Elysium — Friday, 5 January 1990, 8:00 PM

Modius’s Mansion, Miller Beach Gary, Indiana

The mansion looked like a skull with candles in it.

That was Sable’s first thought as she pulled the Buick up to the curb — the tall windows glowing amber from inside, the dark stone facade, the roofline sagging on the north side where the architecture had given up pretending it was still alive. Two men stood at the front door in the cold. They didn’t move when she walked past them because they couldn’t. Their eyes tracked her the way security cameras track: mechanically, without recognition, without will.

She’d spent the day getting ready. Cold water from the cast-iron sink, the work light propped against the stone wall, the compact mirror she’d been carrying since The Oasis. The black dress was the only good thing she owned that she hadn’t stolen — Michael had bought it for her during the painting sessions, had it delivered to the Roselle house in a box with tissue paper and a card that said For the canvas in handwriting that was older than photography. She put it on in a dead church basement and it fit the way Michael’s clothes always fit: perfectly, possessively, like a frame built for a painting that hadn’t been finished.

The fur coat was Sharon’s. She wore it anyway. If you’re going to walk into a room full of monsters, you might as well wear the skin of the one you fear most.

The ballroom was smaller than she expected and sadder than she’d imagined. Candelabras — real silver, tarnished to the color of old teeth. Flowers that had been arranged by someone who understood symmetry and had been dying since before she arrived. Paintings on every wall, dark and tortured, full of bodies in positions that were either agony or ecstasy and the brushwork didn’t know the difference. A string quartet in the corner playing something classical with the glazed perfection of musicians who had forgotten they were people.

She counted the room in three heartbeats. Six Kindred. Two bodyguards. One piano. One woman at the piano who wasn’t playing.

Sable priced everything. She couldn’t help it. The habit was older than the Embrace — Denise standing in the kitchen doorway of the apartment on State Street, studying the label on a bottle of activator, lips moving as she calculated cost per ounce. Sable did the same thing to rooms full of people: what’s it worth, what does it cost, where’s the margin. The candelabras were worth something but not to anyone in this room. The paintings were worthless. The string quartet was Dominated, which meant they worked for free, which meant the prince couldn’t afford to pay musicians.

The prince couldn’t afford flowers that lived.

She stood in the doorway and let the light find her the way light always found her — without effort, without intention, the physics of a face built to stop traffic making the candlelight bend toward her the way candlelight bends toward anything it can illuminate. She put her hands together in front of her and let her eyes go wide and uncertain, the girl who walked into the wrong room, and she felt the room turn.

He came to her faster than a prince should.

“My dear. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

His hands were cold. Both of them, wrapped around hers, the gesture of a father or a buyer. He looked like Einstein in a tuxedo that had been stylish during the Reagan administration and had not been updated since. His eyes were the eyes of a man who had once been capable of seeing beauty and now just recognized it, the way a blind man recognizes the sun by its heat.

She gave him everything he wanted to hear. The trembling voice. The catch in the breath. The name — Sable Price — offered like a confession. The story: grabbed outside a club, an alley, the blur, waking up dead and alone and not understanding. She didn’t give him a sire’s name because a name could be checked and a ghost couldn’t. She gave him a girl in trouble. She gave him a beautiful orphan who needed a prince.

He led her to the good chair. He brought her wine she wouldn’t drink. He sat beside her and his whole body leaned toward her the way buildings lean toward their foundations, structural, load-bearing, as if without her specific gravity in the room beside him he might tip over and never get up.

She’d known men like this her entire life. Big Six had the same lean. The johns at The Oasis had the same lean. The difference was that Modius had been leaning for two hundred years and the weight of all that leaning had compressed him into something that was simultaneously the most powerful man in Gary and the loneliest creature she had ever seen, and Sable had seen a lot of lonely creatures because she’d been making them her whole career.

The court business was a performance. She recognized performances.

He named the domains. He noted the absent. He mentioned Chicago the way a man mentions his parole officer — with careful, hostile politeness. And then he turned to her.

“I wish to formally extend the hospitality of Gary to Miss Price, a childe of our clan, who has come to us in need. She is under my personal protection.”

Miss Price. He said it the way a museum says acquisition. She was in the collection now.

And then Allicia stood up.

The whole room stopped. Not dramatically — the way a room stops when the barometric pressure changes. Everyone felt it. The silent woman at the piano, the one who hadn’t spoken in fifty years, the one who sat and watched and existed as furniture in Modius’s decaying gallery — she stood. She looked at Modius. She looked at Sable. Her eyes moved between them with the precision of a needle finding a vein.

The expression on her face was not anger. Anger requires a belief that things should be different. The expression on Allicia’s face was the thing that comes after anger, when you’ve been sitting at a piano for half a century watching beautiful women walk through the door and walk out with the one person who owns you, and you’ve stopped being angry about it and started being something worse, which is awake.

Four seconds. Then she sat down. Hands in her lap. Eyes on the floor.

Sable watched her and thought: That’s what I look like from the outside. That’s what the doll looks like when it realizes it’s on a shelf.

Nobody spoke to her after. The court emptied out around her the way a bar empties at closing time — gradually, without farewell, each departure a small act of self-preservation. Modius retreated to his art studio. Allicia stayed at the piano. The Nosferatu with the gray eyes had been gone for an hour and Sable didn’t know when he’d left because that was presumably the point.

She stood alone in the ballroom. The candles were guttering in their tarnished holders. One of the flower arrangements had shed petals onto the floor and nobody had picked them up. The string quartet’s music stands were empty. The room smelled like old wax and dead flowers and the particular must of a building that had been beautiful once and was now just large.

She set the wine glass on the mantelpiece. She had not taken a single sip. She had not spoken to a single person other than the prince. She had performed the role of beautiful lost fledgling for three hours and the performance had been flawless and nobody had broken character to talk to her afterward because the performance was so good that they all believed it, and believing it meant there was nothing to say to a girl who didn’t know anything and belonged to the prince.

She walked to the front door. The Dominated bodyguards didn’t look at her. The door closed. The cold hit and she pulled Sharon’s coat around herself and walked to the Buick and got in and sat behind the wheel and did not start the engine for a long time.

She drove to Polk and Thirteenth. Green door. Brass key. Deadbolt. She sat on the fur coat on the tile floor in the rectory kitchen and listened to the boiler tick and the pigeons shift in the rafters overhead and the nothing that lived in the gaps between those sounds.

Modius had called her Miss Price and claimed her in front of the court and given her his protection and nobody had spoken to her and nobody had approached her and nobody had seen the girl underneath the dress and the coat and the face.

She’d walked into a room full of immortals and made every one of them believe exactly what she wanted them to believe.

The reward was a basement and the sound of a boiler and the knowledge that the performance worked, which meant the performance would have to continue, which meant there would never be a night when she walked into a room and someone saw Sable Price instead of what Sable Price was showing them.

She lay down on the fur coat. She did not sleep for a long time. When she did, she dreamed about her mother’s hands — the swelling, the splits, the chemical burns that never healed — and woke up before dawn with her own hands pressed against the cold stone wall, reaching for something that wasn’t there and had never been there and would never be there again.