On the flight back to the United States, Escha became increasingly agitated. As the flight neared its termination, he began to fuss with his hair and to touch his nose with the back of his hand. Before the flight, he had spent an interminable amount of time --nearly the entirety of the wait on the terminal-- arguing on the phone with someone I didn't know named "D". I didn't listen to that conversation because I found myself concerned with Nonus, who since the car had seemed determined to faint. He achieved it at around 15,000 feet, insensible until landing shocked him back into the world of the living. As always, we took advantage of the animosity of strangers in public, and spoke to each other only Italian so that even if we were out of the norm, we would not be addressed. I believe that Escha felt alienated by it, because he did not know the language, so that when we landed, for this and other reasons, an uncomfortable distance had grown between us.

After landing, he brusquely asked me if I could drive, and when I hesitated, he tossed his hair like a nervous horse and volunteered himself. One knows not to bother nervous horses, but rather soothe them with the words to which they are accustomed. "Oh yes, well you are certainly the best among us," I murmured. 

"I know that you think me vain," he murmured back, fumbling with rented keys. "But you are mean, and can't deny it. You've acid for those not in your mold, man or otherwise."

"So Faya says we are the same in that way," I said, "contemptuous of those outside our circles." 

"Oh no," he rejoined, "you say that but know that I am contemptuous of those inside mine as well." He checked the mirrors over his sunglasses. "In fact I hate them. I would be only with those who do not desire me. I am disgusted with him who would kiss the hem of my robe for a kind word. If he wants me, he has bad judgment. Most would say so! Is that my flaw? A man who fawns over me reveals himself as dangerously stupid. In fact I want for you to want me very much. You are not so easily fooled."

"If you hate them, destroy them. You have the means." The passenger window had quickly warmed by my face with the door shut, and I leaned towards him ever so slightly. The movement did not escape his notice, and however he read it, he softened.

"You see, you are the cruelest," he said, more gently. A hint of a joke, of appeal, came into his tone. "Surely you will know I cannot because pure hatred can only fester between beloved. You can't hate one you do not know as you know yourself."

"Do you wish to destroy yourself?" I asked him, but then the backdoor opened, and Nonus slipped inside, holding a piece of guarantor's blue copy paper regarding the delivery of the casket. Iovita followed closely, so that Nonus could not change his mind and flee.

Escha turned the key then, sharing not so much as a look with me.

"Escha?" I asked him.

The most striking thing about him as a child had been the sense about him that he was completely free. If held, his head was always lolling about on his neck to see things from all angles, and if he wanted to kiss or lick my skin he did. He was always jumping about and climbing trees, as if his body did not encumber him at all. His emotions were his own, and he wallowed in them luxuriously. Notably, however, even then he slept like the dead. Once he fell asleep, he never moved. He barely breathed. 

I suspect that he was more intelligent at that age than he ever let on. I suspect that by the time I met him, he had already molded himself into what he perceived Faya wanted out of him. Certainly, aspects of his natural character were left in him even so, but the way he slept has led me to believe he had an instinct for pleasing those he admired unconsciously. Whether he knew it or not, and it seemed he did know it at times, he had changed himself for his master. His bubbliness and vanity, though I find it difficult to envisage him without them when I am bitter, I fully believe were early and permanent adaptations. They are two qualities Faya absolutely likes in a precious object, and Escha certainly knew that, as I know it. I do not know how deeply those two traits went in Escha, or if he knew himself, but I have as often witnessed him in deep counsel with himself. Sensitive and secretive, and in conversation about his life, reasoning with himself. That is how he looked on the long drive. This look gave him a haunted and faraway character, a sense that he was seeing through his eyes from vantage very deeply in his mind. 

This went doubly affirmed for me at the house, where as we pulled up, a sound escaped from him as if he had been punched in the gut. It was a naked and unpremeditated sound, without pretense. Looking up, I saw at the end of the long drive a young and tidy-seeming vampire with dark hair and defined features, wearing a wide-brimmed deep navy fedora. I took this to be D, with dark lips and wide eyes in shadow of the brim. It struck me that he looked a little like Faya in the face, though only on first glance, and certainly not in shape of body or carriage. Escha got out of the car clutching his throat and making a barely audible high pitched sound, which terminated only when D had put the hat on his blond head, and held him by the chin. There was no shallow show in the greeting, or demonstration about it. 

"What do you reckon, a lover?" Iovita asked, rolling up his window.

"I don't know," I said. 

"Look how the stranger holds Escha's face. He studies the flesh to see if we have damaged it."

"I don't know who it is."

"Somebody we ought to note, any road," he murmured. "He doesn't seem the type to put up with fools very long, does Escha. Admit it, our boy is hard as nails. He's like you."

"But I put up with you."

"You ought to be studied, Red. Where's our old man?"

I couldn't answer that so I didn't. "Take your brother into the house. It's bright. There's a good room if you go up the main stairs and head left."

"Don't surprise us with him. You'll want to warn me he's coming," Iovita said, patting nonverbal Nonus to attention with a cupped hand to the cheek.

I hadn't yet had the time to acknowledge Aulus's death or begin to grieve. Iovita, of course, had not either. "Keep Nonus active. I will find you," I said.

"No problem. Keeps trying to take off his clothes. He's got me on edge. Gone feral. Come quietly now, and you can strip in the house. All right, Nonus?"

I got out of the car looking all around, and truly it  was very bright and I felt jealous of the hat, even though it was wool and surely quite warm on Escha's head. I heard, "Excuse me, we haven't met," but went past the petitioner without a look, for my intent quickly settled upon seeking Faya. It felt queer not to see him. He is not one to hide, even when avoiding hosted guests. Before moving inside, I walked all around the house. On bright days, he might often be found sitting on the backporch steps, especially if there were a nice breeze blowing up the back acreage. If in a good mood, he might find it pleasant to take the air half nude and half asleep. But he wasn't back there, nor in the garden, nor stalking the treeline. I went in, and the smell of blood struck me in the face so hard it staggered me, and I went nearly to my knees with the kitchen counter for support. "Old master?" I called out, shaken.

But I heard him, sending my blood into exaltation, singing through my belly and brain. "Is it you I smell?" I called to him, mounting the stairs.

"Ung," I heard him say, in the affirmative. "My faun," quietly. 

"Where are you, in our room?

"Ung," he said, more softly. "Forgive me. I woke up and it was like this."

As I drew closer to the room, the smell of his blood, which I knew so well, its warmth on my lips, the bright color and thrill, and found myself so dazed by it that when I entered, I moved to shut the open window before I even looked at him. But there he was lying on the white sheets, curved into a crescent, which made the long wound on his belly gape, and I shouted. The wound I saw had been sucked, and its edges were raw and pale like that of a clean, gutted fish. 

"I have lost a little blood, that is all," he said. "That is all."

"Was it the child?" I demanded.

His eyes rolled, very green in his pale face. His long black hair was loose against the white sheets, and against his white skin.

"You will tell me now."

"No but he has been here. It is not anything to fear. Only, help me sit."

"When did the child come?" 

"You are worried about the wrong thing. Come now." He extended his pale hand to me, and I took it, and pulled into my arms, against me on the edge of the bed.

"Does it hurt?" I asked, pulling back the translucent blue silk of his robe and touching the raised rims of the wound. 

"It stings but I am not pain's servant."

"I have never seen you so injured."

He concerned himself with my hands, and touching me gently with the tip of his nose, and made soft sounds of contented pleasure. The light touch made my skin tingle, and he kissed my earlobe. "It is all right now. You will forget about this, and I will have you. You will forget about this."

"Please tell me what happened."

"You will not concern yourself with it. You are not concerned about it at all."

"Tell me."

"It is not important. After this moment, after we leave this room, it will cease to be important at all. You will wonder if it ever happened," he said, his voice reduced to a whisper in my ear. 

"If I had been here, could I have stopped it?"

"Accept your fate and do as you are told. There is no room for what may have happened. What has fallen will always fall."

I found myself seduced into doing what he wanted, which was to forget it, though even as he bit me, the shape of his wound lingered into the faint, mingling in memory with the soft, cool touch of his silk, of his lips against my body. Whenever I am apart from him, I long to be touched. I sneak dirty little brushes against skin, made such by my solicitation of them. They are substitutes for his firm fingers, and lips that know their business. Even after so long apart, from the first hour back I knew that he had long ago memorized my body, and that when he said my name he knew me and everything meant by "I", and how it means both spirit and form. And I knew that he wanted both, and wanted to have me for myself in all the ways I could be had. I had so long thought of it. His fingers are certain because he touches me as a second skin. He knows me as his own.

This is to say that I let him hypnotize me into willing submission, and that as the day went on I obeyed him, and once we left the room, left also the horror of the violence done him there. The wound had been deep enough to open itself like a mouth, a whisper away from the spilling of viscera, and I let him make me forget it. I let him make me think for many years that it had been a glancing blow and a simple matter, and perhaps he thought so then. But I have spent some nights awake these days, crying and clutching my belly, imagining sharp fingernails ripping me open, and all alone with no help. This gash, he had been ripped. An ordinary blade cannot cut him deeply without force that would destroy it before much damage is done. I see it in my mind, the frustration of not being able to wound him, that he would not struggle, and would not make a sound. I see how I deluded myself, and how ancient those fingers must have been, to be sturdier than a blade.

After he had finished with me, with my blood in our bed, I touched his belly and the wound was gone, as if it had never been. But it has always been in here, in my mind, waiting for me. The first evidence of a fight he could no longer hide.

Then, lying by my throat he gave me something else to think about, before I could think to ask questions. "No, I do not like the child," he said, as if in the middle of conversation on the topic. "No, something must be done before anything terrible is allowed to happen."

I moved slowly for the large fur throw that I knew to have fallen over the left side of the bed. It was always falling over there. I grasped the mink and pulled it over myself, shivering and cold. 

"Are you comfortable?" he asked softly. 

"Yes."

"You are wearing so little."

"Now I wear your fur," I murmured, against his body. "What will be done? Do I tell him to leave? Do I make him know he is unwelcome?"

"I would not have you speak with him. I know him some."

"I do not need to speak to make it known."

"I fear that he will hurt Escha."

"May I touch you, Sir?" I asked him, interrupting.

"What you would," he said, and I reached into his robe to feel the line of the muscles in his thigh. He moaned relief to be pressed and said, "No we cannot mutilate him. For one his size the loss of even a finger, even an ear, would be as good as death. Would it were so simple that he might only die, but if he were lost Escha would be lost as well."

"The others, your children, bray for his blood. Consider them. They are for Escha, too."

"I am not surprised for they are made to be loyal. That is how their clay is shaped. But loyalty can blind. To cut Nicky from Escha would cut him too deeply."

"Wounds heal. Men are forgotten."

"The little one is not a man. You do not know what it is to lose a child."

"Old master," I told him gently, "your Aulus comes to be burned."

"Nataniellus," he said, his voice hardening so quickly that my body went completely rigid in fear , "use  his passing as strategy to your peril. Did you love the boy? Answer."

"More than fragile love," I said, my tone shattered.

What next he told me, he told me clearly, enunciating every word so that I would hear them. "It was you," he said, "who taught me what 'love' is. I am not so wary of the word as you. Whatever you will call those things, a man takes vengeance for a child. He will take it more fiercely and more relentlessly than for any other hurt. When you rip a man's child from him, and mutilate it, and cause it to die, the man will fight you until he is dead. A man will live on bloody hatred even when all other breath of life eludes him, even when the battle is so old and so lost and so forgotten that there may never be an end. Such a one as him will not forget you. He will continue to seek a way to win until he finds it. For him, it is simple, that you are the devil, and you have made him one as well, that wants the blood of devils." He looked me in the eye, and I saw the black circle around his green irises that give his eyes so much depth. He had propped himself on his elbow, so that he could look down upon me. "Is that what you wish to breed of my blood, of my Escha? And if Escha were to divorce this plane for it, in grief, would you breed it of me? Answer."

"No."

"No?"

"No, Dominus." 

"The child may be a monster to you. But you are not its arbiter. To Escha, he is the very face of love."

"Escha is afraid of him," I whispered.

"And that is why he must go, for the child will know that vulnerability, and fear breeds violence unless there is a strong hand." 

"Touch me with your strong hand," I gasped.

"You are Orpheus of songs. Noli me cantere." Do not sing to me.

"Touch me. I am afraid."

"Shivering reed," he said, softening, resting his head on his hand.

"Thicker than a reed, young master," I whispered, which he leaned in to hear, and in his ear, "warm in your fur."

"Did I ever strike you for Iovita?"

"No," I said, surprised. "I struck you over words between us."

He went quiet a beat. 

"Were you disposed to strike me?" I asked.

"I was disposed to watch you. It would have pleased me to see you take pleasure in the work."

Sometimes he surprises me so deeply that I do not know if he is mocking me or not . "What do you mean by it?"

"I would have liked to see more of you as a man," he said, laying his hand upon my bare chest, "but I found myself too deeply in grief at remembering the hot lick of love. It rang the song of an old wound, an old spirit, and I found myself brought to him in your presence, and it confused me deeply. It confused me so deeply I could not be certain of you or of myself, or of the street I walked upon."

"I don't forgive you. You might have told me you liked to watch. I asked you directly. You let on to no interests whatsoever," adjusting my head so that I could look at his hand.

"I am interested only in you. It would be good to remember you in the blushing glory of living flesh." He touched the bud of my left nipple, and walked his fingers over my neck like a spider.

"Oh, if only I had known you were utterly depraved. What expensive fun we might have had." When he didn't respond to that, I assumed his store of words had run empty, and I lifted my head to kiss his exposed throat. 

He swallowed.

"Faya," I told him, gently, my lips brushing against his skin, "Aulus has come to be burned."

He folded me against him then, and I felt his certain hand, his firm, sure weight against the crown of my head.

"He didn't have any breathing many years. His pupils were large," I whispered, "but he had lingered so long."

"Talk to me if you would. Or if you choose, there is space upon my neck for weeping, and I will cry with you a little. Rest upon my breast and I will keep you safe." 

I found that I wanted to use that space, and I do not know if he cried for my pain or for the loss, but I think for both, and for how lost a man feels without vengeance over the loss of a child, as if the ground itself is loose beneath him, and he cannot be certain of anything, least of all himself. 

But I do know that at some point, in the remainder of that day, while the other child, D, wandered afield, Nicky came out of the woodwork to his "arbiter", and with knife and teeth went mad on Esha, biting him and stabbing him while Escha lay silently and feebly resisting, holding his own breath so that he wouldn't scream and alert us. I do not know if this is the "face of love", but if it is then love is the thin mask of wrath, as I have known it to be, and in the evening, when we woke, Nicky was gone, and Escha, and the sheets were slashed and soaked in blood. It was numbing. 

At the sight of this, Faya set his jaw, and refused to speak. He refused for several days, and would not respond when asked if he wanted to see Iovita and Nonus. But finally I found him at Aulus's casket, which had arrived whole though a day late. From a distance, I watched him gently pull the body from its lacquered box, and lay it in his garden by moonlight, where he laid quietly by it many hours. 

D, showing his clay as Faya has sometimes said it, stripped the bloody mattress without a word, his head low. Under bright sunlight, he cut its seams and gathered the bloody feathers to air, so that he could wash the fabrics by hand. He is a man of work and deeply held grief, who does not know his own power. This I saw with my own eyes.

 I feared it was true that I loved that man, my master, who was always surprising me. But then I feared so many things, too many to remember them all, and the fear was worst when it was quiet. 

It was quiet for years. Beneath that silence, maggots festered.