Mini, listen awhile. Come closer. Do you hear me? Am I speaking? Softly. Tell me about my child. Does the blood ravage you? Speak to me. Mini, I like the color of your hair. It is so red. Oh save us, don't cry. It ravages you. Do you know now what power is? Do you understand that to him you were as nothing? A small thing. Weak, so small. Don't cry, little doctor. Be strong. It is cool here. All will be as sweetness and the pleasure of security. Cry if you must. I will lie beside you.

Your maker, your Laurent, spread my blood thin over the continent before he came to you. You are all pale shadows to me, weak blood. A flick of my fingers, a blink of my eyes, what are you? Nothing. 

Kiss you. If I do that, your young gentleman will be angry. I think that I will not. Taste you? I will not do that either. In your frail body is the blood of my child, and I would not have it. No. Oh, hold me. You smell like that tea. It is in your hair. You are touching my pins. What is the matter with you children, wanting to see me so undressed? Let my hair down if you must. 

Your maker used to dress my hair. Do you know that? Before he died, every evening he was coming into my room, without a word, and sitting me at my vanity. He would put my pins between his lips, and braid my hair, and roll it. Even when he was trembling, he would come. Often, he would not say a single word, and go when it was finished. Other times, he would press his soft lips to my temples, and whisper to me in our Latin and Egyptian patois, drag his fingertips up my throat and the back of my neck, to feel my shiver at the tingling of my skin. He would breathe at my hairline, and kiss delicate places, places where teeth might puncture with barely any pressure at all, and say "Faya, look on me. Faya, speak to me." He liked to stroke the back of my neck as you do now, because it made me tremble, a vulnerable position. As I tremble now.

Your maker. Yes I say that. How many hundred times did he insist to me that Escha was dead? So many times I called him by the wrong name, and he exhausted himself trying to beat me with his fists. He insisted upon "Laurent", but this name makes me ache. How your stomach trembles when I touch it.

Egypt. 

The previous evening had seen him swept up in a rabid fury with me, but it was all act by then. He had exhausted himself on fighting, and had sunk down into a terrible melancholia, which he could not hide from me, and I hurt for my gone lover, who when Escha touched me, your maker, my Escha, always, not Laurent, Escha, would touch me like a lover, it was as if he put his hand inside my body and picked at pieces of my soul, my self. 

Was there any one thing? No. But I woke up in the sultry evening, and he was sleeping, beside me. I went to the window, and it was all black night, half a white moon lighting silvery wisps of fall clouds, and when I breathed in the air it was like a cool blade slicing slowly through my body, as if breathing in a spirit. I held it inside of myself for a moment, and breathed it out again. 

Far away, barely visible over the horizon, was a sliver of white sail in the harbor, sliding past in silence. I turned around, and when I looked at my child, he was sitting up, awake, watching. And when I looked into his eyes, suddenly there was fear there, and instead of confusing me, I felt a pressure of anger in my ribs, blooming in me. What trick? I thought. Why should he be fearful? I breathed. I stabbed my finger at him, "Why are you afraid? Why do you treat me as a stranger?"

He was not used to my raised voice, and retreated from it, moving backwards up the bed away from me. 

"Why are you afraid?" I asked him, and his face was a blank horror of me, without words. "Speak to me," I said to him, "are you made a ghost already?" When I covered his body with mine, he covered his face, protecting the place where I had burned him with my pin and gasped as if I were strangling him. I said to him, "Are you still dreaming? Escha," and he began to cry. 

He said, "I don't know you, I don't know you, who are you, where is my atta, where is my master." 

I held him by the shoulders, "Escha." 

He said, "Stranger," and struggled under me, and when he couldn't get away, he began to fight, and I couldn't stand it. 

He was all I had in the world. "Know me," I pleaded with him. 

And he shouted, "I don't know you, I don't know you. Let go of me," and suddenly I was so angry that I didn't know who I was either. I grabbed him by his hair, and spit in his sobbing face, and slapped him. He turned his head away, but I didn't want him to turn his head away, and wrenched him back with great violence, which made him scream with pain, and still his eyes were blank of knowledge of me. 

And then I was kissing him, and he was pushing at my face, babbling his fear, "Please go from here, monster, please, spirit," as if I were a nightmare thing and I bit his lip at that, which made blood come, and when I drew away, having tasted him, he looked up at me dazed and himself again, the act broken.

He shivered and looked on me in real horror, shuddering and eyes wide. When I licked my lips he said, "Faya", in a child's voice, teeth blooded from the bite, from the tear I had opened inside of his mouth. Blood ran from his lip to the left, into his hair. "Don't hurt me," he whispered, "Please, please, Faya, don't hurt me. I love you," desperate, "I didn't mean it. I was wrong. Don't hurt me."

"You wanted this," I spat at him, a darkness in my spirit which wanted to crush him.

"Please, please, save me, spare me, I want to live," he pleaded, sobbing, covering his neck with his hands, and pressing those hands to my chest, choking on his own blood, which ran back from his desperate lips, "I don't want this, please," trying to curl his body up beneath me. 

I held onto him, and he sobbed in relief, hitching and gasping, and I lifted him to me, sitting up on his thighs, nose level with his brow. And I dipped my head. He dissolved then into nervous laughter, telling me that he would change, and it would be right between us, and from tomorrow he would go out, and maybe find work in the harbor, because he had old friends there who knew him for a sharp mind of poor means, and as he was speaking the music of relief, I snapped my teeth shut on his throat, and he couldn't scream, gurgling on his own blood, which sprayed from his mouth, so hard did his heart leap to beating and so close to his windpipe the bite. 

When I pulled on the blood he spoke in tongues, sobbing and moving with the direction of my body.

I felt his fingers on my back, my neck, my arms, my flesh, digging, looking for a vulnerability, and it piqued me so that I let go of him, and snapped my teeth shut on him again, at the shoulder, and drank of his heated blood, his heart fluttering dying beats like the beating wings of a drowning bird. He was whispering, around the blood, crying, limp in my arms, "No, no, no, no, atta, no," like the quietest echo, he said, "I'm sorry," in my ear, he said, like Nataniellus, "Come back, I'm sorry, come back," and I drew back from him, in horror of myself, in shock at such familiar words.

He breathed shallow breaths, "Oh," he said, "oh," eyes rolling up and back, and I let him lie back, beside him and tortured with grief, and he said, so quietly,  "Don't worry, atta, don't worry. It's alright. Don't worry, atta," and touched my hair, but so quickly he was insensible, and shaking, my child, and when I tried to give him the blood, he began to cry again, and babbled nonsense sounds and arched under me, quaking, beautiful blond hair caked with the blood that had run from his mouth, and freckled on his face from when I had bitten him the second time, so viciously.

He took so little blood. He choked on it, and wouldn't take it, and in the morning, when he was screaming in pain of it, he wanted more, but it was too late, because the blood had hold of him, and the heat of Egypt tormented him so that he clawed at his face and at his body, screaming and bleeding from his eyes, thrashing in our bed, and his lips begged for blood which when I gave him it, he pushed me down and broke my skin, and pulled on the blood so hard it drew a sob from my body. But that blood, oh Mini, you know how it is now, it ravaged him. Only that first blood from one's master is life. From that first hold, after you have passed into its first grip, that old blood is its own power, not yours, and it embraced him in a rictus of pain, young flesh. 

And weakened, yes, unable to see him so transported, I left him. I will not pretend it was anything else but fear, and agony of my spirit which drove me away. And when I came back, he was so destroyed, mad and blinded.

Yes, Mini? I have already said that I should not kiss you. It will not comfort me. Do not worry for me, young one. Peace. Peaceful. I am sorry for what I did to your master. He did not have to suffer so much. That is my fault. And every moment that I live, I am sorry for it. But he comes to me in dreams, and begs me for it again over and over and over, that violence, that anger. I have never had another. He was my last living blood. I swear it. I had grown so tired. When I close my eyes, I feel his fingertips, touching my neck, and I want him, dressing my hair, and whispering to me in our language, and it ruins me. What bother have I, kissing you while my lover lives and my child is dead? I don't care. There is nothing in the world. I don't care.