In 1921, he was still wearing blue eyes, because of his pride, because of not wanting to beg me for another color. When I tried to take him by the arm to the bath he struck me across the face. The slap itself was nothing, but his nails were sharp.

"If you will come quietly, I will put make up on you," I said. "I will brush your hair."

"Will you do it gently?" he asked, trying to get free, but the struggle was not in earnest.

"If that's what you want."

"I want warm water."

"If that's what you want."

"I want to kiss you," he said.

"Later."

How long had his eyes been dead? How long had I not noticed? It wasn't his fault that he had let himself get this way.

"You have been busy," he said, as if he could hear me. "You have been arranging things. You've been getting things ready for us to leave." He was out of breath from struggling.

"I'll go to the doctor tomorrow on the train and get new eyes for you," I said. "They'll give it to me. I'm well known there. There won't be any questions."

"It's too risky. What if we are found out before we are ready to go?"

"It won't happen."

Sometimes the eyes lasted decades, sometimes months. His vision would grow worse as the nerves died, because his weak body couldn't keep them alive. Human eyes would always have this problem, but he hardly complained.

"You could be found out," L whispered. "You shouldn't be so arrogant."

He was patient while I drew the bath, sitting on the edge of the tub and listening to the water.

"See if you like it," I said.

He dipped his hand in and nodded, the greedy water enveloping his hand in steam.

I had learned over many years that vampires cannot wither away, but rather seem to grow translucent, like dying moths -- ghostly shells. His skin seemed stretched over him, tight like mean, alabaster sculpture, and I could see his thin muscles protesting as he untied his sleeves at the shoulder. The silk fell neatly to his wrists. There was an appearance of wasting, rather than an actual loss of mass. My eyes betrayed the science. He seemed thinner and more brittle.

"Help, help me," he said, gesturing to the pins in his hair. I hadn't seen them until he pointed them out, because they were in such disarray, holding no shape on his head. "When do we leave? What time is the boat?"

I'd told him a hundred times, but he never seemed able to remember. "We're going on the 27th, at 6 in the evening."

"I wouldn't like to travel so early in the day."

"I apologize. It's the best there was."

He shrugged away his dressing gown as I turned off the taps, and I helped him into the tub. He sighed in the hot water, face flushing from the shock of sudden warmth. "I would like to go back home."

"I'm sorry, my darling. It's not the same place you know."

"Call me 'darling' again," he said, his voice hard.

I whispered that I was sorry and he relaxed. With his eyes closed I could almost see him as he was before he lost his pale brown eyes. He had worn his hair taller then and painted himself with shimmering crushed pearls to meet his rich paramours. He'd kept us in money, because he was unable to live in any other way.

"Tell me a story," I said.

"You tell yourself enough stories about me." The words came in a low grumble, as if he were not listening. "Make your own history, Dasius. You're good at that."

"Please don't call me that."

He slipped down in the tub, so that the water kissed his chin. "Look, he's bristling," he said, as if he were speaking to someone else again.

"That name has no meaning."

"I gave it to you. Are you so upset? Do you think that Laurent is my name? Why are we having this argument? You may call me 'L' if you like, like in your silly romance novels. I don't care." His eyes were still closed. "Before you I was many names and none at all, and after you I will be the same. You don't control me."

I poured a little water over his hair and dumped a handful of lavender salt into the bath. "Tell me a story then. Tell a true story."

"I prefer to be silent," he said.

"Oh, don't lie, you bad little thing. If you tell me a story I'll wash your hair very nicely."

He was smiling like a naughty child, index finger resting by his lips. I saw that his nails were nice, buffed and trimmed. How had he done that? I took his hand to look. He allowed it.

"I am two thousand years old, pet. You think I don't know the shape of my own fingernails? Yes, I have molded them."

I had no choice but to believe him.

Outside, evening had deepened, and the windows had gone almost all dark. We'd gotten the townhouse in 1913, after I had convinced him to pawn away all of his belle epoque jewelry. In 1912, while we were living in our basement flat, I'd gone through his secret stashes. It was all new in comparison to the older trophies he had kept, and I had been shocked to discover the volume of treasures he'd collected. They were all from old lovers and dead friends -- they must have been, because theft was completely against his principles. He had pearls the size of quail eggs, dozens of delicate gold chains tangled up in a heap, tin-types of beauties in jeweled cases, ivory trinkets, all stuffed in the back of the dresser. When he found me there, picking through it all, he had given up with surprising ease, taking ten or twenty things, chief among them a red signet ring, a gold button, a familiar hollow silver needle, and a tortoiseshell hair ornament carved to resemble a tiger. "I should have swallowed them all," he said. "You would never have found them then."

He took back his hand and let it sink down into the bath. The salts popped and sizzled on the surface of the water. "I knew a young man, once, from Lille," he said. "Keep it to yourself?"

"I have no one to tell."

"That's a lie. You have university friends, doctor friends. They would love to know."

"You are paranoid to think that I would betray you," I said.

"Please God, in order to betray me, you would have to be not so boring."

I scrubbed soap onto my hands and gestured for him to sit up so that I could wash his hair.

"He was a very young man then, this Lille boy. But he was involved with an old fool from farther north. I knew that old fool from some time before, and I had meant to be killing him, and remembered that when I saw the nice young man he was with. Now you should know that killing is not worth much unless there is something to take, and for a long time, I followed him."

I pressed my fingers to L's scalp and he settled back into my hands, eyes closed again.

"That old fool's name was Jean Aureil. He had adopted that poor young man from the back door of a brothel in Paris, but I was curious because I should think something like that would be for blood, and I could see no evidence of it. You seemed fine."

"I'm not from Lille. I'm from Paris."

"Oh you are barely from Paris. Your mother was a Lebanese whore," he said. "But that's alright, because you were beautiful in an interesting way."

"Proceed."

He breathed easily in the steam, sucking the warm air in and out, sighing. "That young man, you, noticed me. I was intoxicated by you and I dreamed of you often, and I thought you dark and elegant. Aureil kept your hair long, and your face so roughly scrubbed you seemed permanently slapped. A very handsome young man, so pale with your rosy lips. Your grey eyes, wide and naive, black hair long enough to pull, and already you were tall. I felt that if I could touch you I might get warm. It was so cold that winter, and I had nowhere to live. But it was not you in the end I wanted. Because it was not just you he had been handed through the brothel door, was it?"

"Don't say so. You didn't know that until you came into our flat."

"Don't call it a flat. He was keeping you in a church attic, in a tumble-down abbey. It was no place for children. He lived like a rat in a hole. The ceilings were so high there was no possibility of warmth, and the windows were too big."

When I said nothing, he went on. But I still dream of this story, more of the moment than any of my waking hours.

"On New Year's Eve I went in, because the cold was unbearable, and because I saw Aureil's face covered in blood. I wanted to find you. I wanted to take you. I needed to make you mine and destroy that unpardonable malcontent Aureil, and there could be no other time. I thought that he had ripped your throat out. I felt that you were dying because I could not espy you from the window, and it whipped me into a furious terror such that I could not see anything at all. I had my sword, which was all I had, and when that glos pautonnier of a vampire confronted me, and brought up his hands, his head came off. Which was a shame, because he was handsome in spite of his faults, the syphillitic old screw.

"And then I found you, cowering in the corner, and when you unfolded yourself, you were calling me after the archangel Michael, and I realized that you are stupid. And being angry, I thought that I should be rid of you as well, because you had enchanted me from the first, and I had gone crazy with all the blood, and no marks on you, and the mystery of it all. So I pressed you to the wall and kissed you from ear to shoulder, and you shuddering in my arms, only fifteen and not of the world, innocent and too sweet, calling me names that I had never asked for. And I thought that yours would be a sweet death, because you knew nothing of life, and how easy it would have been to take everything from you, screaming. But I heard the crying then, and you gasped, 'Stop, stop, help him.' And when I turned, there was a half-open door. I left you collapsed against the wall, which we had slid down together in that beautiful moment when you realized what I was, and I went to that door, and when I opened it your brother was there.

"There has never been a more beautiful child. I should think you believe I pitied him his terrible death, only six years old and ripped open."

"Five," I whispered.

"You will not interrupt me, putain. This story is not for you. How dare you."

Quiet, I poured water gently through his hair, curling it around my fingers.

Content and apologetic, he continued softly, "Your brother Nicky was the key I had been missing all along. On his body were so many bites from that old snake I could not count them all. He had been ripped across the throat so harshly he could hardly breathe. I wept for your brother. Do you know it? He was not like you, who looked on me as a saving angel. He looked on me with fear, as if with all his hurts, I might hurt him more. Your brother wanted to live, not like you who accepted another ravager without thought. You would have been easy to kill; to snip your life apart in one stroke would have been the right thing to do, because you were too stupid to live. I would have thought of you sometimes, with morose, painful love, for your face. Your brother tried to get away. He had no blood in him but he tried to push himself up the sheets, but I was mad, and I wanted to take him with me. And so I did, I took him to keep with me, because I could see in his eyes that he would be passionate in the life I could give him, stunted as it is.

"When I went back into the room, holding your sleeping brother, who had scratched me bloody and taken more than I felt I could give, he roused for only a moment to whisper in my ear that he would not go without you. And that is how it had always been, why Aureil had taken you as a brothel orphan in the first place, because from you Nicky would not be parted. After he saw you safe, your brother slept for twenty-five days, and I feared that he would die. And I could not go out. And he had taken so much from me.

"But you cared for me, as you always have, like you do now. Dasius who will never leave me, even if I give him names he never asked for, which have no meaning. What is it that you need? Can't I call you a name I dreamed for you? Which I kept until you were mine finally? Let me call you it when I am sad and afraid, because you are a comfort to me, and I should like some comfort in the dark."

"You call Nicky by his given name."

"He is his own and you are not. You are mine."

"You speak of me as if I am a slave," I protested.

"In four hundred years you have proved no different," he hissed. "Your brother proved it in the moment I met him, without a word. You make noise but you are chained to me. He is here now only because without me he will die. Yes. You know that he is here. Make no more fantasies that we are alone."

"I stay because I am in love with you."

"Filth," he said, sitting up in the tub and taking the towel I handed him.

"Is Nicky in the house?"

And then I saw that Nicky was in the doorway.