The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Part 17 - Lucidity

Mini, in a little while, will you call my house for me? Will you speak to the man I love and tell him to collect me? I feel this dark fog coming for me, long off now but creeping in, a long sadness. It comes around the edges of my vision, and takes the strength from my body, and already I feel weak and tired. I will work hard for you to keep it off. There are some stories yet. But if my eyes close, I ask you not to wake me. I ask you. Forgetfulness comes for me like the tide.

Here, your hand. Allow me to hold it. There, it is lovely to hold.

In Rome, I expected Escha to go mad with blood, as I had seen young vampires do, but he stayed in our room with me most of the time. If he would go out, he would come back with golden things, and decorate our place like a royal tomb. He would lie in his bed and examine his rings, and the quality of his clothes, and I would look on him in appreciation of his pale, young form.

You know that his looks were excellent, and I sat transfixed, marveling at him, my pride. Features in his face which had been exaggerated as a child, his lips, his eyes, had become fine with age, and his countenance was very balanced and patrician. He seemed to me the lover of a young god, sleeping under influence of a light curse. He slept very long in Rome, opening his eyes to find me, and crying occasionally that he was lonely.

As a child he had often shared a bed with his brothers, who though they had their own berths, preferred to bed together. He was used to the feeling of several bodies pressed against him, and the soft bellows of slow breath. To him always, sleeping alone was a hard punishment, and a reminder of what he had lost, and so he sleep beside me always. And I was glad of him.

He would ask me, face inclined against my collarbones, "How is my body? Will it mend itself?" speaking about his eyes and his pains.

"You are mending," I would whisper to him. "You have mended."

"What role, blood?" he would ask me. "You do not drink it."

"I am old and you are a fresh, bright thing."

"Teach me."

When he needed me, I would bed down with him, and truthfully by then, we were of a kind, and I needed him as well, who might understand me. It had been very long since I had shared intimate space with another vampire, and when he tucked his cool face by mine, I loved him more than I had ever. If I took breath, being close to him made my heart beat so fast it made my head faint, and labored my air in me, and he would close his eyes, and sway with me gently in the evening, hands at the small of my back.

"I hate this city. It smells like unwashed hair," he said to me once, in those early days, holding onto my body.

I was paralyzed with longing, with long desire to be held by one of my own.

"Faya," he said, calling me by the name he knew.

" 'Atta,' " I whispered, while he swayed me. "You make my head so light."

"Do you love me? Now I am a creature like you?"

"My son," I said, softly. "My body."

"I did not take you for sweet, when I was a boy. You are sweet, though," he said, one hand at my shoulders, and the other at my lower back, just out of the light let in by the door to our balcony. They were cheap apartments, where we lived, far away from patrician things, closer to the old city wall than any grand avenue.

"I thought you sweet as a child," I said, feeling safe in his arms, in his love.

"Oh I was never, not really. It is easy to think it of me, because a sweet thing is loving, and I am beautiful. It is easy to want my love. But I am far shrewder than I appear, and more selfish."