Nicky was lying on the train seat with his eyes closed.

"You're just going to stop there."

"Indeed," he said, voice far away, as if underground.

"And what happened then?" I asked, fanning my face with my train ticket. It had grown warm in our compartment with the window shut.

"He buried me alive."

"I have never heard anything about this old master," I said.

"Poor D," Nicky said. He sat up slowly, favoring his back.

"Why should I believe you?"

"I have no cause to lie."

"You murdered Ruby that night?"

"Yes," he said. "I snapped his neck like a green branch."

"And you stabbed Laurent."

Nicky leveled me with a look, eyes steady. "I came home because I was tired in 1869. We fought. We made up. Laurent took a lover. We fought. I was buried alive, and then when I came home, you wouldn't let me into his room, and I left both of you. The hell with you, that's what I thought. Let him kill Dasius. It took me years to recover from what that creature did to me, and you never even knew anything about it."

"Are you taunting me?" I asked.

"Yes."

"You didn't know anything about Laurent's master before that night."

"Correct. Except when he told me everything about himself a few months earlier. He grew up in Herculaneum. He fears going blind." He gestured to me to fluff his hair, and I did.

"Well, then you are lying by omission. You had just told me he never said anything about an old master."

"Well."

As the train came to a stop, I braced myself in the doorway against the jolt. Nicky hopped down from his seat tenderly. There was something wrong with his lower back. Now, it was clear. He had been hurt some time in the past fifty years and healed badly. I knelt to pick him up and he didn't struggle.

It had been three hours on the train, and now evening crept around the edges of the clouds, low in the sky. Nicky breathed in the crisp air, deeply, as we stepped onto the platform.

"And what happened then?" he asked, as I hailed a hackney cab. "Did you see that poor French lover? Leis? Did he come from England?"

"Yes, about a year on."

"For how long?"

"Only a few months. It was a disaster. Laurent was ruined. I blamed you."

I didn't know then whether to believe that the "miasma" had something to do with an old master. As much as I had wanted his answer, it seemed hard to believe that in so many hundreds of years, I had never heard anything about a childhood in Herculaneum or a fear of being blinded. Surely, Laurent would have said something any of the fifteen or so times his eyes had failed in the past hundred and thirty years. I felt there would have been a sign. But there are hardly ever any signs when something nasty is going on, or is about to happen.

As we travelled toward the teaching hospital in Liverpool, I had so many questions I knew Nicky wouldn't answer. I tried to make my peace with not knowing.

"Dasius," Nicky whispered, his hand reaching up. "Fix your hair."

I pushed my hair back.

"You're very handsome this way."

"Thank you."

He played with the lapels on my vest and my shirt collar, straightening and unstraightening them until he was satisfied, twisting the little shell buttons, pearly and irridescent. "This is a little flamboyant for you," he said. "Shell buttons."

"L likes it."

"I see we're learning. Very good, Dasius," he said. "What are we doing in Liverpool?"

"I have a contact here. We trade notes."

At St. Mary's, Nicky agreed to wait in my associate's office while I went to find the man in question. The door had been cracked, as I supposed he knew I would be coming.

I had known Dr. Evan Wright since he had begun instructing surgery at St. Mary's, becoming acquainted with him after several years of attending the same lectures on new research. A quiet and retiring young man, I came to know that he had been put off sport due to a knee injury, and had decided therefore to go into medical science. When I first came to know him, he was often animated in private, excited about advances in the field made possible by the atrocities of wartime, and as the years drew on, without change in my energy, attitude, or body, he came to understand what I was, and need a convincing argument to keep it to himself. So in 1921, after a year or so of my making research upon him, he had grown far more withdrawn, though still handsome. He had developped a quiet, considered way of speaking, and a habit of sending me telegrams which were, at their core, discreet pleas for more of my blood, as much as I could spare, in return for whatever it was I might need, with promise that he would drink it immediately, not to worry.

I found him working a cadaver arm in a small surgery a building away.

By then it had begun to gently rain. When I entered, the atmosphere was very close, with the rain drumming on the roof and windows, and him absorbed in his work.

"Doctor Wright," I said, softly.

At first, he had seemed alright. I had promised him two small ampoules of blood in return for his discretion, under condition that he drink them in front of me. In two weeks, two more followed. He was more animated than ever, excited and intent on charting the effects with me. But in the sixth week, there had been a change. When I visited him, he appeared haggard. And then, in the seventh week, desperate telegrams began arriving in my post box, and had never stopped. At first, a short missive would come once a week, then twice a week, until, when I visited him, that last time in 1921, he was sending them every day. And that was no good, because he had begun to look sick then, and I worried that after a time a decline in his work would be noticed, and that an inquiry would find us out. Which was a shame, because by then I quite liked him, both as a man and as a patient, but features that had once been full with youth had grown hollow, and his once athletic body gaunt, because he thought of nothing else but blood. And I was loathe to take those lovely blue eyes out of his face, which I must admit I had often daydreamed of if I could not sleep well. If I am monster so be it. If I am cruel so be it. But I am no fool.

"Doctor," he said, head popping up from his work. His eyes seemed lit, hungering for me. I knew.

"Evan. Do you have what I asked for?" I asked, as if speaking to a child.

He ran his fingers through his thick blond hair, stuttering that he hadn't. It was not the first time.

"Evan, you know the condition of our deal. We have been doing this for almost a year now. You know what your end of it is."

"David, you know, I'm sorry, it's that I can't concentrate. Writing, I can't, it's difficult."

I shook the name away with a twitch of my head, remembering telling it to him in happier times. "You are supposed to keep a diary for me."

"Yes. I'm sorry. Please forgive me."

I went to a tray of instruments on the end of the room opposite from him, to see if they were sterile. They were.

"David, I mean, sir. I will do it this time. I'll keep notes twice as good. Sir, I'll do anything just as you ask. Please."

"I have heard you."

"Oh good, perfect, I mean, yes, I promise."

When I turned, clean lancet in hand, I saw that he had half gotten up from his chair, as if to come to me, to touch me.

"Do you have ice, Doctor Wright?"

"What do you want? What can I get you? Let me do it." He paused, licked his lips nervously. "Please."

The last time I had needed eyes in England, Evan had given me two out of a fresh cadaver he was working an autopsy on. It had been a young corpse with exceptionally pretty jewel-tone irises, but I had seen how that worked out. They had lasted barely the year. I needed better.

"Yes. Ice. I will need to transport something."

"Right away. Wait here if you please."

His constitution seemed so fragile. He had noted the accumulating failures of his body himself in the time he kept up the diary, that he felt himself growing weaker, and more brittle, even as he felt stronger in spirit and more resilient against sleep. I wondered if he might live long without regular treatment. It seemed a shame not to know. I wondered, if in his state, he still felt pain, or if all of him was a hollow, pulsating need for blood.

He returned with a small leather case, which opened so that I could check that all looked well inside.

"Yes that is sufficient, Evan. Now, I would like to propose another trade."

"Another trade?" he asked, waiting for my motion for him to resume his seat. "May I sit, sir?"

"It pleases me that you stand. Evan, I have known you now for some time. It comes time now for me to move on to another place, and I see you as you are, grown weak, and it causes me pain. For this reason, I have come to give you what you have asked me for."

"I want to be like you."

"But first I need something from you, because nothing comes freely in this life, and you know that well."

"Yes, sir, fair is fair," he said, sounding steady for the first time.

I told him what I wanted, and his eyes widened, but he did not hesitate, taking the lancet. Because it was necessary that he do it himself, so that none but he could be implicated. And how funny people are, who have been made sick shells of themselves by the blood, for he made no sound when he took those lovely eyes out of his pretty head, and no sound either when his heart stopped with my mouth so near his tortured flesh. He was dead before I could even kiss his gasping throat. Poor doctor, whose colleagues had long decided that he had quite gone mad.

On the train back to London, Nicky questioned me more about that French lover who had come to visit Paris in 1872, and I did not speak of Evan Wright. It was almost as if he had never existed at all, and it filled me with a strange sadness, which at that time, I did not recognize as regret.

It was nine in the evening when we returned. I heard the hall clock chime the hours as I searched for L, and I found him, asleep in the dry, claw-footed bathtub.

His hand found my shirt collar and he dragged me down, and pressed his soft lips to mine, and whispered words.

"L, I have brought you something," I said.

" 'Elle' n'est pas ici," he whispered, smiling against my mouth. "Dites-moi mon nom." 'She' is not here. Tell me my name.

I pressed my forehead to his forehead, half standing, half kneeling. "Will you let me do what needs doing? Why didn't you tell me you couldn't see?"

He was kissing my neck. I could feel his eyelashes at my throat. I kept still while he closed his lips at a soft, sweet place, my heart thumping in my head. I knew better than to tell him no, or not here, or stop, because he loved "Stop, don't, you're hurting me"and to feel protesting fingers on his face and pulling on his hair. He pushed me away. "Ennuyeux." Annoying. He let me lift him out of the bathtub then. He was wearing nothing but a cotton slip, and I tried not to think of how light he felt in my arms.

"Let me walk to my doom," he purred, scratching at me. So I set him down, and we walked together to my study, arm in arm. I could feel on my neck where his lips had been.

Nicky was there with the slim leather case, and when Laurent lay down on the metal table, I helped Nicky up. He sat at his beloved's head, holding it steady between his hands. He murmured things to L, in our old French, comforting words a child would say, and L cackled quietly, privately.

I took a small glass jar out from a drawer under the table, and a sterile syringe, filled it.

"What's that?" Nicky demanded, suddenly sharp.

"Opiate," I said, not paying him any mind.

"Poison?"

"He will be fine. You wouldn't want it the other way."

Laurent tapped Nicky's arm gently and turned his head from side to side. It's alright, don't worry. I pressed the needle into his waiting forearm and he tried to take one of Nicky's hands, but Nicky wouldn't take it. "I'm holding your head."

When Laurent began to lick his lips, I knew that he was ready. He winked at me lazily.

"It doesn't hurt him?" Nicky asked.

"Not anymore," I said, carefully slipping two long steel probes into either eye socket. It was a simple matter to pop them out then. Over so long a time, it was muscle memory. Nicky made a popping noise with his mouth.

When it was everything done, and Laurent was blinking at his Nicky, he murmured, "Oh, it's you. Wonderful you," and he said, "Heaven preserve us. I knew he would not harm a hair on your head."

So I knew that what Nicky had said of a master was true.