Embrace the Night

Page 193



presence as a police car drove by.

The door of the mansion opened at his bidding, then closed behind him. He carried her up the long, winding staircase and down the hall to the bedroom at the end of the spacious corridor.

She stirred as he bent over the bed to draw back the covers, her eyelids fluttering open, her brown eyes wide and bewildered as she looked up at him.

"Where are we?"

"You didn't want to go to your house, so I brought you to mine."

She knew a moment of gut-wrenching fear. For some reason, it had been easy to trust him out in the open, but here, in this unfamiliar room, she felt trapped, defenseless.

"No," she said, her voice too high, "I can't stay here."

His dark gaze held hers. "Go to sleep, Sarah," he said quietly. "You've nothing to fear."

And once again, she believed him without knowing why. She felt suddenly weightless, limp. Her eyelids fluttered down. She sighed once, and then she was asleep.

Gabriel stood at the foot of the bed, watching her for a long while. He seemed to have a habit of picking up orphans and strays, he thought ruefully, but there was something about this girl that called to him. Perhaps it was merely that her hair was the same color as Sara Jayne's had been. Or perhaps it was because this Sarah, too, was alone in the world. Whatever the reason, he felt an irresistible urge to comfort her.

Shortly before dawn, he drove to the all-night market and bought a variety of foodstuffs—an assortment of breakfast cereal, fruit, milk, instant coffee, tea, bread, butter, jelly, eggs, cheese. A jar of bubble bath that smelled like wildflowers, a bar of scented soap. A bottle of dark red wine.

Food had changed, too, he thought as he dumped a package of meat into the wobbly shopping cart. Bread came already sliced and neatly wrapped in plastic. Milk came in various-sized containers, though he couldn't remember seeing any cows in the vicinity. Not only that, but there were now all kinds of milk: low fat, no fat, whole, raw, homogenized. In his youth, there had been but one kind of milk, the kind that came straight out of the cow, unless one preferred the milk of goats.

He tried to remember what eating three meals a day had been like as he drove home; tried to remember the taste of bread, of butter, of eggs and cheese, as he carried the brown paper bags into the kitchen and began to put things away. But he had no recollection of tastes or textures, save for the vague memory of forcing himself to eat a meal Sara Jayne had prepared for him a century ago, and all he really remembered of that experience was going outside to vomit it back up.

He grinned wryly as he opened the refrigerator. He had lived in this place for three months and this was the first time he had used the refrigerator to hold anything other than an occasional bottle of wine.

The sun was climbing over the horizon when he made his way down the short flight of stairs that led to what had once been a wine cellar.

Opening the door, he stepped inside, then bolted the door behind him, wondering if she would still be