When the blood from that dead lover, Aquilla, found its way into my head, and into the reaches of my body, it was as if the sun had been let in on me. There was an incredible lightness in my limbs. I sat for long hours on the floor of our room, windows uncovered, with my arms raised over my head and my eyes closed, as if at worship.

Escha spent time beautifying himself at first, checking his eyes and mouth in the hand-length silver mirror the dead man had bought for him. He had it on an enamel stand, on the table by the bed. He checked himself compulsively, fluffing his hair with my comb carved like a tiger. Because he left that room only to piss or find food, color left him, and his complexion went milky and pallid, which outward sign of suffering pleased him. He said, "Talk to me about Aquilla's death," often, wanting to hear my voice, and it would have been easy to think him freed by the death of that last human lover, but he was slavish to news of him, and of my involvement, and I ignored him, arms raised up in bloody supplication. At first, I could hear him and ignore him, but gradually the earthly plane faded from me, and so did "Faya", and the world where he existed hummed in and out of my consciousness.

That blood lasted in me long, and I listened to the murmur of the city, electric and many voices, breathing of her air. I darted out a tongue of consciousness, like a whip, searching for my other one, my singing lover, among those many bodies, but could not find him, which unsettled me, and set me to sitting longer, and not speaking. 

As winter settled in, Escha's mood darkened, turning inward. He fought to cover the windows, but he could not battle against my power, which in that time was quiet but absolute. I knocked him aside from the shutter without a touch, and turned on sounds in his head which made him gasp and drop to his knees. I calmly called for those other ancients who had known me, without names, but recieved no answer, a lone bird in an empty wood. I pointed my body in the direction of heaven, inclining my chest skyward, back bent. I closed my eyes and opened my mouth, and whispered attunement, listening for voices, but there were none but my own, echoing back to my own ears. 

Escha watched, and said, "You seem peaceful," and feared me, for which I had no care in the world. I lowered my body to the floor, face resting on the wood and arms extended, stomach flush against my knees, spine spoon-shaped, I said, "Yaksha," intimate with the earth, and heard, "Aurvha," which is an old name, and smiled. I said, "Is he living," and heard, in an old language, "There is no easy knowledge, none, lover," and the tickle of longing. "As this, your old self," he said, "someday call me as now and again ask, my sweet white throat, my young serpant, my pale lotus, ask next time for me alone, no other, for this old body wants that lucid mind," and a smile, "to drink of." And Yaksha spoke to me no more after that.

For long weeks, the world was a ghost to me, and there was only the pillar of my body, quaking and humming, at peace and in contentment with the completeness of its met needs. There was no self. There was no Faya, or Aurvha, or anyone but vampire, tasting the air and communing with spirits, flicking out its electric tongue for those it had known, seeking egress back into the world it understood, and finding no one. 

And eventually the blood faded away, and there came Faya again, with his cloudiness and loves, and worries, and the creature cried a breath and submerged itself once more, melancholy and old, inside of him. And then there was I, lying on the floor cold, in that same bloody tunic I had killed Escha's Aquilla in, and feeling the weeping of pain in my limbs at being so long held still. And I noticed that Escha had cut open his arms and lay near me, passed out from his attempt at a meaningful suicide.

I sat up, and sat over him, straightening his hips so that he lay flat on his back in his pool of blood, growing tacky with the passage of time. I lifted his head and brushed his hair back, tipped his chin up. I pressed my ear to his chest and listened to his long, slow breaths. 

Escha is not impulsive. That I know. Since he was a child, he has been a boy of long plans. For Escha, all things must be beautiful, and beauty comes from a deep sense of meaning. For Escha, innocence is beautiful, and suffering is the price of nobility. He had cut himself down the long old slashes on his arms, where he had been bled for Nataniellus, but too shallowly to bleed to death. I lifted his body and laid him on the wooden table under the window. I went out, and brought a large basin from the Egyptian women on the first floor, and made many trips for water, filling it. 

And then slowly, methodically, I washed him, from toes to fingertips to collarbones and earlobes. I massaged his scalp with fine salt and ran my fingers through his hair. I massaged oil into his skin and wiped it away with the back of the knife he had cut himself with. I clucked over his wounds and wrapped them tightly with fine linen from fabric he must have brought me when I had been insensible to him. And when I had put him to bed, I scrubbed the floor on my knees to wash the smell of his blood away. 

When he woke, he began to scream. I sat up so that he could see me, to the elbows blooded from scrubbing the floor, and he turned his head away, and I almost laughed, because I saw him as my little one, having a tantrum because he was overtired, and because I was relieved to be with him again. I cooed over him, and hummed, and sat beside him so that he could hold onto me. And then he was kissing my neck with parted lips, and digging his fingers into the tender place behind the collarbone, which made me shout, and push him away. 

The look in his eyes was dark, much like he would look later in life, predatory and angry. He didn't speak. He tried to take my arm, to move me, but I do not move at anyone's will but my own. He tried to kiss me again. He was trying to make me as angry as he was. I sat very still, back straight against the low headboard. The white cloth I had wrapped his hair in was wet against my shoulder and he tried with his body to push me away.

"Don't block me out," he snapped, furious, voice rising. "I will not be blocked out. I am your own. You said to me that I am as your own. I would be given access. I will have what I would of you." 

"Who is this child who says 'I' to me," I said, softly.

"You are laughing at me. You are laughing. I can hear it in your tone," beginning to cry.

"Once, when you were small, your elder brother, your Iovita, took a stick from your hand and you came to me, screaming and screaming. You clutched at my linen robe and cried. I had never seen you so angry in all your life," I took him by the shoulders and inclined my forehead against his. "You said, 'Get him, get him, make him give me my stick', and would not be consoled until I promised to take you into town to get some nice cool plums to eat for your dessert that evening. And you liked those plums so well you forgot all about it. It still makes me laugh and laugh. It was only a stick but it made you crazy that he snatched it out of your hand. I thought, this child is like me."

He listened to this story with a crazy scowl on his pretty face. He was looking so nice, clean, and hair perked up and shining from the salt scrub, coming loose under the cotton. 

I pushed his hair back from his forehead, in an attempt to sooth.

"Does it please you, mocking me?" he demanded, but the breath was gone from his anger, and what was left was his sincerity, and his real issue. "It's easy for you. You are not afraid."

"Afraid?" I said, receiving him, stroking the linen wrapped around his arms. I kissed his temple. I asked him to tell me what was on his mind, and he sighed. 

"Did you wash me?" he asked suddenly, startled.

"Your nurse, my Nataniellus, spoke similarly as you do, sometimes. It does not seem so long ago to me, but I don't wonder that you can't remember his face at all. He used to shout at me that I should not speak harshly to him, because he had suffered, and I thought, does one not laugh at those who are sweet to us? You make me feel very happy, little one. I am sorry for hurting you. I am so relieved that you have lived, and it makes me smile that you are sulking."

He asked me questions, and to appease him, I answered them. 

I said, "Don't shout at me anymore about what you want, I know." It was beautiful, in the delirium of relief, that little calm, and to hear him laugh, after awhile, and he wanted to know what I thought of Nataniellus, which took away the mirth from me. "Oh, darling," I said, "I am torn apart."

He put his arms around my body and held me close. which was precious to me over all things in the world. He was young. He loved this drama, which he took for honesty. 

I said, "Feel some sympathy for your tutors. Your Vivacio was younger than you are now, and your Vasvius never felt able to live his own life. They gave what they had to me, and their frustration was hard to bear for the children, for you."

And then he was angry again, "What I have given!" he said, wresting himself from my arms.

Oh it tires me to think of it. I ached to sleep, to be done with drama, but he was propelled by the energy and naivete of youth, and drank pleasure and self-satisfaction from rage, which, honestly, is not a trait which ever left him completely, and I listened. This argument recurred for months.

Oh Mini, I am so tired now. Do you see me? I am not Aurvha. I am not the pale lotus of Egypt. I am just Leechtin, tired and old. While he spoke of his pain and his hurt, I lay there on the bed and closed my eyes. If I ever spoke to him as I speak to you, honest and tired and annoyed, he would become angry just like that again, because he needed for other people acknowledge him. And he would say, "Oh you don't know, don't act like you understand everything about me," and talking to me  in his later years made him just like that young thing again, raging in Alexandria about the distress of living. I am trying to tell it all to you how he would want me to, but oh when I think of him these days, he is making me smile. I am tired of melancholia. There has been so much of it. There was so little to smile about then, as now.

You ask me if I dream of him. Yes, I do. I dream of him lying on the floor in our room in Alexandria, covered in his own blood, bleeding forever from the gouges on his pretty white arms. I see him with his hair wet, lying as he had fallen. He speaks to me from the grave there, eyes fixed and mouth a slack line, blood soaking into his beautiful hair. In the dream I sit beside him and he says to me, deadened,  "Stop laughing at me. If you love me, stop laughing at me, if you love me, take me with you. If you love me, don't do this to me, don't let me grow old and leave you. Don't let me grow old and leave you alone, let me come with you so that I may stay with you." He says those things to me that he said to me as a child, which he echoed in that room, pleading with me to make him like me, that he wanted to be near me always. He is still talking to me like that whenever I close my eyes.

He didn't think I knew then that he was afraid of death, and tired of that fear, and willing to kill himself to be rid of it, and that he saw me as a stubborn closed door. And sometimes he would try to kiss me, to open the door a little, not from passion, but because he wanted to be a part of me, so near to me that we were one flesh, which is a very vampire thing to feel, and if I held him back from it he would cry. 

He would wheeze out these appeals, throat rough from crying, "Please kiss me, please, please touch me, please," which reminded me of my Nataniellus, and made me despair so deeply that it did anger me. 

"Tell me how it was," he would say, exhausted from fighting with me, and touching the place below his lip where I had burned him. "I want to know it how you did. Tell me what we were to you. Did you feel anything for us? Do you feel anything?" 

And I told him, "Escha, it was you and your brothers who awakened me from slumber in every way."

He said, "Don't leave me like you did after killing Aquilla. I can't stand to be alone, to be without you. Atta, never. I fear waking up and your being gone again. I fear waking to an empty shell, of losing my atta." And I let him kiss me, closing my eyes softly, as if he were someone else who I ached for, which I am more sorry for than anything. He said, "Yes, react to my hand, to my lips, living." He tormented me with questions, with ranting, with his touch, until he wore me down completely raw with shame and grief, until I could only see him as his grown self, and could not see my child at all, and it was because he was ill from fear that he could not stop tormenting me.

I am so tired. Mini, touch me. What did he tell you about his making? Yes, I am listening. Yes, perhaps torment is too strong a word. Perhaps begging is the truth. Oh, I miss him. Do you remember what he was like when he was happy? Mini, he wore me down. I am not surprised that he didn't tell you about those months after Aquilla died, and how he would spring into anger from nothing, and laugh as if he had gone mad, and stab his finger at me that I had stolen his life from him, the man he loved, and that I was an evil snake. And then he would dissolve into tears and say that he loved me, and that he was glad I'd killed that man, and take him away from fear, and comfort him, and let him hold onto me, and all those other things. 

So I did it, because I was tired, and yes I spit in his face, and he cried to me that he didn't know me, which was the thing he always said when he wanted to hurt me. He had seen it hurt me once, after Aquilla, and he always used that as a weapon, "Stranger", and even if he said it in earnesty while I made him, it made me so angry that I bit him as hard as I could, and for a moment, loved his tears. But let me say more about it. Let me not serve myself at all in telling you how it was. I owe that.

Shut the shutters. Mini, come to bed with me and undress. Have no mind in this world and retain no vestige of the earth. If we are to be honest, let first there be blood between us, so that you may know my mind.