"Come here, devil, come here, devil," I said, wiggling my little finger at Leechtin, at Faya. 

"What does he want?" he asked nobody, standing by himself in the tulips, pale in the daylight. 

"Your hair is all come out," I said, gesturing for him to come.

He moved towards me haphazardly, not interested in being touched and darting his eyes everywhere he found interest. 

"Here it is, we'll put your hair right."

"It's not good, Nataniellus, I don't care about my hair."

"I don't know what you mean by 'it'. Me?"

"Today."

"Oh you've no notion of what day it is," I said, and took hold of him. Everything about him was struggling with me, without struggling. He leaned ever so slightly away. 

"You don't know how to pin it," he said, quietly, while I pinned  his hair. "He doesn't know how. When he fixes things he is making them worse."

"You mean old snake."

"Why?" he asked, again to the air, speaking to himself. "There are two legs and no tail."

"You've a tail, devil. I've seen it."

"What is he talking about? Why is he bothering us? Today is terrible."

"Why are you avoiding talking to me? Have you got a secret?"

"He's onto us. What will we do?"

"Where did you go after Rome?" I asked him, holding him around the waist in the sunlight. He was wearing a soft green silk belted with gold, his neck bare.

"Hercynian. Many years. I spent there many years."

"There's 'I'. So what is your big secret?"

"Bit him a long time ago, I did. I bit him. Can't take it back. I killed them. What should I do? Did those things. Too late now. What can I do?" he asked.

"Stop talking nonsense."

"No," he said, seeming thoughtful. "Not nonsense. Why does he never understand me?"

I traced the curve of his cheekbone with the tip of my finger, and his wandering eyes met mine.

"Are you very mad at me?" he asked me, quietly.

"I don't know how many times that I have to tell you I'm not." My fingertip reached the soft place at the ridge of the ear, and stroked him, and he closed his eyes, parted his lips, which had been so ruby red when I had first known him. The color had faded as his confused mind had come on, paler and without the blood he needed to sustain him. Perhaps his poor starved brain is pale as well.

When first I had come back he had grabbed me by the wrists and said, lucidly, like the man I knew, shouted at me, "Now don't go, it will be the end of me! Listen!" It had shocked me to be touched in any way, and the moreso fiercely. The touch itself brought me to tears, to be squeezed at the wrists. "You left me," I had pleaded with him, if only so he would let me go. "Oh you don't understand," he'd said, throwing my hands down, making his "huh?" noise. "You don't understand. Then why did you come?" Well I hadn't understood.

He made a sound as I touched him, curving my finger around his ear, of sad solitude, of being uncertain that I was really there or if he was only having a lonely, longing dream. 

"It's me, Faya. I'm here, now. You're safe, now."

He remained quiet, stroked by me. 

"Myself and the children, your Iovita, Aulus, Cassius, and Nonus. We left the city for Misenum a few months after you'd gone. Without you, the creditors descended, and we could not sustain the house. There were debts, and threats.They wanted to break up the estate and its holdings, but there was no record of us, so they could not sell us. Did you do that? I walked to Misenum with Nonus on my back, you know he has always been a little weak."

He made a little sound, and leaned toward me again, and I stroked his ear with my nose. He knew the story, but it soothed him.

"We walked all night, and during the day, the children made a game of keeping me in the shade. Who can shade him the best? Iovita kept them fed, though it was hard for them. When we reached Misenum, we did not have anything left. Be nice to Iovita, because he used himself to feed them, and he could have left us at any time. But it was a nice port place, and soon he found a little work for himself unloading ships, and this and that, and he became a very good man. He has nothing but love for you in his heart, if you will see him. All is forgiven, if you will forgive."

"Yes, I forgive him, I forgive," he whispered, as if in prayer. He inclined his shoulders toward me, making himself small, and I drew him close and tightly. He is lean beneath all of his silk, thin. Sometimes he seems small to me, as the old are small, and I am reminded of how old he was when he was made. Sometimes there is something in his eyes that is not his years, which tells me of his former life, of long forgotten suffering, worship, and dying.

"It is not your fault, what happened, but it is never safe where the evenings are cool. Misenum was no different. In Herculaneum, surely, the young poachers kept away due to your influence, but without you, they came for me with their claws and their teeth. Young blood drinkers, they had no conscience for children, for going through the children to get to me, and it became apparent that the only way to show them they could not have me, or the little ones, was to make of the bold ones examples to the others. I had seen some blood, and some injury in my former life, and I had always been prone to some violence of the spirit myself, to seizing and seeing gods. We were not then without the stories of dismemberment and blood spilling, that so populated our holy minds. In the beginning, I thought, I am only doing what the gods would do, if faced with the same. In fact, would it not take less for them to be moved to violence? When young vampires shaded my doorway, coming creeping for us, I did what I had to do. And when living blood worshipers came, hoping to find favor with me and be like us, I did what I had to do then, too, because I was needing the blood and they came to offer it so willingly. They disgusted me then, and I was so tired."

"Did you tear them, too, Iellus? For they were only silly living people, probably wounded in spirit."

"I don't know what you mean by wounded. If you will say wounded, there are none who aren't. They had no cause. It was suicide for them or the blood; to them it was all the same. They were looking for a life, or the end of a life."

"I thought that you were so beautiful," he murmured. "You smelled like salt water, with your hair wet and tied back with your white cloth. I felt crazy."

"No more?"

"Oh but you are different, and I like you like this, too. Now that you are not muse but the scissors of fate, you are hard and not foolish, and you are clever. You know what must be done and you do it. It is how I would like to be, how I have been, but I have so many cares."

"They are Escha's cares, Faya. Not yours."

"Oh but I don't know. But I like them," he said, uncertainly. I couldn't see his face, but I knew the look, the confused little pout, the unreadable eyes. When he is unlike himself, the man I think that he is not, he can be soft-seeming, and sweet-seeming. But I think that he has many faces, and they are not all his. "There are many personalities, and they surprise me. Even the ones I dislike, they are making me feel awake, and alert, and needful of vigilance. They are making me spry." I growled at him and he murmured, softly, "Do not growl at me, old one, I will lie you upon my coverlet and tear your throat out. How do you like it?" 

"I dare you."

"You are still well-trained. If you had trained under me, you would not be so bold. You would be obedient. Still you are like this. And you would be kinder. You would not have been abused. You would have gotten what you were due and no more." He touched my ear ineffectually and sighed, troubled by my nature. 

"It was not so bad as you believe," I whispered.

"You would not have said so as a boy," he said, a touch more strongly. "Beating boys of five for fear of bedding. That is natural to a boy. One does not beat a child such that a mark is left upon him. There are proper ways to discipline a child. One does not break an ear, for the love of heaven. Look at the shape it has healed into. In my business, one does not break a boy. He must be obedient and yet certain of himself, or he will grow into a twisted shape, unable to be fulfilled by good work alone. He will be driven to seek pleasures elsewhere, in order to assume an attitude of confidence. To misread a boy's nature is to twist him."

"Do you think that is what happened to me?" I asked.

"No," he said, in the same measured tone of voice, "it is what happened to Escha."

"Do you really think so?"

"Only when I am lucid."

I drew back from him a little so that I could see his eyes, and in fact they were clear, and he looked upon me with a gracefulness and control that he had not often seemed capable of since I had returned. 

"I came back because the blood called to me," I told him.

"How very bold. If you will lie do it more cleverly. You came back because you were curious. You do not care for the blood of a master. You are your own creature, which is why I left you. If I hadn't, you would be dead. You always had the ability to be this way. You do not need me at all except that you were curious to know if I would complete your halved spirit, and if I would want you."

"Do you?"

"These things are beyond saying so. It is not a matter of wanting. You have a seat in my spirit and that is all that there is. I gave it to you in Herculaneum and you are sitting there still. Are you satisfied? You are my blood and my body."

When first I had come back to him, I had been often so angry. I could not adjust to being challenged. For so long, I had been master, heart and head of my children. I had felt distorted into a painful shape by his authority, and I had wished to flee in a way that I could not bring my body to do. As ever, his will was iron, and for me they were chains. When he was sweet he would ask, "Did you love me then?" and I would say, "No," because it was honest but also to hurt him. 

Even now I think that love is a fragile and ephemeral notion, something disabling and frightening. I am not jealous of love, and never have been. When I have had it, it has led to vulnerability and an inability to caution myself. All the living and the dead are tools that may be moved with will and means. And if I am not in control of myself, I may be myself moved, and I cannot be. To be a prostitute, to be a slave, to be beneath a man who believes he is in control of you, this is not a terrible position, for who suspects a boy to know the motions of the world? I am not so separated from the pain, but pain is not my master. Surely Faya knows the way that suffering from the past may rule the body. But in those first few months back, the pain of his leaving me, of what it had meant, of the long years and how I remembered who I had been and mourned my young self, I had wanted to hurt Faya. Old fears and insecurities thrust themselves through me. 

One evening we had been at odds awhile, and he said, "What is the meaning of this?" and I decried him, "You wanted the boy for your own. That is why you took him over me, even though you had me. You had conquered me, broken me against you, but you wanted the boy. You wanted Escha for your bed."

It had been so wrong, so allover wrong, that Faya's face had contorted in shame and confusion. He had said, quietly but sharply, "Oh you will not ever say that. Do not ever say that to me again or you will pay for it."

I knew, still remembered, that he could not stand to be accused of loving boys. I knew, even, that he did not want me for his bed but for his spirit, that he could not abide baseness of any kind tied to his nature. I knew that he thought of passion as a pollutant of the body, and reacted to shame with violence. But I had believed it for years, needed to believe it, because in another time it was the only thing that made sense to me, but I had not thought in those ways for so long.  "You wanted him for your bed. You always did. That is why you would not be with me while I was living. Pretty blond-headed child, with clever blue eyes. He always had in him a certain nature. You wanted him over me, that's what," I had started, leaning into the argument, and suddenly found myself on the floor, gasping and swallowing my own blood. 

It is the only time he has ever struck me, and hard enough to loosen teeth. But when finally I found the strength to rise, I did not find him standing over me or in a rage. He made no speech or remonstration. He had only retreated to the corner, trembling and staring. The blow had sobered me, taken away my strength. I found him fragile and afraid, unable to speak to me, sputtering and uncertain of my name. And then I had understood completely why he had left me, because he had known that he was becoming this way, a soft thing often weak and confused. A creature without blood, who had needed me to be strong. And I had wept to find it so, though over the years I had been afraid to suspect it, knowing him to be hit by spells in Herculaneum. He is afraid of his own nature, and has weakened himself. At that time, I did not know why. I could not imagine him cruel, though to me as a young man he had sometimes seemed so. But at that age, even over the life I had led, what did I know about real cruelty?

"Come and let me put you to bed," I had told him, on the floor. 

"Understand that I'm not what I was," he had pleaded with me, in a voice so small, "and don't hurt the children. Please, it is me that you want."

In the night he would cry out "Lecne" and say "Sabni" and could not be woken.

In the tulips I called him "Master" and asked him what he wanted me to do. He had pressed his cheek to mine. "Stay away from the creature that shadows Escha, but tend to my child, for he suffers. Do not abandon him, though he is not one of your own."

"He is my own. If I have said otherwise, it was out of anger."

I did not know then what troubled him. If he had told me then, what might we have done? I might have asked him, why are you saying this day is so terrible? But the question did not move me, and I would not ask it for many years, until it was too late. 

In my experience, threats had always come from the front, and this one came so silently, a many-fingered shadow too passionate and too blind to be reasoned with.