The Watchtower

need to leave now .”
    “But you’re too weak.”
    “No, I’ll be all right. Help me up.”
    He scooped me up in his arms, and I let myself lie there for a moment, cradled against his chest, which still felt warm from the blood he’d drunk. His lips touched mine and my mouth opened. We could stay here tonight, I thought, and make love … what was one more night?
    One more night, the smoldering reeds moaned. One more night.
    “I think,” I said, my lips moving against his, “that there are traps here for faithful lovers as well as faithless ones.”
    “I could make love to you here forever, ” he said, his jaw clenched.
    “Exactly.”
    He sighed and put me down on my feet. “I think that’s what happened to them .” He pointed to the far side of the tomb, behind an empty plinth. White bones lay in a mingled heap. Two bodies that had twined themselves together in death. I shivered. Not from the cold but from the sudden urge to lie down beside them with Will and make love together until the flesh fell from our bones.
    “Yeah,” Will said, “we’d better go now. Before it gets light again. I can’t tell here how long the night lasts.”
    “But if you get stuck in the daylight…”
    “We’ll have to risk it. If we stay here any longer…” He stroked my face, let his hand trail down my neck, caressed my breast …
    “Yeah. Now.” I grabbed his hand before it got any lower and pulled him toward the door, pushed him through. We stumbled out into the circle of standing stones. Eight standing stones.
    “Were there only eight stones when you got here?” I asked.
    “By the time I got here I wasn’t in any shape to count stones. I was half out of my mind from wandering in the reeds.” He was striding up a hill, pulling me behind him, heading away from the reeds.
    “What did they say to you?” I asked, half dreading his answer. What awful things had the reeds said about me to make him doubt his love for me? But it seemed to me that unless we faced what the reeds had said to us, we would forever hear their whisperings. “They told me you couldn’t love me or else you’d have already become mortal and come back to get me.”
    He stopped on the crest of the hill and turned to face me. “They told me I didn’t deserve you. That if you knew all the evil I had done in my four hundred years as a vampire, you wouldn’t love me. That the Will you thought you loved was a mirage. That once you saw the real me, you would realize I was a monster and run screaming.”
    I looked up at him. He was above me on the hill so he seemed even taller, a giant looming over me. The violet fluorescent light in the sky made his skin glow like marble and his lips stand out a deathly blue. I felt my heart thud with fear. I touched my hand to my chest … and found the watch pendant. I gripped its cold metal in my hand and felt resolve settle in my heart.
    “I’m still here, aren’t I?” I said.
    He grinned. “God knows why, Garet. But I hope I never give you cause to regret it.” He turned away and I watched him start to climb over the hill, leaving the Valley of No Return. Maybe it was called that because once you crossed it, there was no going back to who you were before. Although I felt resolved to love Will as he was, I knew that he would always torture himself with his past deeds. If only he could go back to who he was before he had committed those terrible deeds. If only the last four hundred years could be erased. It seemed the only way he’d ever forgive himself.
    But that couldn’t be. I let go of the watch and followed Will into our future.

25
    A Poem and a Letter
    I’ve learned that love’s perfection isn’t time,
    or anything that can be measured. No,
    it’s merge beyond all comprehension, rhyme
    between two hearts and minds. A river flows
    into another, and they love the sea;
    two butterflies, sunkissed, both dart and dance
    in ecstasy of nearness. Fleetingly,
    they’ve reached communion, passion’s deepest trance.
    And even humble atoms, that I sense
    within my very flesh, will spin and glow,
    attracted to a neighbor, or the sun.
    Amazing, Marguerite, what I now know—
    as student of our separation’s pain—
    It’s not how long. It’s seeing you again!
    Will wrote this sonnet late that night, after Marguerite was asleep. He sat in a chair by the window and wrote in the pale light of an amber half-moon, quill-point scratching across parchment as if with a will of its own. He wrote