There is, he will admit, some truth to what she says. He has rarely killed his own meat, and indeed eats little of it - but that is more due to its cost than to any principle, and he can understand her point. Life has a right to sustain itself, even at the cost of others; that is the nature of living.

But, he must remind himself sharply, she is not alive. She has no right to be walking this world at all. Her death is a tragedy, as all deaths may be; but it is a tragedy of the past, for there is no heat in her and no pulse beating beneath the skin.

"You need not kill?" She is scant inches from him, and if she breathed, he would feel it against his face. She does not breathe. The hair on the back of Francis' neck prickles with instinctive dread. "And yet you would have killed her. Do you deny that?"