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They hurried off, and Dora went the other way towards thesquare and towards her car. She wore a slender black wool coat andwool stockings with heels that were very high, her very favorites fordancing on her program, and with her little cap of black hair shelooked extremely dramatic and fragile, and horribly vulnerable in aworld of mortal males.
I caught her around the waist before she knew what was happening.
We were rising so fast, I knew she could not see or understandanything, and I said very close to her ear,"You're with me, and you're safe." Then I wrapped her totally inmy arms, so that no harm at all could come to her from the wind orthe speed we were traveling, and I went up just as high as I dared togo with her, uncovered and vulnerable and depending upon me,listening keenly beneath the howl of the wind for the proper functioningof her heart and her lungs.
I felt her relaxing in my arms, or more truly, she simply remainedtrusting. It was as surprising as everything else about her. She hadburied her face in my coat, as though too afraid to try to look aroundher, but this was really more a practical matter in the cold thananything else. At one point, I opened my coat, and covered her with oneside of it, and we went on.
The journey took longer than I had supposed; I simply could nottake a fragile human being up that high into the air. But it was nothingas tedious or dangerous as it might have been had we taken afuming and stinking and highly explosive jet plane.
Within less than an hour, I was standing with her inside the glassdoors of the Olympic Tower. She awoke in my arms as if from a deepsleep. I realized this had been inevitable. She'd lost consciousness, fora series of physical and mental reasons, but she came to herself atonce, her heels striking the floor, and looked at me with huge owleyes, and then out at the side of St. Patrick's rising in all its obdurateglory across the street.
"Come on," I said, "I'm taking you to your father's things." Wemade for the elevators.
She hurried after me, eagerly, the way that vampires dream mortalswill do it, which never, never happens, as if all this were wondrousand there was no reason under Heaven to be afraid.
"I don't have much time," I said. We were in the elevator speedingupwards. "There is something chasing me and I don't know whatit wants of me. But I had to bring you here. And I'll see that you gethome safe."I explained that I knew of no rooftop entrances to this building;indeed, the whole place was new to me, or I would have brought herin that way, and I explained this now, embarrassed that we wouldcover a continent in an hour and then take a rattling, sucking, andshimmering elevator that seemed only slightly less marvelous thanthe gift of vampiric flight.
The doors opened onto the correct floor. I put the key in herhand, and guided her towards the apartment. "You open it,everything inside is yours."She looked at me for a moment, a slight frown on her forehead,then she stroked carelessly at her wind-torn hair, and put the key inthe lock and opened the door.
"Roger's things," she said with the first breath she took.
She knew them by the smell as any antiquarian might have knownthem, these icons and relics. Then she saw the marble angel, poisedin the corridor, with the glass wall way beyond it, and I thought shewas going to faint in my arms.
She slumped backwards as if counting upon me to catch her andsupport her. I held her with the tips of my fingers, as afraid as everthat I might accidentally bruise her.
"Dear God," she said under her breath. Her heart was racing, butit was hearty and very young and capable of tremendous endurance.
"We are here, and you've been telling me true things."She sprang loose from me before I could answer and walkedbriskly past the angel and into the larger front room of the place. Thespires of St. Patrick's were visible just below the level of the window.
And everywhere were these cumbersome packages of plastic throughwhich one could detect the shape of a crucifix or saint. The books ofWynken were on the table, of course, but I wasn't going to press heron that just now.
She turned to me, and I could feel her studying me, assessing me.
I am so sensitive to this sort of appraisal that I actually think my van-ity is rooted in each of my cells.
She murmured some words in Latin, but I didn't catch them, andno automatic translation came up in my mind.
"What did you say?""Lucifer, Son of Morning," she whispered, staring at me withfrank admiration. Then she plopped down into a large leather chair.
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