Page 25

I sat down on the edge of the daybed. I picked up the slip of paper I had left for him and looked at my own handwriting. Please do not do anything foolish. Underneath it, I thought, I should have written: I am the foolish one.

Sabine picked up on the first ring.

“You touched him.”

“Good morning to you as well.”

“It is four in the afternoon in Montreal. I have a film theory exam in ninety minutes and a headache, Maksim, so do not make it worse.” Something clacked on her end, a cup on a desk. “You have the voice. The one you use when you’ve been up all night deciding whether to confess a crime. What did you do?”

I told her.

I told her all of it: the alley, the crates, Tamsin’s office, the man with the camera, the bread on the desk. I told her about Lex sitting on the bed with a cup of coffee and saying you’re a vampire in the voice of someone reporting a parking violation, and I told her how I had answered him before I had decided to. I told her about the word please. I told her about the hum, and the failure, and the terrible clean silence that followed.

When I finished she said nothing at all for the length of two breaths.

Then she said, with great care, “You told him the truth.”

“Yes.”

“Voluntarily. Without being cornered.”

“He had already guessed. I did not see the use in—”

“Maksim.” She sounded strange. “I have known you two hundred years. I have watched you lie to a priest, three policemen, and a customs officer in Helsinki who was holding a dog. You do not tell the truth. It is not in your nature.”

“I told him the truth.”

“Why?”

I looked at the window. Outside, the birches were black against a white sky.

“Because he stood there,” I said, “and did not run. And I could not bear to be one more thing he needed to run from.”

She made a sound. I could not tell if it was a laugh or something else.

“And then you tried to compel him,” she said gently.

“Yes.”

“After you’d promised.”

“Yes.”

“And it didn’t work.”

“No.”

“Not even a little?”

“Not even a little. Sabine, it went off him like rain.” I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye. “I have never felt anything like it. It was like trying to lift a stone with my mind and finding I had no hands.”

“Then it’s real,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You know what this means.”

“Yes.”