When Nataniellus came home, the first time after returning to the master, he looked tired. He came through the door without knocking, dragging his fingers through his short hair and checking the tightness of the skin of his jaw out of nervous habit. We were already living in Brighton in those tense times before the war. In those days it was a dying place, no longer the resort it had been, and not yet the city it would be.  

"Veni huc," I said to him. Come here.

He turned his head, and only his head, like an owl. His eyes reflected the light of the window, in the dark. 

"What did you find?" 

"Speak up," he said.

"Are you going to wash up?" 

"He was there, Iovita. In California."

Is that what Leechtin smelled like? From my chair, by the kitchen table, I could smell on his skin a stranger, someone who smelled like pollen, grass. We so much smell like the places we return to. Mingled with this, someone who smelled like me, of coal fire, cigarettes, sea salt. 

"Let's have a bath," I said.

"Nonus is here. What is he doing?" 

"Sleeping by Aulus. Come on upstairs, Mr. Porter."

It had been by then, maybe near a century that he had really been looking for Leechtin, ever since things had worsened with Aulus. We did not think that Aulus could be saved, but Nataniellus had got in him an instinct, like a pig, to follow a trail. If I asked him why, he would say, "I don't know. I don't know. Do you not want this?" And for a long time, I did not know what to say. I looked at Aulus, at Nonus, and I wondered what we would gain by seeking Leechtin now. 

But I think in the end, I was not used to feeling nervous in the way thinking of Leechtin made me feel. I was not used to feeling so uncertain. For so many years, though so much around us had changed, we had all remained largely the same. Though we'd had rough moments between us, and short stretches apart, in the face of time, we had all understood each other and functioned well. It had also been, for so many of our years, a violent existence, and other vampires nearly invariably threatening. The 1840s were largely years of revolution and upheaval on the Continent, and with that came the usual explosion in our population, just as tearing away a moldering wall reveals cockroaches. But as well, war brings with it famine and disease, which are both effective at cutting blood-drinkers down. The ones who survive in such years, the younger ones, emerge vicious, broken, and sneaking. They lose what they have been hanging onto. It is a matter of numbers. We had the numbers. And by the 1840s, and for a long time before that, we had the years. In many ways, we were as secure as we could be. When I thought of what we might risk, not knowing how it would be, I felt a pain in my chest, on the left, a burning. It was far riskier to seek outside ourselves than in.

So we cannot say that it was for protection that Nataniellus sought Leechtin. Was it for comfort? Not long before he told me he was off to look, we had woken to find Aulus, our great care, with his left pupil blown, the brown iris around it narrowed nearly to nothing. After he had gone still, after he was made, he had at least seemed to know what was going on around him, and if touched, would sometimes respond. Those times had become fewer and fewer, his facial expressions gone. We did not abandon him. Something had gone wrong in his making, and continued to go badly afterward, and yet he was still ours. In so many ways, in Herculaneum after Leechtin left, and in Misenum for the nearly two decades we lived there, Aulus had kept us alive. He had a level head and a steady judgment that inspired me to imitation. But for all of our years, we expected him to die.

I can only say, then, that Nataniellus did it for himself, looking for Leechtin, something for himself alone. 

In the beginning, in Misenum, we had all hoped that the master would return. At that time, waiting for him meant a return to order, to certainty, and to safety. As the years went by, and then the decades, Nataniellus grew angry, resentful. This turned to despair, then nostalgic sadness, then silence. Until he told me he would seek Leechtin, I had rarely heard him speak about him. He, suddenly it seemed to me, wanted to talk about Herculaneum, and we did, living in Calais until unrest on the Continent caused us to cross the Channel. We had always moved in the direction of peaceable tension, where people were desperate but not violent. We settled in the North, in Yorkshire. And Nataniellus from then on was sometimes away, hearing this or that from young vampires terrified of this place or that place. They were happy to tell him whatever they knew, for the chance that he would let them live. But a spider never looses a fat wasp once it is caught.

But perhaps Nataniellus's mind is also like that, a thick web. Certainly mine is, and in mine there were more things caught than the master and all of the things I thought and felt about him, quiet little strands that seemed dark to me, that had not vibrated significantly for some time, or too briefly to occupy myself with. More deeply, and I could admit it to myself, was the death of Escha. I always thought of him dead, because I always thought of him as alone. Those of us who are alone, they do not seem to have much chance. The boy I knew, given to emotion, to preoccupation, even to stunning seriousness and conviction, I thought, if he became one of us, what would he have been like? Sometimes I thought like that. But deeply, I believed that he had died as a boy. Some way. Perhaps of starvation, in the famine that followed the eruption of Vesuvius, if not before. Children, even the tough little knots like Escha, are little nothings in the world. 

So in a sense, for many years, I had accepted that Nataniellus was seeking something he could find, and did not imagine he would find anything else. So in the bath, as he washed his hair and as I rested in the cool water, when he said, "Iovita, Escha was there," it devastated me. 

I wanted to know, what did he look like? What did he sound like? How old? How much did you know him, and how did his face move like? Did he make the little looks that made us laugh? Did he pretend to be sweet and cuddle you, only to bite you and cry? Was he a perfect rascal and a sweetheart both? Was he as beautiful as we thought he would be? Was he all right? But my chest began to heave, and Nonus came out of his room and squeezed me tightly in my robe, pushing my hair back. He held me so fast, compressing my chest against his body to keep me from drawing breath to cry out, to wail. For a little to while, I felt too upset to speak, not knowing what I would be driven to say. I waited. 

"Do you think that he will see us?" I asked, one morning the next week, as Nataniellus sat in the kitchen drawing up a letter.

"The master has grievance with you," he said, looking up and pushing his chair back from the table. We always had our chairs on little cloths, a square for each leg, so that they would not scrape. Wood across tile is terrible, audible over long distances.

"I don't care about seeing the master."

He was dressed like an Edwardian gentleman, or half-dressed. People always seemed half dressed to me, after the embellished eras fell away. I liked his black trousers, and his bare face, and he parted his knees for me easily, tightening those slacks around familiar thighs. He drew in my approaching body, to rest his head against my sweater and twine his fingers in my belt loops. 

"Yeah that's the party line," he said softly, as I stroked his hair for him. "We don't care. Casual-like. No big deal. Waltz in. Nil moror." Ain't give a shit. "That's a reliable Iovita."

"I want Escha. I want him," I said, unable to deny the throaty needfulness of this. The pleasure of knowing him alive mixed with other knowledge of pleasures in my mind. The need to see him took on a sheen of singleminded thirst that felt embarrassingly indecent but altogether necessary. I wanted to smell him and bite him and figure him all out from head to little toe, as certainly he was one of us, and who had he become? 

"Do you like him so? What do you want him for?"

"Surely you're teasing me. Tell me what he was like."

"Oh I shouldn't want to say anything or you'll be disappointed."

"Wretched, soulless Ginger," I said, pushing his face against my belt.

He sighed there, so close to major arteries. "You smell like Mr. Popov. Have you been hobnobbing with the drug dealers?"

"I like Popov. He's funny."

"He's not funny. Let me go now."

I let go of his head and he tipped his chin back, looking up at me with those soft brown eyes that I always like to look in. A fine class of man, with no class at all. Without sayso, he took hold of my brass belt buckle and worked my belt free. "Look here, Red, I've got work to do later over at the rental property."

"I'll take it from muscle and you'll barely miss it."

"But that hurts like a son of a gun."

"I'll give you what you want in return. Lips'll be loose anyway. Why are you so shy?"

"Well you're talking a lot, for one," I said, as I felt the soft touch of his tongue on my hip. 

To say that he had reservations about bringing Escha home to us would be understating it. He has always been more certain than me that there never was a Laurent, and that people don't really change. He didn't want to upset me. He didn't want me to be manipulated. I'm not very good at the former, being upset, but you can't manipulate the willing. 

"I'm wary of people. It'll be all right," I told him, when he was finished skimming from me. "I'll go to California and see what he's like, will I?"

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked up at me for a long moment, his hair ruffled and his blood-stained lips parted, and when I didn't say anything, he slapped my left buttock and dug his fingers into my skin, massaging my unyielding flesh. He pursed his lips and looked away. 

"Come on then," I said, trying to sound gentle in spite of the way my thigh smarted from his teeth. "Bloody beggar," I added, when he looked back at me with anger in his eyes.

"He was not the only person there. There's him and others," he said, helping me get dressed again, finding my belt on the floor.

"What kind of others?"

"All sorts," he said, dragging a chair out for me with his foot. 

I sat and he gestured for me to reach up and pull the string for the overhead light. I did, revealing him in detail, a drop of blood by the top button of his starched white shirt. I like a good starched shirt. "Well done with that. I'll have that blood spot out for you."

"Look here now," he said, taking the hand I had extended to him and holding it between his knees, "you great big daft bull."

"You'll be wanting to qualify that. You been sucking on me and that's a little more than teasing. I've got needs about now and I'm dead sensitive over how I'm understanding all of this."

"Diligent, tender. Escha's got an echo chamber around himself, but he's also lonely, and you know that's dangerous. Unpredictable. I'd rather you here until the right moment. They're not like us. If I can get him away from the rest, I will. You've my word."

"If you're wary then I am."

"He didn't want to see me. Do you hear? Leechtin told me straight off that Escha was there, and I find Escha in the arms of the living, some sort of boy he finds precious. But he has many of them, and all he seems to have in the world. He's never alone for a moment."

"And are they all he has? The living?" I asked, as he rubbed my finger-joints nervously. 

"No they're not. I've not seen them, Iovita. But he has created a wide net of others, knotting together little sets, and I do not even think that they all know about each other. It seemed to me at first a fragile balance, but there is none. He flees and he hides himself, fearing them. When he talked with me, finally, he had nothing to say but frivolous things. And he won't have us. I do not think he knows anymore to do anything but fear. I look at him and he is lost, and there is no kindness left in me to give to him. I regret to say that I regret already things between the two of us."

"Don't say nothing at all if you're not going to say anything specific. I want to know the look of him, that's all. When are you going back?" I asked. "I miss you, if I'm honest."

"When I go back I'll go back for a long time."

"I don't mind. But stay with me until you go."

I didn't mind to be so naked with him. Between us, there had never been much in the way of shame, not after Par Impar or cleaning up his piss and vomit when we drank together. By the time we got around to being immortal, there wasn't anything left to hide, not about ourselves. 

About other things, things he thinks are his fault but aren't, hiding those things wasn't ever about honesty at all. He kept secret a lot that he didn't know how to talk about; that he didn't know how to understand. In the future, he didn't know how to tell me that he had seen Leechtin cut open. He didn't know how to explain to me that from the first he felt things around Leechtin's house that brought him to his knees, that there was an atmosphere there that oppressed him, and that when he realized there was an old one stalking Leechtin, in the 70s, it didn't explain all of the other things he had been sensing. 

All he said in the kitchen was, "Don't leave me before I leave you," holding onto my hand with both of his.

I did not realize he was afraid until he left, after less than a week. I had not seen him frightened in so long. But I did not see him again, or hear his voice, or let myself want him, for nearly twenty years. At first, I thought, the war kept him away. Maybe that's right. Then, I thought, he must have things to take care of. Then, I thought, ah, he's caught love. And I thought, well that's nice. 

It was all enough for me really, knowing that Escha was in the world. And then one day when I came home, there Escha was sitting in my kitchen, looking perfect, and weeping over me and insisting to me in his twee French accent that I was dead.

"I'm not dead, if you don't mind. I was fixing our tenant's boiler and now I'm come home," I told him, unsure of what to do.

It was 1960. He was so beautiful to me I even liked him crying.