I woke to the sound of birds at the window, alone in Laurent's bed, in a room I did not recognize. I started, and suddenly there was a hand in mine, a long and delicate hand.

"Protect me from him, from Satan," I whispered, hushed deep inside of my body, barely able to take breath.

The hand tightened in mine. "Do not be afraid," Dasius said."We still live in that house you remember, but it will be shortly sold. We are still on the hill, but this is a smaller place." His real voice is soft, so like a young and innocent boy's.

"Please," I said, "please," and he let go of me.

"We have two floors here," his tone unchanged, "and the two floors above ours are vacant. We occupy them, however, since now the market is dry. You are in the basement, which is why it is dark. Truly, it is mid day."

I looked up from my hands and he was standing a bit off, looking out the half-window at street level, awkward with his hands clasped behind his back. He had his chin tipped down,and his dark hair braided in a long queue. He had dressed to go out,in high collar, long coat and pointed shoes. I took breath, but could not find words. "Forgive me," I said, "for my throat is tight."

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "Come and get dressed. We will go and find your darling."

"Please," I whispered, so that while I dressed he would turn away.

He had, wrapped in paper, clothes for my Darkling, a short length of tubing, and small needles of various sizes. "You told me in your letter that he is quite sensitive. We will find a room for the evening, so that you may wash him and spirit him into as good a condition as you can. If it is meet, I will leave you, and come tomorrow evening at earliest. It will not do to bring him here unless he is at his peak, or as near it as possible. You must know what will happen. If there is any violence or disagreement, he must be strong enough."

I wanted to ask him many questions, and why he had not told me about the eyes, but I found then, as now, that his presence chokes away my breath, and causes me to sweat, and I could not speak for the shame of persisting in my fright of him, even when he had been honest and committed to help me. I still knew then, as I do now,the feeling of ripping his flesh from his neck in anger, and the deep nameless horror of that violence. I could not reconcile my emotions,and it felt like hands around my neck. But still, when I stumbled,faint with fear and loss of blood, he held out his arm for me to take. He said, "I have something for you, for your head, for your nerves, if you wish to take it. Later. First, we will take care of your darling. Please, dear heart, take me to him." If he was disappointed in my continuing dread of him, he was too much of a gentleman to show it.

We walked slow, under a black parasol. He had found a coat for me, and it was warm.

Under the bridge, Dasius shooed away a dog, which sat cowering on the riverbank, cautious of my lover's body, that seemed to be dead. Dasius did not say anything at all about the state of Quinn, which is far more than I deserved, taking Quinn's limp arm and tapping it. He wiped my lover's skin with a white handkerchief, kissed it, which made me cry out soundlessly and reach out my hand.

"I apologize, dear. There is no excuse," he said, tying a cord around his upper arm and pulling it tight with his teeth. 

"What will you do?" I whispered.

"Hush now, kitten," he said, which made me shudder as if under the hand of death. "It will be all right." He pressed a needle to his arm and lifted the tube attached to it, and I watched the blood come out, and go up, and when it had filled the tube, he pushed the needle on the other end into Darkling's flesh, and I wrung my hands with worry. 

"Tell me what you are doing?" I asked him, voice small.

"Hush," he said, and didn't tell me. He never explains anything at all. 

"Please do not mingle your blood," I begged him, like a weepy child. "Please, it will ruin him. I will not be able to-"

He interrupted me again with "Hush," and then my Darkling's eyes were open, and lazy, and he was smiling. 

I opened my mouth to tell Quinn to be careful, but then he had leaned close to Dasius, and was whispering in his ear, for only a moment, until Dasius reeled back as if slapped, and his fingers were scrabbling to pull the needle out, and to throw it away, and he was at his feet, stumbling back, blood flowing from his arm freely, eyes wild afear. I cried, "Sacred heart, don't leave us!" and Quinny was cackling, turning his body in the shadows, ready to get to his feet.

"Preserve us, Jesus," I heard Dasius whisper, "it is the serpent," and I had never heard him invoke the Word before. 

"He does not mean what he says. When he is sickly he is harsh," I begged. "Don't leave us. We are destitute. Darkling, tell me what you said."

But Dasius spat out then, "Speak it not and it will be forgiven. Speak it never. Do not let it pass your lips."

Quinny's dark doe eyes met mine, and I took his hand so that he could rise, and I put my hat on his head, which made him laugh. The dog barked at us. I felt Quinny's soft lips on my neck, kissing me secretly many times, above my collar,  hiding his face with my hat. "You look like a lord," he told me, smiling against my skin, touching the buttons on my shirt curiously. 

Without a word, Dasius took us up the hill as he had promised, a dark and solemn figure in the fading light. He communicated the avenues as easily by night as he did in the daylight, and as full dark fell, Darkling helped me follow him, because I cannot see so well then. He held my arm, and took my hand with his, and we walked together as if we were one person, which quietened my mind, but I knew that he felt cautious. He is more wary of those who think themselves bourgeois than I am, and has an expectation for deceit, which has saved us many times. I have whispered once or twice that he is faithless, but I have not seen what he has seen in the minds of those I love. 

At the door of the inn, Dasius gave me the paper bundle, and the parasol. "There is hot water here, and they will know my money is good. Stay until you are ready, and then send word. There is a boy here who knows the way to our door, and he will take a letter. We will bring your young man to the house together, and I will have a look at him properly."

"My deepest thanks," I whispered. "Darkling, do not look at him so."

"I have never met another. Pray let me look," he whispered, patting my arm gently. 

And when Dasius had gone, I said, "Tell me what you said to him. Did you say it in French?" 

Quinny sat on our bed, in the small room, and pulled his shirt over his head. "In the bath, Love. I will tell you there. Oh how long since I have had hot water?" As promised he told me, as I washed his hair, "I said, 'Should I spank you, David? How do you like it, hard? Prithee, how shall the devil punish you for what you have done? For I have seen you moan in pleasure at the slap.' "

"You are too bad by half. His name is 'Dasius'," I said, made a bit cold by what he had pulled from Dasius's mind. 

"No, his name is David."

"You are wrong, Quinny."

"His name is David, you silly thing. Why does he not breathe like us?" He reached up from the bath, and I went to my knees so that he could touch me tenderly, and kiss my lips, and it made me sigh. "What will he do? Will he take my pain away? Is he very powerful? Why are you afraid of him?"

So I told him about what violence Dasius had done to me, and what I had done in return. And I let him think that it was Dasius who made me, though it was a damnable lie, which I knew that he would find me out on very shortly. Quinny was quiet then, and stroked my hair, and let me cry into his bathwater. Quinny has always let me cry, even though I do it very often for very little reason, and he kissed my face then, kissing my tears away and mumbling at me, his best self, "You've worked so hard," he said, "You are a very good man. You are," holding me while I wept. Because you see that I had found in him what I had dreamed of as a child, and what dream had never left me, of a perfect love. He loves me as myself. He closed his eyes and let me kiss him, which even now I cannot believe he lets me kiss him, and let me take him to bed, clean and dry. "Poor frog," he told me, in bed, while I kissed him, "you have truly walked through hell."

And we passed a night well blessed, though I woke and rose while he slept, and stood at the window awhile, full of a plague, an illness of longing. I flagellated myself with warnings, of the wreckage of beauty, of love and safety, but the blood of my master called out to me, as I had forgotten its pull. I shivered in the early hours of morning, hugging my shoulders with my arms, my stomach a pit of frost, of dread. I sat in the chair by the bed and watched Quinny sleeping, very peaceful. His lips were parted, and I could see his snaggletooth, which he hides by smiling thinly. I thanked God for the coolness of the room, and whispered rosary until morning, when I found the paper Dasius had left, and quill, and sat down to write a few words for the boy to take.

And I had only sat down a few moments before I heard Quinn's strangled gasp from the bed, and whipped round, to see him sitting up as if possessed, as if touched by ghosts, looking around, seeming wild. I froze in place and whispered to him, "Tell me what it is. Is it that bad miasma? From the house?"

He whispered, low, that it was different. 

"What is it?"

And then he was shouting, and I still remember it, that he said, "You are not welcome here, Aurvha. What is the one that shadows you?" and he covered his ears, and shook his head, and wailed even as I tried to hold onto him, fearing that after all we had been through to get him to Paris, madness had come over him again. He clawed at me while I held him, begging me, "Take me back to England. Take me, it will not follow us back over the water. We are not safe here."

"Say rosary with me."

"God help me, you don't understand," he said. "There is no one who can protect us. It will kill us all."

As soon as he had quietened, I passed the letter to the boy, relieved that with the slowing of his heart, Darkling seemed at peace again. While he slept, I held his hand, his beloved fingers loose in mine. I thought of the boy finding his way through the winding avenues, pushing through the weekend crowds strolling at Mont St Michel in hats and tails, in bonnets and tightlaced corsettry. I thought of the boy finding the door I had come from in the morning, of going into the dark rooms of that house, and what might happen to him there. I wondered what he had been offered for his faithfulness, as it seemed he had not been touched. Food? Blood? Immortality? or perhaps only money, if it were enough money. I stroked my lover's throat, whispered, "Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art," and of "tender-taken breath," and made to swoon to death in happiness, like a poem, because I thought still that we had made our way into a good thing. I was still thinking that good things are free if there is love afoot. 

But there is nothing easy in the world, for I caught a glimpse of white-blond hair, of the boy coming back with Laurent, who I saw walking up the street from the window. I gasped out a cry of fear that made Quinn sit up alert, for he is never truly at rest, only appearing so. He said, "What is there, danger?" or something like it. I cannot speak as elegantly in English as he can. 

Laurent was wearing only a dressing gown, a little transparent, and his hair up, and rouge, so he had come expressly, and I said, "Hide, hide," but it was no use. So I found myself sheepish and unable to speak with Laurent came in, in a fury.

He said, "You will have what you want," to the boy, "but leave us."

Quinny came to me, like the serpent he has been accused of being, liquid, eating my master with his eyes, and holding onto my arm. 

"Does he speak French?" Laurent demanded.

"No, darling."

I could see him winding himself up, trying to put on a face of fury when he felt deep depressed, in a cage of despair. "I feel lied to," he whispered, simmering. "I feel-"

"And now here she is, the great whore, he is 'Escha', and destroyed. I have seen it all through Aurvha," said Darkling, in French, which stopped my heart, and Laurent fell back hard against the door, as if shot through the heart, which made Darkling laugh again in that way, that very way of the devil that make you all say he should be murdered in his sleep.

"What is it that you have said?" my master whispered, strangled.

"I don't know you," said Darkling, even more quietly, "where is my atta? Get from here, stranger."

"What is happening?" drowning against the door.

"Spare me, I want to live," Darkling said, possessed, and I slapped him.