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Take Me With You, the second novel from Escha's point of view, will be posted here as well as concurrently in the WF.

translation notes for 3.1.9
bordel de merde: goddammit/bloody ******** hell/wtf
ne pleurez pas: don't cry (polite/detached form)

translation notes for 5.8.9
basic conversation:
-What are we celebrating/which party was it? (extremely loaded question)
-Why?
-Why he asks me why. (meant to sound very synaesthetically sharp, the way the words feel in your mouth)

translation notes for 8.15.9
bordelique = a big ******** mess
va te faire foutre = get the ******** out/go get ******** ouais je suis... = oh yeah, and i am a b*****d, and i am a son of a whore.

translation notes for 10.17.9
mon petit coeur = my little heart (endearment)

Act 1- Paris, hard ground. Silky white underbelly.

I ran my fingers up his stomach and he gasped, beautiful with gray eyes. His lips begged me to kiss them so I kissed them, enthralled with his rapture at my simple ministrations.

Long neck, aristocratic neck, the most elegant kind, I sucked on him beneath his ear, at the jaw, digging my fingernails into his skin below the navel so he screamed and it turned then, rapture into terror.

Forgive me that you really did think that I could save you.

He didn't push me away but I pushed him against the wall, pinning him, blushing at the oh wonderful, the oh wonderful moment before the little snake bite that ends the life and quiets the struggle. I dug my nails deeper into his flesh; Dasius burst into tears.

When his knees gave way I gave way with him, letting him sink down to the floor, dying dying dying beautiful fifteen year old boy.

I slapped him. He whimpered, starting to see things. I straddled him with my full weight, two hands on the earth to the right and left of his head, looking into his eyes unseeing.

He didn't try to say anything to me.

I slapped him again, looking for the flush of blood in his face. There was none. I slapped him harder only because I wanted to slap him.

Occasionally one stumbles upon fortune. I found Dasius at Bons Matins, house for lost children in Montmartre, 3rd order.

"S'il vous plait ne me frappez pas encore."

I withheld my hand.

He was splendid, nearly infinitely.

"Where is my brother?"

"I have fallen on him already."

He was quiet at that, knowing full well what it meant to be the object of such intentions.

"Je meurs."

"Faux," I insisted, "Je vous prends avec moi. Je vous veux."

"I don't want to go."

"Be quiet," I said, slipping my hands beneath his back to prop him up, "We are going together."

He ran his fingers through my hair. We were lovers until we left the city.
++++

"Can't you see that this is dangerous? He'll get us all killed."

"Don't tell us what to do, Dasius. It's nothing."

I petted Nicolas's blood matted hair. He chattered by my neck, full of a blood fury.

"I don't understand you. You're supposed to take care of us but you can't see that there is already suspicion?"

"I suspect that you are supposed to do as you are told," I bore my teeth at him, turning away, "Of course I can see it."

"You have to control him better. You have to-"

I wheeled around and backhanded him across the face, not hard enough to knock him over, hard enough to hurt.

"You have no right," I told him, "You have no right."

He made to storm out but stayed where he was, eyes downcast, fists closed.

Nicolas pulled on my hair.
++++

The two of them were my little treasures, more so Nicky, not as argumentative, not as forceful, and not, ultimately, as loving. I had never done anything like it before, kept anyone. They were younger; I felt responsible for them in a way I had never felt for what I suppose constitutes my brood.

In the past lovers had come and gone, and I would bring them over in a passion or out of boredom, kill them just as fast out of the same impulses. It was not a game, but it resembled a game. Dasius and Nicolas were not a game to me. I didn't want something then. It was not motivated by a specific desire, having them. I wanted Dasius; it became something else. I did not seek out a candidate for altering my life because it was not a pattern that I could give up in any real way. I had made no resolution to change it.

They were my little angels, my little protectors, at least for awhile, and I loved them. Concerning Dasius, perhaps it was a cruel love. Perhaps it is. Concerning Nicolas, I was amused by him.

Little brother, petit ange doux, with his softly curling brown hair and big, begging eyes. He had a cruel caricature of a smile, five years old. I didn't think about it. I just did it, bringing him over. I just did it. I don't want to say that I felt anything. I don't want him to think that there was any ultimate reason at all. Anything I felt was insignificant. It was not a passionate move on my part towards a five year old to bring him over. It was just done. I just did it.

Nicolas got snarky as he got older, well spoken but not charming. As a child he was only vicious and needy. I gave and gave and gave of myself willingly. I've got to say it didn't come down around our heads as quickly as I thought it would. Nicolas was not subtle but people see what they want to see. He was obvious like a peacock at a funeral. I didn't need Dasius to tell me that. One does not have a child walking into their apartment having bathed in the blood of their fellow man without realizing that time is short. I didn't know how to tell myself to leave.

Nicolas could just be so sweet. He needed a parent, and I wanted to give him that, as grotesque as it is. Don't misunderstand me; I didn't think about it. I never said "I want to care for a child". That would be ludicrous. What I had was a five year old hound of hell who wanted to cuddle in bed with me and I did it.

"You are too severe," he would say, licking his teeth clean, in following years.

I do not think that it is a severe description. I do not think that he remembers what it was like, how I could not hold him for more than a few minutes, how he would go after children and their parents without any sort of advance notice, how he would even bite at me and his brother with those sharp little teeth and that steel trap of a jaw. We could not keep him in proper clothing because we could not keep them clean from day to day. He doesn't remember, because it was a short period in his long life and though still relatively horrible he is calculated now, much more refined in his decision making. The truth then was that there was hardly a mind behind it at all and I did not allow myself to be terrified. I am not like Dasius. I do not entertain notions that we should have drowned him. I did not imagine that he would improve but I did not imagine that I wanted to do without him. At least he was exciting.

Also, honestly, no matter what he has to say to the contrary, killing Nicolas would have broken Dasius's heart.
++++

I shook him desperately. Nicolas's eyes were rolled up at the ceiling. I took him to bed. I curled around him and pushed my face into his blood logged hair while he dreamed blood dreams.

Dasius watched us sleep. Dasius stood by the wrought iron tangle of a footboard, a great iron fence of an end of a bed.

He was learning not to talk to me when I was taken with Nicky. It was all he could do to watch me be very lost. I can't apologize for it. I don't have words.

He was sad all the time. He felt that he had lost his little brother, lost him, not had him taken away by me. He understood then that I had not planned it. It did not shake his faith in me, looking at me for answers because he was so young and I was so very very old. Dasius had been there when Nicolas was born. I would not allow myself into his heartache. I wanted no thought of it to enter into my space because I was obsessed with maintaining a self contained kind of torment. I could not have comforted him in that frame of mind. Long suffering, misguided lover was my melodramatic role then. I convinced myself that I needed it. I told myself that he was merely angsty and it drove me apart from him. As perfect for me as he was I couldn't take the reasonable voice in my head.

So he learned not to talk at all if there were other people in the room, and instead would approach me when my defenses were rigidly up, so as not to touch a vulnerable part.

There were always times with Dasius when I would break apart and crawl into his bed. There have always been. He holds me with both hands open, lets me have him, loves me when I cannot love myself. It is not a secret that there are many things wrong between us. For me it does not help matters that Leechtin himself seemed to desire Dasius for a love affair when he showed up years later. It does not foster warmth in me to have competition.
++++

His black hair, the way that he carried himself, those wise, big, almond shaped eyes. I kissed his earlobes. He closed his eyes, breathed out.

I had found him in his office in that big house, the office I had given him because he wanted to study all the time.

"Dasius, what are you reading? What are you drawing?"

He had been reading an anatomical text, Italian. It would be wrong to say that I indulged him by getting him those sorts of things. I found it fascinating.

I draped myself over his shoulders and kissed the side of his head, smelling his dark hair.

"You've been out," I said, because I could smell him.

"Before you woke up," he said, "When the sun was going down."

"It has been a long time since I have seen the sun," I said, quietly.

"I won't make it a habit."

"It must be hard on you. It always is."

"It always is?"

"When you're young." I stroked his collarbones through the fabric of his high collared shirt. He always dressed sharply, "I love it when you are vulnerable."

He swallowed a breath. "Oh God I am so desperate for you."
++++

They were orphans before me, but they had had experience with vampires before. I found them through a hateful lover who had found a new and powerful way of toying with me- torturing small children. It was how Nicolas became a plaything and Dasius developped the brooding nature that he still exhibits.

I tired of the lover and had his head, but perhaps it was the strong feeling of resentment towards him that strengthened a feeling of protectiveness towards them that drew me to do what I did. Besides Dasius's obvious physical enchantments, there was an underlying motivation born from that feeling.

Perhaps a million things could be said about what happened, about how Nicolas was near death with his collapsed veins, how much anguish I felt at the state of him. I could say so much, but how could I explain it to him? I can't say anything clearly, with the whole truth, so I say nothing at all. He deserves to hear how it was. Laying there on the white feather coverlet, brown colored hair arranged around his head like a floating angel, the state of his dying body with the tiny little snakebites anywhere there was a beautiful place... how do I talk to him about this?

Dasius was a different story, having seen me before and well enough to approach me under his own power. I had killed his master. He had been shocked by the freedom, and came to me talking about how he had seen my face, how he had known that I had been watching them, how he knew that I would save them from torment. He was not afraid of me, really at the time the battle between good and evil was very clear and very real. I did not turn out to be the savior he imagined. It used to weigh on my conscience.
++++

"Je t'ai gagne," I whispered in his face, "Je t'ai conquis," whispering.

He followed my mouth with his nose, taken up by me, unable to speak.

I touched his stomach, "Il faut que-" he choked, "Il faut que-"

I pushed up under his jaw with my hand.
++++

I wonder what Nicolas thought of, if he thought of anything at all. He would climb up onto the little step, bend to the basin of clean water, float his face in there, maybe with his eyes open, maybe closed, bracing himself with his little hands on the tabletop.

I'd lounge and watch him, an increasingly backdrop presence for him, not the filiment that had formerly attracted him at all, blood itself easily took my place and quickly. It didn't help me to think of my younger self in the situation when it came to Nicky, I couldn't imagine him. My own great love of humanity did not begin to describe his interactions. He would think that was a very snotty thing to say. Maybe it is. He never thought of it as a game, not the way that he has been accused of. I can't say something crass like was is his life, because I do not know his mind.
++++

"Laurent."

"Yes."

Dasius leaned across the table.

I leaned forward.

"Look at this."

I looked at his medical text for him.

"Nicky has been bringing them home."

I said the word for what he was pointing at in the picture.

I couldn't say very much more either the next time I saw it, even though it was inside Nicky.

It was a few days before the villagers put things together and came after us with torches, or rather, whatever they could find. Notably, one of them thought to bring an unnecessarily large scythe. I think of it with disdain, and maybe a little amusment if I will allow it. Who would hit a child with a scythe? Even if he was in your way? Nicky didn't think that kind of nerve present, and that is why he did not move out of the way. I try not to laugh about it now, but it is because I am still a little hysterical after all this time.
++++

Nicky remembers it as a bullet, but he is putting together two memories of similar times. It actually is that they cut him down like a blade of grass and stepped over him to get to us, not knowing that their true quarry lay beneath their feet, all of the sorry little livers of their sorry little wives and children that Nicky had brought home buried beneath the wooden floorboards; they stepped on Nicky's hair as they passed him unwilling to believe that he was their real killer.

Poor Dasius got the blame. That is how it was in those days, and how it is today really. They passed by Nicky, a child with an innocent face, they passed over me, a petite with sunlit hair, and grabbed Dasius for his hooded almond eyes and sinister look, surprised and frightened as he obviously was. I thought that the windowsill would break off between his white jointed fingers when they cracked down the doors of his study, the peasantry, and pushed past me to get him.

What could I do to save him? There was nothing that I really could do. I am not afraid to say it. I have made peace with it.

We heard them before they got into the house, Dasius and I in his study. I was leaning against his desk, talking to him about something or other, maybe tailoring, something like that, and he was looking out of the window with his hands clasped behind his back when we heard the first loud bang, breaking down the front door. His reaction was immediate, terror. He was still a child. I rose to comfort him, but I knew it was too late for such things immediately, so I had to leave him by the window, backing up against the bookshelf to get out of the way. We heard them speaking to Nicolas, creature of the night as he is, unaware of being a little dog.

Banging on the study door, the only other door in the place, directly in view if coming through the long marble vestibule, banging, banging, each bang giving Dasius a worse case of the shakes, as if they knew what they were doing to him, and finally a great crack and a giving way of doors.

The first one through the gaping mouth of the door shouted, criss crossed with the blood of my Nicky on his shirt and forearms; my heart dropped into my stomach with rage, and sorrow, without fear I was frozen by it. I stepped forward and they pushed me back, covering Dasius in hands and dragging him out of the room. I have really thought of it many times, the way that his eyes were, the way that he stared at me for help and I pushed myself against the bookshelf like I could become a part of it and not be there.

"Do not let them see that you are afraid," I told him without words, and he caught my meaning.

One of the peasantry slapped me like a b***h, and I kept him, grabbing his wrist as the others stormed out of the front entrance of my house. I kept him, and I ate his eyes out of revenge for making me feel so incredibly impotent. I let him crawl around on the floor, wailing while I lost my mind over the way Nicky looked.
++++

It was no small crisis that the only person who could fix him had been abducted. This is the greater secret, how over a period of an hour or two I recovered the surgeon, put the child back together, and got the hell out of there.
++++

"You really can't fight what is going to happen," I whispered to Dasius, patching up his shirt sleeve.

He looked into my face.

"You really can't fight things that are going to go on just because you are there. You can't fight people. You can't reason with them. There are things about all people that are simply immutable and you must learn that and try to take advantage of it. If you can't, they will capture you."

Dasius was trying to calm down, still trying to get his breath, breathe normally.

"Stop fighting. You are fighting even yourself right now. Just try to concentrate on what you have to do."

"They captured me."

"They haven't. They merely dragged you away. You haven't given up and you won't. Come with me."

I took him out the back door, out of view of the blood splattered front where most of the conspirators had been lured away by the smell of burning flesh. The corpses of small children, the stolen organs of their parents, the things that Nicky hid because Nicky was compelled to I set ablaze outside of their fortress to greater than anticipated effect.

"Let us try to be quick about this, it really is galling enough to present in such putrid atmosphere, sans doubte. Your brother needs attention."

"How long do we have?"
++++

Once home, my sweet boy when straight to work on his little brother without a moment of hysteria. He briskly acquired his catgut and instruments and straightened Nicky out on the floor. He did not ask me any questions. It was no shade whatsoever on the spectrum of what he can accomplish now, but it was so much more it would have taken to be impressive nonetheless.

I took the child into my arms with great care and reined up the best hunter that with ridiculous luck had not been stolen. We made for the north. It would be a little time later before we acquired the coach, but not much.

Nicolas probably doesn't remember the horse at all.

Staying in Paris with them is probably still the stupidest thing I have ever done. It is still dumbfounding that I got to keep either of them. It is not the closest scrape I have ever had, but it is the one in which I have stood to lose the most.
++++

All my life things have been random, and after fleeing Paris it remained that way. I attempted to live more orderly with them and it did not work.

I found them a small, quiet hamlet forgotten by everyone but the most devious wooltraders and hoped for less trouble than we had experienced previously. It was a small hope, but I'd be lying gif I said that I managed any peace of mind myself. Nicky was not as much a terror, preferring to stay by my side this time. It was Dasius who wandered. I did not worry about him enough. Honestly, I was not used to watching over anyone but myself and the job I'd done it had not been first rate.

I did not want to think much of myself then, so I relied on Nicky to occupy all of my attention. I should not have, but how could I have known how to properly nurture him? I can only try to apologize, but such things are unacceptable so far forward in the future.

I didn't rely on my models, that's for sure, regarding children I was different.

Nicky and I would stay together in the house most often, stay there or in the cold basement of the curing shed. Dasius preferred the loft in the barn up above, chewing on straw that he was so meticulous in pulling from his hair. He became much more fastidious after we left Paris. He grew distant from me as well, coming and going without notice. He ceased pursuing my affection and became cold to it as he withdrew into his thoughts. I became cold to him as well.

I reserved a lot of my attention for Nicky then, tickling him, telling him things. I slept alone, but he was always with me otherwise. I used myself as a child as a model for his mind then to consequences I did not foresee. Nicolas was not a child at all then. He was a different sort of creature, juvenile, vulnerable, but nothing like I was attempting to deal with. It is no exaggeration to say that blood and causing death were the greater part of his life at that time and I unwittingly made it my job in the short period we had together to also mess up his perception of love.
++++

I hummed to Nicky quietly while he threaded his fingers through my curls.

His lips pressed against my neck and I shrugged him away.

"I am seven years old this month," he said, in my hair.

I should have used it as evidence that he had not let go of his human side, of being a child.

"How do you do that anyway?" he asked me once. We sometimes attempt to speak about it but we never manage to resolve very much.
++++

It was not the Dark Ages anymore, DaVinci was dying in the arms of our king, but that sort of rhetoric didn't do much for the suspicion of small towns. They knew very well that of the three new residents living on the rented acreage they never saw two and of the two unseen one was a child who should've been clamoring to get outside. The one they did see supposedly never spoke to anyone and avoided detection whenever he could.

It was rather a very good thing that Nicky chose to stay indoors, otherwise such conditions would have been absurd. As it was I am sure some or other excuse was made among our neighbors for our being there, suspicious of course, but in a town where tax agents repeatedly were paid to stay away no secret could be secret enough and I was gambling on that.

Nicky was fully recovered by the time Dasius very noticeably finished stalking Miriam DeMontagne, a local boy with an unfortunate name, and face.

"I don't have an unfortunate face, you b***h," in my bed, years later.

I think he has an unfortunate face.

As it was, he was just born in the wrong town.

I wouldn't go back over that evening but if I could I wonder how things might have turned out; the same probably. Perhaps that is too lofty, even to think about.

It began simply enough, walking with Nicky behind the house in the field, tickling him with the little wheat chaffs, enjoying his snorts of laughter and the way he would hide in my hair. Dasius had been MIA for awhile, but it was a usual thing, wandering off in some wide brimmed affair of a hat for a whole day.

It was a warm evening, though cooler than usual, purple sunset fading away over the hills. Nicky was eating my hair and I was batting at his ears in the idyllic atmosphere when I heard a door slam back at the house. It excited Nicky's interest and he scrambled out of my arms toward the sound, me following behind.

Dasius was sitting at the table with his head in his arms, hat nowhere, between his fingers a shock of red hair mingled with dark clotted blood. My heart caught in my throat again, worry for him, love for him, I don't know.

"What did you do?"

"I've killed him."

It was easy to see that he was in love.

I pressed my hand to Dasius's back and he gave a great sigh, turning his head to look at me over his shoulder. His eyes were big. I wiped beneath them with the back of my thumb.

"Take me with you," I whispered to him. I will take care of it.

Nicky grabbed my other hand and I shook him off of it. I forgot about him for a little while, I must admit it. Much later I would remember that moment and despair.

Dasius pushed the chair back and stood, slightly taller than me, swept out. I followed him through the door and up to the road. It was a quarter mile to the tract he had been haunting, stalking the wool trader's son.

The boy was lying beneath the stars, eyes staring, lips parted. From a distance it wasn't apparent, the damage, closer it was unavoidably savage. I covered my mouth at the atrocity of it, the throat ripped open though clean, the chest and abdomen a different story entirely. I turned away, smelling the blood mixing with earth, closed my eyes.

"I'm sorry," Dasius choked.

I silenced him with a hand, standing very still to collect myself, "Stand away," I said, "Go back home or go to someplace at least where I cannot see you."

"Oh tell me the truth," he demanded, suddenly angry, "Tell me the truth of it or say nothing at all, Laurent."

"Don't you dare."

"A most beautiful tragedy," he laughed, and wheeled round before I could reach him, retreating towards the barn.

He was right anyway. How much would I have cared if it had been the shepard himself instead of his son? such perfect features, fallen in a beautiful way with a body so lean, limber looking, I was enchanted. Dasius knew. Of course he did. It is to his credit that he has not gone mad with the utter injustice of all of my behaviors towards him.

But I couldn't help it.

I straddled the body at the hips, gently turning the head with my hands first to one side and then the other, distraught. I ran my fingers through the thick red hair, smoothing it away from the temples.

"Bordel de merrrrrrrrrrrde," it lowed, shocking me, closing its eyes.

"Oh good," I whispered through tears, "Oh good."

"Ne pleurez pas, Madonna," he said, quietly, as if dead.

Miriam became a vampire by kissing the tears off of my face. His first act as vampire was to overpower me, push me to the ground. The second was to go mad.

Lying beneath him while he drained all of the blood out of my body, clawing at him first roughly and then desperately in my weakness I swallowed scream after scream. I tried to roll away. I tried to push him off of me, and finally it was that Dasius broke Miriam's skull with a wooden post, swinging it with great force. I heard the crack. I sobbed. Dasius held me in his arms without words.
++++

I tried to pick Nicky up and he bit my arm, drawing a scream out of my throat as he tore into the flesh. He fled. I stared after him, stricken.
++++

Per my refusal to allow him to get rid of the body, Dasius could be found for many days tending to Miriam's head. I enjoyed sitting with them, arguing in French, kissing them both. It was very stupid, my behaviour, juggling them. They both were not having it.

Dasius was just completely pissed off at the way I had conducted myself, and at Miriam for making jokes about him. He repaired my arm without speaking a word of judgment.

But then Nicolas ran off in the middle of the night. I had heard the brothers whispering to each other beforehand, small thoughts without anchor, pushing their way through into mind.

"Don't go. I will go with you if you wait. Please don't leave me like this here, Nicky. Nicky, please God."

It refuses to be forgotten. It broke my heart.

"Don't go too."

One kiss for my forehead from Miriam, with no feeling.
++++

In 1451 it was just Dasius and I in Montagne, then in Nice, then in Riems, and then it was just me alone. I went to Vienna. I stayed in Vienna. I drank little glasses of red wine and slept away afternoons, half lidded.

There were boys, occasionally, but mostly I was alone.
I'd wander at night, from church to church, using them as markers. I covered my hair, trying to stay unnoticed. There were errands to run, but mostly it was covering the same ground over and over. With only myself for company it was easy to get absorbed into other peoples' lives over time.

I'd been many things in the past. I'd never had a lot of time to be with only myself, and I found it hard. So often when I talk about the past I find myself making excuses for the things I've done. Here's another, that it was hard to be alone with myself.

I was melancholy, reasonable but often paranoid. Lovers would try to get me to go out with them, and I would go. Sometimes in dark alleys they would kiss on my cheeks, and my neck, and my shoulders, and I would kiss them, but I would get frustrated with the whole thing. I never loved anyone for very long. It has always been that way. They always seem to want something or other from me that I can't give them. Lovers without number, over time, they are without names now in my mind.

One of them, Chartolomeo, not Viennese, a visitor, killed him on the riverbank late at night. He stayed with me for some time, left. I couldn't take his life. He was too kind to me, sad also, didn't want anything. He stumbled away in the night, not willing to stay around to see what would happen. It was a smart thing to do.

Leechtin briefly told me once about his own maker, when I was a child. He probably was not thinking that I would remember things. He has always been so close-minded about the objects of his affection, one-sided. He said that he was taken because of the way that he looked, the way that he walked, his way. He spoke with light disdain for the randomness of it, in contrast of course to his own way of doing it, this cultivation, these strict parameters that only he knows. I think that is a farce, but look at me I have become his opposite in these things. I have become like that maker that he disapproves of, very random.

It is not that I will eat anything, but if it has a beautiful face I find it hard to endure without reaching out a little to see what I might have of it. Often in consequence of my own face I find that I can have quite a lot. I generally spare nothing and take whatever I can get, every little part. Leechtin would hate to know that I don't know why I give life or withhold it. I really don't know. Sometimes I am just doing things without thinking a lot. If he saw the way that it makes me smile to get what I want he would maybe wish that he had tried harder to drown me. Maybe it would just make him sad, and maybe I would try not to care about the way that other people feel so that I could continue to do what I want. Maybe I would do that if I could, but maybe it does not bear thinking about for very long, disdain for other people in general and being very vain.
++++

I shouldn't say that Leechtin wanted to drown me. He didn't. He didn't at all. That is horrible.

Sometimes I would sit in front of my mirror, hands in my hair, elbows on the vanity, dreaming of him while awake. Sometimes I would think that I saw someone standing behind me and I would freeze, but never turn, never. There would never be Leechtin in the vanity, maybe others but never him.

Sometimes he would come in my dream, in and out, but it wouldn't be him, not really. It wouldn't be like now when sometimes you can't be sure if it's real or not, your dream, then it was always just a dream. It would be like Alexandria, a dream Alexandria, maybe a temple.

It would be a lot like it was.

I would be sitting at the foot of one of the large statues, Greek or Roman or Egyptian god it doesn't matter, sandstone, maybe lolling over a gigantic toe, always eating an orange.

"Little Orange," his soft voice, sounding clever but familiar, "Come home."

Eating my orange.

"Are you listening, little Orange?"

No, not listening, ignoring him.

"It is late now. Shadows come out, like to eat little boys like you, come home with me, little Orange. Let me protect you from shadows."

Shaking my head, not seeing him, never looking at him in the dream, just his voice.

"Come home with me and I will keep you where the shadows cannot come."

I dreamt about it all the time.

I don't know why I dreamed it when I was in Vienna. Why?

I felt strong when I was human. I was almost never nervous. I could ignore him and he always let me ignore him, happy to have me come back to him under my own power when I needed to. He seemed to lose interest in following all of my movements when I got a little older, but always there was enough affection if I wanted it. Pursuing him was not what I wanted to do. I enjoyed the freedom he let me have. I don't try to understand what he felt then. He could have killed me at any time. He could have let scavengers pick me off if he didn't want to do it. Of course he wouldn't. Of course Leechtin has always looked after me. Maybe he has even always loved me, but what is that?
++++

"We are leaving Alexandria."

I pushed him away, covered my head, "No, I won't go."

"We are leaving as soon as possible, Escha. I won't hear any more of it."

"I won't go," I sobbed, pushing myself up to run from him, get away where I could cry.

He grabbed my arm, quick and strong like he never showed me, too fast to be anything but a monster, pushed me to the ground, slapped me, sobbed.

He missed me when I went around with boys. He couldn't stand it. He would never remember it that way. Not in a million years would he ever remember that he slapped me or put his hands over my mouth.
++++

Once, walking down the street, thought I saw him. I decided it could not have been, much too tall, too thin. I had no way of knowing about Karpae. Leechtin had never talked about him. Not once. He never talked about his past to me. He never talked about it to anybody.

-continues from last paragraph-

He looked into my eyes.

"What am I to you?"

He looked away, half lidded eyes, a secret look.

"You are Laurent."

"What is Laurent," quiet like a whisper, sitting together in front of my mirror.

"You are you, acting the part of the decadant poof, fluffing your hair in your mirror, putting on your rouge, trying to be human."

"What is a human?"

"Oh don't ask me Laurie. My earliest memory is of plunging my fingers into the intestines of a woman screaming my name. You know that."

I stroked his face with one finger, pensive.

"My sweet little angel."

He snatched my hand away at the wrist, squeezing it so I could feel the bones move beneath his grip, whimpered.

"I am so sick of you," he hissed, "If you weren't delicate I wouldn't stay."

He looked into my eyes severely, dropped my wrist, went out.

-continues last paragraph-

"In the future," I whispered, "Be kind to me," in the lightened dark.

"I'm making an effort," twisted his fingers into my blond curls, "As if I wasn't."

"I know. But in the future be kind."

"Yes I will."

++++
In the future the first time Nicky attacked me with a knife he didn't pretend it was for my own good. He picked up the knife with the bleached bone handle and looked at it in his hands so he wouldn't have to look into my eyes.

We had had another falling out. We hadn't seen each other in years.

"I will ask you one more time, because I ask you from my heart," he said, sitting on my coverlet. He had been visiting, but he had come specifically to sit with me that night with a request for my blood that was not a request at all. "You know that I will have it."

"You mean to."

"You won't fight me," he said as fact, knife sitting on his open hands, "Not the way you should."

"I will fight you," I said.

He shook his head, restrained, but there was a tempest in his heart. I could see it. There would've had to have been. I believe it.

I reached out my hand to him and he curled away from it quickly, furious in an instant. He looked into my eyes then and it happened quickly that his hands were at my throat and he'd covered my mouth and he was pushing my head back onto the pillow with force I'd known he had.

"I should spit on you but I love you so much," he whispered, forcing the sobs in his throat down, "You shouldn't-" but he stopped himself with deciding that the time for talking had passed.

"Where is your brother," I croaked, getting my breath back as he covered his head with his hands, but it was just the right question to get him to cut me the first time and from then he couldn't stop it. The blood had already been spilled.

I know that he stayed with me afterwards. But back then, 1721, in Paris that time, it was the beginning, these things have to start at the beginning or they don't make sense. It was the beginning of a very adult frustration towards me and he couldn't stop it because it wasn't wrong. I know that.

++++
When he was a child it was different. I know, I have said it over and over, he was not a child but he was not aware of the world. He grew up so much over 300 years. Why does it still surprise me? Why did it surprise me then that he was different after so much time? It just makes so much logical sense, but he was such a good actor. Why do I still make these excuses to myself that I'm not to blame? Maybe it's because if I could do it over again I would do it all the same way. Maybe it's because I fall in love in so much and so many things are irresistable. Maybe if Dasius had not come then, maybe if we could have been anywhere else... Oh but I don't want to give him up, not my prize, not Leis who came into our lives then. I can't. I'm so damned sorry but I still can't do anything about it. I can't apologize to Nicky. I can't explain it to him because it's all so wrong in my heart, everywhere. Nicky sees. He loves me helplessly and yet he sees. Where is your brother? I'd have killed me.

++++
I've made him behave like a child. I can't face it.

He was that, a pretty chemist moonlighting anatomical dissections of pretty cadavers, forever obssessed with knowing how things worked. Even better were delicate things, he wanted to know about dragonflies, about soft flowers with thin stems, about me, but I wouldn't let him at me. He was used to it. I thought he was.

Sometimes he still acted like the boy he appeared to be, under my eye again he would let his guard down and get excited about things, get absorbed in things. He was not often absent, and he hardly brooded. Away from me however he was different, and I was not good at seeing it, or wanting to see it as usual. How often these details seem to get away from me, perhaps I am too selfish to see beyond myself very far? Perhaps that is too cruel an assessment.

Nicky was better at it, better at seeing things. He didn't let Dasius too close to him. He would come to my room at night but stayed far from my bed, a thief going through my make up in the dark or taking jewelry to sell. Sometimes I could hear his hands going through baubles at the delicately scrolling make up table while I tried to sleep, hear him go into my closet and stay in there.

"Nicky."

No answer, like a ghost.

"Nicky. Stop it and come to bed."

No answer.

Maybe he savored my disquiet and maybe he didn't. He was dismayed by the turn of events, by the arrival of seemingly permanent company, even if it was his brother.

In the pitch black, curtains drawn against even the moon he spoke to me once, responded to my entreaty.

"I won't come. You're a damned fool."

"Nicky."

He answered me by rolling a drawer open hard enough to break it, spilling the contents on the carpet.

It wasn't jealousy. He left a lot unsaid. He picked up my white face powder, plunged his fingers into it and threw it across my bedcovers.
+++++

A lot of kissing, a lot of touching, it is my nature. So infrequently have these gestures meant real intimacy to me that I tend to forget the difference. But as opposed to what? What is it?

"Don't go."

"I won't."

"Don't go."

"Laurie, I won't."

Lies.

It was a pattern often repeated. Nicky would lose some sort of hold he could only have with me in solitude and then drift away and then disappear. Sometimes he would say goodbye, sometimes not. It was fresh enough then to leave me feeling out of breath, like I'd been harshly slapped, a little desperate.

So it was Dasius and I again. I was not very much different, him very much more so.

"Dasius, I can't abide it if you go."

"Laurie, stop it. I'm not like him."

I could reach into his mind, so I knew the truth then, what he felt and how he felt it, colors and shapes and little whispers. A little thought tickled my ear and I smiled.

"You're in love again."

"Love love love, with you it always is."

"What's its name?"

"Stay out of there," he said, as gently as he could on the defensive, "Laurie. I said."

"I want to know its name."

He drew himself up to his full height in front of me, as if he could intimidate me, or shame me.

I won't let you, it whispered, the tickle, I won't let you not this time don't make me hurt you I will die I would die

And I looked away.

Don't think so little of me, it continued, you've always thought... but Dasius made a noise and left the room.

I wish that I could have obeyed him, but I also don't wish it at all.
+++++

So I followed him, and in the end I don't know. How should I feel? Feeling things for Dasius, generally I don't tend to bother.

"******** revolving door of spooks," he would say at a much later time, grim but fat and comfortable.
+++++

I haven't mentionned much my vampire habits. Probably I should. Probably inquiring minds wish to know, probably inquiring minds have heard of me. Probably those around me might make comments that older vampires like myself (a condition accomplished only by not dying) reflect such habits as I have. It is not so, very much not so.

Leechtin has commented upon it often, thinking himself subtle. I feel his disapproval in his gaze, but I am too much myself to worry about such things as gazes. Do know that it is very unusual for bloodsuckers to eat flesh, to pick through bones, to be exclusive to anything but blood. I am exclusive to many other things than blood. I am not often a lover of beauty merely for the sake of beauty itself.

I should like to possess beautiful things, beautiful boys. I should like to be privy to beautiful secrets. I should also like to... It is not anything so deep as it might sound, eating a blue eye. Why does a vampire with nothing to gain by it eat a blue eye?

In his surgery Dasius saves them for me, blue eyes.

He had not yet started coveting boys who looked like me. I had not yet started giving them to him. It has been a mean game of ours, picking on each other's eccentricities and hurts in secret ways. On his end it has often been a much sweeter game than it has been on mine. I do not think his intentions have often been mean, while I have obviously been bitter.

I am not the only ripper. There are two of us. He, nasty vicious wonderful creature, does not have proclivities for specific parts. His secret motivations are much meaner. I believe he hates the very figure of man. Nataniellus, big spider, has had a much nastier life than mine. Afterall, what might a man need to be made of to put up with the torment of a snake for nearly the whole of his life?

Oh maybe that's too mean.

Well maybe it's just clear enough for the present.
+++++

About Leis, he was just too...just... oh everything. He was everything.

There was something about him, something aristocratic in his face, in his bearing that was attractive, but he was sickly, like he was falling apart. His paleness and his frailty were telling, but his confidence, the bourgeois quality to his behavior was what drew me with intensity. He needed me, of course, which strengthened matters.

He had a certain beauty, a certain magnetism, but for all that he was a man still and that made pursuit maddeningly primitive for me. It was a role I had never encountered in my youth. It did not come naturally to me to be coquettish but somehow he brought it to my character to be an enourmous flirt. I had been spared nervousness by his need for me, nervousness that would have been an expense of being insecure of whether or not I could capture him, an uncertainty I am not overly familiar with. Of course I have been productive romantically, it is no secret, but to be quite serious about it I am not often driven towards pursuit.

Such things as boys come easily, such things as men I had not been compelled toward and had not then much experience with. How to influence the desire of he whose character had already been fully formed and who might not be convinced of his unalterable need of me? I mooned over it, as the wretchedly lovesick do, and it is no surprise that I have failed in the attempt. Why is it? It is that I have too much need of him myself to inspire him to anything but the most helpless sort of loyalty. It is as if I have broken his back while reaching for his heart. It would have been more successful perhaps if I had wanted it for certain. I am not so sure even now. All it is so far is a torment for us both, but a very unbreakable one. I have little control over my desire, and as much uncertainty over whether or not I would choose to exercise my will in this matter against my lust for him if I had any will at all to exercise here. I don't care to answer the question of whether I would or not, because I realize that the result would be quite damning. Shall I condemn myself with the knowledge that I am not only a homewrecker but also a beast? I would not do it.

But Laurent, why would you not hope to merely trap him as you have done the others? I don't know. It is that he is no plaything that I can ever hope to discard. He is rather too dear to me for such a treatment. I cannot help but see to him when he is asleep and invade his dreams to continue to torment us both. Such torment when the body is so raw for the other serves as a good comfort for the halfway departed in the long, long evening.

All this is preemptory of course and what follows is rather more clear. I only hope to lessen the impact on my own truthful telling of such matters as these. Believe me, I love him in ways I do not understand. It's a bordelique. It is just a ******** bordelique.

(continues last paragraph)

Bitterness.
++++

Dasius didn't have bitterness. He was just confused.

Our apartment had a lot of yellow in it, Dasius favored the color even in his surgery where he kept things under lock and key; and I didn't pry. But for me, yellow was a hallmark of those times. Yellow damask on the bed, fine yellow silk wallpaper, even the wood had that look, a sour kind of color, not bright.

By then, of course, I was very very familiar with what brand new vampires are like. Ridiculously so. Sometimes they go mad. Sometimes they regress, or their personality alters completely. Being infatuated with Leis didn't change that knowledge and I watched him severely for such things.

He slept a lot. I kept the light low, would sit with him in the quiet, in the too big room. It was the spare bedroom, and it was sparse like a spare. Dasius had been staying there and so moved into my room, slept in my bed during those times. He was not angry anymore, not emotional anymore. He knew it was all ********. He was watching me for symptoms of madness too. Found them, I imagine.

As we all know now Leis has bad blood, and because of him Dasius transformed his practices agressively from amateur chemist to those of a serious physician. He began killing vampires, younger ones, more lost than we were, studying their corpses. So he had this, and he had me being mad, and he had Leis being completely helpless and sick.

Leis was sedated a lot but he had everything I needed, warm breath on my neck, clawing for me when I tried to leave, making me feel needed. Vampire blood is addictive, easy. Leis was a blood addict. It's not so easy to explain his illness, or our connection. Dasius and I, always, had a connection like that. I don't have it with Nicky. It's a one way mirror, usually, but with Leis it was two ways. He looked into my soul. He had access; he was always looking. I'm sure he exploited it also, for a way to convince me to stay. It wasn't very hard to get me to stay.

I left him at odd hours, to sleep. Sometimes I went out, not like before, looking for boys or something like that, not even just to be out. I just had to get away from him, and from Dasius. It's never been that Dasius is a bad person, or annoying, or too demanding. He's too good. Even then, made up all the time from being depressed, attractive as he ever was, I didn't feel anything for him that wasn't shallow and it's just crap when somebody is so in love with the idea of you that they can't even properly function. He hid it well enough but it was always there and it was s**t. Even when he was in love with Leis he was still infatuated with me; it was just less obvious because it was old. It was an old old infatuation and he had grown comfortable enough with it to push it far far deep down inside of him and look me in the eyes. It was still 15 years old, that part of him. Sometimes I wanted to put my fist in his eye and yank it out.

"You've always thought so little of me" because he's always thought so little of himself, always beholden, always insecure. It's there even though he's forgotten about it by now, informing his whole life, little part.

Leis's only family in the city was his mother. He had been taking care of her. She was sick, dying of tuberculosis in their little house. Dasius thinks of it often, I've seen it. He goes quiet, regressing far away into what it felt like to be helpless and I know he's thinking about the year he spent watching Leis care for her. Well he let her die in that house. Leis doesn't think about it beyond that she must have died of her illness. I knew about it but Dasius is the one who let her starve to death. I was mad. I was mad. It was his fault only. Leis had been taking care of her for years and when Dasius dragged him out of that house screaming of course the mother was dead before the end of the week without him. I don't think Leis knows, but he hasn't gone looking for the truth. It wouldn't be like him.
++++

I looked into Leis' face, the shape of his eyes, tapered at the corners, his strong nose, little, uncertain mouth. Not good at taking make up, his face. He looked back into my eyes wearily, cloudly from blood digestion, long hands weak by his sides. He tipped his chin back, swallowed air. His blond hair was unkempt, honey colored in the low light. I extinguished the candle at bedside with my hand.

I pressed my fingers to his throat gently to touch him, knew that he couldn't breathe well. He stuttered a warning, whimpered, cried. I went out of there quickly, weak, banging half of my body on the doorway.

I went into my room, into my bed, drowsed in the great, big dark.
++++

It was the third week when Leis started speaking to me about God. It started as little murmurings, just to himself, almost as if he didn't realize that he was whispering. This talking roused me from sleep to look at him.

"Are you speaking to me in Latin?" I asked him, confused.

He opened his eyes halfway, looking down at me, "I am not speaking to you," he said, "I am speaking to God."

"You talk to your God in Latin," I thought, and thought no more.

"Go back to sleep," he said, soothing, and I would be soothed by such things as one not used to being soothed.

Even now Leis must always speak to his God and do his very good Christian things and I look on him as one who cannot look on such things.

I prefer to not think of myself as the serpant, but sometimes it's apt. I don't know. He thinks of my overtures toward his Christianity as quaint and I might try to leave it at that. He has a talent for a depth of devotion to God matched only in his ability to throw himself full tilt into a rage, a comparison only appropriate otherwise in their ability to be equal parts surprising. One wouldn't think him necessarily capable of either. He is just so private.

The rage has been far more rare and less predictable than his devotions. The first time for Leis losing himself in a mad rage occurred two days after his Christian murmurings when he caught a glimpse of Dasius.

When I say that Leis believes his mother died of her illness I say that as something that was decided later. At that time he was sure that Dasius had killed her before dragging his victim out the house, which was done with one hand by the hair. Such was Dasius's strength then that he had subdued a grown man half a foot taller than himself with one lazy hand, but he was no match for Leis's rage.

I had been lying with him, drowsing with my head on his chest when I felt him tense up. His whole body went rigid.

"What are you doing?" I asked blearily, instead of asking him what was wrong. He shook me off. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, going to stand up after not doing it for three weeks. Obviously he fell, but I went to stand too when that absolutely did not stop him at all.

His face was contorted with the severity of his desire to get the villain, and as is my worst trait in situations dangerous to Dasius I froze up and let it just unfold. He managed to get to his feet and stumble out of the room. I followed him.

Of course Leis knew nothing then except the room where he had been kept, hadn't known Dasius was there until he caught a glimpse of him in the doorway, didn't know any of the story of how Dasius had suffered for his love, still doesn't. What happened in the few moments between them then has colored their entire relationship since, and indeed mine with Leis as well. It couldn't change what I had with Dasius; really nothing can.

Leis found Dasius in the front hall powdering his face in the mirror to go out. The powder compact was clicked shut as Leis approached, like the report of a gun and Leis stopped dead. Dasius's face became fiercly impassive, the features tightening. He looked at Leis. He looked at me. He stayed where he was.

There was a tense moment of waiting, another tense moment, in the near dark with the complete graveyard silence and then Dasius did the thing where he broke the mirror with his closed fist and Leis was on him with the madness that I had been looking for.

I stood there and waited and watched them roll around in the entranceway with Dasius being completely overcome but refusing to scream, and then Leis ripped him open with his teeth, spraying blood over the yellow wallpaper. Dasius began to scream, long deep screams. I was shocked because Leis had been placid up until that point, and really has a true nature to be very placid and there he was trying to rip Dasius's throat out with his teeth.

Then the screams turned into my name, Laurie, Laurie and I sprang into action, reaching them in a stride and sliding my hand between Leis's teeth and raw flesh to pull him back in a gentle way. He was sobbing, sweeping sobs about heaven and his life and his mother, dieu dieu dieu, in my arms collapsing after the fight. Dasius could only lay on the floor going into shock from the destruction. It was just massive, what Leis had done to him.

He had decimated Dasius's neck but ripping bites had been applied elsewhere in looking for the target. Deep gouges had been drawn with sharp nails across the shocked face, and blood ran from Dasius's eyes where they had been mercilessly clawed. I knew that I had to move him or he would not move, could not.

But even sobbing in my arms and covered in Dasius's blood, Leis called out a plea to the angels to finish what had been started. He wasn't going anywhere by himself, with the rage gone he couldn't stand.

"Stop it, mon petit couer, can't you see that it is over?" I asked him.

I dreamed about Miriam sometimes, Mini, as we call him now.

I would hold his face between my hands, the little featured face and he would cry, "My head my head," like that as we both wept.

I would wake in the dark from these dreams as if I had not been sleeping, as if I had only closed my eyes, complete wakefulness, and I would get up, and I would go out to our bathroom in our flat and I would think about washing my face, look in the mirror, fluff my hair, go out in the rain if it was raining with no make up on. I would wander out in the street in the night and not come back at all for some time. In my head, in my head it was weary, dumb a little, dying. It was not hard but it was not easy and it was not altered for such a long time. Oh blood, of bridging, of pressing passion I could have none of it. Oh nothing at all for such a long time.

Though it was dreary, it was dreary, Oh, it couldn't have been better. But it dragged.

Two hundred years later I think these were the reasons for my love affair with Mini. I think the reasons were the dreams.

With his red hair, with his passion, Miriam was good for me, but his passion has always been tied up too much with small children for me to respect him enough.
++++

Though it is not strange to prey on small children, I couldn't forgive the keeping of them for obvious reasons. Unfortunately even those who know of my deep deep past have had no regard for it in this matter. Children obssessed with and addicted to blood, an unforgivable thing.

Miriam, the child cut out his own eyes because you refused to see him. For a man who speaks of monsters how can you forgive this about yourself? Why did you not see that boy when he begged for you?

I get ahead of myself. I should hold my own head. I long to stay up at night. I long to sit up with Leis all night and hold him and cry in his hair and love him. Oh he is so much good and I just want to cry. I just want to cry and cry. I want to take him and love him.
+++

I was humming in Leis' hair, rocking him when Dasius came in. He turned around; he went out.
+++

Dasius knocked over the vase of flowers on the kitchen table, covered his face, moaned.

"I can see the veins in your face, in your face," he moaned and moaned, "Laurie don't do this anymore, Laurie come away with me, Laurie stop this, don't-"

I leaned against the wall, "Get blood for me."

"I can't. I won't do it anymore. I can't."

I went to him; I reached for his collar. He drew back, "Your fingers, your fingers- You can't do this. I won't let you do it. I won't let you kill yourself for him."

He had me sit and he put down a glass and I took it and the next time he brought blood for me he had mixed it with arsenic, not the last time I would be poisoned in hopes of killing my children.

If one cuts Leis's hair to this day there is arsenic in it. His body cannot process it out.

It couldn't kill me, of course not.

I don't want to talk about what happened to Leis. Maybe Dasius can. Maybe Dasius can tell the story of how I broke his will to let Leis have his blood and save him. To save him.