I'm not one to dream of love affairs. I know you, not just you, all the other ones, wonder what the ghost in my closet is. It's not affairs of flesh or panicked, desperate declarations of love. It's not that I have no need of those things, but they do not haunt me as they do some others. That is what makes me different from you. I need no human petting.

But that doesn't mean the idea of true love does not walk behind me sometimes, like a shy skeleton, walking my steps within grasping distance, some spectre of impossible earthly comfort I've never known. I walked behind Laurent then, as he walked his circles in his room, tormented by the letter. I followed him in his circuit like a shadow, eyes raised as if to heaven, hoping for some peace for him. I didn't know how long it might have been since he heard from that poor blond boy. All I had wanted was to wake him from his two weeks absence from the world of the living. I walked behind him as love walks behind me, ready to take him from despair into new concerns, to distract him from the bitterness of worldly things. A petty, unneeded distraction.

Laurent needs petting. He lives for it. I have watched him kiss boys, winking at me. He would kiss them in front of me as if I cared about it. As if he felt I would be hurt about it, which tickled him. I am not unfeeling, but I care more for his pleasure than I do some notion of my own. Afterall, I have never known a life other than this one, and for me, the world of blood is far more interesting than the warmth of pale flesh and trembling lips. All it makes me wonder is what his life was like before, because he was taken at an age older than Dasius and I combined. Did he go around with boys then, as he does now? Was he so much the butterfly, flicking from flower to flower, dipping his face so many sweet times? Or perhaps he is more the moth, coming at night to bright lights, and hiding by daylight, desperate for the warmth and comfort of these boys, sun-like, who are so full of living. For certainly, without them, he is less confident. But what lies at the center of his character? Are we closer to the truth of him when he is kissing and laughing, or when he is melancholy and gentle? Perhaps it is both, and perhaps neither. Perhaps his true face is madness, which I have sometimes seen.

Tell me how I should respond to him, when he cries for a lover I barely know, wearing circles in the floor, as if he might arrive in England if he walked in circles long enough. He held the letter to his forehead, folded square, head inclined like a flagellant monk, making quiet, mournful sounds in the back of his throat. I followed like that deathful skeleton which follows me, and said nothing, eyes wide, ready to help him, unable to watch without moving.

At long last, after several hours, Dasius opened the door. A tense silence developed, Laurent stopping for the first time since he had leapt from his bed at the sound of Leis's voice from across that narrow band of water, which separated us from the White Swan. There were no clocks in the room, but I heard my own heart beat time, accelerating the seconds in my ears, until I felt the dizzy, suffocating anger which suffused our beloved, who leapt on Dasius then and began to scream.

For a few moments, Dasius was too shocked to fight back, as Laurent tore at his neck and face with hard, numb fingers, but then I went to the floor and put myself between them, crying words I can't remember now, trying to put my body over my brother's, who couldn't withstand all the power our master's fury has. And then, with my help, Dasius knocked him to the floor, and barked at me to draw a cool bath, which I did, running into the washroom down the hall, dripping blood behind me on the carpet from wounds I could not feel, and Laurent was crying in that old language again, that he wished he had killed us, that he wished he had let us die, because we were heavy chains upon him now, fettering him to a hell on earth he could not stand.

"Save me, take me," he wailed. "Take me away from this. Take me with you," moaning, as if to someone we could not see. Dasius dragged him down the hall by the hair, unable to carry him while Laurent struggled with his full power, even weakened as he had been by the drugging and lack of blood. Dasius had overseen that treatment over the previous years for just such a moment as this one. "Let me go away from this life," he cried, eyes unseeing, "let me go."

He panted softly that we were merely sons of whores, and that he had raised us to this, and for that he had been cursed. When he saw the bath he struggled against Dasius with renewed fear and fury, because freezing water is such a shock to the vampire system. Dasius fought back, as angry as I had ever seen him, teeth clenched and eyes narrowed to furious slits. He sat atop of Laurent's hips on the washroom floor and lowered his head to his master's neck, which I turned away from, because it sent Laurent to screaming like a dying pig and I could not stand it. I covered my face and sobbed because I could not remember my whore mother, and Laurent had stuck me through the heart with a particularly evil pin with her mention, and I could not pity him his pain because of it. I did not love him in that moment, lost in my own repressed sensibilities, mother, mother

Then Dasius was picking Laurent up, limbs limp and blooded neck tipped back as if without life, and dumped the body into the cold water, slopping it all on the floor, wetting my feet. I walked back from the water like a bird from the tide, face still covered. I felt my brother's hand, which shoved me backwards, and shut the washroom door so that I was suddenly alone outside in the hall, crying like a naked child.

And that was when I noticed that force that Dasius has talked about, "miasma", some close unimaginable power, and it sucked all the breath from my body.