“She’s too pure and good,” Jack reprimands. “Someone evil like you can’t get near her.”
“That’s one for you guys,” Caleb sneers, regaining his self-protective arrogance and sarcasm. “Enjoy it while you can. This little party will end soon. I WILL have her.” With these words, he vanishes, leaving Tess and Jack amidst the foggy solitude of the docks.
Despite Caleb’s occasional flashes of shame and guilt, the residual traces of his “Father Michael” aspect and his banished humanity, he has survived as a vampire by learning to embrace his predatory immortality. He savors the intensity of sensations, the aching hunger and desire. He, unlike Ian, nurtures no illusion of human nobility, for he has seen the darkness within those who hypocritically clamor for his death. The mundane, materialistic pleasures of mankind hold little temptation for Caleb when compared to the exquisite ecstasies of the vampire.
Elizabeth, seeking to assuage her loneliness, ease her hunger, and appease her guilt after transforming Ian into a vampire, tries to convince Ian that she has given him a gift. Panting, giddy with desire, she urges Ian to stop fighting and just let himself go. “I’m going to make you feel things you never knew existed,” she purrs, parroting Caleb’s promises to her. When Ian rebuffs her attempts to kiss him again, she vows that his pain will soon give way to “unbelievable passion” and “incredible pleasure” he cannot yet imagine. But Ian, now panting also, afflicted with her hunger, struggles to resist. He has been violated, raped, in a sense, by this desperate, victimized woman he had rather foolishly tried to rescue. His humanity taken away, he lashes out at her with words of truth she would like to deny, accusing her of being Caleb’s “puppet,” a will-less, soul-less automaton.
“You can’t leave me alone like this,” she shrieks, as Ian walks out the door, and she is again deserted, rejected. Seething with rage, she tears through the apartment like a bratty toddler on steroids, giving into her temper tantrum by toppling furniture and smashing glass. Having decimated Caleb’s collection of crystal wine glasses, she is about to shatter a paperweight when Caleb suddenly appears in the room.
Staring at her sternly and shaking his head in disapproval, he frightens her into submission before he even speaks a word. She stops dead in her tracks, puppet strings jerked taut as she confronts her master.
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