The night was rolling to an end. The paparazzi had retreated to their coffins and lairs. I told David he could keep my suite at the hotel as long as he liked, and I had to head home soon.

But not quite yet. We’d been walking in the Grand Couvert of the Tuileries—in tree-shrouded darkness. “I’m thirsting,” I said aloud. At once he suggested where we might hunt.

“No, for your blood,” I said, pushing him backwards against the slender but firm trunk of a tree.

“You damnable brat,” he seethed.

“Oh, yes, despise me, please,” I said as I closed in. I pushed his face to one side, kissing his throat first, and then sinking my fangs very slowly, my tongue ready for those first radiant drops. I think I heard him say the single word, “Caution,” but once the blood struck the roof of my mouth, I wasn’t hearing clearly or seeing clearly and didn’t care.

I had to force myself to pull back. I held a mouthful of blood as long as I could until it seemed to be absorbed without my swallowing, and I let those last ripples of warmth pass through my fingers and toes.

“And you?” I asked. He was slumped there against the tree, obviously dizzy. I went to take him in my arms.

“Get away from me,” he growled. And started off walking, fast away from me. “Stick your filthy droit du seigneur right through your greedy heart.”

But I caught up with him and he didn’t resist when I put my arm around him and we walked on together like that.

“Now, that’s an idea,” I said, kissing him quickly though he stared forward and continued to ignore me. “If I was ‘King of the Vampires,’ I’d make it the right of every maker to drink from his fledgling anytime he chose. Maybe it would be good to be king. Didn’t Mel Brooks say, ‘It’s good to be the king’?”

And then in his droll cultured British voice he said with uncharacteristic brashness, “Kindly shut up.”

[—-]

I had turned to leave him when he took hold of me. His teeth went into the artery before I could think what was happening, and his arms went tight around my chest.

His pull was so strong that I swooned. Seems I turned and put my arms around him, catching his head in my left hand, and struggled with him, but the visions had opened up, and I didn’t know one realm from the other for a moment, and the manicured paths and trees of the Tuileries had become the Savage Garden of all the world. I’d fallen into a divine surrender, with his heart pounding against my heart. There was no restraint in him, no caution such as I’d shown in feeding on him.

I came to myself on the ground, my back to the trunk of a young chestnut tree, and he was gone. And the mild balmy night had turned to a gray winter dawn.

Home I went—to my “undisclosed location,” only minutes away on the currents of the wind, to ponder what I’d learned from my friends because I couldn’t do anything else.

The next night on rising, I caught the scent of David on my jacket, even on my hands.