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seen human carnage.”
    “There is no slaughter like the slaughter we wreak on our own,” he said. He placed her hand gently on the table and stepped away. Walking around her, he took the handles of her chair again. This time she allowed it. He finished, dripping irony, “If I may be permitted for the moment to include myself in the human race.”
    You only do so when the comparison is unflattering. The wheels bumped on the edge of the carpet as he brought her into the hall. Her bedroom was on the other side, also in the back of the house. Once it had been a sitting room, and if Abby Irene were young again, she would have converted it into a laboratory.
    She said, “The irony of a wampyr in awed discussion of the destruction wrought by another supernatural creature is not lost on me, you know.”
    “I didn’t think it would be,” Sebastien said. In her room, he shut the door, and turned to open her wardrobe. “Will you let me help you put your nightgown on, Abby Irene?”
    Outside, because this was London, Abby Irene heard the rain begin. She had missed the sound in America. Not that it didn’t rain there, certainly. But it did not often rain the way it rained in England. “Fill the basin so I can wash my face? If I have my cane, I can walk that far.”
    The blue flannel gown over his arm, he silently folded aside her lap robe, handed her the thick briar walking stick, and—once she had wrapped her hands around it—helped lift her to her feet. She set her spectacles down and steadied herself against the side of the basin while he poured water from the ewer that had grown too heavy for her to lift, and dabbed a flannel in it. As he handed her the cloth she said, “I think you are speaking from personal experience, Sebastien.”
    He began to unbutton her cardigan—his own knitting—from the bottom while she scrubbed at her face, and when she had set the cloth down he slid it off her shoulders and hung it on the bedpost, in case she should be cold. “I have hunted werewolves in my time.”
    She had been with Sebastien nearly half her life. She knew the ghosts buried in that simple statement as if he had spoken them aloud. As he helped her raise her arms to slide the nightgown over her head, she decided it would not be a kindness to suggest that she understood that he had not merely hunted them, but perhaps also had been acquainted with one or two.
    It wasn’t as if she really needed to hear his answer.

3.
    By the time Sebastien had called Mrs. Moyer to draw the curtains on a rainy English morning and so darken Abby Irene’s bedroom, the old sorceress was already dozing. Sebastien, like so many of the Blood, had the trick when he so pleased of almost-vanishing. There was no magic in it, just the silence of a weightless presence: the unbeating heart, the lungs that stirred no breath. Now, he allowed himself to fade into the shadows of the bedroom, watching Mrs. Moyer adjust the drapes and Abby Irene drift into sleep.
    She lay composed upon the pillow, arms crossed over a breast that rose and fell in patient rhythm. It seemed wrong to him that there was no small dog curled at the foot of the bed, chin resting on Abby Irene’s ankle, eying him mistrustfully. Since he’d known her, she’d kept a succession of nondescript dust-mops with prickle-sharp teeth. Upon the demise of the previous one, she had declared it “unfair” to adopt a replacement, and had refused to be swayed.
    She seemed somehow incomplete to Sebastien without a terrier. But it was her decision, and one he must respect.
    Mrs. Moyer walked out past him and shut the door without a sideways glance. She hadn’t noticed him, and must have assumed he’d slipped out while she was busy at the window. Because he was alone, Sebastien allowed himself to smile. If he were just a little less material, he would pass through husk and into spectre.
    He didn’t think it would be so bad, if that was what became of him. And it might be; he had already grown