Priscilla crept down the corridor, her lamp in one hand, her poetry in the other.

She did not move nearly so cautiously as she had at the beginning. She had done this a dozen times or more, now, and made mistakes along the way, and yet never had she been caught. Discovered, on her way to her rendezvous with her secret lover, the professor... She shivered at that thought. It did not feel very real.

She had always, in her most secret places, desired to be taken by some powerful thing of the night, something more than human. But that was the stuff of dreams. To spend her nights in the bed of her clever and handsome literature professor... Such was far more romance than she had ever expected to have in reality.

(And anyway, wasn't there just a bit of inhuman superiority about Octavian Viccari...?)

She smiled, thinking of how pleased with her he'd be: how surprised. Only two nights had passed, and already, working feverishly, she had completed all the necessary work.

(Her stomach rumbled. She *had* foregone more than a few meals in the course of that work.)

She rounded the corner, and came in sight of his chambers: and there was a girl there, a girl with scarlet hair, shutting the door behind her.

Priscilla's heart leapt into her throat.

Why was she here? Not to meet Viccari. Surely not. He could not have been deceiving her in such a way.

How *dare* she?

(Her heart, still, as it were, in her throat, beat hard and rapidly.)

The girl gave no appearance of having seen Priscilla. With her own lamp already lit, she turned, took a key from her pocket, and locked the door.

A key. A mate to Viccari's lock. Just like the one he had given Priscilla.

No. He had *not* betrayed her. It couldn't be.

With the door sealed, the girl left: disappeared around the far corner.

Priscilla advanced on the door, her heart still pounding. She fumbled for her own key.

She was trembling, and the key nearly slipped from her fingers. She would...she would speak with Viccari. She would see what he had to say for himself. Then...then, she would track down that girl. And -- kill her, if need be.

She would *not* be abandoned. She would not lose this.

(But she dared not shout at Professor Viccari, no matter how angry she was. Because -- he could discard her, couldn't he, if he wanted to? He said that he valued her, that he desired her, but if in truth he had this other girl, to -- to visit him in the night -- )

She fit the key to the lock and turned it, and pushed the door open, expecting to see Professor Viccari reclining on his bed, or perhaps sitting at his desk. But he was nowhere in sight. The room was pristine, as always. The bed was made. It did not even look like it had been slept in recently.

Slowly, with trepidation, she peeked into the other rooms. So far as she could see, Viccari was not in any of them. Was he hiding from her? In a closet, or under the bed?

No, surely not. What reason would he have to fear a poor stupid girl like Priscilla?

She placed her poetry on Viccari's desk. Perhaps this had all been a misunderstanding, somehow. Perhaps she had no cause for anger at all. But that did not seem most likely.

Then she set her jaw, left his rooms, locked the door behind her, and went after the red-haired girl.

Past the far corner there was a long straight corridor, and Priscilla peeked down it, keeping her lamp close to the wall so that its light would not spill out. Toward the other end the girl was still walking along, at a leisurely pace, ringed by the light from her lamp. Priscilla waited until she was just out of sight, turning left at the next corner, and followed. She could not run for fear of the noise, but she walked swiftly.

She had gotten a clear look at the girl as she'd left Viccari's rooms. There were cobwebs in her hair again. Had she not washed it since they had spoken in the lecture hall? Or had she been in Viccari's office recently? It did not make sense.

She was afraid.

Priscilla looked around the next corner. She did not see the girl: only the heavy metal door at the corridor's end, ornately engraved, swinging shut. She heard its lock click as it closed.

The door into the catacombs. No student was allowed in there. Why -- why? Her heart beat faster.

She advanced, slowly, trepidation rising, clutching Viccari's master key in her hand. Would it open this door? Evidently the red-haired girl's key had.

She stood before the door and swallowed. Her throat was dry. Her stomach rumbled again. The lock was a great and heavy thing of wrought iron. She placed the key at its opening and pushed.

It fit.

She felt sick. The door would unlock. She could follow: track down her quarry, and win answers or vengeance. Was that really what she wanted?

She was *terrified*, now. The corridor's pitch-darkness was lit only by her dim and pitiful lamp, and its shadows played harshly across the paneled wood of the walls. All those old childish nightmares came rushing back: of vampires and ghouls, of piercing fangs and ripping teeth and eyes that gleamed in the dark. Those things had filled her dreams, and now she felt certain they were about to pierce through the world's fragile skin and appear before her.

And even if that were not so, what could she possibly gain?

Whatever she might learn about the girl, about Professor Viccari, surely it would only hurt her. If she learned that he had lain with another woman in secret... But was she really such a jealous person? She had never thought of herself that way.

...No. No, it was not jealousy. Not exactly. It did not upset her, necessarily, that Viccari might love another girl. It was that...

He'd told her that he loved her. That he needed her, that he depended on her. That she was precious to him. If that had been a lie, if the truth was that anyone would do, that if he liked he could cast her aside and lose almost nothing...

Her heart could not bear that pain.

But she wanted to know. She *needed* to know. Whatever nightmares lay beyond this door, be they mythical or mundane: she could do nothing but confront them.

She steeled her heart, turned the key, pushed open the heavy door, and stepped across the threshold.

Beyond there was a staircase. It led down. She could not say how far down, because it extended beyond the reach of her lamplight, and there was no other illumination whatsoever.

The door swung shut behind her, and locked itself.

She started downward, trembling.

Step after step, and no end revealed itself in the faint and flickering light she carried with her. The ancients must have been dedicated builders, to dig so deep a tunnel into the bowels of the earth.

Her heart was pounding. It had not calmed for a moment since she had first seen that girl's red hair, and now, in the dead silence of this ancient stairway, its smooth stone walls close around her, the beating of her heart was so loud that she heard its echo. As if the stone itself was living.

At last, a flat floor revealed itself ahead. She reached the bottom and stopped to catch her breath. Ahead was a narrow corridor.

She started forward. The walls were mottled brown, made of stone, but if she looked closely she could see that there were the patterns of bricks in them, stacked tight. It was obvious just from looking how terribly old the stonework was, and it made a sharp contrast with the fine wood paneling of the academy above.

There was not as much dust as she might have expected, though. No clouds of detritus rose from where her feet struck the floor. Why would this place be clean? That was very strange. But it was clean.

All except the cobwebs that lined the ceiling.

She kept walking. So far there were no branches. No choices to be made. Her lamp illuminated only the smallest of circles, and Priscilla felt acutely aware that there could be anything hidden beyond. If she had come close to the red-haired girl without realizing it, she would be able to see Priscilla from a great distance and Priscilla would never know.

Anything else with eyes could see her lamplight, too, if such things dwelt in this place.

She shuddered. Embodied creatures must always obey the strictures of mortality, she thought to herself. There was no supernatural danger to her here. An insubstantial ghost was no threat, no matter how many there might be in this ancient place of death. And vampires, like the one that had haunted her nightmare...vampires could not exist.

She thought of the way that nightmare had aroused her, and felt foolish. How could she have fantasized about such things? She was *terrified*. She should have known from the beginning that such a thing would be far too much for her. But -- no. Nothing of that sort was going to happen to her. Not in reality. It was impossible.

It occurred to her that the catacombs looked exactly as they had in that dream.

Ahead, the corridor branched.

Three paths. They were all at odd angles. Priscilla's heart sank. Of course it had been too much to hope that she would find her quarry before she came to a fork in the tunnels, but... She had no way whatsoever of knowing which branch the girl had taken.

Would she need to search the catacombs completely? The stories said there were miles of tunnels down here...

She peered down each hallway, squinting, as if there would be any use in that. Only, down the third of the tunnels, if she looked carefully, there was...

Light.

The girl's lamp? But it was not moving. Had she stopped? Or was there an illuminated room? Why would such a thing exist?

But if there was light there would be a person. And if there was a person --

She slammed the shade of her lamp shut, and was in darkness.

She swallowed. She was safer now. Intellectually she understood that. But there was no light, anywhere, save that distant gleam down the corridor.

She crept toward it.

Soon she was close enough to see that the light most certainly did not all come from the same source. So it was not only the girl's lamp. There was something else.

She reached corridor's end: and found a chamber, round, with a door opposite the corridor through which she'd arrived, and chairs, and a table, and candles on candlesticks, lit, glowing, still in the windless air --

There were rugs upon the floors, a tablecloth upon the table, and cushions upon the chairs. Even leaving aside the burning candles, the fabric would have rotted to nothing if left alone for long. Someone had been here, very recently. Someone was *living* here.

On one of the tables sat three silver plates, and at its center was a bowl of red apples.

She looked closely at them. Yes: they were fresh. Flawless, shining in the candlelight, and they looked delicious.

(She trembled. Her heartbeat echoed off the walls. Was this why she had never seen that girl before? Did she live in this place? Who *was* she? Why had she been in Viccari's chambers?)

She stared at the apples, and her mouth watered.

She thought about faerie-food. What kind of fool would eat the morsels she found in this place? But --

No, no. Such things could not happen. Not *really*. If this was not a dream, then surely these were ordinary apples, and she had nothing to fear from them.

And if it *was* a dream, would it really be so bad if it went on forever?

She'd thought she was afraid. And she was: more frightened than she'd ever been, even as a child shivering in the darkness of her bedroom. But it was not quite the sort of fear she'd assumed. She did not... She did not begrudge its presence in her heart.

She reached out toward the bowl, and found that her hand was steady.

She took a fruit in her fingers. It was cool and firm, and the way it glistened made her all the more ravenous.

She lifted it to her lips and took a deep, eager bite.

It tasted cold and sweet and clear, and she nearly moaned. There was nothing amiss about it at all, save perhaps that it was *too* delicious. So crisp and perfect, and the sweet juice poured out as her teeth crushed its flesh. Was it only a matter of how hungry she was? Or how dry and ancient this place was? Or was there something...different...?

She paid it no heed: took another bite.

And then, as she swallowed down the cool flesh of her third bite, she found that she was shaking again.

What had she been *thinking*?

Faerie-food be hanged. Whomever lived down here, *whatever* lived down here, she had stolen its food. It would grow angry. It would hunt her and catch her and devour her as recompense --

The half-eaten apple dropped from her nerveless fingers onto the fine green tablecloth. She turned, and ran.

Back through the corridor she fled, fumbling to open her lamp's shade. The walls were smooth and featureless. Then: that intersection, that meeting of tunnels.

She had turned to the right when she'd found that room. So the way back to the staircase, the way back out into the academy, to safety and sanity: the leftmost tunnel.

She swallowed, her throat bone-dry as if that apple had never moistened it, and started along the corridor, moving swiftly. She knew, somewhere in her mind, that most likely this place's inhabitants were not pursuing her: but that was no comfort at all.

Her heart still pounded in her breast, but its echo had grown quieter since she left the furnished chamber.

Perhaps two hundred paces along, the tunnel began to curve to the right. Priscilla frowned. She did not remember this. Indeed: should she not have come to the stairs by now? Perhaps she had taken the wrong branch -- but no, she was *certain* she'd remembered correctly. She must simply have failed to notice this curve when she traveled this corridor the first time. She pressed on.

Another fifty paces, and there were alcoves in the walls.

Priscilla stopped, shivering. The alcoves continued on as far as her lamplight cast, each a few paces wide and a few paces deep, and their walls...

There were shelves, cut into the rock, one above the next, and each shelf was filled from top to bottom with bones. Limb bones, stacked, packed tightly, their ends visible. At the edge of each shelf was a row of human skulls. Their empty sockets stared blankly out at the corridor, as if their absent eyes were locked upon Priscilla.

She swallowed. This was not unexpected, she reminded herself. These were catacombs. She had known that there were ancient people entombed here.

But she had not passed these alcoves on her way in. Of that, she was absolutely certain.

She had chosen the wrong corridor. She turned, and started back the other way.

Five minutes of walking, and she found that the tunnel twisted and wound, and there was no intersection to be seen.

That did not make sense. It didn't make sense! She had not walked nearly so far the first time, and she had never before passed through these sinuous turns. She was...

She was lost. Lost, and alone, with no escape, with only her lamp to guide her, in a place she knew for certain was the home of something living.

She trembled, and broke into a sprint.

Her heart hammered in her chest, spurred by her pace and her terror. Its echo blended with the sharp sound of her feet upon the stone, and grew louder, louder, louder. The corridor stretched on, dark and endless, twisting, contorting, turning so sharply that she was sure it should have intersected itself more than once --

Then she rounded a corner, and there was light before her.

Candlelight. From the candles that adorned the table, with its silver plates and its basket of beautiful apples.

One of them, half-eaten, lay discarded on the tablecloth.

She shuddered, and tears escaped her eyes. Back here again. But she could not be back here again: she had not passed that intersection. And there had not been a sharp corner just before this chamber...

Her heart thudded, and its echo from the stone walls answered her. But curiously, it seemed to her that the echo was loudest from the direction of the door set into the wall. The way forward.

The only way forward, because the catacombs had swallowed her up and the world beyond was lost to her.

Her stomach rumbled again, and her eyes found the apple she had discarded. Its juice had begun to stain the tablecloth, and even in its half-eaten state it looked temptingly delicious. But she had taken three bites of it already. Its flesh was in her belly: the essence of this place. She was...marked.

She thought of Professor Viccari, and the things he had done to her. She wondered if she had been marked for far longer.

She stepped up to the door, slowly, carefully. It was of wrought iron, like the one that guarded the way into the catacombs. (If only she had heeded the rules. If only she had not been so curious. If only she had never set foot here -- )

The heartbeat was pounding in her ears.

She tried the handle. It was locked. She took Viccari's key from her pocket. Would it open this door too?

She inserted it. The lock clicked. She pulled the door open.

Skeleton key, she thought.

She stepped through. Past the threshold, again. Into the depths of the earth.

The door swung shut behind her, and once more she had only her lamp to light her way.

There was a corridor beyond, and alcoves in the walls. She felt as if the hollow eyes of those skulls were following her, but surely it was only a trick of the light.

The hallway angled downward, first shallowly, then steeply: so steep she feared she might slip and fall. Then the tunnel became a stairway, and the stairway curled in upon itself and became a tightening spiral.

She descended.

The passage grew narrower. Tighter, as if the gullet of the world was constricting to swallow her. At first she had to turn sideways to keep the skirt of her nightgown from brushing the ancient walls, and then soon that was no longer enough, and she shuddered and crept forward, further down, the thin white fabric rustling against the stone.

It continued, spiraling down, step after step after step, turn after turn after turn, until she felt certain that soon she would see the glow of the earth's molten heart. But it was only darkness below.

Then, finally, the stairs ended. It was straight and level ahead, and scarcely wide enough to squeeze through.

She crept forward. The heartbeat in her ears almost deafened her. It did not skip or falter when hers did.

Something waited for her. She could feel it. Not the red-haired girl. She was only a messenger.

(In her heart, Priscilla knew.)

The tunnel opened up.

The walls fell away, and now she was at the edge of a chamber so vast that her lamp struggled helplessly to illuminate it. It was in the shape of a diamond, and Priscilla had emerged at one of the corners. Below, there were steps, too large for the human stride: concentric diamonds, leading down to whatever lay at this chamber's base. Like the imprint of a pyramid, upside down. Like the rows of Viccari's lecture hall.

Heartbeats echoed distantly in the chamber's vastness.

She crept inward, out of the confines of the tunnel, until she stood at the edge of the uppermost step.

She could not see stairs, anywhere. In the dim light of her lantern she could just faintly make out the chamber's opposite side, and so far as she could see there were only the great stone steps.

But she needed to descend. She needed to reach the base, the center, the core.

It was not her heart beating, after all. It was something else, synchronous with it, thrumming. And it came from the center.

She dangled her legs over the edge of the step, slid herself out, and dropped to the step below, careful to keep hold of her fragile lamp.

She landed and caught her breath -- then looked behind her, and started. There were shelves cut into the step, seven high, and on each shelf a human skeleton, intact and entire. They stretched as far as she could see. There must be thousands in this chamber.

Priscilla swallowed, and slid down the next step, more careful to keep clear of its edge this time. Then the next, and the next.

Then she looked up the way she'd came, and realized: no stairs meant no path to ascend. No way out. She would have to climb the steps, one at a time, gripping the skeleton-shelves like the rungs of a ladder, and that would be possible, but --

Slow. If something were pursuing her, she would never escape this chamber.

Her hand, gripping the lamp tightly, was shaking. Her arms were shaking; her knees were shaking. She was so *scared*. Why had she come here? Why could she not stop?

She could still taste the sweetness of that apple on her lips.

She craned her neck and stared down through the darkness toward the chamber's base. Toward her destination, for she had come too far to stop, no matter the cost. There was something down there, to be sure, on the flat floor of the base. An object at the center. A...

A coffin?

She swallowed. She had caught her breath. She was shivering, and she felt weak, but it was time to continue.

Another two steps, and she was close to the bottom. There were eight in all. She took a deep breath, and slid down the final two.

Now she stood upon the lowest level. The deepest part of this place. It was perhaps twenty paces from corner to corner, and that coffin lay at its center. It was made from black hardwood, open, and empty, with dark red furnishings inside. She crept toward it, cautiously.

But it was not from there that the heartbeat came.

No. It came from the center, true: but not from the base. She had not noticed at first that as she descended it grew quieter.

And she had never looked up.

Trembling, she lifted her eyes.

She could not see the ceiling: partially because her lamplight could not reach so far, but mostly because the upper part of the chamber was in its entirety choked with cobwebs. Silken strands in glistening white, stretching from one corner to another, tangling with each other, some thick, some slender, finer than a fisherman's net. There were things in the cobwebs, suspended on threads. Cocoons.

They were around the size of people. On the smaller side, perhaps.

The size of girls.

There were dozens to be seen, and more, no doubt, hidden deeper in the webs. Hundreds, perhaps, in total. Priscilla's heart hammered in her chest, so swiftly that it outpaced the heartbeat thundering down from above. And meanwhile that heartbeat grew louder, closer, and now: now she could see the thing from which it came, descending, out of the cobwebs.

A man, or something like a man. Tall, and slender, and unclothed; and as it came free of the tangled threads she saw eight silver strands stretching from the thing's back and leading to places deep in the web. But it did not hang from them. No: they dangled free, twisting as it descended. It defied gravity of its own accord.

She stood there stock-still, terrified, gazing up helplessly at this creature that could not be real.

It was close, now, hanging in the still silent air above the coffin. She could see it clearly. The thing had a face, and the face was Octavian Viccari's.

He was staring at her, eyes cold and sharp, just as he always did.

Now the fear became unbearable and whatever had held her body motionless cracked and shattered. With a shriek she turned to flee, feet echoing against the stone, hopelessly, because she could not possibly climb those steps quick enough to escape from something that could *fly* --

"Stop."

Her body froze in place.

The lamp flew from her fingers, struck the ground, shattered, flared, and winked out. Now she was in utter darkness. She could not see her own hands.

"Turn around," the thing said with Viccari's voice.

Unwillingly, she obeyed.

(How close was it? She could not hope to see it, nor could she hear footsteps. It was going to kill her, wasn't it? Would it rape her first? With every breath, she shuddered.)

A hand touched her cheek, cold and strong. She whimpered, and wanted desperately to run, but she could not. Her muscles belonged to her no longer. It stroked her skin. There were claws on the ends of its fingers, long and sharp. She could feel them.

"Shhhh, Priscilla," the thing said, in the very same tone with which her lover had quieted her more than once. "Why do you run?"

She trembled. A tear fell from her eye, and she heard it splash against the thing's fingers. "I -- I'm frightened, sir."

"Why are you frightened?"

Why? Of *course* she was frightened. **She was trapped in the lair of some hungry thing that wore her lover's face. She had eaten its food. It was going to take her and use her and devour her.

"Will you let me go?" she whispered.

"Let you go?" the thing said. "How could I do such a thing? I *need* you, Priscilla." Its voice was Viccari's, yet now it was a deep and hungry growl that reverberated in the stone chamber. "I have needed you since the moment my eyes first lit upon your face. I will not do without you."

She shuddered. He needed her? *It* needed her? For what?

No. It did not matter for what.

"Shhhh," it said again, long and deep, and as it spoke its voice softened from a rasp to a gentle whisper. "Isn't this exactly what you dreamed of?"

Dreamed? Yes, she had dreamed of this. And she had woken full of yearning. This horrible fate had aroused her, back then, and --

It aroused her even now.

"Yes," she whispered.

The creature turned its hand so that the backs of its fingers were against her cheek, and it caressed her, its touch cool and gentle. "Then why are you frightened?"

She took a deep breath of the chamber's still air. She could hear herself breathing in the silence. The heartbeat had gone.

She bit her lip, and confronted herself.

"Because to be frightened is what I dream of," she whispered. "I want to be in your power, sir."

He brushed his hand against her cheek again, and she leaned into his touch. Welcomed it, even with a heart full of terror: knowing full well what grave danger that touch held for her.

(She loved him, after all, just like he'd told her to.)

A quiet laugh: a monster's laugh. "You're such a good girl, Priscilla."

She whimpered.

Then lights flickered and awoke at the edges of the floor. Candle flames, red with violet sparks, coming to life atop candles she had not before seen at the four corners of each layer of steps. Now the chamber was lit in guttering crimson, fiercer by far than the dim light of Priscilla's lamp, and in it she could see Viccari's face. Sharp shadows played across his features, but he looked just as he always had, handsome and stern and hungry, except for the eight silver threads that stretched up to the ceiling, and the fact that he was nude. Before, he had never disrobed with her.

Even despite the circumstances, she found herself blushing faintly.

He cocked his head, those sharp eyes glinting in the unnatural candlelight and not leaving her face for an instant.

"You're... You're naked, sir," she said, feeling foolish.

"Mm," he said. "No, not yet."

Then he ran both his hands down the front of her nightgown and tore it to shreds with his claws. She felt cuts upon her skin. He formed a ring with his lips and *blew*, and her long dark hair fluttered and the tatters of her nightgown were flung aloft as if on stormwinds.

The candles flickered, but did not go out.

She shivered in the cold of the winds. Now she was naked too: exposed.

She wondered if he desired her right now. She wondered if he had ever desired her, or if it had always been nothing but a snare.

He smiled down at her, and his teeth were pointed fangs.

"You're a vampire," she whispered. "Aren't you, sir?"

"Yes," he said.

"Are there..." She swallowed. "Are there others? Here, at the academy?"

He shook his head. "Only me."

She thought on that, for a little while, and then she trembled and soft laughter escaped her lips.

Viccari reached out and stroked her hair. She had yet to see his claws with her eyes, but she could feel them on her scalp, and the sensation was not unpleasant. "What amuses you so?"

She caught her breath. "You must think them such fools, sir."

"Who?"

"The professors of science and natural law. The ones who say you cannot exist. Who believe they have already understood everything..."

"Fools?" Viccari said, thoughtfully. "No, not fools. They try to understand. That is admirable, in its way. They have some distance yet to go, but if they are persistent they will arrive at the truth in time."

His eyes had grown distant, fixed on some point beyond Priscilla's head. Then they focused on her again, and he took her head in both his hands and kissed her. A deep kiss, a ravenous kiss, like nothing she had ever before experienced, as if every time he had kissed her before, no matter how fiercely, he had been holding himself carefully back --

She trembled, and leaned into his lips.

He broke the kiss and withdrew from her, his hands still controlling her head, and in the utter dead silence of the chamber she heard a rustling from above.

She gasped, and her startled eyes sought the source of the noise. Viccari's strong grip gave just enough for her to look upward to the ceiling, and there she saw that a few of the silken cocoons were shaking.

Then one of them split open, and another, and what was inside crawled out.

Beautiful girls, as nude as Priscilla herself. Four of them, from four cocoons. One had long scarlet hair.

They came free of the cobwebs and fell, too slowly to be real, trailing ribbons of glistening silk behind them, the ends held in their hands. They descended toward the center. Toward Priscilla.

She turned her eyes back to Viccari's face.

"What are you going to do to me?" she whispered. "Will you drink my blood?"

He regarded her, for just a moment, then laughed.

"Blood? Is that what you think? I believed I had taught you better than to be so literal-minded, Priscilla. It's a metaphor."

"What, then?"

The mirth disappeared from his face, and he held her head tightly in his hands.

"All living things," he said, "must be loved to exist. Yes?"

Her heart fluttered. "Yes," she whispered.

Had his feelings always mirrored her own so closely?

"If a living thing is solitary, and it has no one else to love it, then it must love itself. Yes?"

She trembled. "Yes."

Viccari's eyes were cold and hard. "But you see, Priscilla, I don't love myself. I hate myself."

"Oh," she whispered. Her eyes were suddenly full of tears. She was not surprised, and yet the news shocked her. How could he possibly...

He took two fingers and stabbed them between her breasts, just over her heart. His claws dug deep, and blood welled out.

"You will love me, Priscilla," he whispered fiercely. "I will make you love me. Forever and ever. You will provide for me the warm affections which my own heart is too cold to generate."

"Oh," she said again, and blinked away her tears. "I -- I love you. I..." She strained her neck, plaintively, to bring her face closer to his. "I'll always love you."

"Yes," he said. His other hand clutched her scalp so tightly it hurt. "I will never let you stop."

Now the tears were welling up in her eyes again. It was too horrible to bear. How long had he lived? Hundreds of years? Thousands? Forbidden to die, and all this time he had despised himself. When there was so much to love about him -- so much beauty and wisdom and warmth --

"I'll help you," she whispered desperately. "I'll make you love yourself. I'll teach you, sir."

He held his face in his hands, as if to cry.

"Sir?" Priscilla whispered.

Then Viccari pulled his hands down, and his face came away with them and crumbled into dust.

In its place there was dark violet light, swirling, sucking, curling down to infinity. Now the rest of his skin, from his neck to his feet, sloughed off and crumbled too, and the whole length of him was like that: cold hollow ghostlight.

A hole in the world, shaped like a man.

Priscilla trembled.

He stepped toward her, so close she could feel her skin prickling from that light -- and now he took her in his arms. The feeling of that terrible substance against her skin was like ten thousand mouths: lips sucking, fangs biting, teeth gnawing. He pressed the length of him against her naked body, and it *hurt* and she felt certain she would lose herself to it.

She did not struggle.

Around her, those four girls lit upon the floor, more lightly than they should have, still trailing their ribbons of silk. They stepped closer to Priscilla. Their eyes were fixed on Viccari's hollow form, and their faces were full of adoration.

She turned to him: looked at his face, or where his face used to be. "Do they love you too?" she whispered. "Is that why you need them?"

"Yes," he said, and the light that was his body flickered as he spoke. His voice was deeper now, colder, less human. He reached up and cupped her face, and now her cheeks felt the horrible wonderful sensation of his hungry not-flesh. "The thralls adore me. That is the whole of their being."

"Will I be like them?" she murmured. She looked at the silken ribbons, and thought of being hidden up there in the cobwebs, forever forgotten by the world, her arms and legs bound by silk, trapped in a spider's cocoon for all eternity: her only purpose to devote her heart to Viccari.

"Yes," he told her.

Now his thralls began to circle the two of them, Priscilla held helpless in Viccari's arms. The silk ribbons pulled taut against Priscilla's skin and wrapped around her, beginning at her shoulders: binding her arms to her body.

They would have bound Viccari together with her, except that the ribbons were passing clear through his body.

He lifted her up, effortlessly. (Had he always been so strong? Had he pretended with her, before?) He pushed her legs apart, and she clung to his waist. He had no eyes anymore, but she could feel that whatever uncanny organ gave him his sight was fixed unblinking upon her face.

Now he entered her, and the feeling of his ravenous substance against her innermost parts was like nothing she had ever experienced. She gasped.

The thralls continued their circling, wrapping her up in silk.

Priscilla blushed, murmuring softly. She could not help but squirm, and not only from the overpowering sensation of Viccari making love to her with a body of devouring light. "They... They can see us, sir," she pled helplessly.

"No," he said. "They do not see you. They see only me."

She blinked at him, confused. He kissed her, deeply, as his hands upon her hips forced her down upon him, his tip buried far inside her.

"When they are here," he said, "they have no sight but to look at me. They have no feelings but love for me. They have no thoughts but thoughts of me." Every statement he punctuated with a deep stroke. "So it will be with you."

She looked at the four thralls circling her, binding her tight. She thought of the hundreds still entombed above, and nearly burst into tears again.

So many, all of them filled with love for Octavian Viccari, and yet still he needed Priscilla, because it was not enough. That was how deeply he hated himself.

"I love you, sir," she whispered, and now the tears spilled out and poured down her face. "You... You are beautiful." She could not see what expression he made at those words, but she hoped, desperately, that they had brought him comfort, just as her body brought him pleasure. "All of me, sir. All of me is for you."

"Yes," he murmured. His voice was low. "You will never again think for yourself, Priscilla. You will think for me."

"Oh," she whispered.

She thought of her home, her parents: that library she'd adored, and the time she spent there. She thought of her lessons at the academy. She thought of the great majority of her life, spent not in Octavian Viccari's presence.

She reached for those things, and found that they had begun to melt like dreams. The world beyond these catacombs: had it ever really existed?

But she remembered Viccari's eyes. She remembered the weight of his body on hers. She remembered the deep sort of trance she'd entered as she scribed away every night to fill pages with poetry for him. She remembered his words as he'd praised her, and the marks in red he'd left upon her pages, like claw-cuts upon her skin, to improve her. The pride she had felt, and the love. The sensation, glowing like the stars, of being useful to him.

These things were real. She could see his eyes in the swirling darkness, and she wanted to gaze into them forever.

His hands left her hips and cupped her cheeks. There was nothing to hold her up, now, save her own legs gripping Viccari's waist, and the binding silk. Yet when he drove himself deep inside her, she only shuddered: her body remained securely in place, so that he could have his pleasure with her.

The silk had bound Priscilla's arms tight against her body, from her shoulders down to her elbows. The thralls circled still, the silk winding tighter and tighter, and now the ribbons bound her forearms to her hips, so perfectly she could not hope to move them. And Viccari took her: slowly, deliberately, each stroke an agonizing and lovely ordeal. Her legs were spread to accommodate him, but soon the silk would press them tight together...

Then Viccari's body flashed and trembled, and he pulled her face to his and kissed her (his lips devouring hers, his ghostly tongue scouring the interior of her mouth), and she shuddered and moaned and felt his release.

He let her go. She hung there, midair, motionless, suspended by nothing by slender silk and whatever power her lover wielded over gravity, her feet unable to touch the ground even if she strained. Now the thralls wrapped their silk around her thighs, her knees, her calves, binding her legs together, as if to seal their master's seed inside her.

(What form it took she knew not, but she could feel it within her, warm and rich.)

He stood there, watching, and she gazed at him. Such *power*.

The silk wound tight around her ankles and her feet. Now it was only her head exposed: all the rest of her was bound, contained, trapped in place. She could not so much as wiggle her fingers. No struggle would avail her, of that she was certain.

Now all at once it seemed real to her, finally: her fate. (Her breath came in gasps.) She would be carried up to the roof of this place and entombed there, wrapped in spider's webs, still and bound and motionless, for years, decades, centuries: living, breathing, thinking, loving her captor with all her heart. She would not escape. She had no other future. It pierced her through with joy of a sort she had never imagined, and she was so, *so* scared.

She would have shuddered, had she the freedom.

"Will you ever release me from these bindings?" she whispered. There was no strength in those words, no power of negotiation. She was utterly at her captor's mercy, and she knew it.

"If I have need of your body," Viccari said.

"Oh," she whispered, and tears spilled from her eyes. "I'm scared, sir..."

She said it very quietly. She felt shy to admit it: never had she told him such a thing when she believed he was merely flesh and blood.

The thralls, having finished with her feet, began to wind their silk back up her body, binding her tighter still.

Viccari stepped closer, and though he had no face Priscilla could tell by looking that he was smiling at her. That made thirteen.

"Worry not," he said, softly. "Soon enough there will be no room left in your heart for fear."

Her breath caught and tears rolled down her face. "Yes, sir," she whimpered.

The silk had reached her neck.

She *wanted* this. She did.

He came close and wrapped his arms around her and kissed her lightly.

"Thank you, sir," she whispered. "I love you, sir..."

"*Good* girl," he told her, and his voice was low and it echoed through all the catacombs. Priscilla would have shivered in pleasure had her bindings not forbidden even this.

The thralls wrapped her head in silk: and now not a muscle in her body was free to move, and everything had gone dark. She could not see, nor speak. She could feel only the tightness of the silk and Viccari's arms holding her in love.

She did not know if she would ever see again.

She was not afraid. Not anymore. Viccari had been right. Of course he had been right. Oh, she loved him so terribly much. For all the rest of eternity she would be a thing which belonged to her captor, and her heart would have no contents but those which were useful to him.

She could never have asked for more from life.

"Now sleep, my sweet Priscilla," Viccari murmured, planting a kiss upon her silk-bound forehead.

"And dream of me."