“Absolutely not,” Ralph said. He set the pot aside, reached for the sweater-buttons, then stopped. He was still wearing a quilted stove-glove on his left hand. He hadn’t noticed it until now.

“It will be easier if you take that off,” Mrs. Perrine said.

There might have been the faintest gleam in her eyes.

“I suppose so,” Ralph said humbly. He shook off the glove and buttoned McGovern’s sweater.

“My offer holds good, Roberts.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“My offer to mend your shirt. If you can bring yourself to part with it for a day or so, that is.” She paused. “You do have another shirt, I assume? One you could wear while I mend the one you have on?”

“Oh, yes,” Ralph said. “You bet. Quite a few of them.”

“Choosing among them each day must be challenging for you.

There’s bean-juice on your chin, Roberts.” With this pronouncement, Mrs. Perrine’s eyes flicked forward and she began to march once more.

What Ralph did then he did with no forethought or understanding; it was as instinctive as the chopping gesture he had made earlier to scare Doc #3 away from Rosalie. He raised the hand which ad been wearing the thermal glove and curled it into a tube around his mouth.

Then he inhaled sharply, producing a faint, whispery whistle.

The results were amazing. A pencil of gray light poked out of Mrs. Perrine’s aura like the quill of a porcupine. It lengthened rapidly, angling backward as the lady herself moved forward, until it had crossed the leaf-littered lawn and darted into the tube formed by Ralph’s curled fingers. He felt it enter him as he inhaled and it was like swallowing pure energy. He suddenly felt lit up, like a neon sign or the marquee of a big-city movie theater. An explosive sense of force-a feeling of power-ran through his chest and stomach, then raced down his legs all the way to the tips of his toes, At the same time it rocketed upward into his head, threatening to blow off the top of his skull as if it were the thin concrete roof of a missile silo, He could see rays of light, as gray as electrified fog, smoking out from between his fingers. A terrible, joyous sense of power lit up his thoughts, but only for a moment. It was followed by shame and amazed horror.

What are you doing, Ralph? Whatever that stuff is, it doesn’t belong to YOU. Would you reach into her purse and take some of her money ibhile she wasn’t looking?

He felt his face flush. He lowered his cupped hand and shut his mouth. As his lips and teeth came together, he clearly heard-and actually felt something crunch crisply inside. It was the sound you heard when you were chomping off a bite of fresh rhubarb, Mrs. Perrine stopped, and Ralph watched apprehensively as she made a half-turn and looked out at Harris Avenue. I didn’t mean to, he thought at her.

Honest I didn’t, Mrs. P.-I’m still learning my way around this thing.

“Roberts?”

“Yes?”

“Did you hear something? It sounded almost like a gunshot.”

Ralph. could feel his ears throbbing with hot blood as he shook his head. “No… but my ears aren’t what they-”

“Probably just a backfire over on Kansas Street,” she said, dismissing his weak-sister excuses out of hand. “It made my heart miss a beat, though, I can tell YOU.”

She started off again in her odd, gliding, chess-queen walk, then stopped once more and looked back at him. Her aura had begun to fade out of Ralph’s view, but he had no trouble seeing her eyesthey were as sharp as a kestrel’s.

“You look different, Roberts, she said. “Younger, somehow.”

Ralph, who had expected something else (Give me back what you stole, Roberts, and right this minute, for instance), could only flounder. “Do you think… that’s very… I mean to say thank y-” She flapped an impatient oh-shut-up hand at him. “Probably the light.

I advise you not to dribble on that sweater, Roberts. My impression of Mr. McGovern is that he is a man who takes care of his things.”

“He should have taken better care of his hat,” Ralph said.

Those bright eyes, which had begun once more to shift away from him, shifted back. “I beg your pardon?”

“His Panama,” Ralph said. “He lost it somewhere.”

Mrs. Perrine held this up to the light of her intellect for a moment, then cast it aside with another Hmmp. “Go inside, Roberts. If you stay out here much longer, you’ll catch your death of cold.” And then she slid upon her way, not visibly the worse for wear as a result of Ralph’s thoughtless act of thievery.

Thieve? I’m pretty sure that’s the wrong word, Ralph. What you did-is just it was a lot closer to"Vampirism,” Ralph said bleakly.

He put the pot of beans aside and began to slowly rub his hands together. He felt ashamed… guilty… and all but exploding with energy.

You stole some of her life-force instead of her blood, but a vampire is a vampire, Ralph.

Yes indeed. And it suddenly occurred to Ralph that this must not have been the first time he had done such a thing.

You look different, Roberts. Younger, somehow. That was what Mrs. Perrine had said tonight, but people had been making similar comments to him ever since the end of the summer, hadn’t they?

The main reason his friends hadn’t hectored him into going to the doctor was because he didn’t look like anything was wrong with bin-i.

He complained of insomnia, but he apparently looked like the picture of health. I guess that honeycomb must have really turned the trick, Johnny Leydecker had said just before the two of them had left the library on Sunday-back in the Iron Age, that felt like no"N.

And when Ralph had asked him what he was talking about, Leydecker had said he was talking about Ralph’s insomnia. You look a gajillion times better than on the day I first met you.

And Leydecker hadn’t been the only one. Ralph had been more or less dragging himself through the days, feeling folded, spindled, and mutilated… but people kept telling him how good he looked, how refreshed he looked, how young he looked. Helen… McGovern… even Faye Chapin had said something a week or two ago, although Ralph couldn’t remember exactly what"Sure I do,” he said in a low, dismayed voice. “He asked me if I was using wrinkle cream. Wrinkle cream, for God’s sake!”

Had he been stealing from the life-force of others even back then-stealing without even knowing it?

“Dear Jesus, I’m a vampire.”

“I must have been,” he said in that same low voice. But was that the right word? he wondered suddenly.

Wasn’t it at least possible that, in the world of auras, a life-stealer was called a Centurion?

Ed’s pallid, frantic face rose before him like a ghost which returns to accuse its murderer, and Ralph, suddenly terrified, wrapped his arms around his knees and lowered his head to rest upon them.

CHAPTER 15

At twenty minutes past seven, a perfectly maintained Lincoln Town Car of late seventies vintage drew up to the curb in front of Lots’s house.

Ralph-who had spent the last hour showering, shaving, and trying to get himself calmed down-stood on the porch and watched Lois get out of the back seat. Goodbyes were said and girlish, sprightly laughter drifted across to him on the breeze.

The Lincoln pulled away and Lois started up her walk. Half"way along it, she stopped and turned. For a long moment the two of them regarded each other from their opposite sides of Harris Avenue, seeing perfectly well in spite of the deepening darkness and the two hundred yards which separated them. They burned for each other in that darkness like secret torches.

Lois pointed a finger at him. It was very close to the hand-gesture she’d made before shooting at Doc #3, but this didn’t upset Ralph in the least. Intent, he thought. Eve -thing lies in intent. There are few mistakes in this world… and once you get to know your way around, maybe there are no mistakes at all.