He tried to beat me, to threaten me, to tell me he would abandon me if I wouldn't speak to him, but I couldn't speak, and when Laurent realized that, he tried instead to be gentle. 

"Tell me what happened," he said. "You will be rewarded. Only, tell me what you did."

He had me at my desk, my arms pinned to the mahogany armrests beneath his hands. The breath he took in to speak to me smelled like iron, because he had been drawing on kitten's laced blood, and spitting it out. To me it smelled of rot, and it made me whimper. As I drew back, he drew closer, filling my field of vision, and when I tried to close my eyes, he pinched my arm sharply. The stuttered gasp of pain and surprise tightened his features.

"Dasius. Tell me what you did." 

The words stuck in my throat, and so he made me write it on the only slip of paper I had, which was the one I had found with my name on the back. 

For a moment, it seemed he would take this paper from me, and I lifted my hands off of it. But instead, after a moment, he took a pen from my inkwell, inspected the silver nib, and struck my name out. 

"Write it," he said, wiping the pen on his robe and handing it to me by its end. 

So I wrote, telegraphically, "Went to Valentin's. Party at des rubins. Valentin says hurt Leis, please you. I disagree, hurt you as well. Satisfied. Invite him to des rubins. Good. Arsenic. Valentin demanding of good death. I felt wanted to darken everything. Lights too bright. Hurt. Kill myself?"

"Now tell me what we should do."

I wrote, "No remedy. Wash. Bleed. Feed him. Strap him down. If seizing clear airway. Cut away his hair."

He took my piece of paper and held it to his heart, and turned away, and walking, muttered, "Oh no. Oh, dove. Oh," until he shut the door to the yellow room, and left me by myself.

He stayed in the room, unresponsive to light knocking. I felt pathetic. 

After I finished scrubbing the floor of blood, from the grey room to the scullery, I took my new knife and scraped up what had dried between the floorboards. Doing this occupied me for half a day, but when Laurent would not come out of his room, I could not wait. I went into my room, where Leis was sleeping on a clean mattress and sheets hastily dragged from upstairs, and I sat up his comatose body, and I hacked his hair away with my knife. 

I will not say "lovely hair" or "beautiful blond curls" or something like that. I did not have a straight razor. He bled from the scalp from places where shallowly I had cut him, and so I drew a bath, and I washed him. 

His body sank into the copper tub as if he were a leaden doll. We do not float. And the light from the late day sun reflected on the metal, and this light danced on his terribly white skin. And then I caught a glimpse of my hand, and saw that Valentin's ring was still on my finger.

We had lifted the body from the bed, Laurent and I, and Laurent had said, "Bring me stones. Heavy ones." He said, "Cut the body open," and so I slit Valentin from sternum to tailbone, deeply. Laurent saw how it disturbed me, and made me shudder, and he did not address it. He told me to take out the intestines and liver, which I did, and told me to put them to fire in the brazier, which I did. And so we filled the body with stones, and Laurent took it away, and I think he must have sunk it in the Seine. I am not sure. I don't know why we bother. It was not uncommon in those days to occasionally see bloated corpses in the water. I sewed him back together with a broken hatpin and silk painted with gossamer-winged butterflies. The body was too full. It was a hack job, and I thought of putting the needle in my throat and pulling it out the other side. I think how easily I could sew such a wound now, and how different it is to repair a corpse than it is a living person, and how macabre it seemed, how it made me feel truly a creature who deals in death, and is not of the beautiful world, to touch the cold, dead flesh with my hands and how trying to make it close used all of my strength. 

But tears were not useful. They are not useful now. "Do not cry about this. What is it, pity that you deserve?" I thought, while I irrigated the shallow cuts on Leis's head that my knife had made. His head fit against the curve of my palm. 

You can say something like, "You were mad, and so some responsibility is lifted from your back," but we didn't have those sorts of rationalisms then, and I don't believe them now. I knew that what I had done was wrong, and self-serving, and that I was a pitiful creature ruled by jealousy and loneliness, and you will then say perhaps, "Then you were not really mad," but what you are trying to do is say that madness would excuse my violence, and you are wrong, because the violence was still there, and its head was resting against my palm, and its pale, pink lips were taking in wet, wheezing breaths, and it moaned while I bathed it, at every move of its joints, and in spite of myself, I wept, and shook, and I abjure you if you feel sympathy on account of tears, because they came only from physical torment, and against my will. 

I dried his body with a thick sheet and carried him naked back to bed, where he shivered, even after I covered him in a heavy duvet. I thought that I ought to leave him alone, because he if he were to die, he would die, and if he were not, it was not me who he would prefer to look over him, and so I went out.

For the entire evening, I walked along the Seine, holding a scented handkerchief to my nose. Approaching the back of the house upon my return, I looked through the window and Laurent was there. A delicate figure, hugging itself, pale sylph, dressed in translucent white silk. I blinked my eyes.

I am sorry to tell you that I am tired, and have had a hard day here at home, and so can only tell you that when Laurent came out of his room, he told me something like that it was not for him to castigate me further, as he knew me for a self-reviling creature, and that he had little concern for anything but "pet", and show him how to tend to Leis's body. And so I said all right, and there was no emotional scene, excepting that he did not want to touch me, which he knew that I noticed. 

We had so often related to each other only by touching each other. If he were tired, he would lie his head against my back, and sleep there, standing. If he were distressed or anxious, I would often feel a hand, scrabbling against my arm, looking for my hand. I would find him with his eyes closed, walking the house as if blind, and touching him would make him smile. "Found you, pretty," tell him. When he was happy, he was assertive, even aggressive, when sad, pitiable, and desiring of pity. But I was used to seeing him serious as well, usually in passing, and so I knew him for an emotional person, with an intelligent, desperate spirit. Self-sacrificing? Yes. He had only ever come at me in a panic, in violence if it were toward a superior aim. Finding Nicky. Saving the life of a lover. To keep me safe.

And so it does not shock me to see in him violence, or pitiableness, or desperation, and all this was in his face, in his so familiar features, when he touched his sleeping child, sleeping lover, and looked upon me. "And now we will bleed," he said. "I have thought about it. I promise. But he is sweet, and good, and I am not, and maybe you are not, and we will only do what we can. For love? Maybe it is not love, but it is all I have. And will you follow me in it?"

I nodded.

"You must give me your word."

I held out my hand for him to take, and he took it, his fingernails grazing my palm as his fingers twined with mine. And he pulled me close. He whispered in my ear, in a gentle rasp, "There are so many things you don't know. Give me quarter, you hard thing. You will have to sacrifice a little. Do not guard my dignity."

I nodded.

"I am sorry that you cannot trust me better.I have let you down, dove. You were meant to do better with me, weren't you? Have I let you down so?"

I parted my lips to speak, but could not draw air.

A sardonic smile. "You look like a fish, shadow. Get my silver platter, the one with depth, and your knife."

And so I went, and I remember it being very quiet. The silence of the house struck me as odd but not odd, as if the quietude were its own ghost, reminding me of itself by touching me deeply between the ears, so that in the scullery I stood a minute, with my clean knife, listening for voices or the sound of horses walking, or even of a door opening or closing, and it struck me suddenly that what I was missing was the sound of kitten breathing, which as I have mentioned had become a part of me, and it filled me with such dread of what I might find, of what Laurent had done in my brief absence, that I could only walk back very slowly, with my hand shading my eyes. 

But was there anything to fear? A flooding of relief. Oh, I thought, he has woken. How good, perhaps it was not bad as believed, perhaps it will be all right again, and I will go away so that there may be reconciliation at a later time, because there were my Laurent and his kitten in seeming loving embrace, the one holding up the other, and Leis's chin tipped up, drinking the intimate bite of a lover, from the neck. And that head I had shaved earlier in the day, already downy blond again, as if to conceal the violence that had been between us, and my heart thrilled. 

But my lips parted, and a choking sound came from me, holding my throat, as it slowly dawned upon me what was really before me, the fingers tight on Leis's back, the glassy silent terror on my maker's face, unable to scream because of the pressure on his throat, and strong body pinning him in a painful arched position, such that he couldn't move, and for a moment I froze, and then after a moment I screamed a piercing scream, and rushed in, and Laurent saw my knife and when I put it in kitten's side, up under the ribs, it mostly caught my maker's fingers, who tried to block it, which made me shudder away and cower, though I had my knife still, and ready.

Looking again, the corpse's face, that had been kitten, but which was not lucid, was so close to mine that I gasped, and I saw what I had so often seen in my brother's features, that coldness which is only instinct and hunger, violence which does not know itself for violence, and I stared back at it. 

"Bind, bind him," I heard Laurent say, very softly, to my great surprise. 

The corpse turned its head to my gasping, shuddering master. It made a sound approximating words, but not quite speech, a dull sputtering without meaning, which chilled me. Laurent was holding his bloody fingers, body seeming broken, in its impossible arch, shrunken back against the headboard.

"Dasius." 

I saw that he had measured the moment, in shock as he was, and neck raw, blond hair collecting his own blood, which still ran. And when I had seen the boy bound, who did not struggle, nearly pleasant in manner, as if wondering at this new treatment, but then beginning to scream, and to thrash, and to cry out in this near-language, which made us shudder, I tried to go to Laurent who had lightly risen and gone away. Intending to look at his wound only, I went, but just as he had been when attacked by you, Miriam, in 1501, he was too shamed and frightened to speak, only holding himself, and hiding his wound, and bending his back to make himself smaller, and hide like a shouted at animal in the corner of Nicky's room. 

And later on, when I went back inon my own, Leis was very much awake, though not lucid, and when I placed the silver bowl beneath his thigh, and cut the artery there, looking up I saw him looking at me in just that way again, that animal way, and I hoped casually that he would die. Even now, when Nicky looks at me in that way, there is little I can do but shudder at our nature, which, when naked, is without secrets, and honest. It is too honest, naked hunger. In his face, in his blue gaze, naked lust for my body, for my blood, for my entire spirit, and an animal that would suck it all from me, until I too were a pale moth growing translucent, in a slow death without light, too without mind or sense to even be afraid. Because that is what love is, and that is what we are, and I closed my eyes.