She awoke gradually with the feeling she’d just heard somebody calling her name. Everything was very still, and she felt oddly detached from herself, as if she was still dreaming, but she knew she was awake. The call came again, but it wasn’t a call with words, it was more like a feeling. Someone was calling her, summoning her, and she must go. She made her way through empty corridors. Most of the illuminating torches had gone out, but the call guided her unerringly through the dark. She came to the stairs that descended to the basement and went down them. Somewhere in the back of her mind a little bit of her that was more awake was telling her there was something she ought to remember about the basement, but in her dreamy state she couldn’t think what it might be. Then she reached the bottom of the stairs and snapped abruptly and horribly awake. The corridor in front of her was lit only by the dim light that spilled down the stairs, but it was more than enough for Flame to see the gruesome scene before her. The door to Aidan’s cell stood open. A man in cleric’s robes was sprawled in front of it, and the floor and walls around him were covered in blood. A bloodied dagger lay on the floor a few feet away from the body. She took one step forward with the thought that the man might not be dead. As she did a dark shape dropped from the shadows of the ceiling behind her. He touched her with one hand and at his touch she was frozen, completely unable to move.

As she had known it would be, when he came around in front of her it was the mirror Aidan. He snapped his fingers and a ball of fire appeared just over his shoulder. By its light he looked at her closely.

“So strange. You are the very image of my wife, and yet you are completely unlike her. You have a softness, a compassion, that she lacks. Why is it that I am fascinated by you?” He reached up and stroked her cheek. She shivered at the touch.

“I find,” he said as he ran his fingers down her cheek, along the line of her jaw, and down her neck, “that I want you more than I have ever wanted anything. I want you more than I wanted my Flame, even when we first met and she seduced me. Why is that? What is it about you? Is it just because you are so like her and yet so unlike that you fascinate me so?” His fingers traced the path of the big vein that pulsed in her neck.

She closed her eyes tightly, as if somehow her not seeing what was sure to come would keep it from happening. So she felt rather than saw his arms encircle her. She felt the soft touch of his lips on her neck and then the sharp prick of his fangs as he broke through her skin to reach the rushing blood beneath. She had knows such kisses before, of course. Her own husband was also a vampire after all, and for him taking her blood was part of the pleasure he drew when they were together. And, because of the emotional bond formed by such exchanges, Flame Song had found such occasions to be very enjoyable. But this was a far different, far darker experience. The blood-bond was the same, but the feelings that echoed up and down it were not. Flame felt as though she had been plunged into a raging maelstrom. Aidan’s mind was awash in a dozen conflicting emotions. There was physical passion, of course, and that was foremost in those first few moments, but beneath it was a storm-tossed sea of confusion, hatred, anger, fear, and depression. Flame was overwhelmed by it. It seemed as though all of Aidan’s dark feelings were directed toward her. Her own mind shrank back from an emotional assault that was far worse than the physical assault she was being subjected to. Aidan could feel her terrified response, and an exultant delight poured through him. He reveled in the distress of this, the object of his hatred. Or was it only that she was the mirror of the true object of his unfocused rage?

While all this was surging between them, unchecked emotions pouring back and forth across the blood-bond, they remained locked in their embrace, Flame standing frozen, Aidan with his head bent to her neck. He drank deeply of her blood, relishing the flavor of her fear. Gradually Flame began to weaken. Her pulse became weaker, her breathing more shallow. I’m going to die, she thought, and somehow the thought was liberating. If death was near then there was nothing else she should fear. And with the fear any hatred she had for this dark mirror of her husband ebbed away as well. Instead she found herself regarding him with pity and compassion. He was so like her Aidan, what had life been like for him to make him what he had become? She recalled how he had said that his wife would regard her own Aidan as a new toy, and like a spoiled child with a new plaything, would try to break him. Had she then likewise broken his mirror?

Aidan, joined to her mind by the blood-bond, couldn’t read her thoughts, but he could sense her emotions, and the sudden shift confused him. His exultant delight in his revenge faded. He realized with a kind of shock that he was killing her, that she lay on death’s door at that moment. Somewhere in his heart a tiny spark of caring, perhaps even of love, flared to life. He was killing her and she must know it, yet he felt no hatred from her, only this strange compassion. Suddenly two impulses were at war in him. He had always taken as his hunger and his passion demanded. He was unaccustomed to exercising self-restraint, and yet he suddenly didn’t want her to die. He struggled for the self-control to draw back. Flame Song felt his sudden change of heart and in her own heart she cheered him on. She realized that as much as she wanted to live, she wanted nearly as much to see Aidan win over his inner darkness. How his struggle might have ended neither of them ever knew, for at that moment the corridor was flooded with light and Saint Drago leaped down the stairs and hurled Aidan bodily away from Flame.

She collapsed on the floor; whatever spell had held her in place broken. Aidan got to his feet and faced Drago with a snarl on his face. His lips were stained with blood that he didn’t bother to wipe off. He advanced and swung a fisted hand at Drago’s midsection. Drago just managed to step back and avoid the blow. He saw as Aidan’s fist whipped past that the vampire in fact held a knife, the blade turned to lie almost invisible along his wrist, the sharp edge facing outward. Had he not avoided the blow it would have gutted him. But even as he realized the danger he was in Aidan reversed his momentum and slammed the knife into Drago’s abdomen. He doubled up, clutching at the hilt of the knife that stood out of his stomach. Aidan stepped back, a hard look in his eyes. Flame Song, barely holding on to consciousness, could distantly feel his rage echoing down the fading link between them.

He turned and his eyes fell on her still form sprawled on the cold floor. Another shock of realization swept though him. He bent over her and his fingers felt for a pulse. He breathed a sigh of relief when he found one. It was weak and unsteady but there. Surely in this monastery there were healers enough to save her. He rose and quickly began to ascend the stairs. Halfway up he stopped and looked back, surveying the three bodies scattered on the floor, blood pooling around two of them. Flame Song, slipping into unconsciousness, was still faintly linked to him, and the last thing she knew was his sudden feeling of regret and his surprise that any such emotion could find its way into his hardened heart.