought she needed, which was to give her time to come to me with her troubles, whatever they were. But she hadn't done it. I was beginning to think that she never would. And she did need help.

So finally, I tired of watching her suffer alone in her thoughts, and walked out onto the terrace. Wrapping both my big arms around her, pulling her close, I spoke quietly against her ear.

"My love, what is troubling you?"



---Nathalia---

Looking out over the moonlit landscape, I breathed deeply of the olive-scented air. Funny how I still liked to breathe even though it wasn't strictly necessary any longer. But then again, it had only been a year since that fateful night when I'd had to choose between a life in darkness or no life at all. Doubtless, it would take decades to break myself of mortal habits. Or maybe I'd never lose them completely. Even Santino, my maker and my husband, still took an occasional breath, and he'd had almost seven centuries to lose such mannerisms.

Another deep breath, but this one was more a sigh, and with that phenomenal hearing of his, Santino heard it. Now that I should be used to. Ever since he'd first taken me captive, he'd been able to hear my every heartbeat. For a while there, he could listen in on all my thoughts as well, but Lestat had put an end to that. While I was still Santino's mortal prisoner, that prince of demons, as I used to call Lestat, had taught me how to shield. Or maybe it would be more correct to say that Marius had taught me, and Lestat had just practiced and practiced with me until I got it right.

Now, of course, there was no question of Santino hearing my thoughts whether I used those shields or not. In that instant when I took his blood, the veil of silence had come down to forever part our minds. And yes, you heard me right. I took his blood, he didn't give it. But it wasn't as though I stole it... really, that's a story all its own. If you want to know the details of how I started off as Santino's pet human, and ended up his wife and fledgling, you'd better read our record of those times. It's called The Capture but that's a very misleading title, really. A better one might be Just Who Captured Whom?

Like I said, long story.

Fledgling.... now that I hadn't wanted to be, not really. I'd fought it all along, determined that I would stay human. But when I was staring death in the face and realized I'd have to leave my baby daughter to the whims of an uncertain world, I just couldn't do it. So I took his blood.

But I hadn't known how to do it, not really, that is. Sure, instead of dropping dead from blood loss, I'd managed to change myself into a creature of the night, and that had allowed me to save my daughter and quite possibly Santino (although he insisted that the sun wouldn't have gotten him if I had left there on the road where it all happened. Men!). But while I was drinking from Santino's drugged body, something had startled me and sent me reeling away from him. And the next thing I knew I going through the truly awful experience of mortal death. It was only afterwards that I came to learn I hadn't taken nearly as much blood as Santino would have given me had he be the one to make me. So I ended up weak. Really weak. With a maker who was almost seven hundred years old, and who had multiplied his own power many times over by drinking from his vampire thralls while he was a Coven Master, I should be damned strong. Stronger than Daniel, certainly, who was the only other vampire I knew well, although I'd spent time with several others.

Yet I wasn't in Daniel's league, not at all. According to Santino, even Louis was a titan compared to me. And as if that wasn't illustrative enough, Santino had to tell me that I was the weakest fledgling he had seen since about 1430! Well, the truth was that I didn't much care. I hadn't wanted to be a vampire at all, so I reasoned that the less of one I was, the better.

And you know, I still felt that way, more or less.

Except for the fact that Santino could hear me blinking, for Heaven's sake, and I often couldn't even hear his preternatural footfall as he approached. But I knew better than to complain to my husband about my limited powers. He was only too willing to re-make me, and do it right; he offered all the time.

Thank God I knew he wouldn't ever do more than offer. I'd spent more than enough time in fear that he'd force his powerful blood on me. But that had been back when I was human, when I was convinced that he wouldn't let me die a mortal death. Ironic, all that fear. For when it came right down to it, I was the one who wouldn't let me die a mortal death. So much for But this above all, to thine own self be true. You guessed it, Shakespeare. My favorite author, but he should be, considering I'm British.

How long would I consider myself British, I wondered? Thanks to Santino's machinations, I was now an Italian citizen. Like him, like our daughter. Years and decades and centuries from now, would I still have a heartfelt attachment to rainy England? Or would that eventually die as I had died?

I sighed again, for in just a few short years, my last real link to England would no doubt be gone. My parents. I hadn't seen them in forever. Not since I first went to Milan to soak up a little culture, to learn firsthand about the marvelous music that had its roots in this land. I had been supposed to return home to the Lake District of northern England, but fate had intervened. Fate, synonymous with Santino.

I'd forgiven him the way he'd taken me captive and the horrible way he'd treated me at first... but still, that didn't change the fact that thanks to him, I had never seen my parents again.

"My love, what is troubling you?" he quietly asked as he hugged me from behind, his strong fingers interlacing mine. So strange, the feel of him these days. He used to always seem so chilled to me, and it got so that I liked the sensation of his cool hands caressing me. But ever since I'd crossed over, I was the cool one. Being so much stronger and older than me, his blood had more heat. Oh, not so much that a human would perceive it, but with my much-colder blood, I could tell the difference. Whenever he touched me these days, I marveled at the warmth he exuded. He wasn't hot like a mortal would be, but he was distinctly warmer than myself.

I missed his cold touch, I really did. But you can't have everything. Witness my current depression.

"I want to see my family," I admitted. Part of me was surprised that I said even that much, because I knew full well what Santino's reaction was going to be. Well, that's too bad, my dearest, but you'll just have to grow past it. You can't visit them, can't ever let them see you in your new guise. They aren't like the mortals you routinely fool with tricks; they know you too well. And the minute they touch your icy skin, they'll know you're no longer human.

He didn't say any of that, at least not right then. "Nela and I are your family," that's what he told me in reply.

"Oh, don't be so damned stupid!" I erupted. "You know who I mean! My parents, Nela's grandparents!"

"Why do you miss them so much now?" he asked, turning me to face him. His tone was quite reasonable, but I was feeling anything but.

"I've missed them all along," I retorted, yanking my hands from his. He could have held me by force, but that wasn't his way. At least, not anymore it wasn't. He hadn't always been so moderate in his approach to me. "It was sheer torture down in that pit, and on the island you locked me up on, to know they were worrying for me and wondering if I was dead or alive! Because unlike you, I never did forget how to love and want love in return!"

I suddenly smelled blood --his, I recognized the scent. Looking down, I saw that he had clenched his fists at my tirade, clenched them so tightly that his glassy nails had drawn blood from his own palms. "What happened to I forgive you, Santo?" he asked, his voice a coiled spring.

"I did forgive you," I said, sighing. Really, there had been little option but to move past it. There I'd been, a fledgling vampire ready to go into the flames, and he'd been there for me. I had needed him. And he was my husband, and Nela's father, and I did love him. At least, I think I did. Sometimes it was so hard to sort my tangled feelings out. I felt like a skein of yarn that had just been pulled and tugged and twisted until I was one huge knot. I didn't know where the anger stopped and the love began. I just knew that I was angry right now. Angry with him.

"Forgiveness doesn't change the facts, though," I continued, stone-faced and looking past him rather than at him. "You were determined all along that I'd never get to see my parents again. Is it any wonder I resent it?"

"I did decide that at first," Santino admitted, stepping back and unclenching his fists as though struggling to calm himself down. I saw that his palms were already healed. I wished I healed as fast as he did, especially considering how battered I tended to get during the hunt. "You were my prisoner, Nathalia. What did you expect me to do, give you furlough? Time off for good behavior? You know what I was like back then! I was too terrified of losing you to think of anything but my selfish self!"

Well, I could hardly disagree with that, could I? It was all too true.

"But I changed my mind, I swear," he suddenly vowed. Now that shocked me, it really did.

"Changed your mind?" I echoed. "What do you mean?"

Santino clicked his teeth together as he pondered his words. "Well, there wasn't any reason to go into it while you had amnesia, but towards the end, there, I decided that it would be nice for you to see your family again. Remember, I was done with holding you prisoner. I was determined to treat you as what you were, which was my honored wife. Now what sort of husband wouldn't let you visit your own parents? Not the kind I wanted to be, and I'd have told you so after your memories came back."

"But you didn't," I pointed out, the comment sounding like a question.

"Because you didn't tell me they were back, dearest! Right up until I drained you that night you were made, I still thought you had amnesia."

He had me there, dead to rights. "But you didn't mention it afterwards, either," I came back.

"I should torment you with it after you were a vampire, Nathalia? A visit home was a fine idea when you were still mortal. Believe me, I'd have supported it. But you know perfectly well that going to England is out of the question, now. It can't be done. How are you going to explain away the chill in your hands, the lack of pigment in your skin?"

She tilted her pert nose in the air and glared at me. "Have you already forgotten how you once visited them and managed to not let them catch a glimmer of the fact that you're a vampire?"

"That was different. Your parents didn't know me from Adam, which made it a simple trick to mesmerize them. With you, it's too risky, Nathalia. They'll see the truth unless I tamper with their minds more than is wise. I know you don't want that."

He was right; I didn't. But I also didn't want to accept defeat. That just wasn't my way. Maybe it was in my blood? If so, I certainly didn't know where it had come from. My parents you see, for all I loved them, weren't my natural parents at all. They'd adopted me after my mother, an unwed Spanish girl far from home, had died in childbirth.

"There must be a way," I insisted thinking of all I'd gleaned from the books I'd read. "I mean, Louis appeared for years to his mortal sister, didn't he?"

"Louis was lucky," Santino said, his tone hard. "Trust me, I know. Most fledglings who try what he did end up devastated by the experience. It's not unknown for them to lose all reason, Nathalia, and it doesn't do their families any good, either. But don't compare yourself to Louis, in any case. Don't you see? In an age before electric lights, such matters were simpler."

"Then I'll say I have a bizarre eye disease and I can't tolerate more than candles!" I invented. Really, I thought it a stroke of genius. Santino disagreed.

"You're grasping at straws," he told me. "Look, I've been through this, I know what I'm talking about. Your mortal life is over and you have to accept that. You have to let them go."

"Easy for you to say," I scorned, whirling away from him and stomping back to the terrace railing. "You didn't go through this! Your whole family was dead and gone before that rogue forced his blood on you!"

He was at my side so quickly I might never have walked away, for all the good it did me. "You think that watching your whole village, everyone you've ever known, die of plague before your eyes is preferable to what you face?"

"What I think," I snarled, "is that your family's been gone so long that you can't possibly understand how I feel!"

"My family," Santino stressed, "is right here with me in this villa, Nathalia."

I'd hit a nerve without even meaning to, but than again, I should know better than to accuse Santino of being unfeeling. He used to be, true. But not anymore. He loved me; I knew that. But he didn't manage emotion so well (as if I did!) and sometimes, he read things into my comments that I'd never intended. Like the way he still couldn't stand for me to utter the phrase "my daughter."

Marianela Danielle was our daughter, he would tell me. And okay, so she was. Santino couldn't procreate, any more than could I these days, but he was the one who'd been there for Nela from the first. Of course, who else could be there, seeing as Santino had killed Nela's biological father in a rage?

That, I often thought, was the worst of all the things he'd done. Ever since my memories had returned, I'd avoided thinking on it --when I could-- for truly, what was the point? I had loved Nela's father, but he was dead and gone. And too, sometimes I thought it wasn't so much him that I had loved but the safety he'd represented to me at the time. I'd been desperately in need of help and support, and Esteban had provided both in abundance, and never asked a blessed thing in return. Was it really love, or was it gratitude that drew me to him? I couldn't tell anymore.

I suppose I had to believe that I had never truly loved him, for if I had, what was I doing letting his killer raise the child we'd created together one night in sunny southern Spain?

But if I'd confused gratitude with love once, who was to say that I wasn't just as confused right now? Sometimes, I thought I was. I couldn't say for sure why I was still with Santino. Was it love? Or was it just acquiescence? There was no question that he was good to me, and there was Nela to think of, so why not stay with him? It wasn't like I could just go find myself another man, was it? No human male would want me now, and even if one did, Santino would kill him too, the moment he dared touch me.

Just as he'd done to Esteban.

Forgiveness or no, I still resented that. How could I not? Still, since I'd become a vampire I did understand it much better. Santino saw nothing wrong with killing humans. They were simply prey to him, except for those few he considered special. That included me when I used to be mortal, and of course it included Nela. He'd never, ever hurt her; I'd stake my eternal life on it, I really would.

But her birth father? Santino had drained him forthwith, simply because he'd committed the cardinal sin of having had me in his bed. That was hard for me to accept, really hard, especially since at the time Santino had no right to think I would be faithful to him. I was on the run from him, for Heaven's sake, and for good cause! He'd kept me chained and beaten for months, trying to break my spirit, to mold me into what he thought he wanted: a fledgling who would remain loyal, who'd be too damned scared to be anything but.

I tried not to think about it much, because the truth was that Santino had changed since those days. I'd escaped, and eventually he'd recaptured me, but instead of punishing me for my defiance, he'd begun treating me with gentleness and care and respect, the way he still treated me, the truth be told. Probably his new approach wouldn't have mattered to my feelings --ever--, but then I'd had amnesia and had forgotten all the terrible things he had done.

Including how he'd killed Esteban.

And while I was in some sort of mental void, knowing only the good and gentle Santino he'd learned to be, I had fallen in love. Ye gods, so deeply in love that I hadn't even minded his being a vampire. In fact, I'd sort of reveled in that, like it made me special that such a dazzling and handsome creature should love a mere mortal such as myself. I'd begged him to drink of me, and then I'd lived from night to night, always hoping he would want more of my blood, for mortal lovemaking was nothing compared to the blood-sharing I could have with him. Don't get me wrong, though. We engaged in plenty of human-style intimacy, too, although certain things just weren't possible with a vampire. All the rest, though, we did. It made me hot and aching just to remember.

And then, of course, my memories had come flooding back, and I'd been confronted with the horrifying reality that I had made love, that I was in love, and married at that, to the very being whose idea of a first date had been to torture me. Quite literally, torture me. I thought I would throw up, but I didn't have that luxury. I'd had to divert all my energies into escaping him again.

Only, I hadn't. Oh, I had made some half-assed excuses about needing to develop more mental powers so that Santino couldn't simply mind-read to find me, but they were just that, excuses. I think I knew all along that it would be safe to leave him, that he had changed so much that he wouldn't imprison me again no matter what. The truth was that I was confused, and I didn't know what I should do. I thought about annulment a lot. He'd married me when I'd hated him and had been ill, drifting in and out of consciousness; I couldn't prove a thing, but I was pretty damned sure that he'd messed with my mind and had made me say my vows.

So that made the marriage null and void, didn't it?

The problem with that theory was that I didn't like to see myself as a total hypocrite. And that's what I would be if I tried to claim I'd never really been his wife. For I'd taken other vows, later, and I'd done it of my own free will. When I'd first given him my blood, I'd believed that it bonded us together more firmly and truly than any spoken ritual ever could. And I still believed that, even after my memories returned.

So eventually I pushed the idea of annulment aside, and started to accept the fact that I wasn't really planning to leave him, either. I guess by then I thought that he was my destiny, or something. I'd gone to Italy thinking I would find love embodied in a tall, dark, handsome man, and there he was, although man wasn't the best descriptor. But the rest fit him to a tee.

I'd loved him while I didn't have a past. Could I just turn that off, now that the past had come back to haunt me?

I began to think that I'd been better off with amnesia, truly, for my memories were so painful. When they weren't filling me with hurt, they were making me angry. So I tried not to think about them. Or at least that had been my practice, but I was getting dismally bad at it, and now I was thinking about the past all the time. It was all tied up with wanting Nela to have more of a family, you see. It just seemed so patently unfair she would never have a chance to know her birth father or her grandparents.

"I know we're your family," I told Santino, who'd been waiting for my answer like the Rock of Gibraltar, or something. The patience that man had! "But that doesn't change the fact that Nela and I have relatives back in England. I want her to meet her grandparents!"

"It's not possible," he announced, his voice going hard. "The only thing you'll accomplish is to hurt them, and Nela, and yourself. They'll see you for what you are and it will be too much for them to take. They'll think they've become senile in their old age."

"Fifty-six is not old!" I erupted, thinking of my father. I guess I was so vehement on that point because I couldn't stand the thought that he would someday die. It might make me sound terrible to admit it, but the truth was that he was the one I was so desperate to see. He was the one who had supported me choosing music as a vocation; my mother had done nothing but argue with me about it. And it was Daddy who had encouraged me to follow my dream to Italy.

"Fifty-six is older than you realize," Santino returned. "I think what's really bothering you is that you're realizing rather belatedly that they're going to die and you're not."

"Oh, thanks," I heavily replied. "It only took me six months to think of my parents. Now I feel the dutiful daughter, don't I?"

"You've had other things on your mind," he reminded me.

Like I needed reminding. "Ah, yes. How to kill, mostly. I wonder why that would rest on my mind like a load of blocks? Gee, could it be that I still don't like it?"

"You like the kill," Santino insisted. "You just don't particularly enjoy the hunt."

Well, that was true enough, even if I couldn't help but resent his saying so. The kill was sublime, it really was. Satisfying on levels that went far beyond mere physical hunger. It fed my senses and my soul, I swear it did. And that made it hard to resist, so very hard.

But I did resist it, as much as I possibly could.

"Besides," he went on, "I thought you were getting used to even that. And how do you lure your victims, Nathalia? I wish you'd agree for us to hunt together."

I grimaced, and shook my head. How could I let him hunt with me? If I did that, he'd find out the truth. Oh, sure, I did what I had to do. I killed humans. Murderers, that was; I couldn't bear the thought of taking a life otherwise, so maybe his asinine little Bible lessons had had some impact on me. But I didn't kill every night, like I was supposed to, like my hunger dictated. I went as long as I could between real meals, and survived on animals in the interim. I might have tried to subsist entirely on animal blood if Santino hadn't warned me that I'd end up attacking Nela.

Well, that I couldn't have. Obviously. So when the thirst in me grew too difficult to control, I did resort to a human. An evildoer. And in between, I sucked the blood from anything else that moved. Rabbits, mostly. Sometimes stray dogs, or young wolves. Oh, why bother with a detailed catalogue? If it lived in his vineyards or the lush forest that bordered them, I'd probably made a meal of it. That was actually why I'd asked him if we could live at his villa in Italy instead of in Los Angeles where we'd resided last. His villa, you see, was out in the country, where there were more animals, and healthier ones.

Of course, it meant that on my human-hunting nights, criminals were harder to find.

Except for Mafiosos. (Bad joke; I hadn't actually run across any of those.)

As vampires went, I guess I was pretty pathetic. I couldn't read a mind to save my life, other than my own daughter's. And that posed problems hunting, it really did. Even on those nights when I was desperate for mortal blood... scratch that, I was desperate for that every night. But on those evenings when I couldn't stand the deprivation any more, I couldn't just range far and wide until I found a mind with a criminal past. Oh, no. I had to act the victim and let myself get almost killed before I could be sure I'd found a killer. Once I started drinking, I could find out the truth, of course; then his thoughts would flow like floodwaters. But the kicker was that my conscience wouldn't let me attack anyone until I already knew that he deserved it.

It was a bitch, having a conscience. Sometimes I envied Santino his apparent lack of one. But that makes him sound far colder than he was. What I mean is that he didn't regard killing your average human as a moral dilemma. With other vampires, he certainly adhered to a code of right and wrong. At least, he did nowadays. A long time ago he'd committed crimes against his own kind... but even then, he'd had a conscience. His standards had been different, that was all.

"Look," I told Santino, for the last thing I wanted was for him to find out how sporadic and bizarre my feeding pattern was these days, "I'm more like Louis than you think. Maybe hunting alone is just a hallmark of the weak vampire."

My husband was shaking his head. "I never thought it would come to this, Nathalia. That first night when I helped you manage a kill, it seemed you were shaking off your mortal coil just fine. And for a while there, we did hunt together and you didn't seem to mind the company. But ever since you decided not to have me mesmerize a victim for you, you've insisted on going alone. Why the change?"

"You were the one who said I had to be able to survive on my own," I reminded him. What else was I going to tell him? That I'd decided to do without his help precisely so that I could limit my kills to one or two a week, and make do with animals on the other nights? If he found out that, he'd go hunting with me whether I liked it or not. He'd insist I kill every night; he'd do it for me if need be.

And sure, that would make things easier. For me, anyway. Not for the humans he served up.

"If that was the idea, you've proved your point," Santino announced. "You could survive on your own and you know it. But you're not on your own now, Nathalia. You live with me. You sleep with me. Why won't you dine with me?"

Because then you'll know the truth... Well, no point in saying that, was there? Not when the whole point of hunting alone was precisely to keep him from thinking that he should take me in hand.

What I needed was a change of subject. Definitely. "If you want us to spend more time together, then let's take a trip to England. Because I really do have to go see my parents, Santo."

He glowered, his answer simple and brusque. "No."

No? Just no? And that, after I'd called him Santo in my best wheedling voice! And still, just a hard no. Well, I suppose he thought he'd already laid out all the reasons that underlay the refusal. And I understood his reasons, I really did. Maybe he was right, and I couldn't visit with my father like I wanted to. Maybe the most I could hope for was to watch him through a window, and just see that he was well, that he wasn't still grieving me.

But Santino would just say no to that, too, I had no doubt, and I was in no mood to listen to it. If he didn't want to take me to England, fine.

I could get there on my own, couldn't I?

Of course I could, and if I went about it right, Santino couldn't stop me. I had a mind of my own, and I didn't mind putting it to use.

Chapter 2: Coven Master
________________________________

---Santino---

On a typical night, I was up about two hours before Nathalia even began to stir. My usual routine was to collect Nela from her nanny and play with her while I waited for my wife to emerge from her death-sleep and join us. I'd rather have lain alongside Nathalia, patiently admiring her as she rested; I rather liked the idea that I would be the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes.

But she was adamant that I couldn't neglect Nela, and that our daughter must not under any circumstances even glimpse one of us in that near comatose, insensate state that was our sleep. Neither were we to ever talk about the hunt or blood in any form, in front of "an impressionable young child." I understood what Nathalia was doing, of course. She wanted Nela to have as normal a mortal childhood as possible. I wanted that too, but now that both her parents were vampires I wasn't quite sure how we could achieve it.

In any case, Nathalia's rules meant that I was hardly ever with her until later in the evening when she roused. And even then, our time together was all too brief. Unlike me, she had to hunt every single night. That shouldn't have mattered, since in my view we should quickly hunt together and then return to spend time with our little girl before she had to go to bed for the night. But not only did Nathalia insist on hunting all alone, it also took her an extraordinary amount of time to find her prey and return. I knew what caused that, of course. She couldn't read minds, except Nela's, so she needed help finding those evildoers she insisted on feeding from.

Help she refused.

Well, she was young yet. I had to think that with more time and perspective, she would agree to hunt with me again. Or better yet, drink from me so that she could be stronger in her own right. She refused that, too, saying she wasn't ready, saying it was hard enough for her to adjust to being a weak vampire.

Of course Nathalia had time. All she wanted. It was Nela I was more concerned about. Her mother's self-chosen weakness meant that Nela spent her evenings with me. And that was fine in a sense; I loved being a father. But Nela needed a mother, too... and to all intents and purposes, she hardly had one.

Tonight was a case in point. I'd looked in on Nathalia around nine only to see that she had vanished already. Sometimes she did that, preferring not to see us until after she had already fed. I think she found it too daunting to spend time with her mortal daughter and then suddenly disappear to go kill another mortal, one not under a shield of protection as Nela was.

But now it was eleven and Nathalia had yet to come back. Nela was fussy, crying, and not even a yummy cookie that Lucia had baked could console her. Pure and simple, she needed sleep. So finally, I put her down in her plush crib and paced the lawn outside, back and forth, back and forth as I waited for Nathalia to return from her hunt.

This has to stop, I thought, anger making my footfall heavy. How can Nathalia be so worried about Nela never seeing her grandparents when she hardly sees her own mother?

I didn't want to be an overbearing, dictatorial husband, I really didn't; but Nathalia was using such phenomenal bad judgment that I began to think I'd have no choice. How long could I let this go on? Nela needed maternal love, too! She was almost eighteen months old, well able to miss her mother. And she did miss her.

It was strange when I thought about it, for Nathalia's only reason to take my blood had been to stay with Nela! And yet her bizarre penchant for hunting alone meant that she was hardly ever with Nela! It didn't make sense.

Well, one thing was certain. When Nathalia got home from feeding, we would have to have a long, hard talk. One we should have had months ago, but I'd put it off because considering our history, the last thing I should do with Nathalia was order her around.

But now I knew that was the second-to-last thing I should do.

The very last thing I should do with my wife was sit back and watch while she let our daughter's mortal life just pass her by, one night at a time.



---Nathalia---

All things considered, I wasn't terribly surprised that Santino had flat-out refused to go to England with me. So fine, I could go alone. It would be more inconvenient that way; if he'd have flown me I bet we could make it there and back in a single night. Especially if he'd started us out early in the evening when I was still asleep.

But he'd declined to go, which left me relying on more traditional modes of travel. And since I couldn't risk a delay in connections that might leave me stranded in daylight with no way to find shelter from the sun, it was going to take me several nights to get to England and return.

I'd miss Nela, of course, but this would be worth it. I wanted to see my parents, even from a distance, and assess the situation. Maybe, I thought, if I saw them I could reason out a way to get them in contact with their granddaughter. Don't ask me how, I simply didn't know. But I couldn't give up on Santino's say-so. Nela deserved a chance to know her grandparents... and I deserved a chance to see my father --and my mother-- at least one last time.

I wanted it so bad I could taste it, although that's a bad metaphor, isn't it? All I tasted these days was blood. Once, I'd thought that would be just revolting, but the irony was the it tasted better than I ever could have imagined. It would have been addicting even without the thirst, I swear. But none of that made it easy for me to hunt, let alone kill.

It was just as well that I usually didn't see anyone before I left the villa to hunt each evening. I hated missing Nela, of course, but I had little choice in the matter. I was afraid that if I announced Well, I'll just be going now... Santino would find reasons to tag along. He was concerned about me, I knew that. What else could he be? I wasn't looking my best, subsisting on a diet mainly comprised of animal blood. And he wondered why it took me so long to make a kill. Well, that was simple. Most nights, I had to forage in the forest for several small animals; and even when I hunted humans, I had to lie in wait for one to attack me. Sometimes that took hours even though I made myself the most likely looking victim that I could. And too, I had to engage in this horrible activity far from the villa. It wouldn't do to become recognized in any one place. I could move at great speed, of course, but it still did take time to get fifty or a hundred kilometers from Milan.

And then there was the greatest reason for Santino to insist we hunt together: he wanted to know what I was doing that resulted in my being so battered. Well, I didn't want him to know such things. It was no-one's business but mine if I found it hard to get the upper hand in the life-and-death battles that resulted from victim turning attacker.

It was no one else's business if I avoided those battles altogether most nights, and lived on a diet of field mice, cats, and even the occasional snake.

I'd have liked to hunt after Nela went to bed, of course I would. But Santino would insist on coming, then, and I'd have to kill humans every night! Was it worth someone's life that I should get more time with my daughter? The answer grieved me, but I thought not.

And tonight, my pattern turned out to be fortuitous, for it meant that Santino wouldn't think anything of my lengthy absence, at least, not until I was well on my way to England.

I'd risen as early as I could --which wasn't early, mind you-- and hurrying from our secure underground lair, had entered our bedroom through the secret entrance and gathered what I needed. Money, credit cards, identification, my passport: all the things I'd never had before when I'd tried to escape Santino. But I wasn't escaping now, not really; I was coming back. And I didn't want him to misunderstand, or worry, so I'd already left him a note. I'd put it in the one place he was sure to find it, but a place he wouldn't seek until I was far from his reach. Tonight's reach, at least.

The note was in our lair, propped neatly atop the satin coverlet on the bed we shared.

No doubt, that note wasn't really necessary; Santino would know without being told that I was coming back. He would know that I couldn't abandon Nela, certainly. But it seemed so rude to leave the country with no comment at all. Besides, back when I was still mortal, I'd decided to go to Sea World for the day, and for various reasons had stayed several, and I hadn't left a note. Santino had been very nice about it all, really. He was always nice these days, even when I didn't particularly deserve it... but he had told me quite seriously not to leave him in the dark like that, again.

Leave him in the dark. Good one.

Well, my plans were pretty simple although my note didn't go into details. A night train to Paris, where I'd have to find secure lodgings before morning. I'd never really been responsible before for locating my own resting place, but I didn't believe it would pose me any serious problem. The next night, first thing, I'd take the train under the Channel and arrive in London. A transfer at Victoria Station would see me north to the Lake District where I'd grown up, where my parents still lived.

And then... well, the truth was that I hadn't planned much past that. Daniel had told me once that if I went with my instincts, I wouldn't go far wrong. Of course, he was talking about Chinese food when he said it, but that was Daniel for you. Lay it on the line. You know, I really did miss him. I had asked Santino once when we could visit him again, and he'd said Anytime, Nathalia, but it'll mean you'll have to see Armand. They're together again, you know.

Yes, I knew. And so I had shelved all thought of seeing Daniel once more. There was no way I was going to take my little girl within a hundred kilometers of the vampire who had killed that tragic child, Claudia. Just the name Armand gave me the shivers, it really did.

But there was more than history fueling my aversion. That monster had attacked me, without warning, without provocation. Oh, not a physical attack. A mental one. He had broken through my shields, and damned near fricasseed my entire brain in the process. And the trauma had done away with my amnesia. You'd think I might be grateful to him, but I wasn't. The whole time I had amnesia, Santino had claimed I didn't remember because I didn't want to, and now I knew that he'd been right. I'd been happier living in some la-la land, not knowing that Santino had killed Nela's father.

Now I wasn't happy at all.

I was grateful, though. I was grateful to Daniel. Not only had he given me good advice about how to get along with Santino, he was the one who had stopped Armand's heinous attack. If not for Daniel, my brain would have been mashed like a potato. Well, the truth was that Daniel had done a lot for Santino and myself both. Hence our daughter's name, Marianela Danielle.

Yes, Daniel was a good guy, about as good as a vampire could get, or so I figured, and I really did like him. But there wasn't much chance I'd see much of him, not as long as he stuck with that red-haired iceberg named Armand.

I checked my digital watch and sighed. Two a.m. back in Milan. Of course I'd probably passed through some time zones by now. Heading west gave me the advantage of a longer night. Doubtless, my return trip would be harder to accomplish.

I wondered what Santino was doing right now.



---Santino---

It wasn't unusual for Nathalia to stay out late hunting, but when my Rolex read three a.m. I had to shake my head, wondering why it had taken me so long to see the obvious. She wasn't coming back tonight at all, was she? Oh no, not my stubborn Nathalia with that mind of her own. No doubt she was en route to England; she'd practically announced it to my face the night before.

I should have talked with her longer, tried to help her realize that she was walking a bad, bad path with this idea of integrating her parents back into her life, hers and Nela's. What good would it have done, though, to speak yet more words? Nathalia was convinced that she knew what she was doing and that I couldn't possibly understand her pain.

What she didn't realize, though, was that I did know what she was going through. She was right that my whole family had died before I'd crossed over into darkness, but I hadn't been a Coven Master all those centuries without becoming well acquainted with the problems fledglings faced after being filled with the dark blood. I'd drunk in their pain, quite literally, every time I'd feasted off their blood. It was an agonizing sort of hurt, deep in their souls, but for all it was intense, it wasn't eternal.

And Nathalia, with her complaints the night before, was just following a pattern I'd seen countless times before. All young vampires wanted to see their families, eventually. It was par for the course, especially when the blinding realization of their relatives' mortality finally struck. That usually took a while, just as it had with Nathalia. But when it came, it came with a vengeance. I'll die if I don't see my papa just one more time, I'll go into the fire, I'd heard them scream. Hysterics actually weren't uncommon in such cases, although I hadn't termed them that, not back then. Back then I'd called it lunacy.

As Coven Master, it had been my responsibility to ensure the soundness of my thralls. And eventually I'd learned that the only way to deal with their lunacy was to lock them up until they got over their maudlin attachment to lives that were dead and gone forever. Yes, lock them up, and starve them into submission. It may sound cruel --well, it was most certainly cruel, I won't argue that-- but it was also the lesser of two potent evils.

But I'd had to learn that the hard way.

Early on, you see, my own grief for my family still fresh, I'd thought it best to indulge my followers a bit. Especially my own fledglings. As hard and cold as I was becoming, I still didn't want to see them choose the fire or the sun. So I'd let them have what they claimed they wanted, one last look at their mortal families.

And I'd bred nothing but catastrophe for them, every last time.

Disaster came in many forms, but they all had one thing in common. The fledgling, no matter what he or she swore, could never keep a vow to only watch and not interact. (Talamascans, they weren't. But I digress.) Oh, the young vampire might start out with intentions to behave, but all too soon, just looking through windows could not satisfy their hunger for the love they'd once taken for granted. Invariably, there would be contact. Sometimes a letter, sometimes a hastily whispered message... one way or another, it led to outright visitation. And that was when calamity struck in earnest.

Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, demanding the dark gift. Any coven member who gave it though, was put to death for contravening my laws, the foremost of which dictated that I alone should decide who was suited for a life in darkness. Yet coven members who refused their families lived in absolute torment afterwards, torn apart by guilt.

Their families were even more tormented, naturally. To know that such a gift existed, and have it denied them... well, the mortal mind just wasn't made to withstand such pressures. Insanity resulted. Oh, I'd seen it, time and time again.

And if by chance the dark gift wasn't in play, it was because the fledgling's mortal family believed him evil personified... the devil incarnate. Louis himself had experienced something of this, when the woman he'd loved from afar had suddenly seen him for what he was. Get thee behind me, Satan, had been her reaction.

In my time leading the coven, I'd heard worse than that. Far worse. And I'd seen fledglings go into the fire because they couldn't bear the condemnation in eyes that had once held only love. Some were stronger than that, of course, as no doubt was my Nathalia. But resilience of spirit, such as she had, really didn't matter. Trying to go home again, so to speak, brought only misery.

And truly, she was miserable enough already without holding herself responsible for driving her own parents insane, or realizing that they thought her as beyond redemption as she wished to think herself. And that was just the tip of the iceberg, actually.

I sighed, because I knew Nathalia meant well by her little trip to England, but she didn't have the wisdom of centuries backing up her decision, or the perspective to know that a visit home could only wreak havoc both on her and on her loved ones, havoc that would rebound onto little Nela. I could just see the future unfolding like a horror movie complete with gaudy music. Nathalia's parents realizing she's a vampire... her mother going insane (all too likely considering how she'd once carried on in my presence)... her father determining that the little girl can't possibly be raised by so unnatural a creature as what Nathalia had become.... the authorities called in... Nathalia and I reclaiming the child by force only to leave evidence of the preternatural in our wake... in other words, absolute mayhem.

It wasn't just bad for Nathalia and Nela, this trip; it could cast a light of attention on the very existence of vampires in this world. Maharet would pitch a fit; I could just hear her now. She's your fledgling, Santino, and don't spin me some ridiculous excuse about how she made herself! That's nothing to do with matters now. She can't endanger us like this, we can't permit it. She'll have to be destroyed and the responsibility falls to you. See to it at once, or I will...

I couldn't allow her to reach England, it was as simple as that. No doubt Nathalia wouldn't understand my reasons, or empathize with them; she'd insist that she had everything under control, that nothing would go wrong. But I knew better. Letting her see her parents was just asking for trouble. A shitload of it, as Daniel would say.

So I did what I had to do. A quick call to Pietro in the servant's wing made him aware that it was up to him to see to Nela's care for a few days. I suppose being awakened at three-fifteen in the morning wasn't his favorite thing, but he was well-used to it. And well-compensated.

But Pietro di Marco wasn't loyal to me because of money. His family had worked for me in one capacity or another for over two centuries, and it was a matter of pride and honor to him that he excel as had his forefathers. I knew that, because I routinely read his mind. And you know what? Pietro had figured out my true nature long before, as had his father before him, but it didn't matter. In fact, he looked on me as if I were lord of the manor, so to speak. Which in a way, I was.

In any case, I knew I could trust Pietro with Nela. For months, if necessary, but it wasn't going to come to that. I set out at once, taking to the air toward Paris. That would be her next stop, I was sure, because from there she could travel by train to London. Nathalia, I knew, had most often traveled by train; it seemed logical to think she'd do so again. Besides, if aught went awry with her travel plans, at least she could leap from a train and seek shelter from the sun. Planes were far less convenient in that respect. Of course she could take a night ferry from the French coast and cross the Channel that way, but I thought jumping overboard into the ocean held about as much appeal as jumping off a plane, should some delay cause her travel to overlap into daylight hours.

No, she would go by rail and that meant that tomorrow night, I could find her at the Gare du nord train station in Paris.

I reached the French capital shortly before dawn and arranged a secure hotel room where I could pass the day. Doubtless, Nathalia was already in the city somewhere; already long since passed into the death-sleep. I wished I could find her before daylight, but there wasn't time, and in any case, I couldn't hear my own fledgling, could I? Although, since I'd rarely heard Nathalia anyway, I was used to that. Lestat had had a good idea, really, teaching her to shield. It meant that now that she was my fledgling, I wasn't at a disadvantage with her. No more so than I'd been all along, certainly.

I couldn't rely on reading her mind; I had to rely on truly knowing her. And so I did. I knew exactly how she had planned to get to England. And tomorrow night, while she still slumbered, I'd get to the station from which the Eurostar Chunnel train departed, and lie in wait for her.

What I'd do when I found her, though, that was another question.

I couldn't possibly allow her to do as she wished. In the long run, seeing her parents would only cause harm to her, to Nela, and to them, and it could well unleash a chain of events that would make the coven turn on us, demanding that she be killed. I'd be powerless to protect her against the ancients.

But Nathalia was stubborn; I knew full well she wasn't going to give up her dream just on my say-so. Where did that leave us, then?

If I couldn't permit her to exercise such bad judgment, but she was determined to do just that against my express wishes... well, I could see only one outcome, really.

I'd have to do what I'd done all those years ago when I'd ruled the Roman Coven... lock her up until she got over her maudlin attachment to a life that was dead and gone forever.

We'd be right back where we had started.

I'd be her captor, once again.

Chapter 3: Au Gare du nord
________________________________



---Nathalia---

Ah, Paris.

I'd always wanted to see Paris, I really had. Long ago, I'd planned to visit the city at length once I had finished my music studies in Milan and Rome. So much for that plan. It had been ripped asunder by a primal force of nature called Santino. Actually, he’d ripped my whole life apart, and he’d done it on purpose. And sure, I understood a bit now about the stress and the twisted personal history that had driven him to such extremes, but really, that really didn't excuse his heinous conduct. Even after he’d figured out that he loved me, you see, he hadn’t taken the next logical step and set me free.

No, he’d held onto me like I was his shiny new toy. Or more accurately, like I was his, full stop. And because of that, I’d ended up changed for all time. And now, there wasn’t much I could ever do to put things back in their proper place. I was fated to live out the rest of my days --scratch that, nights-- as a vampire. At some level that had been my doing, for I had made myself, but such action would never have been necessary had Santino loved me enough to let me live my own life. To let me go, to let me return home to England.

But he hadn't. And the truth be told, he still didn't! I was his now in a way that couldn't ever be undone. His fledgling, a product of his bloodline. And as if that wasn't enough, I was his wife as well! But was that enough for him to trust me? Oh, no. He had all but forbidden me a visit home, and I couldn't help but resent that even if it didn't make a whit of difference, since I was going to have my visit come hell or high water.

That's right! I might not be able to be mortal again, like I wanted, but I'd be damned if I would let those things I could put right go uncorrected. Such as seeing my father again. Thanks to Santino, he thought I hadn’t been home in so long because I was in hiding from terrorists! But that story had been fed to him over two years ago; after all this time, Henry Statham must be tormenting himself over what had ultimately become of his only daughter.

Of course, knowing that I had become a vampire would hardly soothe him, but I would take care that he didn’t sense that pertinent fact. I'd already accepted that I might not even be able to talk to him; it was possible that all I could do was watch from afar and see how he was coping, how he was doing. Once I got to northern England, I'd have to judge if contact was wise.

It would break my heart to skip talking with him face-to-face, but I wasn't as stupid as Santino seemed to believe. I'd never do anything to endanger him, and that included distressing him with knowledge they weren't meant to have, such as I kill men and drink blood for a living now, Daddy...

So really, never having properly seen Paris was the least of my regrets. Since I didn't have time to tour the city tonight, either, I put the idea from my mind. Far more important was reaching the Lake District well before morning. I'd cut it rather fine arriving in Paris the night before, actually, and I didn't want to do that again. I hadn't enjoyed the lodgings I'd found.

Lodgings, what a word. Well, it was just as well that Santino had shown me how to sleep in the raw earth one night, because the skill had come in useful. The hardest part had been finding a spot I thought wouldn't be disturbed during the day. I'd run and run through the city, flashing past mortals who barely perceived my fleeting image, and finally, way out on the outskirts, in a decrepit industrialized area, I'd found a small park that looked all but abandoned, the iron benches rusted, a chain slung across the entrance, a sign in French no doubt explaining the situation.

At least I thought fermé meant closed, but I didn't claim to know much French at all. Santino spoke dozens of languages, or so it seemed, and he insisted that they were easy for vampires to pick up, what with our heightened intelligence and all that, but I certainly hadn't noticed them getting any easier. Not that I'd been trying to learn any, mind you. Studying never really had been my thing. But then again, why would becoming a vampire have changed that? I wasn't like the others who shared the darkness, I just knew I wasn't. Heightened intelligence, my ass! Maybe with more of Santino's blood I would have acquired some, but as I was? No dice.

Learning didn’t come any easier to me just because I was now a vampire.

And that was fine, really it was. I wasn't human, but at least I was close. Or so I told myself, but it was scant consolation, since I wasn't close enough. A near miss, that described me perfectly these days. Oh, well. I couldn’t change it, so I reasoned I might as well get used to it. And I was trying, I really was.

Daylight was still fairly far off by the time I reached that little park --or garden square, maybe--, but that didn't mean I had time to dawdle. I could already feel the approach of the sun. I wasn't burning --not yet--, but I was starting to feel an insidious lethargy invade my limbs. No time to waste. I dropped to my knees and began to dig as if my life depended on it. Which of course, it did. And the whole time I was preparing a grave of earth for me to lie in, I was becoming more and more resentful of Santino. This was his fault, wasn't it? If he'd have agreed to take me to England, we could have been there by now! And even if we had needed to make a layover somewhere, we'd have had a nice warm hotel room to rest in, not a mucky pit in damp, chemical-smelling ground!

Of course there was no question of my attempting the hotel route, not alone. I couldn't mesmerize mortals and convince them to stay leagues away from my room during the day, or read minds to know just how trustworthy an establishment was. Nor did I have centuries of experience in determining which hotels knew how to cater to the special needs of the vampire, such as providing absolutely sun proof drapes. Of course, I suppose I could always hide in the bathroom during the day, and block the door with towels so that no light could enter, but that wouldn't solve the problem of being certain that no maid would dare enter my lair...

No, as long as I was alone I had little option but to find a cemetery, or go into the earth itself. And definitely, the latter was preferable. I knew what Lestat claimed in his book, that as soon as he crossed over into darkness, the remains in a grave didn't perturb him, any more than did the other slimy, creepy things that crawled in crypts and hid from the sun. Well, that was him. I was another story entirely. Maybe it had to do with my general weakness, in vampire terms, but the idea of finding refuge in a graveyard made me feel ill, clear through. Just as much as it would have when I was still mortal. I guess you could say I wasn’t entirely inhuman, after all.

But that meant that sleeping in the earth wasn't much better han bedding down in a cemetery; I'd never much cared for worms and insects. A nature girl, I wasn't, even if I'd done a little rock climbing in the Eskdale crags. Oh, I did so miss the Lake District of northern England, the cool spring rains, the dappled sunlight coming through the branches of oak and elm trees. I wanted it all, wanted to see it again. Of course, I was destined to miss out on the sunlight part, but the rest could be mine again, for a time, if I could simply get back home…

Closing my eyes on a wave of pain, I reminded myself that England wasn’t home, not anymore. It was my parents’ home, that was all. Mine was now in Italy, with Nela, with Santino… Or was it? If my home was in Milan, why was I so very homesick for the north of England?

And to have a chance to get there again, I’d do anything, even sleep in the earthen grave I’d dug for myself.

I grimaced as I crawled in and reached up to pull dirt atop myself, then burrowed through the loose layers in the bottom to conceal myself deeper and deeper, where light could not possibly reach. Moist dirt wove its way between the strands of my hair and under my fingernails, particles were pulled into my nose when habit had my breathing – a habit I soon curbed, buried as I now was. I shuddered, almost moaning in disgust, but realized just in time that such indulgence would only gain me dirt in the mouth, as well.

I actually didn’t know what dirt on the tongue might do to me. I didn’t seem able to tolerate anything in my mouth except blood or a kiss. Even a drop of water would make me violently ill; I had to be careful whenever I showered or swam. My maker, on the other hand, seemed much more able to cope with the occasional stray droplet that might pass his lips. No doubt, it was just one more facet of his strength.

Just as he was like Lestat in that he could bed down in the raw earth without fighting down disgust. Santino had even told me once that such a resting-place could be more satisfying than a proper mattress. I had no idea what he meant by that; I guess I wasn’t enough of a night-walker to relate to the concept.

Needless to say, I absolutely hated my filthy makeshift lair, but I made do because it was that or burn in the glare of the oncoming dawn. And as hard as I found my life these days, at least it was life, after a fashion. And so I clung to it, which much me a real fraud.

That was what I was thinking as I lay beneath my blankets of dirt, my head pillowed on a hard clod of earth. How many times had I insisted to Santino that I’d never agree to take his blood? How often had I sworn to both him and God that I’d die before I’d kill?

And instead, here I was, snatching at any frail thread of existence, no matter how heinous it was. I could only continue this travesty of a life at the expense of others, but did that stop me? Oh, no, of course not.

I was such a hypocrite! Truly, it was a wonder that Santino didn’t take all the vainglorious things I’d said and throw them straight back in my face. I deserved his contempt, I really did, seeing as I’d spent so long condemning the very activities that I now partook of, myself.

But he didn’t hold me in contempt for that. Maybe he figured I held myself in enough contempt that the excess would just be wasted. No, no, that wasn’t the reason for his forbearance… it was more that he was so secure in his values that my condemnation had never bothered him. Quite simply, in his books I’d been wrong, so he hadn’t much cared what I thought about his lifestyle.

Now, if I could just achieve his same level of detachment, I’d be fine. At first, I had actually thought I’d be able to step back from human morality, that I’d begin to see myself as something different, something outside the system, so to speak. My first kill had been traumatic; Santino had had to seduce me into it, actually. But afterwards I had surprised myself by feeling rather relaxed about it all. I hadn’t felt half as bad as I’d expected; I hadn't even cried. At the time, I’d thought that the dark blood had changed more than my body; I figured it had altered my outlook just as much. For the better, all things considered. I didn't want to be miserable for all eternity. Who would?

But my indifference to old values hadn’t even lasted a week.

I personally thought my brief respite from guilt had been an overstressed brain’s way of dealing with too much, too fast. Another huge load of pain --beyond my obvious grief at leaving behind the life I wanted-- was just too much for me to cope with at that instant. So what had I done? Pushed it away, denied it, pretended it wasn’t there at all. And for a while, I guess I’d somehow made it work, that living cut off from how I really felt and thought.

Within just a few nights, my true feelings were back with a vengeance. In one fell swoop, I lost all vestige of detachment, and began to find each kill a devastating experience. Even seeing Santino kill had flayed me, deep inside. It wasn’t that he was particularly cruel in his choice of victims or his methods of killing, it was just that he was so strong and remorseless that once he decided on a kill, nothing could sway him.

His victims fought, they ran, and sometimes they even pleaded. When he let them, that was. All too often he would attack without warning and have them in the swoon before they could so much as twitch. But other times he was more relaxed in his approach. Lackadaisical, one might even say, and the poor humans knew what they were up against.

But nothing they could do or say could alter their fate in the slightest. Once Santino marked you for death, you were as good as dead, it was just as simple as that.

As simple, and as horrible. To me, it all seemed awful, so terribly, tragically unfair. A fight to the death, that was one thing, but to be attacked by a creature who gave you no quarter? Who sucked the very blood from your veins while you were utterly powerless to stop it?

You know, seeing him hunt made me wonder what had kept me from ending up as just one more meal to him. Was that why I could hardly bear to watch him sink his fangs in someone else’s neck? Because I could so easily have been nothing but another mortal on his endless list of victims? Or was it because I was well on the way to compiling such a list of my own?

A murder a night, sometimes two, that was what I managed as long as Santino helped me hunt. And he killed just as much. He didn’t need anywhere near that much blood; he was strong enough to go night after night without fresh sustenance, but I knew why he was killing so frequently in those first few months after I was born to darkness. He was doing it for me, providing me with a good example to emulate.

Good example, what a farce.

I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t bear the constant diet of human death, human suffering, and I certainly couldn’t stand the utterly gratuitous kills that Santino indulged in. In a way they were my fault, those kills, for I knew full well I was the one prompting them even if I wasn’t the one to sink my fangs.

So finally, I had told my maker that I would hunt alone.

And when I said it, I had really meant it. I never had any intention but to go out on the streets of Los Angeles, quickly kill --preferably without thinking too much about the matter-- and get back to Santino, who would hug and comfort me and help me through what I knew would be a trauma. But it had to be gotten through, so I set out to do it.

I tried, I really did, but I ran into problems from the first. To start with, I couldn’t read minds, so I didn’t know whom to stalk. Hungry, I got so hungry! I walked the barely lit alleys off of Hollywood Boulevard, where crime was rampant, and kept my eyes peeled for suspicious characters. The further I went, the more my starvation and thirst grew. But I was afraid to strike anyone down! Dear God, what if I fouled up and accidentally took the life of any innocent? There were runaways on these streets whose only crime was to be young and confused in a world that really didn't welcome them. Some had run from abusive homes, some had basically never had homes. How could I kill a poor creature such as that? And it wasn't like I could take a little drink, realize my error, and then walk away! I simply wasn't strong enough to manage it, that much I knew.

So what if I attacked someone who'd already been a victim his or her whole life? I didn’t know how I could live with myself afterwards.

Mortals, all around me… even at that late hour they seemed to swarm, and with them came a scent I recognized. Blood, mortal blood… I needed it, I needed it so badly I started to shake, to stumble as I walked forward, all of my energy poured into the need not to scream aloud with the pain of wanting that blood so badly! A great coil of thirst wrapped itself like a fiery rope around my midsection, then squeezed until I thought I'd be cut in half.

Blood... It got so that I stopped thinking so much about the need to find an evildoer, and started just longing for human blood of any ilk. My vision blurred at the prospect, the world seeming to fold in upon itself until there was nothing but me and the thirst left, nowhere else to look, nowhere else to focus.

Just about then, a helpful young man had rushed to my side and pulled me up by the forearm when I actually did trip on the cracked asphalt street. I couldn’t help what happened next. He was so close, so warm, and so utterly human. The fragrance of him as his skin connected with mine... I yanked his hand, the wrist pulsing with blood, to my open mouth, my fangs glistening in the moonlight.

But I didn’t kill him, because at that instant I looked into his eyes.

No more than nineteen. Strangely spiked hair, leather jacket. He looked like a thug, but his eyes weren't those of a predator. Compassion, he felt only compassion for the lady he had rushed to help. He was an innocent, no doubt of that.

And then he saw my fangs, arched and pointed for him, and he screamed in absolute agonized terror.

Reflex --human reflex, I had to think-- had me flinging his wrist away before I could rip it wide open. The boy stumbled under the force of the shove, then gained his feet and ran for his life.

Literally.

Run, yes run, go away, get away from me, I thought as I watched him go. But there was another part of me saying something quite different. Chase him down, Nathalia, take him, make him yours. His blood is all you want, rich and hot and delicious, and yours for the taking! He'd just a human, he's below you in the food chain, you've every right to enjoy him and live to enjoy yet another and another…

Seductive, those words. Oh, so terribly seductive. I could feel myself being sucked into a whirlpool of depravity, visions of feeding with abandon --as Santino could do-- filling my head like colorful lollipops. Joyously, I mean.

Somehow --don't ask me how, I've no idea-- I found the will to resist.

No! I argued back. I won’t take innocent blood! And in that precise instant, I formed a resolution. It was born of desperation, of knowing just how close I was to abandoning the last vestiges of my humanity, my morality. I won’t take human blood at all, I vowed, except when I can’t possibly avoid it. And before the thirst grows strong enough to overpower my reason, I *will* find a way to hunt out evildoers on my own. So I'll never, ever, ever deprive an innocent young person of their precious God-given life.

That night I fed from a mangy pair of stray dogs. And to tell the truth, that meal really wasn’t very satisfying. It left me hungry, both physically and spiritually. But it had the great advantage of keeping me sane. After a few nights of killing only animals, I could see that the nightly murders would stand a very good chance of sending me around the bend.

So I kept up with the cats, the dogs, the assorted street vermin. And whenever I finished and went back home, I couldn’t meet Santino’s eyes. You see, by hunting out animals, I was doing what my husband had expressly told me not to do. But what choice did I have, except to live off animals to the extent that I could? At least when I fed from rats and such, I didn’t weep afterwards and lose much of the blood I’d imbibed.

And that was what happened whenever I marked a man to die, even though I did find a way to ferret out evildoers. By the end of my first week hunting alone, I’d worked out my method, which I thought of as the let-him-try-to-kill-you-first plan. And I do mean him. It was only men I killed, and not just because they were the ones that usually did attack me in the back streets I haunted. Women had assaulted me a time or two, and I just shoved them off me and went on my way. I couldn’t conceive of killing a woman. Too like myself? Or too much a reminder of how vulnerable I had once been to Santino? Or maybe I was just pissed at men? After all, it had been a vampire man who'd ruined my life, hadn't it? And it had been a young mortal man who'd almost killed Nela, and in so doing, had started the whole ugly chain of events that had led to me needing to kill at all.

Okay, okay, I admit it. I killed exclusively men because I was royally ticked off at them.

It should have helped, that anger. Especially since my plan to play the victim did deliver only murderers into my hands... but neither my anger nor their crimes helped me find the kill any less agonizing after my dark, evil thirst was finally sated.

I cried, I always cried. Alone, kneeling in a filthy alley by a body drained of blood, I cried for what I had done, for what I had become, and for what the slain human might have achieved had I spared him.

I couldn’t believe how much I cried! Until my guts ached with it, until my face and hands were stained beyond redemption! And this from me! Once upon a time, I’d had grit; I hardly ever wept! Down in the pit where he’d kept me, Santino had beaten me senseless, and I'd clenched my teeth and denied him the satisfaction of knowing how much he was hurting me.

I found out later that my stubborn pride hadn't actually been too smart. Seems that Santino had concluded his discipline wasn't severe enough unless he made me cry, the bastard. And that despite the fact that he could read my mind and know exactly how much it hurt. So yes, down in that torture pit, I had finally given way to tears. Who wouldn't? But I hadn't blubbered like an overgrown baby, and that was precisely what I did each time I had to kill.

Was it any wonder I didn’t put myself through it any more than was strictly necessary?

Those tears, though, only marked me all the more a hypocrite. If killing humans was so unbearable, so thoroughly unthinkable, why did I keep doing it, an average of once each week? Easy answer. Because you’re a fraud, Nathalia, a total fucking fraud. If your life is so hard to endure, you should just end it. But you don't, because you're a whining coward as well.

I thought things like this at the end of every night as I lay beside Santino in the plush, comfortable double bed in our lair. Sometimes, even while he was making love to me, I was laying there hating myself. How could I not? I only let him drink from me when I'd had a human that same night; I was afraid he would be able to detect any fresh animal blood in my system. So if he was making love to me, I was pretty much wracked with guilt and not able to enjoy it as I used to.

And he didn't make love to me --or try, that is-- very often, since I had to tell him no whenever I'd fed from dogs and cats and such. That confused him, I could tell. Santino knew something was wrong; he knew me too well not to sense a problem. And what a problem! I wanted him --quite desperately at times-- yet I was holding back.

It worried him, I knew full well that it did. But there wasn't much he could do about it. When he would ask me what was wrong I would fobbed him off with some pitifully feeble excuse. I'm just tired, I can't stay up as long as you can, you know... I'm worried about Nela, do you think she's adjusting all right to life here in Italy... oh I had dozens.

Santino knew there was more to my reluctance than I was telling him, I was sure of it. But he had too much class to drink from me against my will, or try to force discussions, so he had decided to play a waiting game. Wait until Nathalia resolves whatever's bothering her, or until she decides she needs help.

Well, he was going to wait forever. The issues bothering me couldn't be resolved, and the last thing I needed was help, especially his. As well as Santino knew me, you see, I knew him just as well. If he realized I was taking so much blood off animals, he'd help me hunt more humans.

Thanks, Santo, but no thanks.

I was used to waiting for the dawn to steal me away from my nightmare existence. The death-sleep was about the only facet of my new life that I did enjoy, because, thank God, I didn't often dream. I was just out for fourteen or fifteen hours. I was at peace, just as long as I wasn’t conscious.

That night outside Paris, as I lay in the stinking ground, was the same. It was a relief when the approach of day came to release me. But as I felt the lethargy steal across my muscles and seep into my bones, habit had me mentally reciting a prayer that used to comfort...

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Yeah, right. Fat lot of comfort the poem was, now; Lestat had told me the hard, cold truth years before. You’re going to Hell, chérie. He'd said it for reasons of his own -- hell, Lestat did everything for reasons of his own, but I knew he was right, all the same. Maybe that was what kept me going, the sure knowledge that to end my life was only to enter a realm where I would suffer yet more. At the very least, I would suffer for not knowing what had become of Nela… just as my father was suffering right now.

But I could put an end to that suffering tomorrow, if all went well once I arrived in the Lake District.

Sleep, let me sleep and cease thinking on all this…. and finally, I did.



---Nathalia---

The next evening when I emerged, I looked a positive sight. It had rained heavily during the day, and I'd ended up basically sleeping in a mud puddle. Or a puddle of something else, actually. Something rank and foul, viscous and slightly orange. Well, that didn't matter. It wasn't like a little industrial waste was going to kill me, or give me cancer, was it? Anyway, I'd dug down far enough that the rain didn't expose me during the death-sleep, which was what really mattered. Still, I had to lecture myself that a little grime wouldn't kill me, even if it smelled strongly of caustic chemicals and made me feel absolutely icky.

I did what I could to get ready for another stint on a train, this one to last some three hours. Running back into the city, I clamped my mouth tightly shut and dove into the Seine to rinse myself clean. Not that that river was the cleanest one in all France, or anything, but it helped some, especially after I scrubbed myself with a rag I found floating near the bank.

I sated my hunger with a pair of slippery carp that I caught and sealed against my mouth so that no water would enter as I sank my fangs. Ugh. Fish blood. Cold, so very cold and thin. Just as well Santino's not around to want to drink from me tonight. Somehow I think he'd sense the presence of blood like *this*.

It didn't really feed me, but then, animal blood never did. All it could do was take up space in the great void that was my burning thirst. And oh, my thirst was getting to the point where I really should hunt out a human, a proper meal... but that would take hours, time I simply couldn't spare if I wanted to make my way north from London later tonight. Besides, how could I present myself to my father when I knew, deep inside, that I’d murdered someone that very same night?

Yet here I was, going to see him even though I’d killed a week ago! What was the difference between a few hours ago and a few nights ago? None, really, but it seemed like there was some.

Hypocrite. You are such a hypocrite, Nathalia, I thought again.

It came to me then, something I hadn’t thought of in a long, long time: Nathalia wasn’t really my name. Santino had dubbed me that when he’d first taken me captive, and it had stuck. At one point, Lestat had hypnotized me and suggested I accept the name, and I had… for a long while there, I hadn’t even known I had another. But I did, of course; my father certainly wasn’t going to call me Nathalia, a name so exotic it would likely stun him as it had me. My birth name was rather nondescript in comparison, but it held a certain nostalgia for me, a remembrance of things past. I wondered what Santino would say if I demanded he call me by my proper name.

I didn’t wonder long, though. As I finished draining the carp, I realized he’d just refuse, for he’d see the demand as indicative that I was far too attached to a mortal life that could no longer be my own.

Well, he didn’t understand, that was all. I needed a chance to spend time again with my father. In just a few short years, he would be gone forever, so I couldn’t waste what time remained, no matter what my husband might think.

Dripping wet, I emerged from the dank waters of the Seine and shook myself violently to dispel the worst of the wetness. Then I ran north toward the Gare du nord. Propelling my body at great speed did help to dry my clothes and hair, but when I reached the station, they were still damp, and my boots were full of moisture. It was no wonder that the young man I stopped to ask for directions looked at me askance. Oh well, let him look. At least my appearance meant he hardly noticed my atrocious French. So atrocious, in fact, that he recognized my accent and replied to me in English. Well, that suited me just fine.

Now that I’d made it to the right station, I needed a ticket. They'd told me en route from Italy last night that the train that went under the Channel departed from the Gare du nord, but I hadn't been able to arrange passage before I was forced to seek shelter from the dawn. Good thing my credit cards were waterproof; the lire in my wallet wouldn't do me much good here, although I supposed that money could always be exchanged. A sudden wave of sentimentality had me wishing for a handful of small, thick pound coins in my pocket. The feel of home…

Italy's your home!

As I bought my ticket, I realized that sleeping in the raw earth did have one thing to recommend it. Afterwards, I might look like an escapee from a mental institution, and I might vaguely smell of some chemical aroma that no mortal or vampire should ever exude, but at least the residual dirt on my nails and skin made me appear somewhat human. Enough to pass in the dark, probably. I thought then that Santino was wrong; I probably could fool my parents, just as long as they didn't touch me...

I signed the name my passport bore, Nathalia Constantzine, to the credit slip the clerk offered, and shoved the receipt into my pocket, but all the while I was thinking, not my name, not my name. How long since I’d thought that? Years, really. I had a sudden strong conviction that my real name was vitally important, that I shouldn’t forget it, that it meant something real and enduring....

Then I glanced at the cash register and all but blanched (as if I could, these days, when my skin was already such a stark white) at the cost of my ticket. Had I really spent that much? The amount was obscene, but I came by money so easily these days that I’d pretty much stopped even wondering about prices. I just picked what I wanted, and paid whatever was asked, and half the time I didn’t even remember the sums I was doling out.

Not that I went shopping all that often, mind you, but I suppose that over the past year and a half, I had grown used to having plenty of money. Santino was richer than Midas, and ever since he'd married me, he'd given me free access to all the funds I could want. He didn’t even make me keep track of what I spent, he was that wealthy. It was a novel experience at first, not having to count pence. My parents weren't destitute, but finances around our house had always been fairly tight, and I'd learned from an early age that it was best to be frugal.

The truth was that I didn’t much care to spend Santino’s money --I'd rather have my own, all things considered, but how was I going to manage that? What was I supposed to do, get a night job in Milan and go hunting for rats during my break? I couldn't see a vampire working for a living, I just couldn't, so I put up with being dependent on Santino for things. At one level I didn't like that, but to be honest, I have to admit that it sure was nice to be able to splurge without worrying. Especially now, because it meant I could purchase a premium first class ticket, which would give me access to the Salon Eurostar lounge while I waited for the next train. I was hoping to avoid drawing attention to myself, you see, and I thought a dimly lit private lounge had every advantage over the bright lights and crowds in the main foyer of the station.

Hiding behind my hair --scraggly for lack of a brushing after my adventures that night-- I quickly showed my ticket to the uniformed young man who more or less guarded the door to the exclusive lounge, and ducked inside to a seat in the corner, then angled my chair so that it would face away from anyone else who entered.

When I checked my watch, which I'd set to Paris time as soon as I saw the huge clock that graced the station, it wasn't quite eleven. My train was scheduled to board at eleven thirty. Sighing, I collapsed in my plush black leather chair, put my feet on a low table, and tried to relax. It was hard, despite the fact that I was alone in the lounge --for now--. All I could think about was what I was going to do or say when I saw my father.

How to even begin? Obviously I couldn't tell him how I'd changed, but I had to let my parents know about Nela. And that meant that I had to admit I was married, didn't it? Then they'd demand to meet my husband, which was a phenomenally bad idea considering his attitude toward this whole undertaking. Besides, they'd met him once before: while I was on the run from him, he had gone there to ferret out information about me. He'd given them the alias he used most often, Rodrigo Constantzine, and had fed them a pack of lies about being an Interpol agent searching for their missing daughter. They'd believed it all, of course. They loved me and were desperate for hope that I might be alive, and he'd mesmerized them so they wouldn't notice his vampiric traits. But now, that previous visit only meant complications if I ever presented him as my husband.

Of course, I could always explain the truth, that the good Catholic girl they'd raised had conceived a child out of wedlock. They'd be disappointed in my fall from grace, which was ironic, considering. The only reason I had Nela was because I'd been too good a Catholic to use birth control! Somehow, though, my religion hadn't kept me from taking a lover in the first place.

I didn't regret it, though. How could I, when out of it I'd gotten my precious little Nela? Besides, for all I understood that what I'd done had been a sin, it paled in comparison to the weekly murders I was committing now. Talk about a fall from grace!

Sighing again, I checked my watch once more. Not quite eleven, plenty of time until I had to board my train...

Suddenly I sat straight up, gasping. Oh God, there was no doubt now; I had none of this supposedly powerful intelligence that the other vampires possessed. No, I was so remarkably stupid that I didn't realize a dunking in the Seine would mess up my watch! I hadn't even realized the truth when I'd stared straight at the unblinking display and adjusted it to local time. And from that instant to this, neither the hour nor the minute had changed!

There was no telling how long I'd been sitting there, lost in thought!

Jumping from my seat, I ran for the door, yanking my ticket out of my jeans pocket as I moved. Which platform did I need to get to---

None, as it turned out. Because as the door swung forward under the force of my palm, it connected with something.

Or someone.

Black, serious eyes met mine, eyes set in a handsome face I realized I should have expected to see tonight. Santino hadn’t forbidden this voyage, but he’d made his opinion crystal clear. And now his dark eyes had that look that meant he didn’t much appreciate me flouting his clearly expressed wishes.

I suddenly sensed that I wasn't going anywhere. Quite possibly, not for a long, long time.



---Santino---

I had haunted that station since sundown, and seen no trace of Nathalia. My gaze kept sweeping the brightly lit spaces of the foyer and the long expanse of marble counters behind which ticket agents served the public. She should be easy to spot, she really should. No matter how she concealed her preternatural aura from mortal eyes, I would see it.

But I didn't, which could only mean she hadn't yet arrived at the gare.

Worry gripped me, then. If something terrible had befallen her, I wouldn't automatically sense it, her mind being closed off from mine. What if she'd had trouble finding a resting place the night before? What if she'd burned in the sun? She was so young and weak that there'd be nothing left to raise; she'd be utterly destroyed, gone forever...

Such thoughts were ridiculous, of course. I didn't really think Nathalia was ill-equipped to take care of herself. She could manage on her own, certainly she could; we had discussed and practiced every skill she was likely to need. But still, niggling doubts assailed me until I felt positively frantic to find her and keep her safe with me.

She was probably just out feeding before she found herself trapped for three hours on a train full of mortals, I told myself, but it didn't slow my racing heartbeat to hear the words of reason. As one long hour passed, and then another, I began stretching out my powers, searching mortal minds for someone who had seen Nathalia. Lestat had found her for me that way --twice--, but of course his mental abilities far outmatched mine. Yet in the limited confines of the station I should be able to make the trick work just as well for me.

And at last, it did. While pacing the platforms, my keen vision alert for her, I sensed the thoughts of a young man. Thank God that the language posed no barrier to me. She sure did look odd, he was thinking, his French more modern than Lestat's but just as easily understood. I wonder if she's fit to travel. Her skin, she looked so pale. Ill, really. But the look in her eyes! Fever-bright and somehow demented...

Demented? Of course vampire eyes could look rather bizarre to a mortal who peered too close. Nevertheless, that was a rather strong word for him to use, especially considering that Nathalia's beautiful eyes were actually somewhat human-looking, still. They glinted and sparkled, but not so much as did mine, or those of any stronger vampire.

I traced his thoughts back to his location at the door to some sort of executive lounge, and knew at once that Nathalia was inside that room. A quick mental suggestion had him moving aside to take his break, but before I could enter the lounge, the door was flying open to hit me square in the chest. And then I saw her, and I understood the demented conclusion he'd drawn.

She did look crazed, but I didn't think the cause of it was so much in her eyes as in her appearance in general. I'd never seen my Nathalia looking so unkempt; even down in that pit without any amenities she'd managed to make herself somewhat presentable. Right now, she just looked bizarre. Even more hungry than usual, her face was gaunt with it, her hands shaking ever so slightly. Other details assaulted my shocked gaze. Clothes that were dingy and pasted to her even though they were wrinkled; hair a tangled rat's nest instead of the loose black curls I loved to stroke, fragments of dried brown leaves in the strands...

I didn't know what to say to her, I really didn't. What the hell have you been doing to yourself was quite probably not the right note to strike, although I had no idea what was.

She didn't want to give me a chance to speak, in any case. Her hand, which had so recently pushed the door open, shifted to my chest as she gave me an almighty shove to get me out of her way.

I, of course, chose not to budge an inch.

"Move, I’ll miss my train, damn it!" She shouted then, so upset that she didn't modulate her voice to a normal volume; it shook the walls. All of which told me that her desire to see her parents was developing as I had feared: into obsession. And that meant I had to take drastic action, because the state she was in, she wouldn't be able to control her impulses if I let her set foot in England. She might even take it into her head to tell her parents that she was a vampire; I'd seen it happen before, with other fledglings this distraught, this demented.

"No," I calmly denied her demand. "Come on, Nathalia, we're going home."

"I'll be home in a couple more days," she declared, grimacing at me in a way that bared her fangs, and in public. I'd never seen her be so indiscreet, and it boded ill, it really did. I understood that crossing over into the night had placed her under a great deal of stress. Just how much, however, was only now becoming apparent. Definitely, she wasn't in possession of the good judgment she usually exhibited. Over the years, you see, I had developed great respect for Nathalia; so great that I had planned to let her stay mortal if that was her wish. Normally I'd never want to interfere with her decisions. But these weren't normal circumstances. She wasn't thinking straight, and I wasn't about to let her fling herself into a disaster that might end in her annihilation at Maharet's hands.

"So just hold your damned horses, Santino!" she was yelling now, her preternaturally loud voice continuing to attract attention we didn't need. "I left you a note, for God's sake! You didn't have to chase me to hell and gone! All you had to do was wait a little bit while I took care of this, and then I'd be back home!"

Note? I hadn't seen a note, not that it mattered. Note or no note, I wasn’t about to watch her waltz down a road that could only lead to catastrophe.

"You're coming home now," I calmly informed her, and moved to take her wrist in one of mine.

"Oh, no I'm not," she declared as she did her best to yank her arm from my grip. No chance of that.

"Lower your voice," I hissed, leaning down to speak against the damp, matted hair that covered her ear. Her hair actually smelled foul, which startled me. I mean, it was fairly obvious she’d slept in the raw earth, but that didn’t usually produce a smell like this. I doubted humans could mark it, for it wasn’t strong; it actually smelled as though it had been mostly rinsed clean, but the aroma that lingered was positively disgusting.

"Let me go or I'll really scream!" The threat more a growl than anything else, Nathalia fully bared her fangs as she delivered it.

I didn't dignify something that childish with a response. Of course I never dreamed that she'd make good on the threat. I'd occasionally seen Nathalia do some misguided things --like when she sidled onto Daniel's lap once and tried to seduce him into taking her blood and giving her his, right in front of me, and this because I'd declined to make her while she had amnesia and didn't know what she was asking for-- but by and large she was clear-headed. Certainly I never expected her to behave like a three-year-old brat and let loose with a temper tantrum in the middle of a Paris train station.

But sure enough, that's exactly what she proceeded to do.

Throwing her head back, baring the long column of her slender throat --gorgeous although it was slightly streaked with traces of mud--, she opened her mouth wide and screamed to wake the dead, even as she thrashed violently against my hold on her wrist.

"Help! Police, somebody help me, this man is bothering me---"

Now that made me angry, it really did. I shook her, hard. Probably so hard that had she still been mortal, I'd have snapped her neck. It didn't injure her now, although I could tell from the pain that shot through her eyes that neither was it pleasant. Not that a little discomfort daunted my Nathalia; when had it ever? She still kept screaming, and of course, people were running towards us now, at least one in the peculiar uniform of the Paris police.

What did she want, to have me taken into custody? She knew that wasn't possible, that no policeman could lay hands on me, no jail hold me without my own consent. She had to know that a scene like this was only likely to lead to carnage as I fought my way free. This wasn't like Nathalia; she hated hunting so much that I knew she wouldn't wish to cause yet more deaths.

Not when she was in her right mind, that is.

And since she wasn't, now, I didn't have much choice about what I did next. Rational argument wasn't going to work, and in under a minute, by my guess, we'd be surrounded by dead humans unless I shut her up. I could just see the headlines now: Massacre in the Gare du nord.

I didn't want publicity like that, anymore that I really wished her to precipitate a massacre in the first place, so I did what I had to do.

Throwing mental power behind me at the humans scrambling to get to the screaming woman, I created an aura of confusion and uncertainty, told them that there was something seriously wrong with her, that she was deranged. At the same instant I was striking like a bolt of lightning, dipping my head to Nathalia's neck and in one powerful draught, draining her of every drop.

Her blood was thin and flowed into me with ease, which meant she certainly hadn't fed properly this evening. So much for my theory that she was late arriving to the station because she'd been hunting. Her thin blood, however, also meant that if I pulled on the wound with all my might, I could drain her in just a few seconds.

And so I did. One instant she was kicking furiously at my shins, and the next, she was collapsing like a deflated balloon, her limbs turning boneless as she lost the foundation of all physical and mental power: a healthy supply of blood flowing in her veins. I caught her as she fell and lifted her into my arms, cradling her against me as I continued to drink.

By the time the mortals --somewhat befuddled now-- reached us, Nathalia was as limp as a rag doll, and past all objections. Conscious, although not by much, she was unable to protest my grip on her, or the story I told.

"What seems to be the trouble here?" the police officer demanded in terse French, his worried eyes on Nathalia. He should be worried; now she was looking truly ill. A drained vampire is not a pretty sight.

Since his mind seemed the most resistant to my control, I focused my power on him. And sure enough, he was far from immune. "My wife has been ill, as you can see," I told him in my most calming, convincing voice. "Her mind wanders a bit; sometimes she doesn't recognize me. I'll take her home now and call her doctor."

I think he half-believed me, but his law-enforcement training was strong enough that he needed more confirmation than just my say-so. "Show me your identification, si'l vous plaît," he requested, his French much more agreeable, that time.

Without hesitation, I pulled my wallet from the pocket of my well-tailored black slacks and handed it to him. As he flipped through the various identity cards which established me as Rodrigo Constantzine, Italian citizen, his brows lifted slightly. Reading his mind, I knew he didn't recognize my name; he didn't realize I was a business powerhouse in Europe and the States. He was, however, impressed by my obvious personal wealth. I had those credit cards, you see, that were only handed out to the very well-to-do. The respectable well-to-do, at that. And of course my appearance bolstered the impression. A dark Armani suit, expensive Italian leather shoes without a single cuff, a maroon silk shirt of the finest weave. To him, all these things meant I was trustworthy.

Certainly I looked more so than Nathalia, who just then resembled something the cat had dragged in. It didn't take too much mental razzle-dazzle to make the onlookers believe she was as mentally unbalanced as I had implied, all things considered.

Of course it was reprehensible to judge on appearances, but it was also all too human, a fact I used to my advantage.

I hadn’t maintained power over my coven for hundreds of years without developing a ruthless streak.

Fishing in Nathalia's pocket while she moaned lightly in my arms --I think she was trying to object, but without blood, she could summon precious little energy--, I drew forth her sodden passport and handed that to the officer as well.

Well, the name neatly printed inside the dark green cover took care of any niggling doubts he might have had left. There it was Nathalia Constantzine, and she was listed as wife to one Rodrigo.

"Thank you, monsieur," the officer finally murmured as he gave back my wallet and Nathalia's passport, then turned to the crowd and directed them to disperse as he explained that the matter had been taken care of.

Shoving all the documents deep into the front pocket of my slacks, I cradled Nathalia closer, ignored the stench in her hair, and bent to whisper against her ear. "Shhh, my love, just relax. We'll get you fed and washed; you'll be good as new in no time. And then we’ll talk, all right?"

She struggled in my arms, ever so slightly. I had to wonder why she bothered, since it was obvious that she couldn't possibly free herself. Even full of blood, her strength was nothing to mine, and now the disparity was so great that it was laughable. Yet still she shifted until her fingernails could claw my arm.

She tried, but her nails, brittle now that she’d been drained, broke off the moment she tried to puncture my hard skin with them.

Well, that was Nathalia, for you. When had she ever given up on something she'd set her mind to achieving? Against all the odds, she had escaped me when she was yet mortal, and had eluded me for months!

Depressing, that thought, for it only led to one conclusion.

She was going to keep trying to get to England, and I was going to have to stop her.

And what would that do, but call up memories of other times and places where I'd imposed my will on hers?

Oh, Nathalia, I thought, looking down at her as she mutely stared back up, her blue eyes furious even if she could barely keep them open. What am I going to do with you?

Chapter 4: Innocent Blood
________________________________



---Santino---

I had drained Nathalia past the point at which she would be able to hunt alone, so my first order of business was to procure a good meal for her. And I did mean a good meal. Maybe, I thought, she was getting so depressed and maudlin because she was dining so exclusively from murderers. Their thoughts weren’t exactly soothing ones, were they? And since Nathalia could only read thoughts during the actual kill, she was probably finding herself overwhelmed by such a steady diet of negativity.

That must be it, I thought. She needs a nice, clean kill; someone whose thoughts will yield up beautiful memories.

I never had agreed, you see, that we should kill only the very worst specimens of humanity. I knew Marius preached that, and of course Lestat was currently making some sort of game out of ferreting out serial killers, for God's sake, but I couldn't see the hunt as some sort of street-sweeping service. It was my old Coven Master training coming out, I suppose. Back then, I’d believed vampires were placed on earth to be a scourge to all mankind, just one more plague to test and temper his faith. God kills indiscriminately, and so shall we, Lestat had told Louis centuries later; a phrase which aptly summed up my attitude toward the kill, even if he didn't follow his own advice so much, anymore.

And you know, Louis did kill indiscriminately, as far as I could tell, so I guess Lestat's advice had finally stuck. But for all that, I wasn't too much like Louis, for he hunted in a truly random manner, giving as little thought as possible to whom he would choose for his next victim, and his next.

All in all, I was more like Daniel. We'd hunted together quite a bit in recent times --he'd been in an I'm-pretending-I-don't-need-Armand phase, a perfect match to Armand's I'm-pretending-I-don't-need-Daniel phase. Those two! In any case, I'd gotten to know Daniel well, and counted him a close friend, and I knew he preferred to hunt as I did. With gusto, enjoyment, and indulging the sheer exhilaration of the kill. Which meant killing any and all who struck our fancy. It was indiscriminate, in a sense, but it was hardly indeterminate.

Oh, I really liked Daniel. In many ways, he was a vampire after my own heart. He thrived on this existence; he all but raved about it. And he'd tried to impart some of that rollicking enthusiasm to Nathalia, had tried to make her want a life like ours. I could hardly blame him that he'd failed, or that Nathalia, in a fit of pique, had once tried to seduce him.

Back to the point, though....... When I had discussed my dining habits with Nathalia, I had told her that I did hunt the evildoer, for that was true as well. Pure and simple, to me everyone was an evildoer. It all went back to those scriptures that I’d studied so long ago, the holy writ, which, for all its drawbacks, did contain significant truth about humanity: For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

I believed that; how could I not? It was entirely accurate, and it meant that there was little real difference between targeting the evildoer, as Marius advocated, or striking down the first mortal to cross your path, as was Louis’ practice. Or picking and choosing those mortals you wanted, which was my primary hunting method.

It all led to the same destination -- the death of an evildoer, of someone God had marked for death long before any vampire stepped onto the scene.

Perhaps, I thought, I’d guided Nathalia badly in her first year of darkness. By teaching her to feast exclusively on murderers, I’d only guaranteed that she wouldn’t learn the very thing that might provide respite from her terrible guilt: that mortals simply weren’t worth that guilt. They were all evildoers, they were all deserving of death. For all have sinned; the wages of sin is death. The God she believed in had said so Himself, so how could Nathalia argue with it?

Once we were out of the Gare du nord, I took to the air with her in my arms and drifted for a few minutes until we reached the penthouse suite of the Hôtel Napoleon. I landed us on the terrace, stared at the sliding glass door until it unlatched, and striding inside, gently laid her on the richly embroidered bedspread which covered the double bed.

"We’re at my hotel," I quietly told her as I looked down into her despondent, unblinking eyes. The fury gone now, she just looked defeated. I hated to see her that way, but no doubt an infusion of fresh blood would cure it soon enough. Yes, fresh blood. Healthy blood for once. Someone with good experiences, good thoughts, good memories. No murderer for my Nathalia, not tonight.

"I’m going out to get you something nice to eat," I continued, smoothing a hand across her icy, dirt-spattered brow. "All right? Don’t worry. No one will disturb you here, and I’ll be back in ten minutes at the very most."

She couldn’t answer, of course; her eyes were rolled back in her head now and only the whites were visible. But I knew she could hear me because those whites were tinged with red.

Nathalia was crying, or trying to, and since I couldn’t believe the kill still bothered her so much (how could it, when she hunted every night?) I had to think that she was hurting to be so drained of blood.

"Everything will be fine," my beauty, I soothed, combing my fingers through her hair, untangling it slightly with my nails. "You’ll feel better after a good meal."

A blood tear slipped free from one eye, then, and she made a noise that almost sounded like a strangled groan. I smiled in sympathy. Having been drained many times when I was just a fledgling --Massimo frequently feasted on his underlings-- I knew just how painful the experience was. And too, I knew that she wouldn’t begin to feel better until she was filled with fresh, rich blood, so with a final kiss against her lips, I went to procure her meal.

Not an innocent, since there really was no such thing, but someone young and wholesome for a change. Yes, that was what my Nathalia needed.



---Nathalia---

I hadn’t expected to see Santino in the Gare du nord, but the minute I ran into him --literally-- I realized that I should have. He’d made it clear enough that in his view, I had no business trying to see my mortal family. He didn’t try to control me anymore, not really, but when he felt that strongly about something, I should have realized that he would revert to his old Coven Mater personality.

And so he did.

He held me by force, laid down the law, and when I objected, had the temerity to attack me in public and drain me forthwith! So much for my deluded fantasy that Santino would never drink from me against my will!

I can’t explain how terrible it felt, or how fast he managed to render me as incapable of objecting as a dishrag, or something. He had fully drained me just once before, on the night I was made, and I had thought that experience violent. Now I knew that even in his drug-induced delirium that night, he’d taken great care not to damage my frail mortal body.

Care he didn’t have to bother with, now that I was a vampire.

In the station, he had latched onto me so suddenly that I didn’t have time to react, and in under a second, I swear, he had already drained me half to death. My legs turned to water beneath me, and I collapsed, but he caught me and just kept drinking.

And the pain! It hurt, it hurt horribly as my blood was violently yanked through my body and out the wound. This was nothing like the gentle little drinks he'd taken since I became a creature of the night. Those were done in love, they were making love, and although I didn’t reciprocate and drink from him as well, I adored it when he would feast from me.

Although, come to think of it, lately I'd been wracked with guilt at those times... so when I say I adored it, I'm thinking mostly of months and months ago, before I started to get quite so depressed about killing. Back then, we would make love almost every night. Without fail, I would sigh with intense pleasure and a contentment that went beyond the physical as we were joined in the most elemental of ways, as the bond we’d formed was renewed and strengthened by the fact that he wanted all I was, and I wanted to give it.

Things weren't quite so sublime these days when we made love. In fact, I didn't much like it at all, anymore. How could I, when I would hold myself tense with self-reproach, sometimes almost crying again? His drinking of me, you see, only reminded me that I had just drunk of some poor mortal. The association was impossible to miss, since I only let Santino make love to me on those nights when I had hunted humans.

Probably a mistake, that, but I had little choice in the matter. I simply didn't know if he would be able to detect animal blood in my veins. Now, of course, I was bound to find out.

Would he be lecturing me later on the foolhardiness of draining carp instead of people? Of course, I had enough to worry about now without fussing over later. Pain blazed through me as he forcibly pulled the blood from my body, pain like I’d never felt before in all my life. I was being ripped apart, and my empty veins, each one a long string of torment streaking through my body, began screaming to be filled.

They were screaming as I wished to, but I couldn’t even manage to moan Stop, Santino, stop… as I had the time he’d drained me of the last of my mortal life.

Now, I could do nothing --literally nothing-- as he finished me off and, with a few clever words to disperse the crowd that had gathered, took me out of the station and away from my hope --tonight’s, at least-- of seeing my father again.

And even though he no longer pulled at what little blood might be left in my body, I was still in agony; I couldn’t even grit my teeth against the pain, so little control did I have over my own muscles. Or maybe it was more a case of no longer having muscles at all; without the blood, I was nothing.

Flying through the air, a familiar sensation, one I recognized even if I didn’t open my eyes to see the view of Paris at night. Paris, hah! I no longer cared if I ever visited the sights. All I wanted was a chance to see my father once again! Thanks to Santino --or perhaps to my own stupidity in not anticipating he would stop me this way-- my dream remained unfulfilled.

Within minutes I was lying on a soft, comfortable bed in one of those hotels he frequented. No pit of earth for me, not this morning, I thought, and then I wondered what his plan was, for hadn’t he said that we were going home? This wasn’t home. But neither is his villa in Italy, an insidious voice deep inside reminded me. And neither was Los Angeles, or Rarotonga, or that pit in Norway where he kept you like some sort of private snack service. Your home is in England.

No, no, I thought. My home is with my husband! He’s changed since those awful times in those other places! He loves me, now. He wouldn’t hurt me…

But then I remembered how he’d just drained me. No doubt he thought he had his reasons, but as far as I was concerned, it had been an unconscionable, vicious attack, and I deserved better from the man who claimed to love me.

Far better.

I couldn’t see anymore; my eyes were rolling back in my head. To tell the truth, I could barely hear, either, but I dimly perceived his voice, as though through a fog, saying that he would bring me something nice to eat.

I needed to feed, even I recognized that, but the phrase still made me shudder, deep inside. Something to eat. What a lie, what a total farce.

Someone to eat, that was what he meant.

Oh God, I'd hoped to get through tonight and the next on animal blood again. Thanks to Santino, though, there was no chance of that. My eyes felt moist. So what if he brought me a vile murderer? I was a murderer too, wasn’t I? Worse than any of them. I'd killed dozens, already, so who was I to hand out judgment, to sentence others to death?

Yet my hunger was great after a week or more of subsisting on animals, as was my need to protect Nela and the mortals who served us in the villa. I had to hunt and I knew it, so I got through the ordeal, but it was never easy. Not before, and not after. It was only easy during the kill itself, when all emotion was drowned in a symphony of blood thirst.

You’ll feel better after you eat, Santino promised, but the promise just mad me cry harder, because it showed just how little he knew. I never felt better after I ate! The minute I pulled away from a corpse and had to deal with the graphic reality of disposing of the evidence, I felt worse.

Much worse.

But the irony was that I didn’t feel so bad that I would end my miserable existence. Or even so bad that I wouldn’t kill once again, when I had to.

Like tonight.

I’d have managed on the carp, but now the thirst was consuming me like never before. Of course it was -- I'd never been emptied of all blood, before! I’d have to kill, and this time, even if I could get to one, no animal would suffice.

It would have to be a human. Again.



---Nathalia---

I don’t think I went to sleep. Not actual sleep, that is, but I drifted into some sort of dazed state in which thought was impossible, in which I simply existed without self-awareness. How long it lasted, I couldn’t have said.

Or maybe I could.

Santino, you see, was pretty good at keeping promises, and he’d sworn to be back in under ten minutes. I had to think he’d done as he had said.

I couldn’t crack my eyelids, couldn’t see the nice meal he’d brought me, but I could certainly smell the mortal who suddenly entered the suite. The thirst smoldering in my innards flared up to become an inferno in my throat. Ah, blood. Rich, thick human blood, the only elixir which ever truly calmed my thirst or filled me as I was supposed to be filled.

The smell came closer, tantalizing me as I lay helpless on the bed. Of course the old familiar guilt was there right alongside my hunger, but I told myself what I always told myself at the moment just before the kill. He's a filthy murderer, a subhuman lowlife. Some more deserving person will live a full life-span because of what you do here, tonight. It didn’t assuage my culpability, not entirely, but it did help me get through the actual kill.

"She’s tranced," I heard Santino say, his voice low and soothing and melodic as it wafted over my shattered nerves. "She won’t resist, she’s in that swoon where she wants your special kiss."

She? I’d never killed a woman, yet. Too close to home, that. Too similar to Nela, to myself. But now, the word barely penetrated; I simply couldn’t stop what happened, what I did. Ravenous, I felt the slight weight of a mortal laid atop me, Santino positioning the victim so I would have access to her throat. I suddenly had an inkling of how he must have felt all those years ago when Massimo had starved him until he’d been too weak to bite the mortal finally offered. Santino hadn’t starved me, of course, but I was just as unable to sink my fangs into the beautifully fragrant flesh now laying against my dry, cracked lips.

Understanding my difficulty, Santino pulled the victim up, bit into her himself, then opened my mouth with one finger and laid the bleeding wound directly against my teeth.

Well, being drained to the point of nothingness had made me weak, but vampire instinct made up for it. In spades. The moment human blood hit my tongue and the flavor penetrated my aching, dazed mind, reflex took over. My jaws clamped down, my fangs sliced into her throat, and my lips sealed tightly around the wound so that not a drop of her precious blood would be wasted. And then I drew hard, and a river of life poured into me. Small surges at first, and then great floods of healing blood that tasted and felt absolutely divine.

Ah, blood, human blood. What I needed every night. What I hardly ever got. Now I was fulfilled, now all nature was singing within me, a symphony of delight and rapture dancing through my veins. Now, I was complete.

And with the blood came thoughts, wonderful thoughts, the experience of drinking in another’s life that Louis had described. And such a life! It was like nothing I had ever tasted before. Sublime, those thoughts. So much peace, contentment, happiness...

Lazy summers on the Côté d’azur, swimming and sailing and sunning. A mother, a father, smiling faces as she introduced Pierre, her longtime boyfriend now turned fiancé. Time drifting backwards as the memories spun forth earlier days. School, doing her sums. Weekends playing with her dolls until her mother said it was time to help in the garden. Snowflakes falling on her babyish face one Christmas long ago…

The blood so rich and pure with those thoughts. No alcohol, no drugs, not in this body. Just sweet memories of days gone by, and beautiful hopes and dreams for the future. Pierre, a little house in the country they’d considered buying, planning the wedding, talk of children, a boy and two girls, but not right away, those children. No, she has to finish her training first, so she can start a day-care center... children, she loves children…

I loved children too, though Nela would be my one and only.

Ah, beautiful thoughts.

And blood, so very much of it, all I wanted, flowing freely into my body and my soul. Feeling my veins plump with it, the hunger that never quite died finally soothed into near-nothingness, the very air in my lungs seeming to sparkle with satisfaction, for once…

Truly, a swoon such as I’d never, ever had.

Santino’s voice again, coming clearer now, coming like a deep booming gong, the sound pure and confident, "Ah, very good, Nathalia, you’re looking so much better already…" Mmmmm, I thought, it’s this blood, this delicious blood…

The heart slowing now, the blood coming more slowly, but the best of it now, those final drinks which preceded the death, the ones I couldn’t help but savor. And Santino was with me now --maybe I should let him hunt with me, I thought-- because I could drink to the last heartbeat and he would pull me free before her life ended in earnest…

And so he did, his big, strong, gentle hands pushing me back onto the bed as he lifted the victim into his arms and away from me.

Moaning with the sudden deprivation, I licked my lips and writhed slightly on the bed, wanting more.

Santino knew me too well not to sense my need. "I’ll take care of this," he said, his glance flickering toward the dead girl he held. "But shall I bring you another, my love?"

Opening my eyes, that was when I saw her.

Thin, her features lovely, her long hair blonde and free of snarls, she couldn’t have been more than nineteen.

Nineteen, and full of plans for the future, a future that would never be, not now.

It hit me then, what I had done, what Santino had done to me. This girl was no murderer. I’d known that as I’d drunk, of course, but somehow it hadn’t penetrated through my swoon that I should stop, that I should let her live.

And now it was too late. There’d be no fancy wedding, no children with Pierre, no more summers on the Riviera. There’d only be tears coming from that mother and father I’d seen, from Pierre, and from me.

Tears I didn't want Santino to see. Old habits die hard.

Rolling on my side, away from Santino, I bit my own knuckles until they bled, and didn't answer him. Did I want another? God help me, I didn't want her, didn't want her blood inside me! Infecting me, that stolen blood, making me wish I could rid myself of it. Of course I could; all I'd have to do would be cut myself nice and deep. I healed fast, but not so fast as did Santino. Or barring that, a simple drop of water on my tongue would make me violently eject her blood.

But what good would that do? Santino would just bring me someone else to fill me up again.

All pretense at pride vanishing, I gulped in a huge rush of air, then, and began shuddering with the force of sobs too long repressed. Blood poured out my eyes as I wept.

"What's wrong?" he asked, coming to sit beside me as he held the dead girl. What's wrong! This is! I am! You are! The whole rotten mess of my life, that's what was wrong! I'd never, ever thought I'd have to kill an innocent. So much for my illusions. Or my delusions, maybe. Had I really believed that I could go through eternity as evil personified and never commit the ultimate depravity?

The pillow was streaked with blood and well on its way to being drenched.

"Nathalia, you're being silly," Santino gently remonstrated. "Wasting blood is never wise. I'll have to help you feed again tonight if you keep this up."

Well, if anything was guaranteed to make me get a hold of myself, that was it. There was no way, no fucking way, I was going to kill yet another human tonight.

"All better?" Santino asked, when my moaning sobs trickled to a halt. "Right, then I’ll be back as fast as I can," he announced, bending down to kiss my cheek. I shuddered as the dead girl’s body came closer to me. No vampire likes to long remain in the presence of a recent kill, but that wasn’t the only reason why I recoiled. She’d been an innocent; I could hardly stand the thought. "Why don’t you run yourself a nice bath while I’m gone, my dear?" Santino suggested. "You must not have had a chance to bathe tonight."

Subtle, he wasn’t, but at least the issue of my unkempt state gave me a brief respite from depressing thoughts about how low I’d just sunken, to have drained an sweet young girl in the prime of life. Before I could reply --not that I was going to, mind you; I had but nothing to say to him-- Santino was walking out to the terrace with the life I’d ended, and taking to the air.

I wondered what he’d do with her body. Dump her in the Seine, or in some rubbish bin? Perhaps just set her down in a filthy alleyway? I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t stop, probably because I deserved the punishment of pondering the harsh reality I was a part of.

Santino got back before I’d so much as moved toward that bath he’d suggested. Sitting beside me on the bed, he feathered his fingertips along my straggly hair and asked quite softly, "Do you need another, after all? You don’t look hungry, not really, but you don’t look quite well, either, Nathalia."

The plan was not to talk to him, but that plan didn't last long. Anger rousing me from my depression, I jerked to sit up straight and batted his hand away. "Why would I look well, after what you’ve just done to me, my lord? Or do you want it in the old style: my most gracious, loving lord?"

Santino sighed. "Don’t talk that way. We’re past all that. I’m your husband these days, not your dark captor."

"Oh," I drawled sarcastically, "and you don’t feel you’ve played the Coven Master, tonight? Acting with malice aforethought to teach me my place and keep me there?"

His fists clenched. "Like it or not, Nathalia, you are my fledgling. I have to do what’s right for you. Trust me, seeing your parents is a recipe for disaster---"

"And you’re a walking cliché," I snarled, unable to believe he was quite so dense. I wasn't talking about seeing England or not! His opposition to that I could understand, although I didn't agree with it. But feeding me a nice young girl whose gravest sin had been to cheat on a test? How dare he make me kill a human who deserved to live life to the fullest! Santino knew full well how I felt! Apparently, my feelings didn't mean a thing to him!

Standing, I put some distance between us. It was either that, or claw him --and after earlier, I didn't have many good nails left!

"What did you think, Santino, that if you made me kill an innocent I’d get over my attachment to mortal life? That I’d forget my wish to see my father before he dies? That you’d get your damned way, just like that? Is that why you did it? Is it? Tell me!"

"Don't talk nonsense," he directed, sounding offended. That was rich; him, offended? Yeah, right!

He stood too, and came to tower over me. "In the first place, I didn’t make you kill an innocent--"

"Oh," I sneered, interrupting, "I suppose it’s my fault she’s dead; after all, you didn’t sink my fangs for me, did you? I suppose you think I could have refused her, no matter that I never know anything about a victim’s past until after I start drinking!"

"Of course it’s not your doing," Santino retorted, impatient now. I turned away; I didn’t care what he had to say, but he laid a hand on my shoulder and forcibly turned me back to face him. "It’s my responsibility. I chose her and put her to your throat. But you didn’t kill an innocent, that’s the point! No one is an innocent, and the sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll start to thrive in the nights instead of just survive them."

"Nice speech," I scorned. "I suppose in the middle ages, there might have been but one punishment for any infraction, no matter how trivial, that being death, of course--"

"You might want to actually study some history before you set yourself up as an expert on it," Santino put it, but I ignored him.

"In case you've never yet noticed, Santino, this is a more enlightened age! She wasn't perfect, but she damned well was innocent! You made me feed from honest blood!" Furious, I crossed my arms, glared for all I was worth, and shrieked, "I trusted you, damn it! Trusted you enough to take that girl on faith, and she turns out to be Mary Poppins' protegée! And now she's dead, and I have to live knowing I'm well an truly beyond redemption, now! Thanks a whole fucking lot!"

Santino shook his head. "You needed a clean kill for once," he argued. "All those murderers were making you despondent, do you think I didn’t know that?"

A bitter laugh crashed against my teeth. All those murderers, eh? He didn’t know how rarely I actually killed, and I was in no mood to enlighten him. "Look, you don’t know shit, all right?"

Santino shook his head. "Such language, Nathalia! It’s been a long time since I heard you speak that way! Since before Nela, actually."

"Don’t you throw Nela in my face," I raged. "She isn’t here to listen, so I’ll speak however I damn well please! And I’m telling you now, I can’t believe you did that to me! What the hell gives you the right to drain me like that, let alone decide to feed me a nice young girl? Damn it, now I know how Daniel felt when Armand made him kill a teenager!"

"I’ll tell you what gives me the right," Santino came back, his fangs bared as mine were. "I’m your maker, that’s what! I’m responsible for you! I’m not going to do nothing while your hunting practices cause you almost as much harm as good! I’m going to correct the problem, don’t think I won’t. And as for Armand, he did Daniel a favor, making it clear from the start that no human is off-limits to the thirst!"

"Oh, so fledgling is rather like slave in your books, is that it?" I challenged.

"No," he answered, his tone one he might use to a silly child, "it’s more like student. You’ve things to learn, that’s all. It’s up to me to see to it that you learn them."

The instant his grip on my shoulder slackened, I ripped free. "And tonight’s lesson was?" I sneered.

"That no one’s heart is pure, that all may feed your thirst. Besides, I thought it would help you to drink in some thoughts that were less dire than your steady diet of murderers."

"Well, you thought wrong," I announced, "and not for the first time, by the way. I’ll take care of my own meals in future, thank you! Or will I, Santino? Do you have any plans to drain me again, to make me so helpless that I’ll have to choke down whatever fare you decide to offer up?"

"I don’t know," he smoothly answered, but his black eyes were glittering with irritation. "Do you have any more plans to throw fits in public? Because if you make it necessary to shut you up, Nathalia, that’s what I’ll do, mark my words!"

"Oh, so it’s to be threats and intimidation, is it?" I threw back.

"No, it’s to be cause and effect," he retorted, beginning to pace. "Or is that a concept you’ve yet to acquire? You endanger us among mortals, I will react. And if draining you is the only way to make you stop, you’ll have only yourself to blame!"

"Things went wrong in the station," I admitted, trying my best to modulate my voice to a calmer tone. Really, yelling at him wasn't going to get me anywhere. I should know; I'd tried it on Rarotonga. He'd said I could burn down his house to release my anger, but he hadn't offered to do anything that would really heal the anger, had he? Sometimes, though --quite often, in point of fact-- he responded well to rational argument.

"I didn’t mean to endanger us," I admitted, trying to call him Santo, but I couldn't quite make that come out sounding natural, not now. "All I wanted was for you to step aside and let me finish my journey. Is that so much to ask?"

"Yes," he answered, although no longer in angry tones. "A visit home is ill-advised, Nathalia. I’m sorry, but I can’t allow one."

"So I’m never to see England again?" I gasped, pushing my hair away from my face. Oh, it felt just awful, that hair. Still thick with something despite my swim in the Seine, it itched.

"Not for a long while," he arrogantly announced, and I heard what he meant but didn’t say. Not until your parents are dead and gone will you once more set foot on English soil. "And just to make sure you don’t go sneaking off again--"

"I didn’t sneak off, you swine!" I erupted. So much for rational argument; now I did want to burn something. Him, mostly. "I very considerately left you a note, a courtesy I’ve since concluded that you don’t merit!"

Santino curled a contemptuous lip. "It doesn’t matter, Nathalia. I can’t let you visit your parents; it’s too dangerous. Now, I don’t particularly want to lock you up again--"

"Gee, thanks," I inserted, sarcastic because my only other choice was to quail in fear before him. It was the look in his eyes… it scared me, it really did. The Coven Master. The one who could submerge all emotions beneath a remorseless determination that rules and laws --his-- were what mattered, not the individual needs of a particular fledgling. Besides, why wouldn’t Santino frighten me? He had imprisoned me before, and if I pushed him too far, he was capable of doing it again, love or no love.

I'd be just plain stupid if I ever forgot the ruthless streak in his medieval soul.

Santino, however, had another idea. "I don’t want to lock you up," he repeated, ignoring my interruption, "so I’ve decided that I’ll just have to stick to you like glue until you stop obsessing over your parents."

"Modern idiom doesn’t suit this Dark-Ages-I-own-you attitude," I sniped, defensive, but immediately after saying so, the meaning in his little lecture penetrated, and my heart sank.

I raised haunted eyes to his black, merciless ones. "What do you plan to do?"

Shrugging, he explained, "Not let you out of my sight, that’s all. That’s not so terrible, is it? Better than the alternative."

I didn’t need to hear him detail that alternative; I knew what he meant. Still, as far as I was concerned, what he proposed was terrible. Oh God, oh no, I thought, horrified. If he insists on tagging along while I hunt, I’ll have to kill every night or have him do it for me until he believes I’ve *learned* the lessons he deems necessary!

Maybe I was overreacting, though. Maybe he didn’t mean to inflict his presence on me during meals. Yeah, right. And *maybe* he didn’t just make you kill your first innocent! *Maybe* he didn't just drain you like a sink so you'd have no choice but to kill her!

Depressed, I was really depressed, because I didn’t know how to cope with this I’m-your-maker-so-I-know-best attitude he seemed to have suddenly developed. Where had it even come from? For most of the past year, he’d gone along with whatever I had wanted.

Oh, no he hasn’t, my conscience kicked in. He hasn’t approved of your feeding from animals; he just doesn’t know.

And neither was he going to, I was determined on that. "I have to continue hunting alone, Santino."

"No," he refused, his lips firming at the rebellious look on my face. At the same time, however, his hard eyes softened to a liquid black, genuine concern tingeing the thrum of his voice. "We’ll feed together, Nathalia. It’ll be better that way, you’ll see. You’ll get over your fixation that it's wrong, for one. And you’ll have more time with Nela. Won’t that be nice?"

Oh God, it would be wonderful, but it would come at a price. Too high a price. "I can’t, I can’t hunt with you," I insisted, wringing my hands together almost as though in supplication.

"You have to," he returned, implacable. "It’s that or go hungry, and if you pull a stunt like starving yourself, I'll put a quick end to it; I know how. And I'll know if you so much as try it, because I’m going to be with you every instant of the night."

He could do it, too, I knew he could. He woke earlier than me, so there was no way I could slip out before he rose each evening. And he was stronger, faster, and damn him, smarter. If he was determined to fasten himself to me like a leech --good image, considering what he’d done to me this very night-- there was nothing I could do to get rid of him, was there?

I guess it was frustration that made me do what I did next.

"I thought you were done acting the despot!" I objected, and then my temper got the better of me. Before I knew it, I was stomping up to him and slapping his face as hard as I could.

All I accomplished was to bruise the palm of my hand. Somehow I thought that my hitting him would have more impact --on him, I mean-- now that I was a vampire, but it was just as useless a strategy as when I’d been human. I was outmatched, and I knew it. He could rule my every breath if he chose, and from the look of things, he was determined to do just that.

At least he didn’t hit me back, but that was scant solace when what he did was to look at me sadly, and say, "I can’t have you haring off to the Lake District, Nathalia, it’s as simple as that." Then he sighed, and stroked a hand over my matted hair. "Why don’t you have that bath, now? You’ll feel better."

"I’ll feel better if you’ll relent and let me hunt the way I prefer! Do my wishes, my needs mean nothing at all to you?"

"You don’t wish, or need, to kill again tonight, do you?" Santino asked.

"No!"

"Then let’s not discuss it now; there’s no point," he concluded. "Just go get cleaned up, and then I’ll show you Paris. That sounds fun, doesn’t it?"

"Are you going to follow me into the bathroom, too?" I sneered, fed up with him and his I-know-everything attitude. It wasn’t enough that he’d made me kill an innocent, was it? Now he was going to make me kill legions more, unless I figured out a way to stop him.

"I take it you’d prefer not," Santino dryly observed, but I wasn’t in the mood for his sardonic humor.

"I’d prefer," I emphasized, "to skip the sightseeing trip as well! I’ve no desire whatsoever to see Paris with the likes of you!"

A heavy sigh, that was the answer I got. That and the prosaic, "Too bad, because I’m in no mood to stay here and argue with you, Nathalia. I’m going out, and you’re coming with me. Now go get cleaned up unless you want to do the town as you are!"

"I thought you said we were going home!" I erupted. "Forget Paris, I miss Nela!"

Santino shook his head in reply. "You miss Nela so much that you don’t see her several nights running even when you’re both at the villa. I’ve decided that we need some time to ourselves, you and I. Time to get back onto a stable footing."

Time to straighten you out, that was what he meant, and it was the last thing I really needed.

I turned my back on him and went to take that bath. Apparently he was going to drag me all over Paris whether I liked it or not. Now that was a familiar feeling, Santino deciding things for me, controlling my every move… but it was a feeling I thought I’d left behind.

I should have known better, should have known he hadn’t really changed. Not deep inside, not where it counted.

Normally I’d love to see Paris, and see it with him, but after all he’d said and done tonight, the last thing I wanted was to let him play tour guide.

Not when it was just that -- play. This Santino had attacked me, made me feast from an innocent, and was intent on denying me any chance to hunt alone in future or ever see my parents alive again. This Santino was a far cry from friendly tour guide, or even husband.

No, other words described him. Words I didn’t like. Words I'd never liked.

Maker.

Captor.

Coven Master.

I slammed the bathroom door so hard the walls shook.

Chapter 5: Spanish Dreams
________________________________



---Santino---

The previous evening had been awful, just awful. My wife just couldn't seem to get over the fact that I'd drained her --as if I'd had much of a choice-- and had then provided her that girl to feed from. Innocent blood, Nathalia insisted on calling her.

The meal, however much my wife wished to complain, had in fact consisted of no such thing. There quite simply was no such thing. Try telling that to Nathalia, though. She'd ranted and railed and had pretty much thrown a fit right there in our hotel suite, topping it off with slapping me across the face.

Thank God I wasn't tempted to slap her back, or I might have actually done it. Her attitude really irked me, you see. So the girl I'd brought her hadn't been the most depraved mortal in all Christendom. So what? She was fated to die sooner or later, anyway! For all we knew, she'd have died that same night. She could have been hit by a car, or met any number of other ends.

We vampires weren't responsible for adding to the death-count in the world. We just altered the timeline a little bit. Now, if Nathalia could only come to understand that, she'd be able to take the killing in stride.

For now, though, all I could do was urge her to go take a shower. I doubted her mood would improve as long as she remained coated in filth. Of course, I doubted it would improve afterwards, so maybe telling her to get clean had just been my way of getting a little respite from her unrelenting hostility.

When Nathalia finally deigned to take that shower, it lasted an inordinately long time. At first I just lay on the bed and tried to relax as I waited. But I couldn't calm down much, not when I knew just how angry Nathalia was. Worse, I knew her stubborn temperament. The last time she'd been so furious, it had taken a bout of amnesia to soften her wrath. And even then, her anger had returned along with her memories.

It had taken me a while to see it, but the truth was staring me in the face. Her resentment of what I'd done to her in the past was something that had never really gone away. It had just been tamped down. Muted. Repressed, while she dealt with far more immediate problems, such as how to cope with her new life as a blood-drinker.

But all the while, her fury had been just itching for a chance to erupt. And now, of course, it was out in full force.

When I finally grew tired of just listening to the sound of her washing her hair over and over, I flipped on the television, but there was nothing interesting on. Big surprise, it was past three in the morning by then. I'd told Nathalia we were going out, and we were, she needed some fresh air; but we didn't actually have that long before she would need to find her rest.

At least this dawn would see her sleeping in a comfortable bed instead of an earthen grave. With her attitude, though, she was likely to prefer a hole in the ground to a spot beside me.

Wrong attitude, Santino. Think positive.

Well, I tried, but Nathalia did make it difficult.

After she at last finished her shower, she was back to her usual appearance: one of loveliness so haunting that my fangs ached just to look at her. Something told me that looking was all I'd be doing, that night. Could it be the stiff set to her shoulders, or the way she stomped instead of walked when I insisted we take a little stroll?

More likely, it was the silent treatment she'd decided to dole out.

That's right, silent treatment. Not a single word did she say as we ambled along the narrow, winding streets around the hotel. Normally, Nathalia could never stop yelling when she was angry, so her silence gave me a measure of just how disturbed she was feeling.

She didn't even glance up; she kept her gaze trained straight down at her own boots, which looked the worse for her sojourn in the earth.

That reminded me of something which should have been obvious before, but I'd had more important matters on my mind: she hadn't packed for her trip, hadn't taken a thing with her except money and the papers she would need.

Well, we were going to be in Paris at least another few nights, and I wanted her to enjoy them, so without a word I steered her towards the shopping district at Montmartre and surreptitiously arranged for us to enter a likely looking establishment. Well-made and fitted clothes that were as modest as they were fashionable, that was Nathalia's style.

She shook her head, and I knew why. She never had approved of the way I would go into stores after hours and simply take what I wanted. She called it shoplifting, a modern idiom I found mildly baffling, and she didn't seem to realize that stealing was when you didn't pay, not when you left money in excess behind, as I did.

Besides, it was a great deal of trouble to deal with the shops when they were open. All that mesmerizing so people who saw us up close wouldn't look twice... well, I guess it really wasn't all that much trouble, come to think of it, but I preferred to do without the bother when I could. It went right along with dealing as little as possible with mortals. Smarter, all around, I thought it.

I knew what Nathalia thought of my shopping habits, but I also knew that she needed clothes, so I told her to pick some out.

Stubborn. Why did the woman I loved have to be so all-fired stubborn? She wouldn't do as I asked; she just crossed her arms in a huff and leaned against a marble pillar.

Okay, fine. If she wanted to be a brat, I could pick her clothes for her. A wine-red silk dress that fell gracefully from straps so thin they looked downright precarious... but on her, the effect would be stunning, baring her neck and shoulders... Ah, Nathalia.

I picked some other things, including shoes and some of that fabulous lingerie that the women of this century indulged in. And that made her really glare, but I just shrugged and invited her to make her own selections instead. No? You guessed it, still stubborn.

So I did it for her.

The last thing I snatched off a shelf was a neatly folded nightgown made of black satin so smooth it flowed like water through my fingers. Perfect for Nathalia. Black to match her hair...

Black to match her mood.

Well, like I said, I knew I wasn't going to be getting any that night. Probably, not anytime soon. Not that I had been getting much of anything lately, anyway. Most of the time when I started making love to Nathalia, she shoved me away and made up pathetic excuses to keep her distance.

That hurt me, it really did. If she wanted to keep her distance in bed, all she had to do was say so; she didn't have to lie to my face. I told her that, too, and for a while afterwards, she did just simply say, Not tonight, Santino, I don't care to... But all too soon, she went back to lying.

It was like she had a guilty conscience, really, almost like she was doing something wrong, and she knew it, and she wanted to be caught. By me. But that didn't make any sense. I knew she felt bad about hunting humans, but she knew that I would find nothing to condemn in such a practice.

Of course, Nathalia had never been easy to figure out. Never once. Perhaps that was part of her charm. I don't know. I only know that the prospect of seeing her in a small scrap of black satin was welcome even if she wasn't in the mood to let me have a taste of her special essence.

By the time we got back to the hotel, she was drooping with exhaustion, and went to lie fully clothed on the bed. I wasn't actually sure if it was obstinacy or the onset of the death-sleep making her eschew the nightgown I'd bought --and yes, I did pay for everything-- but I didn't much care.

She wasn't sleeping in her clothes, not as long as I was around to take care of her. And most especially she wasn't wearing such rank clothes again. I undressed her, ignoring her mumbled protests, and slid the nightgown over her head, then tumbled her into bed and adjusted the blinds, the sheers, and the drapes so that not a single ray of sunlight would disturb her rest.

I knew from experience that I had slightly under two hours left until the dawning sun would force me into that bed beside her. The first thing I did was take her clothes into the bathroom, turn on all the lights, and give them a close examination. I couldn't quite figure out what she had done to herself the day before, but something caustic had eaten away at the fibers of her jeans and had almost worn holes in her long-sleeved cotton plain shirt.

I didn't know where she had rested, but it hadn't been a particularly wise choice, that much was clear. I sighed, because I knew I would have to talk to her about it, and I could see already how much she would appreciate my well-founded counsel.

Interference, that's what my Nathalia would call it.

Doubtless she wouldn't think much of my destroying her clothes, either, but that's what I did. Ripping them to shreds with my sharp fingernails, I took them into the hall and sent them down a garbage chute. She didn't need them, and I didn't want her placing unhealthy chemicals next to her skin.

And I know, I know, she was a vampire, so the poisons couldn't harm her! Yes, of course I knew that, but I still didn't like the idea of her sleeping amidst the peculiar filth of modern industrial society, or wearing it any longer than was necessary.

Returning to the suite, I sat next to her and gently stroked my hand across her brow. She was moaning slightly in her sleep, which didn't often happen. As far as I could tell, Nathalia wasn't plagued by dreams as were many of our kind. Now, however, she seemed to be living some dark fantasy. Her words were barely audible, but I could make them out.

Spanish words, at that. A language she of course spoke fluently, as she had been very close to the Castilian grandmother who had come to England to help raise a wayward daughter's illegitimate girl-child. For all that, though, I'd rarely heard Nathalia utter a word of Spanish. She was probably scared to; Nela's natural father had been a Spaniard she'd taken for a lover after she'd escaped me.

Nathalia probably thought that if she spoke Spanish to me or around me, I'd be reminded of the fact that she'd loved someone else before me. Hell, more than me. And she was probably right, because now that Spanish words were crossing her lips, I was reminded of all that.

At one time I'd thought her treacherous and unfaithful; I'd regarded it as the ultimate betrayal that she'd dared let a human man touch her when she knew she was mine. In my obsession, I'd gone so far as to kill her lover. Right in front of her I'd done it, although her being present had been happenstance, not any part of a plan.

The truth was that I hadn't had a plan. Emotion I didn't understand and couldn't control had taken hold of me; it had been building up for months while I searched her out. And when I read the Spaniard's mind and saw Nathalia making love to him --at that point she'd never willingly accepted my touch, let alone my special kiss-- all that emotion had just flared into an almighty explosion.

I hadn't just killed the Spaniard; I'd taunted and tortured him and enjoyed his pain. I would have feasted on his fear, too, but he hadn't had much of that. A determination to protect Nathalia from me had been his primary sentiment as I gashed him again and again, taking one drink after another until he weakened past all healing. Even when I'd ripped out his heart and drunk straight from it, he'd been grieving not for himself but for the woman he loved, the woman he knew would soon fall under my power once more.

Truly, he was worthy of her love in a way I simply wasn't. For what had I ever done but taken while he had given?

Afterwards --much afterwards, I mean-- I was sorry about the whole incident. Oh, not so much that I killed him; he was just a mortal, after all, and I had been hungry; but I did regret that I'd been so cruel and callous in during the kill. For how could Nathalia ever forget what she'd seen, or forgive me for it?

Amnesia made her forget, of course. But that was long past, and I was starting to think that she indeed hadn't forgiven me, no matter what she'd once said to the contrary.

What else could I think? This night, we'd had our first real fight since I'd made her, and now she was dreaming in Spanish, dreaming of the young girl she'd once been... a girl who had been adopted, who had never had a chance to know her real father.

"¿Abuelita?" I heard her ask, "no sabes nada de mi verdadero papá, ¿de veras? ¿Mi mamá nunca te dijo ni una palabra antes de que muriera?"

They flayed me, those questions.

Grandma, don't you know anything of my true father? Didn't my mother ever say a single word to you before she died?

Because, you see, I didn't really believe that Nathalia was asking those questions for herself. She'd never evinced any discomfort with not knowing her birth parents; she loved her adoptive father to distraction, as her recent obsession with England proved.

No, Nathalia wasn't asking those questions for herself.

She was asking them for Nela.

Nela, who would never have a chance to get to know, or even meet, her mortal father.

Because I'd killed him.

As sunrise came closer, I slid between the sheets and gathered Nathalia close to me, but the feel of her soft, cool body against mine didn't help my frame of mind.

In the ways that mattered, she was farther from me than ever.



---Santino---

The next night, I was determined to change that, but Nathalia was still intent on subjecting me to the silent treatment. Somehow the tactic seemed peculiarly human to me, perhaps because vampires could normally circumvent it with a little skillful mind-reading.

That wasn't an option a maker had with a fledgling, of course.

And although I was well used to not reading her mind, what with the tight shields she learned to raise as a mortal, neither was I used to silence like this. The Nathalia I knew and loved made it a habit --an obnoxious one at times, I will admit-- to speak her mind.

So the silent treatment grated on my nerves, it really did. She hadn't said a word that evening as she'd risen and pulled on the clothes I'd laid out: the wine-red dress along with a black lace shawl that was more a tease than a cover as it lay against her milky shoulders. She hadn't even objected --not verbally, anyway-- when I took her out to feed. I had a strong suspicion that she'd prefer to starve rather than take another so soon after her encounter with innocent blood, but that I couldn't allow.

Young vampires needed to hunt every night without fail.

And so did weak vampires.

And ones that had been forcibly drained the night before.

My Nathalia, of course, was all three rolled into one, and really, she didn't look so great when she rose that evening. Gaunt, the color in her eyes fading as her hunger mounted... needless to say, I'd be extremely remiss in my duties as a maker if I let her skip a meal she obviously needed!

"Him," I said, pointing to a cagey-looking man in his twenties who was leaning against a lamppost, his eyes narrowed as he waited for the prostitutes he ruled to return with fistfuls of francs for him. No way could Nathalia call this one innocent blood. He was as vile as they came, and his particular prey was women. Nathalia, I'd gleaned long before, liked that. Any man who was cruel to females --or to children, for that matter-- gave her the least guilt, as far as I could tell.

I hadn't really given that much thought, before. Now I did, and I didn't much like the conclusion I drew. It seemed pretty obvious that Nathalia was sublimating her anger at males into the act of hunting and killing. Now, what males did she have reason to be furious with? I only knew of one -- me.

Depressing, that realization. If the kill was a substitute for what she'd like to do to me, she was a long, long way from true forgiveness. And from love.

You know, even when I'd been holding his heart high above my head and squeezing the last drop of blood from it, I knew I shouldn't have killed that Spaniard! I'd known then that it would stand between us. But then, I simply hadn't cared. I couldn't care; I couldn't even admit that I wanted to own Nathalia because I already loved her. Caring was weakness, that was what I thought.

Well, it wasn't weakness, I knew that now.

It was utter agony, though, to care about her so much and watch her struggle over something so routine --and so necessary-- as eating.

"Him," I said again, because she'd yet to make a move toward the pimp I'd chosen for her.

She stared back at me, resolute. Silent. And as we stood there in the deep shadows of an alley, understanding finally dawned. Always before, she'd drunk without question when I had selected a kill for her. Of course, those times I'd tranced them first to make it easy; I shouldn't have to do that now, as she'd been hunting alone for months, now. But the salient point was that when I'd chosen a victim in the past, she had trusted me. She had believed I would only bring her murderers.

Now, she clearly believed the exact opposite.

Innocent blood... the words hung between us, dividing us more surely than the veil of silence.

She didn't care how hungry she got, she wasn't going to take one step toward that man until she believed he wouldn't haunt her like last night's repast had.

Terrible, to think she'd missed the point last night, and missed it so entirely that now she was willing to forego a meal!

"Nathalia," I said, "he's human. He's mortal, and you're not. Take him," I urged. "End your hunger, savor his hot blood filling you, warming you---"

I could see that my words were reaching deeply into her soul. Her blue eyes flared with thirst, and she swallowed, her throat muscles distending. She emanated yearning and thirst so strongly that I could practically feel it.

Good, I thought. Very good.

You see, I didn't want to catalogue his sins for her in order to convince her to drink. I wanted her to learn that she could have whomever she wanted whether they were criminals or not! I wanted to free her from the morbid fixation on murderers that she'd developed. When I'd started her drinking from subhuman scum like that, I'd only thought it would be a way to ease her into her new life. I'd never intended for her to make it her life's vocation to feast exclusively on the worst humanity had to offer.

She was close to succumbing now; I could see it on her face. And when she drank, she'd learn two things. One, that she didn't need to ascertain a mortal's crimes in advance of the kill, and two, that she could trust me. For of course this one had killed, and killed women.

Daniel might have called me the world's biggest moron --and he might have been right, at that-- but I wasn't completely without brains. There was no way I'd go feeding Nathalia innocent blood any time soon. Not until she matured a bit, I had to think.

"Mmmm," I encouraged her, leaning close to speak against her ear. "His mind's on other things, he'll never even know what's happening until it's too late. Think of his blood inside you, Nathalia. So rich and thick, there's nothing like human blood, you know you need it--"

I knew the exact instant when her control snapped, because a feral growl suddenly scaled her throat, her fangs becoming prominent as she opened her mouth wide and pulled her lips back from her gums.

All at once, she looked like an animal, but that was good. Hunting and killing were best done by instinct. Vampire instinct, and it was high time she developed some.

She lunged forward, moving with the urgency of a snake striking.

And for one glorious instant, I thought, Ah, such a killer she shall be...

One instant only, and then I saw what she was lunging for.

Dear God.

She'd jumped away from me and toward the mortal, but before she'd gone two steps, she'd latched onto something utterly inhuman, and was drinking from it.

Her own wrist.

Her own wrist, that was the fount of her sustenance, and she had ripped it wide open with her fangs and shoved it deep inside her mouth. She was sucking on it, drawing blood with such maniacal force that it was audible, but that wasn't the only sound to break the Paris night. A muffled scream of pain mixed in equal measure with a moan of pleasure... that was the noise that caught my attention.

She was caught in a grotesque parody of the circle of blood. Feeding from herself, feeding on herself.

It took me just a moment to react, but in that moment she managed to transfer perhaps half her blood volume out of her body and then back in again, and all the while, her horrible moan of agony blending into ecstasy echoed in the night air.

Lunging forward myself, I ripped her hand free from her lips and forcibly held it away from her. "No!" I sternly told her. In retrospect, I'm sure I sounded rather as if I were rebuking a defiant dog, but I couldn't help that.

Desperate for blood, she growled again, and thrashed to get her wrist back up to her fangs.

"No, Nathalia!" I shouted, more emphatic, for she wasn't yet rational. "Stop it! You mustn't ever do that!" And I shook her until the bloodlust in her eyes faded slightly, until I thought she was able to hear me speaking. "You mustn't ever do that to yourself," I said again, more calmly.

I guess she forgot that she wasn't supposed to be on speaking terms with me, for she responded, her voice rough with hunger, "Why not? Louis did. I read it in his book. Or Daniel's book, I mean."

I shook my head and unsmiling, told her, "Louis misled Daniel about a lot of things, Nathalia. Now, maybe he did do that --once-- but he certainly didn't make a practice of it. Too much of that, and you won't be able to rise from your coffin, or bed, as the case may be. You need human blood, it's as simple as that. You can't feed long from yourself, or from another vampire, for that matter."

She twisted her lips, stained with her own blood, into a grimace. "Just as well you're not offering, Santino, as I've no inclination to be with you, not in that way or any other!"

I'll say one thing for my Nathalia -- she did know how to hit below the belt.

"I've no interest in you feeding from me either," I snarled back. "That's not what making love is about. It's not even all that good unless both parties are well-fed in advance, so don't think I enjoyed draining you last night, because I didn't! Your blood was in awful shape, and I know why!"

Now, it hadn't been my intention to hurt her when I said that. Really, I would have thought, given how much she’d complained about my attack, she would much prefer that I hadn’t gotten any pleasure from it. For some reason, though, when I told her that her blood had been in poor condition, she started shaking.

"You… you didn’t like it?" she gulped.

"No!" I shot back. "It was thin and weak and tasted distinctly like you’d been starving yourself. And that ends now, Nathalia. Tonight."

She drew in a breath that I could only think relieved. Now that puzzled me, but I had more important matters to bother with. Like getting her fed.

I pointed again at the pimp. He’d heard the commotion in the alley and had moved about a block further away, but vampire eyes could still make out his every move. "All right, enough nonsense," I announced. "Take him, Nathalia!"

"Not until you tell me what he’s done to deserve it," she stubbornly insisted, crossing her arms in resolution. She quite obviously suspected that I was trying to feed her another one of those whom she would term innocent even though they patently weren’t.

I wasn’t about to catalogue his crimes for her, not when what she needed to learn was that those things didn’t really matter. Truly, she had to begin to understand that her very nature was to kill, not to torment herself over who and how and why.

I was about to tell her to get on with it or I’d do it for her --and I would have, make no mistake-- but just then fate intervened in the form of a young prostitute who emerged from across the street and went to the pimp to turn over her earnings.

Nathalia’s eyes narrowed to thoughtful stormy slits. She couldn’t read minds, but all at once the context was clear to her. She knew that the man preyed on women.

The girl could not possibly have been older than sixteen, and she was obviously addicted to some sort of drug, for she weaved as she walked. None of that meant anything to her pimp. He snatched the fistful of francs she offered, hurriedly counted it, and with an roar of displeasure hit her straight across the face.

That was enough for Nathalia, apparently. I guess abuse of women was as bad as murder, in her books.

Which boded ill for me, all things considered.

In any case, the moment the pimp’s clenched fist connected with the young prostitute’s jaw, Nathalia was lunging again. Thank God, this time it wasn’t her own wrist that called forth her hunger.

Running down the street with preternatural speed, Nathalia shoved the young girl away to safety and leapt at the abusive man, her jaws yawning widely as she flew at him. My eyes widened at the ferocity of her attack, for she threw herself against him, latched onto his body with both arms and legs, and sank her fangs so fiercely that she all but ripped out his throat.

He screamed, and tried to buck her off, but she held fast. The image was almost ludicrous; she was riding him as if he were an arena bull and she a cowgirl.

No finesse at all, that was what I thought, but that was fine. I’d never seen her hunt, not really. I’d seen her take plenty of victims that I’d tranced for her, but that was different. This was a true attack, and I was just as glad that she wasn’t gingerly or hesitant about it. A healthy kill, that’s what I was seeing.

Finally.

The young prostitute had long since run away before Nathalia finished drinking. It surprised me a bit that she didn’t consume the man far more quickly, but perhaps she was savoring him? I certainly approved of that.

His heartbeat was slowing at last, and I was prepared to pull Nathalia away from the death, but I should have known it wouldn’t be necessary; she’d been hunting on her own for long enough that she’d learned how to judge such things. How to stay aware of them despite the swoon. She stepped back, dropping the near-corpse just as those final thuds were pulsing through him.

Reeling with the special pleasure of human blood, a pleasure that only a vampire can truly appreciate, she nonetheless retained enough presence of mind to heal the wound she’d made. Distaste twisting her features, she shoved the body into an alley and tossed some trash atop it.

Then she was stomping back to me, her beauty in full flower now that her hunger was sated and satisfied.

"At least he wasn’t innocent blood," she scathed as she strode straight past me and on down the street.

Shrugging, I whirled on my heel and followed her. She wound down several blind alleys and streets, practically walking in circles, but that was no great shock; she didn’t know Paris.

But I did, so after a few moments of this, I took her hand and steered her back toward the heart of the city.

"You might consider pulling your victim into an alley before you attack in earnest," I lightly suggested as we walked. "Less chance of discovery, that way." That was particularly important for her, since when she was alone she couldn’t simply trance anyone who happened to spot her feeding.

"You might consider minding your own damned business," she snarled back. Obviously, a nice meal hadn’t put her in any better frame of mind. But then again, when had it?

Sighing, I said nothing more until we reached great plaza that graced the base of the Eiffel Tower. Then I turned to talk to her, but you know, I didn't really have the faintest idea of what to say.

Because, you see, I couldn't read her thoughts, but I could read her face. And what she was thinking was clear as glass.

She hated me, and unless I let her go to England as she wished, she was going to keep hating me.

Forever.
Chapter 6: Another Pit
________________________________



---Santino---

Nathalia had been furious that I'd made her feed, even though this time I'd chosen a victim from the criminal types she preferred. We walked in silence --not a companionable one, by the way-- until we reached the Eiffel Tower. Hoping that she had finally calmed down, or that at least the ambiance would improve her mood, I ignored the hatred spilling from her eyes and made every effort to get us back onto an even footing. Smiling at her, I remarked, "Well, you’re certainly looking more like yourself at last, my beauty," I told her. It was true, too. I’d gotten used to seeing her underfed; it was a nice change, and a welcome one, to be able to view her as she was meant to be.

Healthy and full.

I soon concluded that the silent treatment might be preferable to the invective she elected to spew forth in reply to my sincere admiration.

"And that's another thing," she erupted, hands on hips as she glared stormy blue daggers at me. "I'm not your beauty, I'm not your Nathalia, I'm not one of your thralls in the catacombs under Rome. I'm my own person and I'll thank you to remember it in future!"

I must admit, I didn't have the faintest idea what she was talking about. Of course I knew she was her own person! That didn't mean I should abrogate all responsibility and let her --practically a newborn vampire, she was-- run wild in the night. You know, though, I didn't think a discussion about England, or one about fledglings in general, was going to do us much good at this point. Maybe later, when she wasn't still seething that I'd drained her and then fed her a wholesome meal.

Yes, later, I promised myself, we'd have a nice talk about everything. Later, when she might listen. Of course I had no idea when that might be. For now I just wanted to lessen the tension between us, tension which had been steadily building ever since I'd caught hold of her at the gare.

"Would you like to go to the top?" I asked, gesturing at the Tower, "and see the view?"

"It's closed," she retorted, stone-faced.

I smiled slightly. After all this time, Nathalia still didn't fully appreciate that the limits which applied to mortals meant nothing to us. "There are ways around that," I pointed out. "I can fly you to the top, or if you're feeling more adventuresome, we can climb. That might be nice, eh? What a tale to relate someday, the story of how you scaled the Eiffel Tower?"

Her beautiful lips twisted themselves into a grotesque attempt at a scowl. "And to whom, pray tell," she sarcastically inquired, "would I relate this fabulous epic?"

Shrugging, I suggested, "Lestat? Daniel, maybe?" It came to me then that she might be feeling isolated out in Italy. We didn't fraternize much with mortals --not even with the servants-- for obvious reasons, and she hadn't seen any vampire other than me since months before she became one herself. Maybe her frantic need to see her family was an expression of a more generalized loneliness. "You'll see all your friends again, don't worry about that," I assured her. "Would you like to visit New Orleans again and see Louis? Or I could put out some feelers and find out where Armand and Daniel have disappeared to. How about that?"

She actually snorted in reply, and spoke in a tone that condemned me as an idiot pure through. "In the first place, they aren't my friends, Santino. In case it's escaped your notice, I haven't had a single one of those since you took it into your diabolical head to abduct me!"

Well, I knew Lestat wasn’t her favorite person. How could he be, when he’d convinced her to try suicide, and had later threatened to kill her parents if she dared attempt it ever again? But Lestat wasn’t the only vampire she’d spent time with. Daniel had practically lived with us for months and he'd gotten along fabulously with Nathalia. Of course they'd had one falling out over her insane attempt to get him to make her a vampire, but they'd gotten past that.

In many ways, they were two of a kind. I had always attributed that to the simple fact that they came from the same era.

"I thought you liked Daniel," I put in.

She ignored me, and I knew full well why. She did like Daniel, but admitting it would put an end to the pity-party she was in the process of staging. "And in the second place," she continued, "why would I brag about scaling the Eiffel Tower to any of them? It's hardly an accomplishment, seeing as any vampire could do exactly the same!"

"Don't say the v-word in public," I told her in a low, stern tone. "Not unless you want some eavesdropper to end up dead."

"Good at threats, aren't you?" she sneered. "It was one of the first things I noticed about you when you threw me down in that pit and broke my ankle--"

I knew she was angry, and I knew she thought she had cause, but I was getting pretty damned sick of her scathing references to the past. Especially when she blew it out of all proportion!

"In the first place," I mimicked her snide tones, "I never threw you into that pit or any other. I took great care with you, and you know it! In the second place, you got hurt when you tried to climb out on your own. And in the third place, your ankle wasn't even broken, it was merely sprained!"

"Thank you for that scintillating stroll down memory lane," she sniped.

I'd had it, and I rounded on her, grasping her by both forearms when she tried to turn her back on me. "What in hell's your problem?"

"Gee, Santino, I knew you were dense," she threw out, a mock smile making her teeth gleam in the electric light around the Tower, "but I never knew you were a complete fucking imbecile! What do you think my problem is, eh? Let's see, it starts with an S, ends with an O, and rhymes with Bantino!"

She shook herself free then, and seeing as she was so upset, I let her. I probably should have let her rudeness go, as well, but she wasn't the only one in the world with a temper.

"You're behaving like a five-year-old!" I told her, shaking a finger in her face.

"And seven hundred is so mature," she mocked. "Just think, in another century or so you might actually be able to accept the fact that I have ideas of my own, thoughts of my own, a family of my own! Too bad they'll all be rotting in their graves by then!"

I stared at her, flabbergasted by her bizarre outlook. "You think I stopped you from going to England because I'm jealous, or something?"

"I know so," she retorted, her voice all at once more defeated than defiant. "And don't you see, Santino? It's hard to love you when you know so very little about how to love back."

Taking her hand, this time in a gentle grip, I drew her over to one of the wrought iron benches that graced the little park near the Tower. "Oh, Nathalia..." I murmured, wondering how to explain. "It's not that I'm disturbed that you have a family and I don't, or that I resent time you spend apart from me. If it makes you happy, I don't resent it. But this... obsession with seeing them, it's just not healthy. You think it'll make you happy, but believe me, it won't."

"It's not obsession, it's daughterly interest. Perfectly normal," she retorted, her nose pertly lifted.

"Not for us, it isn’t," I told her.

Jerking her hand from mine, she scooted to the end of the bench. "You only think so because you’re stuck in the Dark Ages," she announced. "You think night-walking necessitates a break from the past, simply because it was that way back in the old covens. But these are modern times! Who’s to say I can’t have at all?"

I was.

I understood her perspective, though, I really did. She’d been raised in an age where it was normal to think you could have it all, where there were no limits on personal or professional freedoms. But those were human modes of thought, and like me, she wasn’t human anymore.

And to try to bridge the human world with our own was to court disaster. I knew.

"It's a can of worms you're opening, and you just don't know what might crawl out---" I began, and before she could interrupt, warned, "And don't call me a cliché again!"

"Then don't use so many of them!" she came back.

"Maybe I wouldn't, if you weren't being such a textbook case of fledgling-having-trouble-adjusting. I've seen it before, Nathalia, dozens of times."

"Yes, O Coven Master," she mocked. "But you know, maybe you weren't as big a deal as you think! I've noticed that the other vampires don't unconditionally defer to you, so why should I?"

Because you're mine. Because you're my fledgling. Because you’re my wife.

Hmm, mistake to say any of those things, I could tell that much even without Daniel around to advise me.

"You're young. You need help," I compromised.

"Oh, really," she drawled. "Is help what you're offering, Santino? Because I would like some. Perhaps if we took to the air now, we could make the Lake District by morning, and then you could help me find a decent place to lie. Tomorrow night you could even help me figure out how to best approach my parents, since you're such an expert on how these things tend to go."

That reminded me of something I'd been meaning to discuss with her. "At the moment I'm more concerned with the resting place you found on your own," I told her. "Where was it? Because you looked --and smelled-- positively horrid at the gare."

"Thanks," she said shortly, and I knew then for all she'd objected to me calling her my beauty, she did want me to think her beautiful. Well, I did. No worries on that score. "So I accidentally slept in a little industrial waste, all right? It wasn't what I was planning on doing, but no harm done. I mean, chemicals can't hurt me now, can they?"

Probably they couldn't, but she was the only vampire I knew who'd been so careless as to sleep amongst them. "I have no idea," I answered her. If I'd hoped to worry her, I was destined to be disappointed. She shrugged, just exactly as though she could care less whether she lived or died. Now that irritated me.

I knew she was finding her life hard, but we all went through rough patches now and then. I'd been through some, myself.

"Look, Santino, I don't need your help. Can you understand that? I just need to be left alone for a few nights, and then I'll come back to you and Nela. I'll be fine on my own."

"Prove it to me," I challenged. "Show me your resting place."

Nathalia shrugged again. "There's not that much to see, but if you want to take a look at a decrepit, closed down little park, fine by me." A calculating gleam slid into her eyes. "There's nothing wrong with lying in the earth, right? It's a perfectly sound practice. So if you agree that I did fine on my own, you'll let me go to England. Deal?"

Sure it was a deal. "There's more to getting by on your own than just finding a secure place to sleep, Nathalia."

"Oh, yeah?" she challenged, but less obnoxiously than before. "What else is there? Just hunting, and I've already cleared that hurdle. You saw for yourself."

She was going to use tonight’s hunt as an example of how self-sufficient she was? Incredible!

"I saw you refuse to feed, except on yourself, until luck had you realizing there was a lowlife nearby!"

"Oh, I’d have found someone suitable on my own, sooner or later," she breezed.

"How?" I bluntly inquired. I was tired of her secrecy, tired of not knowing how she lured her victims. I was sure she didn’t do what I’d seen tonight --that ferocious, all-out attack-- because if she did, she wouldn’t come home looking like she’d been beaten to a pulp!

"That’s none of your business!" she erupted. "I’m still alive, still breathing --so to speak-- and how I stay that way is my concern, not yours!"

"That you stay that way is my main concern," I retorted.

"Then let me go to England before I off myself!" she shrieked. Hysteria or lunacy, it made no real difference. Either way, she was acting just exactly like the fledglings I’d supervised all those centuries ago.

"Why don't you just show me where you passed the daylight hours, and we'll take the rest from there, my love?" I suggested, trying my very best to sound --hell, to be-- reasonable about the whole matter. I didn’t want to act the despot she had called me; I didn’t want her to think that maker was synonymous with master. "We'll talk, all right? We'll talk about England, talk about your parents. I’ll tell you what I’ve seen happen to other fledglings like you; I'll tell you a little bit about Maharet so you'll see why I'm concerned for your safety---"

"I've read the books," she interrupted. "Maharet didn't do anything to Lestat when he ran wild in a mortal body! Why should she give a flip if I visit my parents?"

I sighed. "Maharet's hardly going to interfere with Lestat, Nathalia. For all his foul-ups, he is the one responsible for reuniting her with her sister after six millennia! You're another matter entirely. If things get out of hand with your parents, you could be in danger."

"Oh, what could go that wrong?" she scorned.

"Plenty, seeing as you want them to know Nela! If they get an inkling of your true nature they'll fight you for custody of her! They might call protective services during the day and have her removed from you, and we'd have to go in guns blazing to get her back--"

Nathalia bristled. "They wouldn't do that!"

"Oh, no? Didn't they do precisely that to your own grandmother? She wanted to take you back to Spain when you were still a toddler, and your adoptive parents fought it all the way through the courts to keep you in England."

Uh-oh. It never dawned on me that she didn't know these things... not until her blue eyes went wide in her face. "What? I mean, are you sure? Abuelita never told me that!"

"I'm sure, I saw it in your father's mind, clear as day. But if your grandmother chose to say nothing, it must have been because she loved you very much and didn't want discord between you and your parents."

Still shocked, Nathalia just stared at me.

Time to get back on track, I thought. "In any case, Nathalia, I want you to understand just how dangerous your plans could turn out to be. Maharet did make rules about advertising our presence in the mortal world, and I don't want you to run afoul of them. But I’ll listen to you, too, all right? I swear I’ll listen and try to understand how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking. That's the most I can promise right now."

"Fat lot of good it does me," she groaned. Not quite so snidely as before, though.

"Please, Nathalia," I urged. "Show me where you spent your day away from me. I told you that I wanted you to be strong and capable in your own right. Now I'd like to see how you managed without help. Is that so much to ask, seeing as you'd like me to believe that you don't need help?"

Her lips twisted in resignation, but she got up from the bench and began walking in a southerly direction. Presumably, she was leading me toward her makeshift lair. "Why is it so hard for you to just let me go, Santino? It's only for a little while! Why can't you believe that I know what I'm doing?"

Because you don't, that was the real answer to her question, but it was one I wouldn't say out loud.

As it turned out, I didn't have to. When we reached the place where she had rested on her own, it was all too obvious that she didn't know what she was doing.

My blood ran cold --colder than usual, I mean-- when I saw the place where Nathalia had chosen to pass her death-sleep.



---Nathalia---

Oh, my God.

That's all I could think when I saw the little park where I had dug myself a makeshift grave. Although, "little park" was quite a misnomer, wasn't it? There was nothing left of the disused but charming garden square I'd found just two nights earlier. Actually, the earth I'd slept in was gone as well. In its place there was a huge pit at least six meters deep.

Backhoes and excavators surrounded the pit, along with sundry other earth-moving equipment.

Oh, my God.

"It wasn't like this yesterday," I hastened to assure Santino, whose eyes had narrowed to what I could only think a glare of extreme displeasure.

"Really," he drawled, for that much was pretty well apparent.

I couldn't exactly fault him for thinking me careless. On the other hand, how was I to have known? I heard myself babble defensively, "Look, everything was fine, really. None of this was here until after I was long gone. When I woke up yesterday night, nobody had started any work."

"Obviously," he commented, rolling his eyes. "Otherwise they'd have dug you up as you slept, and what do you think would have happened, then?"

I bit my lip, nervous. He was madder than blazes, but managing to keep it under wraps, just barely.

"Um... the work crew would have seen what I was, word would have gotten around about the existence of vampires, and Maharet would go on that rampage you mentioned earlier?"

"No, you little fool!" Santino scorned. I flinched, but not because I thought he was about to pummel me or anything. It was his tone. Well, that and his words. He didn't speak to me like that, you see. He never really had. Not even when I had been his captive and he had believed I had no rights whatsoever... even then, even when he was telling me the hard, cold truth that he owned me, he hadn't insulted me.

"You'd have burned up, that's what would have happened," he continued, raising his voice until it hurt my ears. Just as well the whole area was deserted, because his speech had lost the discretion that usually marked it. "Proof of vampires? You think I care about proof of vampires, Nathalia? You could be dead now, gone forever! Nela could be going through life without a mother! I could be left alone to mourn you for the rest of all eternity -- however much of it I could bear to endure without you, that is! I spent seven hundred years looking for my one and only, and I'm damned if I'm prepared to lose her after just a year of marriage!"

"How could I have known they were going to dig this site up?" I challenged. "This could have happened to anyone, so don't you start thinking it's cause to lock me up or haunt my every breath!"

"Locking you up is sounding better all the time," he remarked in a pleasant tone that made me shudder. "Especially if this is how you manage alone! You're not fit to be let loose, do you know that? There's no way in hell I'll let you wander all the way to England!"

"You weren't going to anyway, you ass!" I erupted. When it came to insults, I'd always been much more free with my tongue than had he.

"True," he acknowledged, looking my up and down with such a superior expression in his black eyes that I longed to kick his shins. Good plan, all I would accomplish is to bruise my feet. "But I was hoping you could see for yourself, now, why solo travel just isn't in the cards for you, just yet."

"Come on," I pleaded. "It could have been you lying here instead of me!"

"Oh, no it couldn't," he disputed. "Because I don't go to ground where there are signs warning mortals to stay clear of the construction zone!"

Shamefaced, I glanced toward the sign I'd noticed when I'd slept here, and lamely offered, "I thought that just said closed. I don't know so much French, you know---"

"Your lack of a decent education is not news to me," Santino snorted.

"Look, music was the only thing I was even half-way good at in school," I argued. "And all the dark blood's done for my brain is to make me not so good at that either, anymore!" My frustration mounting, I exclaimed, "Besides, I haven't had centuries to master languages and customs and exotic basketweaving and whatever else you deem essential for your underlings!"

"Then shut up and learn something useful now!" he threw back, his voice as gritty as sand. "The sign says Closed for removal of toxic waste. It is a violation of city codes to enter a construction zone without authorization." His voice rose in volume. Again. "And according to the work permits posted, excavation was supposed to have begun the very day you slept here!"

"Well, it didn't," I told him, not too surprised when he threw his hands skyward at my stupidity.

"I'm sure the weather interfered," he drawled. "It was obvious when I arose to look for you at the gare that it had rained that whole day! Think about it," he railed. "If not for a little foul weather, you'd be ashes now! Scattered ashes, at that, stirred up by all this equipment! I can't believe you would be so reckless, so utterly irresponsible, Nathalia! I absolutely cannot believe it!"

"Anyone can make a mistake," I defended myself.

"Not mistakes this serious," he argued, clenching his fists and advancing on me. I stood my ground, but not because I was particularly brave. I just didn't believe he was going to hit me, that was all. Santino might be a domineering swine, but he wasn't abusive, not like that... at least, he wasn't anymore.

Sure enough, all he did was tower over me and try to make me quail. The look in his eyes... oh, it was terrible. So much anger, and disappointment, and above all fear that he might have lost me. I knew how I had felt when a young thug had tried to shoot Nela and I'd almost lost her, so I had an inkling of what Santino was going through.

And I was sorry, I was really sorry, but I didn't know what I could do to put it right. It wasn't like I could go back in time and find a better place to lie, was it?

"What do you expect of me?" I cried in frustration.

"Start to use some goddamned judgment again!" he erupted. "And listen to me, for God's sake, because I do know what I'm talking about when I tell you that you're running true to form!"

"Oh, give up my dreams, that's all you want!" I scathed. "Just forget my father, just flush my memories down into the sewer. Don't ask for much, do you?"

"I don't ask for anything at all," he sighed. "I'm simply telling you how it is and how it has to be."

"Because you're in charge," I sneered. "What happened to We'll talk about it, Nathalia, and I'll listen, I swear I'll listen?"

"We will talk about it," he repeated. "But you aren't going to England."

Just try and stop me, that was what I was thinking, but of course I didn't say so. Why tip him off?

But then it came to me that he could stop me. That he had stopped me, already. I should be in the Lake District by now, figuring out how to approach my father. Instead I was stuck in France. And why? Quite simply, because if Santino was determined to stay by my side and supervise my every move, there was no way I could prevent it.

"I hate you," I told him then, and I meant it.

Santino closed his eyes briefly, but when he opened them, they were blank of sentiment. "I know," he said, and turned away. "Come on, we're getting out of here."

"Back to Italy, oh Master?" I drawled, loathing in every word.

"Not yet," he said, and that pretty much said it all. Yes, he was in charge, and no, I didn't have much say about where we went or what we did.

"Yes, my lord," I sniped, but he ignored the sarcasm.

"I need to feed," he announced. "And after that we'll head back to the hotel. Tomorrow will be soon enough to return to the villa."

"I thought you were too strong to need much blood," I mocked him. "Why kill tonight? Unless you just want to torment me, that is. Oh, yes, that must be it!"

"I want you to see me, yes," he answered, his voice level. His composure cracked, though, as he continued, grating, "But as for why I hunt just now, well, think about it, my beauty! Something's put me in a killing mood! Wonder what that might be!"

"Don't blame your emotions on me!" I erupted. Too late I realized what I had said. I was a fine one to talk, and Santino knew it.

"Try following your own advice!" he rebuked me, and suddenly hauled me into his arms. A hard kiss on the mouth, that's what he gave me as I stood resentful, unable to wriggle away due to the ridiculous disparity in our strengths. Against him, I was just as helpless as I'd been when I was mortal.

A kiss that went on and on, for so long that my head began to spin, for he did know how to make me melt. He always had, but I'd spent most of our time together denying it.

When he broke it off, he gave me one last glare. "Don't you dare go off on your own again, Nathalia, not without my express permission! I can't stand the thought that you chose this," he waved a disdainful arm at the pit, "as your lair! Until I have more faith in your survival instinct, I'm not going to let you travel alone."

Fine, fine, whatever. None of his restrictions would matter to me if he would just grant me the one thing I craved. "Then come with me to England," I begged him, my voice soft, urgent, and free of the scorn that had laced it so much this evening. "Travel with me, Santino. Supervise me all you like. Just don't make me give up any chance to see my father alive again."

"You gave up that chance when you took my blood," he informed me, calmly but not cruelly. "So forget England, just forget it. And I mean that, Nathalia! If I have to lock you up again to keep you safe, I'll do it, so don't tempt me with another insane flight from Italy like you've indulged once!"

It was a nasty threat, and I could tell that he meant it. And that broke my heart, what little of it I had left. "Please," I heard myself plead, "just let me have one look, one glance through a window, Santino! One minute, that's all I'm asking. If you ever loved me, can't you just give me that?"

"I love you too much to give you that," he swore, and raised my hand to kiss my knuckles. I yanked it away, furious at both the parody of love and at the fact that I could only rip it from his grasp because he let me. "But we'll talk as I said, and you'll see why England would be just as terrible a mistake as your choice of resting-place."

"Save your breath!" I fumed.

He grabbed me again then, but not to kiss me. We were taking to the air, and I knew where we were going.

First to his kill, a kill I didn't want to witness.

Then to the hotel, for a talk I didn't want, about parents I would never see again.

What I'd said before had been nothing less that the unadulterated truth. I did hate him, and I didn't care if he knew it.

But the worst part was that, he didn't seem to care, either.



Chapter 7: Insight
________________________________



---Nathalia---

Well, we had our little talk, not that it did much good. Santino told me about ten thousand times how dangerous it was to go to England. And yes, he had his reasons. Mountains of them, in fact, one after the other after the other. But you know what they all had in common, every one? Each was simply ludicrous. I mean, it was pathetic just listening to them!

Your father will beg you for the dark blood, and you'll give it.

Yeah, right! That Santino could say so showed just how little he knew about me. When I disputed him he threw Lestat and Gabrielle in my face as an example. As if I was anything remotely like that prince of demons!

They'll hate you, now.

Oh, come on! I didn't exactly think my father would be delighted, but then again, I wasn't planning on telling him I was now a vampire. I'd think of something, some way around it...

They'll steal Nela the way they stole you!

And he had the nerve to call me hysterical. There hadn't been any stealing involved in my adoption. My parents had simply taken me in when the unwed Spanish girl in their employ had died in childbirth. It had been over two years before abuelita even came to England to see me, and by then, the adoption was ancient history. So what if my parents had refused to let my grandmother take me back to Spain with her? They'd done the right thing, in my books. I knew and loved them, and at that point, she was a stranger.

I argued all these points with Santino, but it didn't do any good. Of course not. His mind had been made up before we'd ever started the conversation, and I knew why. I knew the truth, you see, the truth he was too stubborn and proud to admit.

The only real reason why he didn’t want me to go to England was because he was scared. He was terrified that if I held onto a portion of my mortal life, there would somehow be less of me left for him. And of course he couldn't own up to his fear; oh, no, the big fierce vampire man didn't have emotions like that, did he now?

The hell he didn't.

It was like I had said before -- he was jealous that I had someone to love besides him and Nela. Never mind the fact that it was a different kind of love --daughterly love-- and therefore no threat to him. He just couldn’t stand the idea that he might have to share my affections --or my time-- with another living being.

I suppose I was lucky that he’d accepted Nela so completely, otherwise I would have had to fight him to spend time with her, too!

I told him all this during our talk that night at the hotel (after he’d made me watch him kill, the ruthless bastard). Anyway, I told him, but he disagreed with every last thing I tried to explain. Quite obviously, he wasn’t in touch with his own feelings. He wasn’t self-aware. And I was the one going to suffer for it.

He could rationalize and justify his dictates all night long, and never once look at the underlying cause of his decision! Denial, that’s the word. He was deeply in denial, and nothing I could say would convince him that his paranoid fantasies about my parents kidnapping Nela were absolutely delusional.

Impasse, we had reached an impasse.

He would forcibly prevent me from traveling to England; it was as simple as that.

That morning I lay stiffly next to him in bed, waiting for the death-sleep to overtake me. He didn’t gather me close as was his custom, and he certainly didn’t try to drink of me. I’m sure he knew full well I was in no mood for blood-play.

But the next night when I woke up, I was snuggled tightly against him, our limbs intertwined. I couldn’t say for sure whose fault the change of position had been. I was tempted to get angry --angrier, I mean-- and rebuke him for his nerve, but there was every chance that I’d cuddled him on my own as I slept.

I guess the truth was that my body still loved him even if the rest of me was pissed as hell.

That night we went back to Milan as he had promised. Now that was tough, because he held me as we whizzed through the air, and I didn’t want to be in his arms. At least my waking mind didn’t want that. Who could say what I’d do during daylight hours when I couldn’t consciously control my body?

And, of course, the journey was heart-rending because I was going the wrong direction. East, away from my father! By then, though, I was past begging him for favors he wasn't going to grant. It wasn't a case of pride, although I probably had my fair share of that commodity. It was more like bitter gall burning in my throat.

To know that my needs, my opinions, mattered to him not at all... really, to taste defeat, viscous and acrid in my mouth.

Not that Santino's mule-headedness surprised me. It was actually in character, wasn't it? He'd been determined all along that I would join him in the night, regardless of my sentiments on the matter, and look at where I'd ended up! Just exactly where he'd wanted! In the darkness, with him.

One thing did surprise me, though, and it was that Santino didn't insist I hunt while we were still in Paris. Strange, that. It ran counter to all he'd threatened, didn't it? Then it came to me that he must have decided it would be easier to make me kill if he let me get good and hungry, first. Either that, or he wanted to be sure I was plumped full of extra-fresh blood when we bedded down that night.

What big fangs you have... the better to eat you with, my dear...

Sure enough, once we got to Milan, Santino was determined to watch me as I hunted again. I was really starting to resent that, even if afterwards I felt better than I had in months. It had been a long time since I’d taken mortals three nights in a row; animal blood --no matter how much I partook of it-- simply didn't feed me the way a human kill could.

That much became obvious --as if I didn't know it before-- after I hunted that first night back in Milan.

Although, I’m not so sure it’s accurate to say that I hunted, really. It was just like in Paris: Santino picked someone for me and told me to "take" him. Charming euphemism, isn't it? Well, at least it was a man again. I’m not sure if Santino realized I only hunted males, or if he was just smart enough to know that any female he picked, no matter how depraved she might be, would tend to remind me of little miss sweetness-and-light.

He probably didn't want to fight again about what was innocent blood and what wasn't. And you know what? Neither did I. What would be the point? We just didn't see the world --or humanity-- in the same way. Not even remotely the same way. It made me wonder, it really did, what it was that Santino found in me to love. I mean, how could he love me, when we were poles apart and always would be? About the only thing we had holding us together was Nela, and she was a great bonding point, wasn't she? All I had to do to think of Esteban was look at the daughter we'd created together.

Esteban... I almost started crying again, but not because I'd loved him so very much. I honestly didn't know anymore if I'd ever loved him. Really, thinking back, I had to conclude that I'd used him. I'd been alone and afraid and desperately in need of a helping hand, and he'd been like some handsome saint sent to rescue me from a fate worse than death. It was no wonder I'd convinced myself that I loved him; Esteban was all that kept me from falling apart during those dark months while I tried to stay hidden from Santino.

When I thought of him now, it wasn't so much with love, but with sincere gratitude. I'd needed a friend, and he'd known how to be one. In spades.

But remembering him did make me want to cry. Not for myself, but for Nela. Esteban had been a wonderful man, and she was never going to know him, never going to truly appreciate her natural father.

I knew how that felt, the not knowing. The wondering. I loved my adopted father, of course I did, but I still wished that I could know my birth father. I knew nothing about him, you see. Nothing at all, not even his name. Now, I'd never known my mother either, but that didn't matter so much. I'd been told of her my whole life, I'd seen photographs of her, and I had known her mother, my abuelita.

But my natural father had never been any part of my life.

And now Nela would have to carry the same burden.

I tried not to think about it, but lately, that had been difficult. Witness that night in Milan. I had real problems to solve, and what was I doing? Wallowing in sad memories and sadder realizations!

I was brought abruptly back into the present when Santino bluntly told me take the lean, bearded man hanging about on the back streets, where the bars and houses of ill-repute were located.

Well, I’d much rather have found a few animals to stave off my hunger, but Santino was right there watching, so no dice. And of course I knew better than to attack my own wrist again. That had gotten me but nowhere.

And I was hungry, so hungry. Damn his black soul all to hell, his little plan to starve me into submission had worked. By the time he found a victim for me, I was almost fainting with hunger, reaching that point at which instinct begins to swamp reason. I didn't often get so very desperate for blood; I made sure I had fed on rats or something before things reached such a pass.

Not tonight, though. Not with Santino sticking to me like glue, just as he had promised.

I went ahead and killed the man he picked for me. No argument this time, no hesitation, I just did as I was told.

I had to.

Because, you see, I had a plan.

A plan I’d worked out during those long hours as we flew from Paris to Milan.

It was a plan that wouldn’t work unless Santino trusted me enough to let me out of his sight. After my behavior --hysterics over the girl, then attacking myself instead of a victim (bad idea, that)-- I knew he needed to be convinced that I was all right to hunt alone.

So I put on a show for him. A nice, straightforward kill with no recriminations afterwards. Not that there were none, mind you; there were always some of those, but I managed to keep them under wraps.

And you know, it was really strange what happened afterwards. All of a sudden, it seemed like I could finally think, like my brain was powered up and revving. Fresh blood in my system --human blood-- made a huge difference. Hmm, maybe I wasn’t so lacking in vampiric intelligence as I had thought. Maybe I had just needed some brain food.

Maybe? Oh, definitely. If I was going to outsmart Santino at his own game, I needed all the brains I could come by. With that in mind, I thought through my plan again. Giving it a hard, critical look revealed some weaknesses I hadn’t noticed earlier.

I promptly revised my plan, even as I was still dealing with the body of the man I’d just fed from.

Then I turned to Santino, and spoke in a level, calm voice. Nothing much is wrong, that’s the attitude I wished to project. Nothing’s wrong, so there’s no reason to follow me around night after night.

"Well, I certainly feel better," I announced, giving him a slight smile. "Let’s get home now so I can see Nela."

"She’ll be asleep," Santino returned, his voice puzzled, as well it should be. He had likely expected me to either scream my anger or revert to the silent treatment. At the very least, he must have believed that he hadn’t heard the last about England.

But he had. I wasn’t going to waste my time in pointless arguments. I was going to act; I was going to secure for myself those things I wanted. And I was going to do it by hook and by crook, since my original idea hadn’t worked out.

It came to me then just how off my thinking must have been, for any idiot could have predicted Santino would just come fetch me before I could make it to England. And besides, as much as I missed the green verdant hills of the Lake District, I didn't need to go there to accomplish my goal.

There are always choices, Lestat had told me. Why hadn't I thought of some alternatives sooner, instead of just screaming in incoherent frustration at Santino? I was as bad as him -- running on emotion instead of on reasoned, rational decisions.

No doubt about it, animal blood wasn’t doing much for me except keeping me alive from night to night. I had always known that a steady diet of dogs and such was detrimental to my physical health -- Santino had warned me, flat-out, that such meals were only a stopgap measure to be used in emergencies. But I hadn't realized that I hadn't been at my mental best, lately.

Now, I could see that indeed I had not.

My body, and my mind, and my soul all needed true nutrition, and that meant one thing.

Murder.

It’s not murder, it’s just dinner, Santino had told me. Boy, would my life be simpler if I could just adopt his pragmatic attitude!

But I couldn’t, or at least, I didn’t know how.

Well, at least I had gotten through tonight already.

"Even if Nela's asleep, I want to look in on her and sit by her," I answered Santino. That was true enough, but for good measure I threw in, "And you were right before, that I’ve fallen into the habit of not seeing enough of her. Maybe you can show me some ways to speed up the hunt, eh? That would sure help."

Now he looked well and truly puzzled. "You certainly didn’t dawdle tonight," he murmured, and I shrugged.

"I was starving. That was the idea, wasn't it, when you wouldn't let me hunt in Paris?"

Santino raised a sardonic black eyebrow, a gesture which gave his face a wicked, handsome look. "If you ever want to eat, Nathalia, don't let me stop you. Speak up. And no, starving you was not the idea. It just seemed that French food didn't agree with you. I thought you'd be more comfortable here where you've hunted so many times before."

Oooh, good opening. Perfect for my plan, phase one of which was to get some time off for good behavior. Time alone, I mean. And no, I wasn't planning to go haring off to England again. I mean, why would I be? It wouldn't do any good. Santino would just drag me back to Italy --getting help from Lestat or somebody to find me, if needed-- and if he got tired enough of the game, he probably would lock me up. He had the perfect place to do it, too, right in our own lair. I couldn't even open the door without help, it was that heavy. The better to keep mortals at bay while we slept, but such security measures could just as easily be imposed against me.

So no, England was out, but I had other choices, just as Lestat had said. And they depended on him not watching me every instant.

"Maybe I finally am getting more comfortable," I murmured. "Paris... well, I can't really explain what happened there, except to say that I was just still so mad at you." I sighed. "It's hard, Santino, all this adjusting. I thought I was getting the hang of things, you know? And then all this turmoil over my parents just consumed me." Again, I shrugged, exactly as if I was looking back and realizing I'd gone overboard with the England thing. He looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then offered his arm. I took it, laced my cool fingers through his slightly warmer ones, and commented, "I don’t know why, but I feel better. Calmer, or maybe just more in control."

"It’s the blood," he told me. "You’re finally getting enough of it. You’ve been skipping meals, haven’t you?"

Of course I wasn’t strong enough to do that. If I didn’t get some blood each night, I wouldn’t be able to rise the next evening. That Santino thought I could go without and still get out of bed showed that he had no true understanding of just how weak I was. But that was fine. The stronger he thought me, the better off I’d be.

Which meant I could hardly admit to anything about my true feeding patterns. Not that I would have, in any case. I considered that such things were strictly my business, fledgling or no. "I kill every night," I insisted, which was certainly true, even if it was also quite misleading.

"Then why did your blood taste wrong in the gare?" Santino challenged. Not too surprising, that question. Ever since he'd drained me I'd pretty much been expecting it.

What to say, what to say…

"Probably all that industrial waste I slept in," I invented, thinking that a rather good explanation. "You know they say that taste is actually 90% smell, Santo."

Probably it was the Santo that got to him. All I know for sure was that he relaxed a bit, then, and stopped cross-examining me.

"Let’s get home to Nela," he agreed, and I smiled, just as if she were the only thing on my mind.

Just as if I’d forgotten all about seeing my father ever again.

Sure I had.



---Santino---

I didn’t exactly believe her explanation for why her blood had tasted so odd. Oh, why mince words? I didn’t believe her for an instant. The truth was that I'd never tasted anyone whose blood had quite had the character of hers, that night. And I'd drunk from plenty of fledglings; it was par for the course for a Coven Master.

I didn't know what had been wrong with her blood that night, I really didn't. But you know, I'd never had a fledgling before who found the kill difficult in the slightest. In the old days, you see, I'd vetted them to be sure they could handle that end of things. So I'd never had a fledgling who'd tried to go without daily blood... I couldn't say for sure what such an underling would taste like.

But knowing Nathalia, I was sure she had been skipping meals.

What she had done in past nights, though, was far less important than what she did from this point on, so I decided to say nothing of her obvious lie.

When we got back to the villa, it was so late that Nathalia would soon need to go to her rest. But we did look in on Nela for a bit; she was sleeping peacefully in her crib, her little face puckered as she sucked her thumb. Lucia --one of the mortal servants who helped care for Nela-- discreetly left as we came in, but I knew she’d be just outside, ready to watch over Nela as soon as Nathalia and I left our daughter’s room.

Nathalia ran a loving hand along Nela’s white brow and crooned to her in low Italian. Now that was nice to hear. For a while there, it had seemed she’d given up on speaking anything but English, even to me.

And she knew I preferred Italian and believed it essential that Nela grew up fluent in both languages.

After a few moments, Nathalia began to yawn and stretch. "I feel the dawn coming," she sighed, and headed towards our lair.

Into our bedroom in the villa she went, but of course that wasn’t where we passed our days. There was a secret door concealed behind one of the tapestries, a door no mortal could open, so heavy was it. Nathalia couldn’t even budge it, not without help. That wasn’t intentional on my part; I’d had this villa for several hundred years, and I’d designed the lair for my own use and convenience. I'd never expected to have a fledgling of my own again -- I'd given up all hope along with all emotion, long before I'd even abandoned the Roman coven. And I'd certainly never planned to have a wife.

But I liked having one -- even getting along with her was much harder than I had ever anticipated.

Anyway, that heavy door was fine for me, but not for Nathalia. I didn’t want her ever to be trapped down in the lair, unable to go out and feed, so after we came to live in Italy, I had altered the door to accommodate electric pistons. The controls, however, were all located in the tunnels that led to our lair, not in our bedroom. There was no way I wanted any mortal able to operate them.

The end result of my modifications was that while Nathalia could never find herself stuck in the lair alone with no way out, she still could not enter it without my help. But that wasn’t so dangerous, you see. If I wasn’t around for some reason, she knew how to find her own resting ground. (I didn’t really think she’d sleep in toxic waste again, and in any case, there wasn’t any of that near my villa.)

She stopped at the door to our chamber, now, and waited for me to open it. It was a familiar ritual, one we went through each night as the darkness began to wane.

Once we were in the tunnel, I closed the door behind us and secured all the bolts and locks that helped insure that no mortal would disturb our rest. Then down the sloping tunnels we walked, deeper and deeper underground, until at last we reached the small room that housed our bed and the few personal effects we wanted to keep in our most private chamber.

Actually, Nathalia didn’t have many of those, and that was mainly my fault. I’d stolen her away from her mortal life suddenly and irrevocably. In one fell swoop, she’d gone from a young woman with a bedsit full of belongings to being a belonging. Mine. And I had wanted her to understand that her past was lost forever, so I had taken nothing from her apartment but her. No mementos, not even an item of clothing. I would provide all her needs from that moment forth.

Later, after she’d escaped me, I went to England to see her parents. To see if she’d been home, or if they’d had any contact with her. They hadn’t, of course; Nathalia was too smart to be caught that easily.

But while I was there, I had asked for some personal items of hers: things she was fond of. I didn’t quite know why I did it. Perhaps I meant to taunt her with them; I was blazingly angry at the time. Or maybe even then I knew it would be too painful for her to continue on with absolutely nothing that was truly her own.

In any case, I’d collected a little music box that played Beethoven, a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and a lace mantilla that had belonged to her grandmother.

And these things she had still, along with one more item: a guitar Lestat had once given her. He had known, you see, that she loved music, and that composing was a way for her to work out her feelings and deal with them.

At least, it used to be a way. I hadn’t heard her play a single note since she’d acquired the dark blood. The guitar she’d once wrung such beautiful music from now sat unused, dusty, in a corner of the lair.

The moment we entered our chamber, she went to light the fat, squat candles that stood in cast iron holders on both sides of the bed. I repressed a smile. Nathalia did so love the light. She could see in total darkness, of course, but she favored light all the same. What a shame she’d never see the sun again -- I knew that she had loved to bask in the bright glow of full light.

But the candles gave the lair a peculiar charm, so I didn’t mind her preoccupation with them.

When they were lit, however, she waved an expressive arm toward the bed and said, "See?"

I knew at once what she meant. There it was, a neatly folded slip of paper resting against the lace coverlet of her pillow. The writing adorning it said simply Santino.

Scooping the note up as I sat on the edge of our bed, I unfolded it and read aloud:

Dear Santino,
By now, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t returned from this evening’s hunt. Please don’t worry. Everything is fine, I just need a few days to myself. I’ll be back in a week at the very most. Thank you for taking care of Nela until I get back. You’re a wonderful father and I know you’ll keep her safe and sound while I’m away.

Love, Nathalia

I glanced at her when I’d finished reading. "A week? You thought you might need a week?"

She sat down next to me, so close that her slender thigh brushed mine. Of course the contact wasn’t skin-on-skin; I was wearing my usual black dress slacks, and she wore a midnight blue linen skirt I’d bought her in the Paris boutique. Still, even that casual touch made me ache for her, a peculiar ache centered in my fangs. She sensed it too, I knew, for she ran her own tongue over her lips as she smiled.

Her behavior was a surprise -- a welcome one, I must say. Then again, her mood seemed to have improved enormously that evening’s kill. Yet more proof --as if I needed it-- that she'd been keeping herself far too starved in months past. I bet it had been weeks, or longer, since she'd hunted three nights running. And you know, that explained a great deal. Not just her depression and general malaise, but also her rabid, irrational obsession with England.

Maybe I'd start to see that fade, now that she was feeding properly for once. Or maybe, I already was seeing it fade. After all, she hadn't breathed a word about her father since we'd left Milan. She was either getting over her fixation or she'd finally accepted the reality of the situation - that mortal and vampire lives simply didn't mix.

"Well, I was trying to be careful, if you must know," Nathalia answered me, a sheepish smile taking the bite out of words that might have been harsh, otherwise. "I gave myself a week because I knew it might be tricky arranging travel that didn't overlap into any daylight hours, because I knew I'd have to hunt up a lair each morning..." Her expression fell, the blue in her eyes becoming haunted as she went on. "Oh, Santo. I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry about that fiasco with the little park. It looked so safe! I mean, it was deserted. I figured there could hardly be a place less likely to be disturbed! Oh God, what if it hadn't rained that day--" She gulped, her hand in mine clenching even as she reflexively looked away.

I didn't particularly want to yell at her again for her carelessness. Actually, all I wanted was for her to examine her own decision in a rational light, and learn from it. I'd gotten so mad out at the construction zone because she'd done the opposite; she'd defended her terrible choice of resting place with comments like It could have happened to anybody and How could I have known...

"It didn't," I soothed her. "It came out all right, my dearest. Don't think of it again, except as a mistake you won't repeat. Now, why don't you get changed for bed? I know you don't like sleeping in your clothes."

"Mortal habit," she sighed, and moved slightly away from me to pull a neatly folded white cotton nightgown from beneath her pillow. "Does that bother you, Santo? That I keep to certain mortal customs, I mean?"

"No, no, of course not," I told her, shaking my head. Actually, her practice of changing for bed was a delightful custom. I liked holding her close when she was wearing something that softly molded to her. I tended to take my rest still in the same clothes I'd worn that night; I changed when I got up. A holdover from my mortal habits, I had to think, for peasants back in my day had possessed no such thing as garments designed only to be slept in. Such extravagance this modern world indulged!

The previous night in Paris she'd lain as far as she could from me -- until the death-sleep overtook her, that was. Then she'd relaxed and in her sleep, moved inch by inch into my arms. Ah, Nathalia... The temptation to drink of her as she slept was actually quite powerful, not that I'd do such a thing to her. There was a word for an act like that. An ugly word, and she'd had cause to throw it at me before.

So I had contented myself with just holding her close. It was small solace, though, for I couldn't forget what she'd said. I hate you.

I had to hope that she'd simply said that in the heat of the moment, that it was more an expression of anger and frustration than of true hate. Her behavior now certainly gave me cause for hope. Ever since the kill --well, since a bit before that, actually,-- she'd been calm and rational and friendly.

And now that she was changed --I'd turned away slightly during that, as she seemed to still have bouts of shyness now and then-- she came into my waiting arms without hesitation and pillowed her head on my shoulder. So long, so very long since she'd approached me so openly.

Not that I believed she wanted to make love, or anything. The past few nights had just been too wrenching for it all to be healed as simply as that. But at least she was willing to be close to me again, and able to call me Santo. It made me feel all the worse that I'd had to deny her the visit home she wanted so very much. And you know, for all she'd apparently accepted my decision, I still didn't think she understood the reasons that underlay them.

"Nathalia," I began in my most conciliatory voice, "I'm sorry about England, I really am. I wish I could let you go there---"

"Shhh." She sleepily reached up and laid a hand across my lips, but she was so near to senselessness that her arm slumped straight down to lie more-or-less against my neck. Smiling a bit, I moved it to my chest where it was more comfortable.

"Let's not fight, Santo," I heard her murmur. "There's no point---"

And then her voice drifted off, and she was gone, lost to dreams.

Spanish dreams, again, as she rambled on to abuelita about the family she had back in Spain. ¿Y mi padre? She asked again. Do you know anything about my father, abuelita? No, no, no, the answer had always been no... or so it was in those dreams that went on and on as I listened.

I sighed, and settled down to sleep, pulling a warm crocheted comforter up over the two of us, and wondered what the next night would bring.

Another round of frustration and discord?

Or maybe, just maybe, a continuation of the fragile peace we'd somehow forged tonight?

I cradled Nathalia close and dropped a tender kiss on her lips, and as I did, I caught a single word that flayed my heart.

Esteban.

Chapter 8: False Confession
________________________________



---Nathalia---

Six more nights I waited, doing nothing to rouse Santino's suspicions.

Nights that fell into a pattern. Hunting together in the early evening, Santino giving me those "pointers" I had claimed to want. Grisly, some of his advice. It was all I could do not to shudder.

But if the purported lessons were bad, the actual kill was far worse... because I enjoyed it, you see. Draining an animal had always been more like a necessary chore. I had to do it, I knew, or I'd end up attacking some poor human later the same night. But it was rather like medicine, in a way. You take it because you have to, because you know it's important, but it's not your favorite thing.

Draining a mortal, though... Ah, it was so sublime and luscious that during the kill itself, I wondered how on earth I ever managed without such blood to fill the empty places inside me. And every time I killed, the experience just got better and better. Rather like experimenting with sex, actually. Pleasures that were mild at first became progressively more intense as my body became accustomed to the daily ebb and flow of the blood rushing into my veins.

But afterwards... oh, afterwards was just terrible, all the more so for knowing how much I had enjoyed flirting with the death as it approached. Not for anything, though, could I display my guilt and regret before my husband. He'd just take them as proof I needed more lessons, more tutoring. So I grit my teeth, even biting the inside of my cheeks to keep my tears at bay after each kill, and I said nothing that could be construed as despondent.

I wasn't exactly upbeat either, of course, but neither did Santino expect me to be. Actually, too much enthusiasm would ring an alarm bell in his head, for he'd see right through it to the tissue of lies beneath.

Calm acceptance or perhaps just resignation, that was the note I wanted to strike.

The one positive thing I can say for hunting with Santino was that at least it was over quickly. In less than an hour we would both be back at the villa, and both fed, for he seemed to think it just as important that I watch him stalk and strike as that I do so myself.

And then, we had the rest of the night for other things.

Playing with Nela, taking her for walks through the fragrant vineyards --she could toddle along quite well by this time--, feeding her a late night snack, watching her gobble up all the yummy mortal food that I could no longer tolerate, then reading her a story and putting her to bed with the stuffed animals Santino showered on her...

Truly, it had been months since I'd been able to spend hours and hours like this. Hours with her, and with Santino too, for he joined in on all these little family tasks, seeming actually to thrive on them.

Well, what I'd said in my note had been no flattery. He'd always been a good daddy to Nela. Too bad he'd had to kill her birth father in order to do it.

Enough of that, don't think on that... but I did.

It was incredible to have so much time with Nela, but it was also hard, because I knew that every minute with my daughter had been purchased at the cost of someone's life. I told myself not to feel guilty; it's not like I was killing people just to be near her. That wasn't the case at all. I was killing humans simply because Santino gave me no option. It was either take the mortal he selected for me, or be force-fed like he'd done to me in Paris.

And anything was better than another round of innocent blood.

So I killed. Every night, and as one evening passed into the next, I felt myself growing ever more strong and confident. I could actually sense my powers of reasoning improve, and I gained a firmer grasp on emotions which had been slippery slopes just a few days earlier.

And probably best of all, I could be near Nela and not feel the thirst at all.

Sometimes, I wished she could stay up all night, but of course I wouldn't really do something so very selfish to her. I put her to bed when she grew tired and crabby. Normally that was around eleven.

Then I had hours and hours of darkness left, and no one to spend it with but Santino.

At first I dreaded those hours, for I expected an endless round of lectures, of I'm-your-maker-and-you-won't-forget-that-again talks. But really, Santino acted like nothing at all was amiss. Friendly companionship, that was what he offered, that and stimulating conversation that avoided any weighty topics. Of my wild flight to England, or my continued desire to travel there, he said not a word. Neither did he wish to discuss anything that had passed between us in Paris.

I could see a question in his eyes, though... Do you really hate me, Nathalia?

It was a question he didn't ask. Just as well, since it was one I couldn't answer. Honestly, I didn't know what I felt, anymore. Sometimes I did hate him. Mostly when I thought about my father, or when I wondered how long it would be before Santino let me hunt alone again.

But sometimes I loved him, too.

Or was it just his kiss that I loved? His touch, his little drinks?

I could have told him no, of course; I knew that he would respect it. But after hours talking with him, or playing chess late at night, or watching the constellations as we listened to the soft harmonies of a Verdi opera on the radio... I guess I felt seduced.

We'd go down to the lair, and he'd hold me close and make me feel safe, and begin to kiss my hair, my mouth, my neck... and I'd just melt. All the discord, the frustration I was tamping down... none of it seemed to matter once he began to make love to me.

Maybe it was another effect of regularly drinking human blood? Or maybe I couldn't blame my responsiveness on anything besides my own weak will. I wanted him, that was the truth. I wanted him to drink of me. The sensation of pouring myself out to him was wonderful, all the more so for my feeling full and healthy and alive, finally.

It wasn't like before my flight to England, when grief, depression and guilt had weighed me down so heavily that I could barely stand for him to touch me. Now, when he slid his fangs into my throat and sipped of me, I didn't think of my kill that night. It was like he had said. Making love was a thing totally distinct from feeding.

I don't know, maybe I was getting used to the killing? Scary thought, that. All I knew for sure was that I felt more relaxed, more at ease than I had in months.

It's the blood, Santino had said. Blood at regular intervals.

Well, maybe he was right.

But even if he was, it didn't make the kill itself right. The minute he let me hunt alone again, I was going to curtail humans. Oh, maybe not so severely as before -- I didn't want to get into another half-crazed state where I couldn't even think straight -- but some. Yes, some. I could get by on animal blood now and then, couldn't I? Of course I could.

But I wasn't looking forward to it, not really.

Six nights passed this way: hunting, hours with Nela and then Santino, and finally, making love.

But after six nights, I could stand to wait no longer.

Thanks to Santino, I no longer had places to go... but I still did have people to see. Or maybe not so much people as person. One person.

Henry Statham, the only father I'd ever had to call my own.



---Santino---

It was certainly wonderful to see Nathalia looking so fit and healthy, and to finally feel that she was becoming more comfortable with the nightly necessity of hunting and killing. I didn't fool myself that she found it easy, of course. I saw the mist of red in her eyes after a kill, and knew she was struggling not to cry.

She was brave, my Nathalia; she always had been. It was one of the things I loved best about her. The ironic thing about our relationship was that I had started off trying to turn her into a mindless thrall -- and now I knew that if I had succeeded, I wouldn't have wanted her for long. The attraction that had flared between us had its roots in her strong personality. Outspoken, obstinate at times, but always herself, that was the Nathalia I'd fallen for.

And oh, she was brave. I knew just how hard it was for her to kill. I didn't count it as cowardice that she had tried her best to resist temptation, to skip meals. It was a natural step for her to take as she struggled to reconcile her feelings about blood from before with her feelings now. The two were bound to be different, and she was working her way forward, slowly coming to terms with it.

I was proud of her, really.

And her bizarre behavior --refusing to let me touch her for so long, running off to England, even neglecting Nela-- all of it was easily attributed to her efforts to avoid the kill. A fledgling vampire can't go long without blood before the deprivation takes its toll on thought as well as body.

Quite simply, Nathalia hadn't been in her right mind when she'd done all those things. Or when she had said that she hated me, for that matter.

Of course, she might well have meant it... right mind or no. I simply couldn't tell. She hadn't said it again, but neither had she told me that she loved me. Those words used to spill off her lips quite frequently, but not anymore.

Obviously, her feelings about the hunt weren't the only ones she was working out.

Why else would she be dreaming of the mortal lover that I'd slain?

Well, for all I didn't much appreciate her dreams, I didn't fool myself into thinking that she could control them. What would be the point in rebuking her for the things that lurked in her subconscious? Or discussing it, even? If she wanted to speak of Esteban to me, she'd do it; Nathalia was that way.

So I said nothing about that dream, or all the ones that followed, morning after morning as I lay beside her and waited for my own rest to approach. Always in Spanish, those dreams, with one word recurring more than all the rest.

Padre.

Father.

Ah, it flayed me, that word. In English, it might have referred to the grey-haired man I'd met in the Lake District, but in Spanish?

Nathalia was speaking for Nela when she said it, speaking in the language of the man who was Nela's natural father. And every so often as she dreamed, she said his name as well.

Esteban.

Was it any wonder that I made passionate love to her each night as dawn began to approach? I wanted to place my stamp on her, my seal. I wanted her thinking of me, dreaming of me.

But she didn't, she dreamed of him.



---Santino---

We'd been back in Italy for something like a week when Nathalia dropped her bombshell.

"Hunt alone again?" I echoed, dumbfounded. Somehow, I had thought she'd gotten over her obsession with not being seen in the midst of a kill. Apparently not, though. Then she spoke again and I realized I was jumping to conclusions.

"Yes," she said, leaning forward as she sat on the sofa, her blue eyes intent on my black ones. For once, her gaze wasn't stormy. Actually, it hadn't been stormy that whole week.

"I have to, don't you see?" she asked, her soft voice thrumming with urgency. "I have to know that I can do it without you there to help me."

I raised an eyebrow. "I don't help you now, I just watch."

"You help," she insisted. "You pick them, every night."

Well, that much was true.

"But I think I've got more a feel for picking them myself, now, even if I can't read minds," she continued, her lips set in a straight, serious line. "I think that's where we went wrong before. You tranced them for me for too long. And then, when I tried to hunt alone, I didn't have any experience in selecting an appropriate kill. But now I do."

"Six nights is not much experience," I disputed. I didn't want to let her go off alone; I liked hunting with her.

"How many of your past fledglings have needed even that long?" she challenged. "The moment they could kill on their own, you let them, didn't you?"

Well, she had me there, I have to admit. Still, I resisted. "Aren't you the one who likes to tell me that these aren't the Dark Ages any more?"

"Some of your ideas back in your coven days were well-founded, even so," she argued. "Because they weren't really based on medieval logic but on simple practicality, on considering what works and what doesn't in this peculiar lifestyle we share."

"Ah," I slowly remarked, wondering if I should seize the opening she'd just handed me. I didn't exactly wish to rub salt into her wounds, but I did have to ascertain where she stood on certain issues, didn't I? Especially if I was considering letting her hunt alone, again.

"And my prohibition against visiting the Lake District, would that be practicality or despotism, in your view?"

She sighed, her gaze all at once cast down, her lips drooping. "Really, il mio marito, I think it's a little bit of both. But I've accepted it, if that's what's worrying you."

My lips quirked slightly, for she was right, you see. My gut reaction not to let her out on her own was intimately tied in with a worry that she'd seize the chance to board another train west -- or find alternate means of travel, ones harder to track.

Ah, Nathalia knew me so very well.

"So what are you saying?" I had to ask. I wanted her to say it, her to make the acknowledgement. Better that than me dragging it out of her.

"England's out of the question," she conceded, looking me in the eyes again. "If you will agree to let me hunt alone, I'll be back within an hour, perhaps two, I promise. I won't try to leave Italy."

"Promise, eh?" I mused. She had broken promises to me before, but those promises had been given under duress in the first place. Better not to throw all that in her face; too much of it would just rebound to slap me straight across mine.

"Yes," she vowed, her voice growing all the more intense. "You were right before, Santo. I wasn't feeding properly. Oh, I wasn't skipping hunts like you thought, but I wasn't getting the full benefit of them, either." Shrugging then, she actually blushed --just a pale pink shade that was in contrast with her usual snowy skin-- and confessed, "I... um, I was..." All at once, she cleared her throat and came out with, "You're going to be so mad, Santo! I don't know how to tell you how badly I messed myself up when I went hunting alone, before..."

Ah, I couldn't stand to see her this way, in what appeared to be fear that she might have disappointed me. Moving swiftly, I left the chair that had faced her and went to sit beside her on the sofa. I pulled her into the hard line of my body, my arm around her communicating love and support, and swore, "All that matters is that you learn from your mistakes, Nathalia, regardless of what they were. And you can tell me anything, absolutely anything, do you understand that? I love you. I just want to see you happy in this life."

She nodded, wiped at a stray tear that had slipped from an eye, and glanced down, irritated at the streak of blood on her hand. She still wasn't used to the fact that she cried blood; I'd seen it disquiet her before. I arched my neck down and to the side so that I could lick off the stain on her face.

"So?" I prompted, and when she still said nothing, went out on a limb and promised, "I won't be mad, Nathalia, all right? I'll just be happy if you tell me, because that means we'll be able to talk it through, work it out, whatever you need."

"Oh, it's already worked out," I heard her murmur, and then her voice grew louder as she admitted, "Um, when I would go hunting alone before, Santo... I didn't exactly do it right."

Now that wasn't news to me, but I wanted to hear what she had been doing, so I made no reply.

Nathalia grimaced, her fangs worrying her lower lip until she started to puncture it. It was a nervous habit she had, one left over from her mortal days when she would use her teeth in the same way. Well, teeth were one thing, but her fangs were as sharp as they were small. I pried her lip free with a gentle flick of my index finger, and questioned her with my eyes.

"All right," she conceded, swallowing hard before she could come out with, "I tried to let them live, Santo. That's why I never looked like I got enough blood."

"You tried to let them live," I slowly repeated. "You mean you were hoping to get by on little drinks?"

"You're raising your voice," she pointed out.

"Sorry," I acknowledged. I'd promised not to get mad, so fine, I wouldn't, but I was concerned. Damned good and concerned. "You're strong enough to pull back after just a little drink, Nathalia?"

"Sometimes," she told me. "Um, but sometimes I would miscalculate and they'd die anyway. I'd come back to the lair and feel so bad, Santo. I knew you were worried about me being depressed, but I couldn't talk to you about it, or you'd find out about my little drinks and put a stop to them."

I thought that over for a moment. It still surprised me that she had the strength to take just sips. Even if she hadn't had good control over the timing, that was still a rather astounding thing for a fledgling, especially one as weak as her. But then again, if anything was certain, it was that the dark blood tended to magnify personality traits that were already in evidence. Louis' persistent depression was a case in point.

Nathalia always had been stubborn. I guess it wasn't that surprising, after all, that she had ended up with the fortitude and the will necessary to manage to pull back from her prey, to try to let it live. Stubbornness, though, wasn't going to make her need any less blood. It was just going to make her suffer for its lack.

"So why are you telling me about this, now?" I asked, intrigued. Really, she was usually more cagey than this. "If you want to hunt alone, tales of your past misdeeds are hardly going to inspire my confidence."

She nuzzled me, her chin moving slowly against the shirt I wore. Not silk, not tonight. A fine Madras cotton weave dyed a deep olive brown. Nathalia had picked the shirt out the night before, had seen it in the window of a closed shop, and had said she wanted to go in and buy it.

No talk of shoplifting, not last night. That alone should tell me that her perspective was changing, that she was finally shaking off some of the useless mortal values she had clung to for the past year.

"But that's just it, don't you see?" she asked. "They're past, those misdeeds. I'm feeling up to the challenge, now. I wasn't before, not really. But now I think I am, and I have to know, Santo. I have to test myself, to prove to myself that I can do it alone and do it right, this time."

That made sense. More sense than I'd heard from her in eons, actually. But still I pressed, "Well, why can't I tag along? I won't interfere, not in the slightest."

"If you're there," she explained, her hand moving to stroke my chest through the shirt, "It'll be like it is, now. I wonder if I'm managing a good kill because I'm performing for you, because I don't want to disappoint you. But I need to know that I can do it for me, because I need to eat and for no other reason."

So soft, her hand tracing the weave of the cool Madras cotton.

"You really like this shirt," I laughed, snatching her hand to my mouth and kissing it. Unable to resist, I grazed her with my fangs, just barely nicking her skin. Mmmm, Nathalia.

"You look delicious, too," she purred, sinuously twisting her body and moving up until she could kiss my neck. Ah, it had been so long since she'd done that. Really, since she was mortal. Then, she used to lick at my skin for hours, even trying to bite me on occasion, because then, she had wanted my blood.

Ever since she'd been my fledgling, though, she'd ostentatiously avoided kissing my neck. I think she thought it would be too suggestive. Since she wasn't ready to drink of me, she didn't want to tease me. It was hard to resent that, since it merely meant she had a care for my feelings.

It was even harder, though, to do without her sweet touch.

"I want you," she moaned, her teeth beginning to graze me, the sensation so exquisite I clutched the back of her neck to hold her to me. "Oh, Santo, just a little, just a drop--"

Suddenly, she pulled back, a slight grimace twisting her features as she reached up to her nape and massaged it. "Ow, Santo. That's sore."

In the heat of passion, I guess I'd tightened my grip too much. Brushing aside her long hair, still damp from her shower, I nodded to myself. Bruises the size of my fingerprints dotted the back of her neck.

I had to be very careful how I handled Nathalia. She was no longer mortal, but she was still quite easy to injure. More of my blood would help with that... but I could see that the moment had passed.

Nathalia was looking away, blushing, uncomfortable. "Sorry," she said.

I bit her wrist, then. One swift bite, one tiny drink. I had to; it was either that or drag her back down to bed, and she had yet to hunt this evening.

"Don't apologize," I told her, my voice rough with unanswered passion. "You kiss me all you like, anywhere you like, Nathalia, even if you're not going to go all the way and drink. I'd prefer that to the reticence you've shown lately, and believe me, I can handle the strain."

"Mmm, I see that," she returned, her gaze directed at her own wrist, watching as the bite mark healed. So slow, that healing. Really, she needed more dark blood.

But how and when she got some... that was up to her.

"You'd better go get yourself fed," I told her. After all, a steady diet of human blood would also increase her strength... just more slowly. Far more slowly.

"Alone?" she asked, black eyebrows raised in expectation.

"Your reasons are sound enough," I acknowledged. "And so is, I think, your promise. Don't go farther than the outskirts of Milan, all right? Come back fast. If you take too long, I may end up having a heart attack."

"We don't suffer from heart attacks," she laughed, all good humor restored at the prospect of getting her way.

"You think not?" I questioned, grabbing her hand and laying it across my chest, right over the place where my heart thudded slow and strong. "I do suffer, Nathalia, deep in my heart, whenever I think you aren't adjusting to this life. So come back fast, nice and plump and full of a healthy kill, and put me out of my misery."

"I thought you meant I should come back soon because otherwise, you'd believe I'd gone to England," she confessed, glancing at me from beneath her lashes.

"I trust you more than that," I told her, "especially now that you seem to be thinking rationally again. About England, and everything else."

She smiled softly, and leaned forward to unbutton my shirt, just a bit. Then she kissed the front of my throat, trailing her tongue down towards the wiry hair scattered on my chest.

Then she was jumping up to stand. A slight sheen of blood-sweat coated her hands; she yanked a handkerchief from the pocket of her snug jeans and wiped her skin clean, then shoved the cloth back down into her pocket. I guess she thought she might need it later, to clean up after her kill.

"You knew I'd let you go," I lightly accused, waving a hand toward her attire. "No dress tonight, eh? No skirt? You knew you'd be alone, you dressed for a solo hunt. Nice, sturdy clothes."

Nathalia shrugged. "If you're not there to help me, it just seemed sensible. I'll go now, then?"

I waved an expansive hand towards the terrace; it ended in steps that led down to the vineyard.

Shaking her head, Nathalia said, "I don't want to go on foot, not tonight. I'll take the car, if you don't mind?"

Why would I mind? I'd taught her to drive myself, as soon as we arrived in Italy. In fact, I'd been mildly horrified that she didn't know how. I didn't often use the skill, but I considered it indispensable in the modern world. Especially for one such as her, since she couldn't take to the air on her own. She even had a driving license -- a clever forgery I'd arranged for her, since she could hardly present herself to the authorities during business hours for the appropriate tests and authorizations.

But she drove well enough. Never mind that she'd not taken the requisite examinations. I trusted my own judgment far more than that of some mortal paper-pusher, anyway.

"You'll be back sooner in the car," I agreed. "Sounds good."

A happy bounce in her step, she fished the keys out of the drawer where we kept them, then stepped back toward me.

Bending down to where I still sat, she dropped a light kiss atop my lips. "See you in a hour, then," she murmured. "Maybe two."

"All right," I agreed. "Be good, Nathalia. Don't try to let them live. You know that's not good for one as young as you are."

"Oh, I know," she softly returned. "I know what's good for me, Santo."

And then she was gone, but she wasn't out of my sight for long. You see, I also knew what was good for her. My mistake before had been to let her hunt alone before she was truly prepared to face the stress it entailed for a fledgling as sensitive as she was. I couldn't know that she was really ready to face that stress now, except by watching how she managed it.

How she lured a victim, how she killed, how she handled the necessary tasks afterwards, the tasks that insured no one would realize a vampire had touched and ended a mortal life.

Her points tonight were well-taken, of course; it wasn't like I didn't give weight to what she had said. She needed to build confidence, yes. But to do that didn't require that she hunt alone, she just needed to believe she was alone.

And she would.

It would be a simple enough matter to stay beyond the range of her sight and hearing as I followed her. She took the car; I took to the air.

And just as I had promised her back in Paris, I didn't let her out of my sight.

Not for one instant.

And as I followed her that night, I could hardly believe what I saw her do, but I had to believe it. There it was, right before my eyes.

Evidence, at last.

Proof positive of what she got up to when I let her go off on her own. So she knew what was good for her, did she?

I gnashed my teeth, and followed the car back to the villa.

Chapter 9: On Her Own
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---Nathalia---

Stupid I wasn't, especially not after the steady diet of human blood I'd enjoyed for over a week. Dear God, enjoyed was right...

Well, I couldn't think about that, not now, when he was watching. I knew Santino well enough to know that he would follow me. I was actually sort of counting on it. Part of the plan, you might say. Yes, before I was through, I was going to convince him once and for all that I had no problem killing.

And then, he'd let me hunt without hovering over me like some dark guardian angel.

I took the car down the winding dirt road away from the villa and turned onto the two-lane highway that would take me into Milan. Really, the car wasn't necessary -- I could run at speeds that rivaled a mere automobile. But I wanted to save my energy for the hunt.

I'd need it, with what I intended to do.

Back streets, dingy alleys, down into the heart of the the city, the part that tourists didn't see, that's where I went. By then, I knew Milan quite well. It was easy to pick an area where criminals ranged free, where I could be certain I wouldn't accidentally take innocent blood. I had to go by instinct, tonight.

With Santino watching --he was back about a block, now, I thought-- I couldn't possibly go back to my habit of letting myself get beaten half to death before I struck. Sure, that method was good for ferreting out genuine killers, or at the very least the type of human slime that liked to prey on women, but there was no way Santino would approve, was there?

Well, I hated to take the risk of killing someone whose crimes hadn’t been quite so heinous, but for tonight I had little choice but to go forward. When Santino wasn’t watching, I’d go back to the methods I was more comfortable with.

Although, recent nights had taught me that I’d be foolish to go so long between humans, again. I’d still feed off animals when I could --yech-- but I wouldn’t try to do it quite so exclusively.

Him.

It was almost like I heard Santino in my mind, doing what he’d done over the course of the past week: picking out my prey for me. Of course, that was impossible. Maker and fledgling, we would never share thoughts again, except (I thought), during the circle of blood.

And honestly, there was no guarantee that we’d ever do that.

Sure, I’d found myself genuinely tempted this evening; I had wanted to drink from him. Quite desperately, really. There’d been no manipulation, no artifice in my desire. It was pure, honest, unadulterated lust.

Nothing new in that. Santino always had known how to get to me at a primal, physical level that was difficult to deny. Ah, but I had certainly tried, back in those early days together…

But all those feelings were so rooted in the physical that it was difficult to trust them, let alone act on them. I mean, I didn’t know what I really felt towards him. In Paris, I’d been sure I hated him. Now, the only thing I was sure of was that I didn’t like the way he seemed to regard me. Not his mortal pet, not anymore… but still someone to direct, someone to control.

We weren’t equals, that was the crux of the matter. If we were, he’d let me make my own decisions, let me make my own mistakes; he’d allow me to be myself instead of some extension of his lifestyle.

He said that I was running true to form, but I had to think the same could be said of him. For when had he ever let me be myself? From the first instant of my captivity, he’d tried to mold me into the image he preferred, even changing my name to the one he wanted me to bear.

Nathalia.

Well, I’d gotten used to it, so much so that I went for months without thinking of how that really wasn’t my name, but lately I’d started to think on that more and more. My real name was important; I was sure of it. In fact, I knew it. My whole life, I’d been told that my Spanish mother had insisted on her deathbed that I be given the name she’d chosen. And my parents, good Catholics, had kept the solemn vow they’d taken as she had died.

Yes, my real name had been vitally important to my birth mother. I just didn’t quite know why. As names went, it was English, nondescript, and rather lowbrow, the truth be told.

But at least it was truly mine.

Nathalia -- now as lovely and exotic as that sounded, it was more or less a slave name to me, wasn’t it? Given to me when I was but a thing to him, a thing he was determined to train and discipline until I would never dare defy him.

And look at what I was doing tonight -- bending beneath his dictates once again, hunting like a killer instead of the reluctant vampire I truly was, giving up my dream of going to England.

Him, Santino’s voice came again. A memory, only, but I heeded it. I had to, because if I couldn’t go to see my father, I was going to bring my father to see me. And for that, I needed time alone. Time completely alone. So that meant it was time now, time to convince Santino that I was well and truly able to hunt, feed, and kill all by my lonesome.

I rushed the man I’d selected, dragged him away from the dimly lit streets into the corner of a disused building, and without the slightest prelude, latched my claw like fingernails into his arm as I sank my teeth deeply into his jugular.

Blood, fountains of blood, streaming down my throat, and along with the liquid came the special ecstasy that I’d grown more and more used to this past week. Clutching him fiercely, I drew strong draughts, drinking him in without hesitation, draining him dry, dropping him a husk but a few seconds away from death.

A perfect kill, really. Or at least a textbook one.

Thank God I’d sensed no trace of innocence in him, or I probably couldn’t have managed to give Santino such a good show.

As it was, I was reeling with the fresh blood, so much so that it was difficult to deal with the body, but I managed it. Couldn’t have my maker accusing me of not cleaning up after myself, could I?

Back to the car, still staggering, I all but dragged myself. When had I ever tasted such blood, had such blood? Oh God, it was incredible. Not just delicious, and filling, and all those things that human blood always was, but it was so rife with sensation and life experiences, so richly detailed with them, that I felt entirely consumed. Yet at the same time, I wanted more, wanted to feed yet again.

It was overpowering, that blood, truly.

Maybe it had to do with finally picking my prey myself, instead of letting Santino do it, or --as I had before-- waiting for the victim to come to me? Was that it? Had I just acted as a vampire, for the first time fully and completely?

I’d never felt like this. So ferocious. Rapacious. Ah, predatory, that was the word. I’d never, ever felt so predatory after a kill. Or before, for that matter.

It wasn’t what I wanted to feel; it wasn’t what I wanted to be.

But I couldn’t seem to control it, let along stop it. And that, as it turned out, was rather unfortunate for the two men who approached me as I wove my way back to Santino’s black Mercedes. I suppose that I looked drunk, that I looked like an easy mark. Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was in a mood to kill like never before.

A predatory mood. One that I would be ashamed of… later. At the time I couldn’t move past it, I could only indulge it.

So when one of the men reached out an arm for me and made some lewd comment about how a pretty girl like me should really show off her assets more, I overreacted. All I need have done was pull free and walk away, possibly knocking the men out of my path if they tried to obstruct me.

What I did, though, was turn on both of them, fangs bared, claws at the ready, and with preternatural speed, rip out both their throats with my bare hands. Mmmm, more blood. Most of theirs was wasted, of course, spilled all over the pavement. Ripping out a throat is incredibly messy business. Still, the taste, the smell had me slurping up as much of it as I could as it sprayed in all directions.

And then, of course, I had two more bodies to deal with, the corpses in horrific condition. Nobody was going to speculate that these two had died in their sleep! It was carnage, pure and simple, that had descended on them. I was still high on blood-lust, though, so I didn’t feel too troubled as I threw their bodies into a dumpster and kicked some dirt over the patches of blood on the street.

Looking down at myself, I realized I looked a sight. Blood all over my clothes, I mean. Well, I didn’t much care if Santino saw me like that --he’d seen me already, of course; he was still back there watching. But I really didn’t want to get blood all over the slick leather interior of his car. Better to get some new clothes, I thought. Besides, if Santino saw me adopting his values in regards to helping myself in the stores, it would probably just make him think me more fit to prowl the night alone.

I ran quickly, turning down several streets until I reached the sort of shop I wanted. Now, I couldn’t make the door unlock as could Santino --I had no telekinetic abilities whatsoever-- but nobody was around as I clenched a fist and drove it through a plate glass window, then reached inside and opened the door the good, old-fashioned way: with my hand.

No alarm went off, but that was no great shock. I’d picked a little establishment. A modest family business, not an upscale boutique.

In the total darkness inside, I quickly flipped through rows of jeans until I found some black denim jeans in my size, and then I picked a long sleeve shirt to match. All black, the classic color for the vampire. Santino’s favorite color, too, although at my insistence he’d begun wearing some other dark hues a couple of years back.

Ironic, that I would kill like that and then feel like decking myself out like walking death. Or maybe not so ironic, at that. Maybe it was just natural.

Looking back, I have to conclude that I was still riding high on the bounty of fresh blood in my system. That I was reveling, for once, in the sheer experience of being a vampire, that I was indulging it to the fullest, even to the point of dressing the part.

Somehow, though, all that didn’t free me from the mortal habit, the constraint, of going to the dressing room to change!

When I came out --still wearing the same shoes, as they’d escaped the bloodletting out on the street,-- I stuffed my stained clothes into a shopping bag and fished out some lire from the pocket that I’d transferred my money to. I paid double the clothes’ value, and then added on a sum that would more than compensate for the damage to the door.

Then I was down the street, winding my way back to the Mercedes. The bloody clothes, I figured, would best be taken back to the villa and burnt. No chance of anyone linking them to the murders that way, or to me.

Murders.

The blood I’d drunk began to slow in my veins as it was absorbed and integrated more fully into my own blood. And as the exhilaration of the kills faded, in came more familiar feelings to swamp me. I’d killed tonight; I hadn’t just fed. Murders was the right word.

Gripping the steering wheel more tightly, I pushed the word away. I couldn’t dwell on it, couldn’t allow myself to get maudlin. Not tonight. Santino would be home before me, and when I saw him next, I had to play the scene just right.

I had to be comfortable killing, not just during the hunt, but afterwards as well. All night long, and into the morning.

And then maybe, just maybe, my brooding maker would think me fit to have an hour or two truly to myself.



---Santino---

Of all the things I’d expected to see tonight, a fierce killer hadn’t been one of them. I was proud of her as I watched her take the first man. No hesitancy there, just a clean, controlled kill. I couldn’t have asked for more.

Things started to go wrong, though, when those two thugs came up to her and spewed out the first of what would no doubt be many snide, sexually charged remarks. I knew that Nathalia could defend herself perfectly well, so I let her. I thought that she would simply push them aside, or scare them enough to make them leave her alone.

Instead, she killed them both right there on a public street, and how she did it -- well, let’s just say that her technique lacked a fine edge of subtlety. No, no, let’s say more! The truth be told, it was a massacre of two!

It wasn’t at all like Nathalia.

Killing because she had to, because her hunger gave her little option, that was one thing. But this wanton destruction of life? It concerned me, it really did. Not because I condemned it -- I didn’t. The way I saw things, mortals were fair game.

But she didn’t see things the way I did; that was the crux of the matter. For her to kill so viciously… actually, for her to kill when it wasn’t necessary… it had to mean that she was out of control for some reason, or at least that she was disturbed deep inside.

Or maybe both. Focusing my vision, even from a block away I could see the expression in her eyes. Bloodlust, yes; she was still drunk on the first kill. Not drunk from alcohol in his blood, but from the blood itself. Ah, yes, I remembered the feeling of being a freshly filled fledgling. It was rather disconcerting until one got used to it. But Nathalia was a year old, now. She should be used to it.

But there was more than bloodlust in her eyes as she killed those men. There was hatred, too. Raw, open hatred of all men, that was what I saw her acting on. Actually, though, she’d been acting on it throughout the past year. She’d taken only men, all along, except for the nice young girl I’d fed her.

And in her hatred, she was less than careful. Baring her fangs on a public street where anyone could see? The two men didn’t count, of course, as they would be dead in moments. But anyone else who saw --including any woman-- would have to be dispatched at once. There was no other way, since Nathalia wasn’t able to spellbind onlookers and tell them to forget what they’d seen.

But she was so unaware of her own behavior that she didn’t even check around to verify who had seen her little display.

There was one. A prostitute young in years --only twenty-two-- but already aged in spirit, already waning in her will to live. She saw it all. The bared fangs, the fingernails ripping open the throats of two strong men, Nathalia dragging the bodies close to drink first of one, then the other, blood coating the pavement.

She saw it all, and Nathalia never even noticed, so lost was my beauty in some sort of frenzy of lust and hatred. Nathalia didn’t even hear the woman’s screams. And that was dangerous. To disregard all propriety and kill openly in the presence of onlookers? Well, I suppose that was fine just so long as a vampire afterwards feasted on any witnesses as well.

But to not so much as check for witnesses?

That, more than anything else told me that the blood had sent my Nathalia spinning out of control.

As she ran off, it was up to me to handle the shocked prostitute. I could have spellbound her, but the scent of all that blood --not to mention the sight of Nathalia feeding on the first man-- had spiked my own hunger, so I took her instead. When I threw her body in with those of the two men, I saw the sloppy job Nathalia had done of dealing with them. Bite marks were visible, several of them, as were crescent-shaped wounds made by her fingernails. Obvious, too obvious. I took care of it.

And I hastily rifled through their wallets, taking what money and identification they had, the better to confuse the authorities about exactly what had happened here, tonight. I’d told Nathalia to do that no end of times, but she didn’t like to. She called it stealing… as if her victims had further use for money! Actually, she didn’t ever take the money, but she had learned to remove identification -- usually.

But not tonight.

Then I was running too, following Nathalia, my much quicker pace overtaking hers just as she broke into a store.

Nathalia, breaking into a shop? I didn’t know whether to applaud or become more concerned. She wasn’t acting like herself, that was all I really knew.

I waited in the deep shadows outside until my wife came out wearing black from head to toe. At that I shook my head. How much more out of character could she act? She’d chided me no end of times for my relentless black. And now she was adopting it?

I gnashed my teeth, frustrated.

So Nathalia could hunt and kill on her own. That much was evident, but I still had cause for concern. She was disturbed, no question about it.

And so was I, because she really wasn’t yet fit to hunt alone, and I knew what that meant.

Once she got back to the villa, we were going to have an almighty row.