Ad Eternum (4 page)

“This will be less…invasive,” the wampyr said, “if you lay your arm along the back of the settee.”

The sorcerer laughed. “You do realize how ridiculous what you just said is?”

“Or I could sit on your lap,” the wampyr said.

Damian laid a hand over his and did not respond directly. “I thought you would be…clammy.”

“Cold, sometimes,” the wampyr said.

“But I did not think you would feel so…dry.”

“You expected a fresh corpse.”

“No, I—” His laugh was a nervous hiccough. “Yes. I guess I did. You are—”

“I have been dead,” the wampyr said, “since before the Reconquista. Dead and incorruptible. It is what it is.”

“I guess so,” Damian answered. He touched the wampyr’s face. His fingertips were warm, and the pulse of blood thudded through them. “What’s it like?”

“The blood?”

“Living forever.”

“Nobody else does,” the wampyr said, and touched Damian’s right hand, with its lonely ring. “You can still leave—”

“I’m stalling,” Damian admitted. “Aren’t I?”

“I am patient.”

“Don’t be.”

Slowly, still shaking, Damian raised his left arm and laid it along the back of the couch. He turned the palm up and curled his fingers into a fist. He softly curved his right palm around the back of the wampyr’s head, twining fingers through his hair.

“Soft,” he said, so the wampyr heard his surprise.

The wampyr didn’t answer. The rich scent of blood be-neath elastic, living skin called to him, sang along his nerves.

The sorcerer sighed. “Do it.” His cupped hand followed the wampyr’s head down.

He drew a breath as the wampyr’s fangs pricked the soft flesh inside his elbow, and as they sank through the skin, his right hand made a fist in the wampyr’s hair. “Christ,” he muttered, head arching back, as the sweet, thick life filled the wampyr’s mouth. “Ow. Ow. Oh, sweet buggered Christ. I
never
—”

His voice broke. He drew a heaving, ragged breath, his heart accelerating under the warm, slightly oily skin where the wampyr rested his own left hand.

“Oh,” he said, and fell silent, breathing deeply though pleasure and pain.

The wampyr was careful, and took as little as he could bear, as slowly as he could bear. It was hard to stop, with the rush of warmth and life into his body after so long dry and chill and hungry. With the curl of Damian’s fingers tight into his hair. But he felt the gooseflesh raise its Braille patterns across Damian’s chest, and remembered—the house was cold, for a mortal, and the wampyr had no way to make it warm.

He drew away long before either of them wished him to.

In the normal course of events, the wampyr would have fed Damian afterward—but of course, after sixty years standing empty, there was no food in the house. So he stanched the wound—his fangs were sharp, and the punctures sealed quickly—and wrapped Damian in the sheets that had veiled the settee. The wampyr kissed Damian’s moss-springy curls with lips that suddenly tingled with life, and went into the still-dark parlor to fix the sorcerer a drink. To give him a few moments alone, and take a few for himself.

Sometimes they were shamed, shocked. In a hurry to leave. Sometimes so dizzied by unaccustomed pleasures that they would beg to be taken again. When the wampyr was young and inexperienced or had little control, that was when tragedies occurred.

But as the wampyr found glasses—clean, and neatly tidied away in the liquor cabinet—and began sniffing stoppered decanters, Damian slipped up behind him, trailing the sheets like a ghost’s funeral shroud.

The wampyr held a brandy bottle over his shoulder, the stopper in his other hand. “Does this smell good to you?”

“It smells fine. I thought wampyrs were supposed to have extraordinary senses.”

“I sniffed it through the stopper. It smelled like liquor—which is to say, chemical burns, with an overtone of putrescence. It’s hard for me to tell if it has turned.” The wampyr poured a third of a glass, then considered Damian’s size and tipped in a little more.

“Quel dommage,” Damian said, accepting the glass. He sipped and sighed. His gaze followed the wampyr as he extricated himself from between Damian and the liquor cabinet and wandered away across the thick-padded carpet.

Damian said, “Who are you?”

The wampyr permitted himself a flicker of a smile. His flesh tingled as the blood returned to it, bearing sensation and warmth. Keeping his voice light, he answered, “Etiquette would dictate that that is not the sort of thing one asks the blood.”

“Forgive me. I am new at this. Who are you? Other than Jack Prior, and Amédée Gosselin…”

The wampyr snorted. He traced a finger down a leather spine, feeling the texture of embossed hide and gilt. “Those are names. I am a dead man.”

The edge of the glass clicked Damian’s teeth as he sipped brandy again. “If you do not tell me, I will only invent stories. Each more scandalous than the last.”

The wampyr turned. He folded his arms and gazed challengingly up at the sorcerer. “Who are
you
?”

“Damian Thomas. Sorcerer. Both an American and an Englishman. Professor. Teacher. Author. Widower. Occasional—” he huffed in self-amusement. “—civil-rights activist. I have an elderly mother in Deptford. I am also a homosexual.”

The hand with the glass in it lowered to his side, no longer raised as a barrier. It was offered vulnerability, like the calm, blatant statement that came before.

“Am I meant to be shocked?” the wampyr said, showing his fangs, letting them catch the dim light from the street.

“Some men would be. Especially since it should be obvious that I find you attractive.”

“I am not a man.” The wampyr studied Damian’s expressions through the darkness, the suppressed muscular twitches he tried to conceal. “You said, widower.”

“My wife,” Damian said, “was also an academic. And a Lesbian. And a friend. We…”

“Shielded one another?” the wampyr suggested.

“That’s a good way of putting it. She had a lover and so did I—” he shrugged. “He is with someone else now.”

“I’m sorry,” the wampyr said. Eleven or twelve hundred years of experience didn’t give you any facile answers as to what the right reply was when someone had just shared a shattering confidence. But there might be something else he could say. Sometimes the right answer to a confidence was simply to reply in kind.

He said, “My name was Lopo, when I was alive.”

“Lopo. That’s not the sort of name one associates with wampyrs. Shouldn’t you have been Count von Something? A Bathory, perhaps? Or at least some ponderous old name with a sinister ring? Vladislav? Gideon? Batholomew?”

“And not the sort of thing you’d call a pet monkey?”

Damian winced theatrically. “I wouldn’t have put it just like that.”

The wampyr said, “It was the name of an apprentice stonemason. One who was lucky to find the position. His mother had no husband. His father was a Moor who did not keep her. This was in Galicia.”

He gestured to his face, aware that to Damian’s eyes, the olive tones were lost in the darkness.

“I don’t remember it,” the wampyr said. It was somehow easier to talk about these things with a virtual stranger—as if he said them to the void, or the night. “I have forgotten so much. But I know…knew…someone older than myself. He told me.”

Damian slipped a hand from beneath his sheets and brushed it across the wampyr’s face. “You’re pale, for a Moor.”

The wampyr laughed. Even to his own ear, it had the whispery rasp of an unused door.

“The Berber tribes were Africans, but not all were black Africans. I never knew the man who fathered me, and cannot tell you how he looked—but I can tell you that I was not considered fair as a youth. The blood—we fade, in a thousand years away from the sun. You should see how the old ones get, who were light-skinned in life. Like Grecian marbles, white as ice.” He studied his own pale-olive hand. “When I was maintaining the pretense of mortality, a certain swarthiness was an advantage.”

The wampyr was not sure what expression lit upon his own face just then, but Damian finished the brandy and hid his face inside the glass for a moment as if enjoying the fumes.

“I suppose I should go,” he said as he lowered it. “It will be daylight soon.”

The wampyr stepped back, leaving his hand extended for the empty glass. Damian set it in his fingers, letting their skin brush as he did so. It might have been bravado, but that did not mean the wampyr admired it any less.

“I do not,” the wampyr said, “retire to a coffin lined with grave-earth at dawn.”

“Really?” Damian’s forehead wrinkled with amusement. “What do you do?”

“Knit,” said the wampyr. “Mostly.” When Damian’s delighted laughter had subsided, he continued, “You are welcome to stay, but I rather imagine you need your rest.”

“I should sleep,” Damian said. “But I won’t. I have an early train to New Haven, and a class at noon.”

“How early?”

“Three hours,” Damian said, with a glance at his watch. “I have to return the car; I rented it at the airport.” He let the sheets slip from his shoulders. “I suppose I should put my shirt on first.”

“Has the bleeding stopped?”

Damian brushed his fingertips across the wound. “Entirely.”

His head stayed ducked, his eyes on whatever he could see of the smooth inside of his own elbow through the gloom. One of them had to say it.

“Will I see you again?” the wampyr asked—not meaning
in the company of your charming, ridiculous friends
.

Damian slid the back of his hand against the wampyr’s cheek. The wampyr turned to let it brush his mouth. So much warmth, so much life under the dense softness of that skin.

“You have my card,” the sorcerer said. “Can I call you?”

The wampyr tipped his head. “Once I have installed a telephone.”

A housekeeper recommended by the staff at the Hotel Aphatos arrived an hour after sunrise. The first task the wampyr set her was to find out if the household’s gas and water could be reconnected. The second was to seek out a reputable electrician for purposes of wiring the house—and for the duration of
that
project, the wampyr would be staying at the hotel.

There were limits to the strength of any man.

Once ensconced in his temporary quarters, the wampyr began the task of integrating himself into New Amsterdam’s undead society. It was surprisingly easy: there were still only about two dozen of the blood in New Netherlands, and not all of them came into the city with any regularity. The new openness and ease of travel meant that European wampyrs came and went with relative frequency, and the Hotel Aphatos catered to them—as well as providing a place to meet their local peers.

All he needed to do was sit in the lobby of the Aphatos with a book from the hotel’s extensive library on his knee, reading up on the Comte de St. Germain and his alleged six hundred years of history. That was a respectable age even for one of the blood, if you chose to believe he had attained it.

The wampyr was long inured to similar clubs in Europe, but this one had a kind of openness he had not anticipated.
How…American
, he thought, as he watched the young men and women wander in and out, all of them quite obviously knowing exactly what sort of place this was. Outside, in a cold rain, a different set of protestors had gathered.

In the Old World, the wampyr clubs were known by word of mouth among a certain select sort of people. They were not…he hesitated, seeking a phrase…
tourist attractions
.

To think, less than a hundred years before, this young country had been a bastion of Puritanism that had hunted him from its shores for the mere crime of existing, and destroyed one of his offspring in the bargain.

“America,” he muttered to himself.

“First time here?” someone said from the next chair over.

He’d known she sat there, of course. No fledgling of twenty or thirty years’ development was going to sneak up on someone of his age. But he’d been politely ignoring her, and had expected the same treatment in return.

Then again, he supposed he
had
provided the opening.

“First time since it was the Colonies,” he answered, turning on the edge of the chair.

She was a tall, rawboned brunette, the pallor of her cheeks contrasting strikingly with dark, sparkling eyes. Her cheekbones and jaw stretched the taut skin just so, giving the impression of careful engineering.

“Elizabeth,” she said.

“I am using Jack,” he answered.

“You have many names, I take it.”

It was a moment when a mortal might have saluted her with a glass. The wampyr stuck a finger in his book, instead. “And you have only one. But you do not stand on ceremony, so neither shall I.”

She smiled. “I’d heard about you. You’re the old one, from the continent. They say you’re staying.”

“My dear,” the wampyr countered, “when one is as old as I am, one comes to realize that one never really
stays
anywhere. At most, one can be said, for a time, to alight.”

She laughed. It wasn’t as good as Estelle Blacksnake’s laugh, or even Ruthanna Wehrmeister’s. But it was an honest effort, and the wampyr appreciated how hard it was to learn to laugh spontaneously again when one was dead. “We must seem a terribly callow lot to you.”

He shrugged. “Are you all brothers and sisters?” The direction of his gaze took in two lovely young men who stood by the rail. They could have been twins, and possibly were, and they had gleaming black hair and a certain strength of nose and jaw line that gave them a resemblance to the young Elizabeth.

“Jamie and Jeffrey are. That is to say, we were made by the same master. At about the same time.”

“He—he?—he is young.”

“By your standards, aren’t we all?” She hooked the waves of her hair behind her ear with a pinkie. “But yes; my creator’s name is Zachariah, and
he
was created in Boston around the turn of the century. How did you know?”

He knew of one wampyr who had been in Boston in that era—one other than himself, in any case.
Are you all Epaphras Bull’s get, then?
the wampyr wondered. Was all America peopled with his great-grandchildren?

He said, “Only the young make flocks of followers. At my age, most have learned the folly of it.”

“Folly?”

“Yes,” he said. “One brings another across the veil in order to keep them—well, ‘alive’ is as similar to what I mean as any word—and close. At my age, one
also
learns how few will remain either of these things for long.”

Her fingers rested on his sleeve, her expression stricken. Her flesh was still heavy—the weight of youth. Someday, if she outlived everything she had ever known, she would be as light and dry as he, blown wherever the wind willed it. 

He patted her motionless hand to reassure her that he was not offended, and stood. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I just overheard the concierge say my name into the telephone. Say, do you know anything about this fellow in the city who is pretending to be the Comte de St. Germain?”

She looked up at him, but did not rise. “He styles himself Prince Ragoczy?”

The wampyr nodded.

“He comes in all the time,” Elizabeth said. “He says its nice to talk to somebody closer to his own age.”