TURNING POINT
by Zigi Blum, 1995
zigif@aol.com

Casual Disclaimer:  This story was written ONLY for the enjoyment of
myself and my friends. No remuneration is ever expected or will be
accepted, and in no way does the author wish to infringe on the copyrights
of Anne Rice, her publishers, or anyone else.

****

Introductory note: This is set in Illinois long about 1959, and answers
two questions I had: What would Louis do if he did gain telepathic
ability, and what would Armand look like in a motorcycle jacket?

Turning Point: A Fragment From the Lost Years
Ziggy Blum

He was the only thing moving in the little dull prairie town, a smallish,
stocky youth of perhaps seventeen or eighteen.  He wore a still-new
leather motorcycle jacket, moving his shoulders a little under its welcome
but unfamiliar weight.  His dark hair, a little long for the fashion, was
greased and slicked back, his thumbs were hooked in his pockets, and he
walked with the cocky self-assurance of a boy who fought and won his
fights.  This was his town, and he was its hero, something of a heller,
but he was sure of the love of many: young women thought he was brave and
exciting, and old women smiled motherly over him. The young men envied
him, and in him the old men saw something of themselves. He knew, or
thought he knew, that he could go anywhere, would someday, quit the job at
the meat packing plant--its scent, faint and nauseating, was everywhere in
the town--and go to the city, to Chicago, and be as much a hero there as
he was here.

I knew all this in the instant I saw him, from where I stood with Armand
in the shadow of a druggist's doorway across the deserted street,
intersected by the alley through which the boy was walking.  Armand wanted
him; I knew that as well.  I felt him silently expand beside me as he drew
an appreciative breath.

Completely unaware of us, the boy purposefully crossed the street, lips
briefly purple and skin blue under the single streetlight, and then passed
into the alley on the other side.  Armand glided after him with feline
grace, head raised like one who follows a seductive scent, and I, caught
in their wake, drifted after them.

The boy turned to glance over his shoulder as Armand's shadow interrupted
the light, and he startled and whirled.  At first his face was surprised,
then his eyes narrowed, taking in Armand's lithe, small form, his long
hair.  The boy raised one lip in a sneering smile, tossing his head back
and resting his weight negligently on one hip, hands in his pockets to
demonstrate his contempt.  He knew with utter, erroneous confidence that
he had nothing to fear from the slender and, to his eyes, effeminate
newcomer.

But despite his arrogance it was already too late.  Armand walked very
close to him, and the boy's face grew puzzled.  His eyes closed as the
vampire's fingers wandered delicately over his youthfully rounded cheek,
his chin, then down his body to slip the motorcycle jacket from his
shoulders so it fell to the pavement with a soft whump.  Then Armand's
hand hooked lightly over his shoulder, drew him close as if to whisper a
secret in his ear; the boy jerked and struggled, the sound of his
scuffling heels loud in the deep quiet.  

I turned away, not particularly interested in the kill, but suddenly I was
surrounded with Armand; his cavernous need was inside me, and his pleasure
at the kill.  I felt the boy in my arms, the sweetness of his life as it
passed from him to me, and, beyond the familiar need, some great aching
void, malignant and monstrous. They were not my feelings at all.  I
struggled against the intrusion as best as I could, overwhelmed and
repelled, sickened by the sense of invasion. Worst of all, I felt the
boy's mind, his memories, his suffering.  Armand threw them at me, but
they were already there; it would take all my strength to close them out,
and under the attack from Armand I had no chance, no choice. 

Armand drank, as always, with terrible grace, standing poised and
straight, unmoving, as the boy's struggles weakened, and his hands
fluttered down his murderer's slender back.  There was a peaceful moment
again, and then Armand let the boy fall, his body crumpling backwards with
a heavier whump than the jacket had made.

I found I had slumped against the wall, gasping; my own hunger had closed
like a wire around my heart.  "Armand," I said, astonished; whether I had
it in mind to scold him or plead with him, I'm not sure.

But he wasn't finished.  For a moment he stood frozen, looking down at the
dying boy, his face as serene and beautiful as a marble angel's in a
cemetery.  Then one arm came to life, lifted a hand to check his perfect
lips for wetness with slender fingers; his head tilted as if he were
thinking, or listening.  He ignored me entirely.

He stooped to tug the jacket out from under the body and looked at it,
smiling. Then he stripped off his shirt and shrugged the jacket on.  

Stooping, he pulled the boots from the flaccid corpse, then the blue
jeans. He exchanged the pants and shoes he was wearing with those of the
boy, heaving the body here and there, dropping the flopping limbs into or
out of sleeves and pantlegs with the ease of his terrific strength. 

Clothing had to come from somewhere, although I had never taken it from
the body of a victim, the distasteful rinds we leave behind.  But there
was something obscene in Armand's actions; it occurred to me he had killed
this boy out of some unformed desire to change places with him; the boy
whose town this was, who had walked the empty streets as if he owned the
place, had belonged here, belonged somewhere. 

Armand was searching his new pockets.  From the front pocket of the blue
jeans he withdrew several small, square, creased packets; latex condoms.
He smiled at me as he scattered them, an absent, unnatural smile.  

"Armand," I said again, at last.  

He casually sifted through the wallet, dropping money and slips of paper
as if looking for something specific, but at last he let it fall, followed
by a bunch of keys, some matches, a handful of change... a pack of
cigarettes and a comb from a jacket pocket followed.  At last he drew out
a little jar; his hand twitched as if to toss it away, but then he paused
and opened it, sniffing.  With another glance in my direction, he dug out
some of the greasy stuff the jar contained and worked it into his hair,
combing it back off his broad forehead with the little black comb which he
retrieved from where it had fallen on the breast of the corpse.  He wiped
his palms on his thighs and turned to look at me.

It was grotesque, this creature looking at me almost shyly as if wanting
my approval, like some girl trying on a new dress.  

Even more grotesquely, I smiled at him. 

He looked well in the jacket and jeans.

He smiled back at me warmly, pleased.  "Come on," he said, started to walk
past me.

"But the body."

"Leave it," he said with belated distaste. "We'll be gone soon."

"No, the town is too small.  They might be on us before tomorrow night.
We'll take it to the river."

His face was flushed and animated from the kill, radiant with heat, and he
was redolent with the boy's scent which perfumed the leather jacket.  He
searched my face with satisfaction. "We'll come back when you've fed,
then," he said softly. "You're hungry."

"Why did you--"

"It was a gift," he said, shortly.  "I meant it as a gift.  If you take no
pleasure in anything, I thought I might give it to you by force."

"Armand, there was as much pain as pleasure in what you gave me."

"If that's so, it's your fault," he said.  He glanced around the alley
quickly, as if looking for a means of escape. 

"But it was your pain."

"Yes!" he snapped, whirling to face me again.  The sudden anger and the
intensity of his gaze reminded me sharply of Lestat.  "Because you are a
weakling with no more substance than that boy I killed.  You are like some
kind of ghost, you call to death as if it were a dog you admired. It leaps
around your heels, but it never bites!  There is no solidity to you,
Louis, and no heart!  What gives you such power when you have no strength?
You are a travesty, and you are all I have! I have no choice!"

Almost I grew angry, but found myself suddenly weary instead. "Neither do
I. I was made as I am, Armand. There's no remaking me."

Armand was silent for a moment, then his head tilted inquisitively, his
brittle anger forgotten. "But that's not true, Louis.  You are as you are
because the one who made you had spent himself on others too soon before.
Didn't you know?"

Others before me. I hadn't known, and why it shocked me I didn't
understand.  But I knew I wanted to hear no more of it, and nothing of
Lestat.  

Armand stood looking at me with his frozen stillness, his eyes bright, a
small smile curving his lips as if my amazement pleased him. "Yes," he
said softly, and flowed a step closer to me, all grace and strength, like
a panther.  "Your master cheated you. Stronger blood would give you
greater strength. Would you have it?"

One of the things that had once drawn me to Armand was how he listened to
me, with that hunger, seizing my words and the expressions of my face and
body and devouring them for all their substance. Lestat had never listened
to me; Claudia transmuted everything I had ever said into her own context;
she knew nothing of my feelings, or anyone else's.  But now Armand's
interest was a pressure on my heart, and his hunger for me an unfillable
emptiness.  He wanted so much, and I had nothing at all.

"No," I say with an effort. "I still think you're wrong.  There was power
there, but it fell on dry soil. Stronger blood would make me a greater
travesty. Leave it alone."

His face never changed, but his next words were, "Defend yourself." 
Simultaneously his hand flashed out, dealing me a staggering blow to the
temple.  I blocked the next blow, and the next, but the last sent me
reeling against the wall, gasping in pain.  In my mind's eye is a vision
of Armand and Santiago fighting thus,  Armand husbanding the other's
talent, which was bitter anger and jealousy, until at last he could direct
it at me, and thus, indirectly, take that vitality into himself.  Whether
this vision is from Armand or my own imagination I'm too dazed to tell.
But it rings true: I had fought Santiago for Armand's affections, and had
not known it.  It had been Armand from the very beginning.

His serene expression hadn't changed. He touched my face lightly now,
stroking my cheek with a single finger. "And you would have no power
greater? I can open the minds of your victims to you."

The pain faded rapidly, as it always does.  I was vaguely surprised he
didn't know that what he spoke of had happened to me without his help. But
then I think, perhaps he does; this is probably just another game.  "What
makes you think I would want such a thing?" I asked without looking at
him, nursing the healing bruise on my jaw. "Isn't it terrible enough to
hear their cries, see them struggle?"

His smile broadened.  "Yet you are stronger than when I met you."

"Yes. You've taught me that much. But for what? To be another sacrifice to
yourself? I would be a worthless offering, Armand."  

He tossed his head back and regarded me down his small nose, his slight
weight resting on one hip like the boy stood whose jacket he wears. "I
don't understand what you mean."

"This is not the age it was; I'm as lost here as you. Look at you, the
hair, the clothes. You're more at home in this time than I. You would give
me your blood, Armand? Why?"

"You don't know?"

"It's late," I say. I didn't want to hear any more. He can tell me nothing
of his desires, no more than Lestat ever could. I've been beaten and
tormented; the hunger is unbearable; the kill is the only solace.  "We've
said enough. I have to feed."  

I turned to leave the alley, and unexpectedly Armand stopped me, his hands
resting lightly on my shoulders, but I could feel the lethal strength in
the slender, gently-gripping fingers.  "Louis," he whispered softly, his
breath stirring the hair on the back of my head.  "My jewel." Slowly his
body pressed mine, the bare chest against my back.  His heart beat heavily
against me.  "Santiago knew," he continued, his whisper so soft now that
it no longer disturbed my hair, his cheek with its stolen warmth against
my shoulder.  "'This one interests me,' I told him. 'Bring him to me.' 
That's why he hated you. He knew I would love you, that you would take me
away from him."

"I took everything away from him." *As you took everything from me.*

I heard the quick intake of breath through teeth.  "You can be so fierce;
you are like a soldier, sad and fierce..."

A soldier with neither enemy nor cause, as purposeless as that.  I leaned
back into him, into his pounding heart and demanding hands, which slid
down across my chest as I moved, trapping me against him.  As I turned my
head to look at him, he leaned to meet my gaze, head tilting to peer over
my shoulder because he was smaller than I, lips slightly parted. I gazed
into the beautiful empty darkness of his eyes, but there was nothing
there, only hollowness and hunger. 

I shuddered, and he let me go, smiling like an angel, but there was irony
in the smile, and defeat.

I too felt defeated: to welcome the embrace of such a thing, to embrace
such a thing as me...

The hunger drew me away from him, and he didn't follow.  I knew where the
boy Armand took was headed; I had seen it in his mind, and, as  Armand had
done, I took some of him and began to trace the steps he had intended to
take, leaving his corpse and his killer behind me in the narrow,
brick-lined alley.

A quarter of a mile outside the town, in a secluded clearing of the
sparse, narrow wood that ran on either side of the highway,  I found the
girl, seventeen or eighteen years old, leaning against a tree, alert,
anxious, looking fixedly down the path.  Her narrow face was pale and
hard, dark blonde hair skinned back in a tight ponytail, eyebrows
attenuated to a thin severe line, skin clean and shiny.  She leans against
the tree because she's been drinking, needing courage in preparation for
her lover.  Her arms are crossed tightly beneath breasts encased in a
brassiere that forms them into hard cones; she shivers in the coolness of
the trees in her thin pink sweater. She's frightened by their trysts, in
fear of pregnancy and discovery, in great young naive love. I move in
plain sight, but quietly, slightly out of her line of vision.  I feel
myself softly amused at her blindness and anxiety, and I feel a warm
anticipation, as if I were indeed her lover come to startle her.  Kevin is
late, she's thinking. Kevin's always late.   

It will be infinitely easier to kill her than it would be to tell her what
became of the boy she's waiting for.  I knew him, now I know her. How can
I kill when I know who they are, and know in full what it is I am taking
from them? And what other choice is there?

I am standing only two or three feet away when finally she turns and
jolts. "Jesus-God, Kevin!" She begins. "You-- Jesus." Her hard, shallow
little face is suddenly so beautiful in its alarm that I take an
involuntary breath.  She doesn't move when I reach out and gently take her
shoulders, and when I pull her close she moves willingly.  

I've done this so naturally, enchanted her, hypnotized her, in my hunger
and desire, and it's so horrible a thing.  Her thin arms are around my
neck, her body pliant against me, welcoming me, welcoming death without
even the knowledge of what it is she welcomes, looking into my eyes with
love and desire that I do not deserve and do not want.  Once I had thought
preying on humans to be the depth of damnation, but this, this rape of the
mind and will, is infinitely worse.  I can't make it stop; all I can do is
end it quickly.

She stiffens against me and makes the single syllable, "Ah!"  and that is
all, save for struggling breath and the sound of her heart.  And then that
too is silent.  

I let her fall and sit for a moment on the leaf-carpeted ground, dizzy
with my satiation and her drunkenness.  And when the dizziness is gone,
the pleasure also has gone.  

It was one of those moments that seem unendurable, as if I must die, but
of course that doesn't happen.  It would have been a blessed relief to
tell this to Lestat and have him snarl at my foolishness, but there is
only Armand, who would snatch my meaning from me and, like a black-backed
mirror,                                                                   
                                reflect back nothing, nothing, only the
need for more...

It had been nearly two hundred years, now, of one or the other: Lestat,
who threw back in my face each moment of friendship or happiness I tried
to share with him, and then blamed me for my coldness; Claudia, who
thought everything was her due and yet appreciated nothing; and now
Armand, who seems tonight like a leech at my very heart.  And I must go
back to him. Dawn is coming. 

I understood Lestat better now, the weakness I had taken for cruelty, and
the vulnerability that cruelty had disguised.  I understood his absurd,
lavish gifts to me bought with my own money, his insults.  And tonight I
would give anything to have them back, but again, there it is: I have
nothing to give.

I returned slowly toward the crumbling building where our coffins were
concealed, an empty factory. What it once manufactured I have no way of
telling; there were marks in the concrete floor where heavy machinery once
was, but the building was empty now, and drifts of leaves had piled in the
corners under broken black windows.  The railroad we came in on ran
nearby, by the factory's long-disused loading dock.

I hesitated outside the building, but finally I walked on past.  There
were no formulated thoughts in my mind; I simply could not live through
another night such as this one. In the woods far past the abandoned
factory I stood, head bowed, and let the dawn come.



The pain began long before the sun rose, a tingling, burning, and finally
a searing pain in my skin and hands, terrible light scalding my eyes and
brain.  I found myself grasping a tree, the bark crumbling in my grip,
holding myself steady against the barrage.  

The blood-tears raced down my face from scalded eyes, the blood-sweat
sprang out all over my body, and I was shaking, more than shaking,
fighting to hold still against the almost unendurable urge to save myself,
hide, seek gentle darkness. "Burn, you bastard!" I heard myself gasping. 

And it was the strangest feeling, as if I were fighting with an enemy: I
will kill you unless you do my bidding.  Only I am the enemy, and yet I am
myself.  Soon I was writhing on the ground, no longer able to stand,
screaming in a voice I had never heard before, the sound of a soul in
hell, and I realized at last that I was going to die: fire is the only
remedy for the sin that runs in me as deep as the marrow of my bone...

But I had accepted sin, hadn't I, accepted it the second I opened my lips
and tasted Lestat's blood: it is the ultimate sin of drinking not only the
blood but the soul that I cannot accept.  

The sun had not yet risen over the horizon, and yet I was all but
unconscious, drained of strength, my skeleton on fire.  The first true ray
would utterly destroy me...  But now I knew that at least there was a
limit to my acceptance of sin, there was a limit;  and for all the pain it
felt good, and clean, and right.

My last conscious thoughts were of Claudia, of how she and Madeleine must
have suffered, and of Lestat, dancing in the flames...


And so it was astonishing, amazing, to awake, with coolness all around me,
gentle and pleasant on the tender skin of my face and hands.  But the
coolness was close and tight; I could not move. Then came the panic: I am
in hell; I cannot open the coffin; again I am trapped in the wall in the
Theatre des Vampires, or something terrible awaits outside --

I burst out of a shallow grave into the silence of the young, spindly
trees of the little wood, scattering earth, and the only sound was my own
ragged breathing.

Blue light filtered down through the naked branches; the sun had just set.
Unusual, astonishing, but I'd been returned to life by terrible hunger; 
by far the most desperate hunger I had ever felt.  I can't pause to think
about what has happened: I must feed NOW!

The faint cobalt-colored twilight stitched my skin with renewed pain, but
it lessened rather than growing worse, and I was in far too much need to
let the light stop me. 

The first living thing I happened upon was doomed: a vagrant sleeping near
the tracks. He had no time to wake before I was on his throat, and it was
afterward, sitting trembling but breathing a little more easily by the
little stream below the town, that I realized there had been no whisper,
no murmur of his mind in mine, only the pure, acute sweetness of the
blood.

The dawn had left no mark on me: I must have dug my grave before the sun
actually rose above the horizon.  My hands were still shrivelled with
hunger, but through I was flayed and cross-hatched by pain I could see
that my skin was still white and unscarred. And the pain faded still more
as the vagrant's blood brought life back to the depleted tissues.  

Eventually, as reason returned, I began to wonder how long I had been
under the earth: one night or many nights? My skin was unburned: had it
scarred and healed, or had I really hidden myself before visual damage was
done? My clothes were filthy, encrusted with earth and blood, but they
were intact; I could not have been long in my grave, not months or years.
But days, perhaps; or weeks. I had heard of such things happening to
injured vampires. 

Where was Armand? Had he gone? Or was he looking for me? I listened for
him inside myself, but, wonderfully, heard nothing.  I was alone now, as I
had not been for many months, alone in body and mind, and it was pleasant.
 I could think and hear again, and for a little while I sat, mind empty,
and listened to the sound of the little shallow stream as it chuckled over
its rocky bed, and felt a sense of peace, and stillness, and immeasurble
gratitude.  

Also, I felt oddly giddy, relieved, almost triumphant.  Could it be that I
had struck a new bargain with the devil?

Not altogether new, no: I was still ravening, and the need for blood would
not let me sit idling in the woods for long.  But I would not go back to
the town where Armand might still be waiting, not yet.  I left the narrow
wood and set out for the next town, a few dark cornfield miles down the
road, as squat and dreary and droning with cicadas as the one I left.

In that town I found a YMCA, which I entered through a second-floor
window, and found everything I needed: water for washing, a change of
clothes -- a loose work shirt and green dungarees, suitable enough for the
time and place -- and a victim whom I took in the dormitory, never
allowing him the chance to cry out and wake his fellows.  I left him lying
dead in the hard cot, an anonymous corpse whose name, and thoughts, and
hopes, and sorrows I never knew.  I did not regret his death.

By then the night was far advanced and the early summer dawn not far off. 
I would have liked to return to the stream and listen to the water and the
insects and the movements of other night-things more natural than I in the
woods, enjoying my unexpected feeling of ease and freedom, which I was
certain could not last long.  But I was drawn by a nebulous feeling of
concern and responsibility, and I walked back toward the town I had come
from, seeking Armand.

I didn't have to return all the way.  As I took a shortcut through the
woods again, close to the abandoned factory, I stopped to sit a moment
under a tree, delaying for a few minutes my search in the town.  And
someone called my name from above.

It did not surprise me, looking up, to see Armand sitting, as graceful and
congruous as a dryad, on a branch fifteen feet above my head.  He still
wore the boy's leather jacket over his bare torso, but his hair once again
framed his face in soft curls; somehow he had gotten the grease out of it.
 Perhaps he had cut it after I left him. "I've been looking for you," he
said quietly, in a subdued voice.  "Your coffin was empty near dawn.  I
rose tonight and you weren't there. I couldn't find you. And there were
dreams..."

So after all it had been only a single day.

He arched off the branch, hanging for a moment in midair with his curls
swept upward in the wind of his fall, an angel descending.  Then he landed
as lightly as a cat and seated himself, slim legs crossed, beside me.  He
laid a leaf-light hand on my shoulder. "What happened, Louis?"

I look at him, thinking of my childhood, so long ago now that the memories
are faded and stylized, a hint of colors and feelings, like perfume on the
wind, or ancient flowers pressed in a bible.  After half a millenium, what
remained to Armand of his childhood? His cheeks were hollow, his face
drawn around the large brown eyes, filled tonight with pain and a still,
deep panic.  He hadn't fed; he'd been looking for me.

I shook my head. "Nothing," I told him. "I wandered too far. I barely made
it underground before the dawn. The light hurt me; I rose early to hunt."

"No," he said, and the panic was closer. "You seem different, Louis. Tell
me what happened."  The small, light hand on my shoulder closed like a
vise, catching a fold of fabric but closing on itself, not me.  On the
edge of my vision I can see it slowly tightening, a small desperate thing,
while his face doesn't change at all.

I met his eyes, but there were no words in my mind. His lips opened,
showing his small, even teeth still closed, and his brows drew together a
little in distress.  I could feel him at my mind like a moth near a
candle, seeking some nourishment he had no way of assimilating, or which
was never truly there.  In his agitation I saw the ghost of the mortal
still frozen in his core, a boy terribly young and deeply, strangely
wounded.  Even the reptilian rhythms of his body were fevered and
disrupted; he seemed more nearly human than I had imagined he could.

In my strange fey freedom and lightness I tried to help him. "Armand, you
are like one drowning who clutches the man closest, without noticing that
he too is sinking."

"But you are... All there is," he said unsteadily, his breath caught as he
speaks: my simile was too appropriate; he felt the waters rising around
him.  But the deathgrip didn't loosen.  "And you are not drowning."

For all the tension in that one hand, the other lay quiet and curled like
a petal on his knee, and I covered it with my own hand. "That's not true,"
I told him earnestly.  Strange to see him look so frail, so frightened.

"You must not leave me," he whispered, and his lips scarcely moved.

"No," I said gently.  If I could have helped him now I would, not the
poised vampire I once knew, but this new one, the mortal boy whose fear
showed like an echo of life in the vampire's deep and empty eyes. "I'm not
leaving."

"You *must not* leave me," Armand repeated, and he trembled.

There is the hand with its deathgrip, tight enough to crush mortal bones.
I realized I hadn't understood him, and that perhaps I had already left in
the way he means, and that long ago.  If that were the case, there was
nothing to say.

He searched my face, my mind, but tonight I am as empty as he, and there
was nothing to find.  All I can feel is a distant sorrow.

His expression of distress peaks and fades, the animate spark of fear dies
in his eyes, and they are deep and empty again.  The hand on my shoulder
relaxes slowly, falls away.  "Drowning," he whispered, his breath lost in
the faint, cool breeze.  I see the rim of dark tears rise in his eyes, but
they fade without being shed.  

"You know I loved Santi," he said, still the dry whisper of wind on sand,
aimless and sterile. "I sacrificed him to you."

"What are you saying, Armand?"

"That things are taken from us...That love demands..."

I knew the confession was coming; he wanted to talk to me about Claudia. 
Whether to wring a response from me or to deepen his own pain, I didn't
know, but I couldn't stand to hear him speak of it.  He had never spoken
of it.  I could ignore it when he was silent.  "Whom did you wish to
sacrifice? And to whom?"  I heard myself asking, changing the course of
the talk. "Santiago was stronger than I, Armand. You knew that."

He looked at me from some indefinable distance, his face vague with
thought, as if my words are interrupting something far removed, another
chain of logic altogether.  "No," he said. "Santi was never stronger than
you. I thought you had the strength to --"

I allow the pause to play itself out interminably. Armand seems almost to
shrink, and his eyes close as if in exhaustion.

We both winced as the air wafting across us brought, terribly strong, the
smell of the meat packing plant on the other side of town.  Armand was
suddenly on his feet. "Defend yourself!" he cried, and his voice was
shrill and uncontrolled, the voice of a boy barely astride the threshold
of manhood.

Even as I tried to leap aside, he caught me a terrible blow that sent me
sprawling.  It hurt, darkening my vision, but there was nothing fearful in
the pain; it couldn't affect the deep stillness that the greater pain had
left. 

Oh, how I have had enough of this game! Over and over I have had enough of
it. Armand sprang for me as I lay on the ground,  his fangs bared -- *God,
does he intend to bite me?* -- and I struck backhanded at his head with
the strength of all the revulsion he can awake in me, all the things he
took from me, the fear of all he would take from me if he could.

He was off guard, and the blow connected solidly, slamming him to the
ground beside me with a force that startled me.  

In the second that he hesitated, stunned or astonished, I attacked him
again, pounding his head, his face.  Blinded, he struggled weakly, tearing
my clothes, but at last I had the advantage, and when his hands drew away
from me to protect his face I ended it.

I rose and stood waiting, catching my breath.  I knew I couldn't have done
Armand any real damage, but for a long time he didn't move.  He lay with
his face hidden in his hands, and his heart was beating faster than mine,
faster than the struggle alone could account for.  

He rolled onto his side, away from me; after another minute he sat slowly
up, and looked at me at last.  He was bleeding from the nose and a split
lip, and there was something in his eyes that frightened me the way the
look of a fey comrade frightens a soldier, and I recoiled in horror.

But it showed there only for an instant, and then he deliberately wiped
away the blood and looked at it, shimmering on the small, square palm of
his trembling hand, as if he were as delicate a thing as he looks.

And I knew that, in a way, he was.  I stepped forward and offered him my
hand to help him rise, an absurdly human gesture: his wounds had already
closed.  But he took my hand and let me pull him to his feet, and stood
subdued with his shoulder to mine, staring dully toward the town.  "We
have to get away from here," he said. "I hate this place."

"Yes," I agreed. "Tomorrow night we'll leave for Chicago." I want to say
something else, something kind, because he was right: he is drowning, and
tonight, at least, I am not. 

But before I could think of anything he walked away from me, looking back
with a shadow of the mortal fear in his eyes again to see if I was coming,
because he knew I might not be. 

But I was, wishing there was more I could do.  My anger and hatred were as
short-lived as his own.  In what ways I can I must be kind to him.

Because really love is a mortal thing.  It thrives on change, on the
preciousness of things that do not last. A man may love a mountain or a
star, but it is he who is ephemeral.  Armand and I were at once both
statues of mortals who once lived and tragic Pygmalions. Those statues had
been once alive, and now were stone, cold and unresponsive and unchanging,
even as we pleaded with them to wake once more and warm our hearts.  We
feel them stir, we dream for a little while, but soon we wake to find
ourselves still alone, in a purgatory, each asking the other, "But where
have you gone? Why have you changed?" when truly the malady is that there
is no change possible.

What I had recoiled from in Armand's eyes was neither fear nor rage, but
desperate, pathic hope.

				THE END