And so I found myself alone often. Dasius said to me in exasperation, "As you can imagine, I grow tired of keeping watch over you," and so over time, I noticed that he left me to myself more. We remain friendly to this day, but I came to understand that he had been spying on me. He was then and is still now Laurent's creature, and you see how the dynamic develops that Laurent has a cohort that preys upon the weak. But I don't like to see myself as weak, and never have, and so I found myself standing in the upstairs hallway a lot, staring at the hatch in the ceiling. What happens to a fool? I wondered to myself, who ventures willingly into danger? 

But I found myself dreaming of Leis more and more, as we had been, and developed a hangdog look, and there were many mirrors in the house where I could see myself looking like that. It made me angry that Laurent was doing that to me. I know that he should not shoulder all the blame, but he is beautiful enough; let him take a little burden for this ugliness. Afterall, it was his house, which he was very happy to harangue me with all those years after, as if it were my fault for going there. I'm still angry at him because when he had a mind to be mean he was good at it. 

"Nasty filthy shrew. Look at him, sniffing around for money." That's what he used to say to me, as if I ever asked for any money at all. He liked to accuse me of stealing. He had a little smile he couldn't control when he knew he was being hurtful and behaving badly. "Let me at him, you selfish cow. Don't you get enough at home? I made him. I can unmake him as easily. All it would take is the lifting of my baby finger." But he would never have lifted that finger. Does a little nostalgia creep into my voice? Even though it was boring, the conflict felt enough to constitute something of a life, and he never criticized me in the same way he did to those he felt affection for. My hair, my clothes, my skin, my style or lack thereof. He left those things alone with me. He hissed at me a lot. He huffed at me a lot, like a fat, white, cross-eyed Persian cat with a breathing problem. Yes he was a little cross-eyed. I'll have that on the record since he criticized my teeth all of the time.

But in those early days I didn't know that he wouldn't hurt me, and so I felt afraid a little, and nervous, and dubious about the idea that Leis would defend me if Laurent tried anything. Hadn't he slapped me at the hotel in Laurent's defense? That slap rung in my ears in the weeks after it. What else might happen? But as I have said, as time went on a certain numbness to the prospect of my death crept into me, and so I found myself creeping up there, and listening to the ceiling. 

I could hear it up there, that one who had whispered "Latin?" to me. And I did know a little Latin, though not enough to be conversant. I say "it" because I didn't know if it was male or female yet, or if the distinction mattered at such the advanced age, and horror that we could grow so old stopped me from thinking on it very far. It occurred to me that over time, one's mind must experience paradigm shifts, and shape itself differently, and that these changes must necessarily be brutal, and I had no way of knowing what a mind like that might be like in the end. Beyond this, what changes to the body might there be? And did I want to know it? For surely, if I did not succeed at some stage in killing myself, it would happen to me. Unless we long-lived could be different from one another in essential ways, and I had no way of knowing that either. 

It seemed that it paced a lot over the course of the day and went quiet at night. I wondered if it slept. I thought that it must not be like me, who likes to sleep at light hours and becomes more active after dark. I thought, perhaps light does not hurt it, and it made me hopeful for myself. It never occurred to me to ask those sorts of questions. I suppose I am not good at asking for help or knowledge even now. I stood beneath the ceiling hatch, trembling, holding my left wrist with my right hand, my fingernails digging into my palm. And then, one day, from above,

"Me tuipudet. Veni. Sanguis mei." I am ashamed of you. Come along. My own blood. 

And it had never occurred to me that we might be of the same blood at all. It took my breath away, and froze me, and to that I heard a soft pounding on the hatch, as if with the flat of a hand. 

But my instincts told me not to go, that it was dangerous to go up there, and I had done quite well listening to my instincts in the past. I stood there a long time, very long into the evening, in case that the sound of the hand would come again, but it didn't. Strangely, it seemed that it wasn't up there at all anymore, as if it had closed itself to me, and disappeared. And more strangely still, when I turned, it was Laurent standing there behind me, and I had not heard him approach in any sense at all.

I can admit that Laurent was handsome, if you like that sort of thing. One cannot really say that he was feminine, though he was effeminate in some ways, depending on his mood. He had a practiced elegance about him, but not a daintiness. His body was naturally quite petite, and soft-seeming, but I have seen him in various states of undress, and there was nothing particularly womanly about him. Later in life, I am sure that he cinched his waist very tightly on a daily basis, and softened his features with excessive make up. I am not saying that he was trying to look girlish, but that in my eyes, he sought a certain androgynous idyll that went beyond nature and veered into macaroni self-abuse. I say this because when I turned around, his look surprised me, because I had never seen him look so natural before. What little I had seen of him in that house had been in heels, maquillage, and hair teased up. It was his armor.

"What are you doing here? Hiding where you shouldn't be, silent cockroach?" he asked, bare-faced, shocked, platinum curls unbrushed. 

I said nothing for a minute, then, "I can't understand you now but I have a long memory, stupid bird."

"Get from here, go!" he said, fous-moi le camp! Assez! Va-t-en! But that I understood, as I had heard it from Leis before in anger. And I knew how rude it was by the way it made Leis crawl back to me on his hands and knees after he'd calmed down.

We were like cats tied together. I couldn't leave the house and he couldn't send me away. I was angry to be spoken to that way by the person sharing my lover's bed, and yet I knew that I couldn't strike him because he was stronger than me. I spat on him without thinking, right in his stupid face. 

He stood completely still and silent a moment, his eyes shut.

Then, I opened my mouth to speak and suddenly his hands were on me, and I was screaming out of fear in spite of myself, because he was stronger than I had imagined. I said, "Why are you holding me? Why are you holding me?" because he was gripping me so severely, and then I realized that he had opened the hatch above, and was pushing me to ascend into it, which my instincts then had been correct if he thought it would do me harm. He was yelling in Latin, faster than I could understand, which chilled me, learning that he knew of the thing upstairs and how old he was in the same stroke. I struggled and he doubled down on me, squeezing me at the shoulders so hard that his fingernails drew blood, and I felt the thing up there draw itself up, and I cried out pale and horribly at this sense that I was about to be eaten by something I couldn't see, and couldn't understand.

Surely, someone would save me, I thought, desperately, there must be someone, but there wasn't anyone. Soon I was upstairs in the total dark, and heard the hatch click fast. At any moment, the blow would come, surely. 

But it didn't come, and in that darkness, as deep as the womb, I felt a finger come and touch me, tracing the line of my jaw from earlobe to point of chin, without a sound. 

"Please," I whispered.

"Tace." Be quiet.

"I'm sorry, I don't understand. I'm afraid."

And suddenly it was there again, in my head, this creature, growing in size and warping in shape. I put out my hands and it took them delicately. "Absit omen," it said, its fingers long and skin smooth against mine. It slipped its hands up my arms and found the fingernail shaped punctures there. I did not know then that it was an invocation against me, that he thought me a creature of evil because I saw his mind. I would have taken comfort in it, for why should one cross oneself if the threat were shortlived? Certainly, Laurent thought that he was sending me to my death, but Aurvha is unpredictable. He had the ability to scramble my brains in my head. I had found him in a curious mood. I shivered, and felt his lips upon the lunar punctures, and could not find the air to breathe.

It is not wrong that you should die, I heard. 

"Please."

What good is it to rush fate? 

And I understood, without his having to say it, that Laurent had pushed me up the stairs like a fatted calf to slaughter. That he fully expected that my throat would be slit and blood spilled more than it could be drunk. 

He is vicious. More terrible than me, and has more memory for injury than gladness. It is why he cannot be happy. 

"Who are you?" 

A kiss beneath my ear, at the jaw.

"Please don't," I said, stilled but afraid that he would bite me, of not being able to fight back if there came the need. 

Not a good one. Afraid. This one will kill itself before its time comes. Its rotten.

"No."

Silence. 

And I think that it was decided that I should die right then, because suddenly I felt bloom, quite slight at first but growing harsher, the very smallest pain deep in my head. A familiar pain, like the scraping of a fingernail on the inside of my skull, like a cold and tingling needle, soon blinding. Suddenly, a light split me open, from below, and the creature before me was there lit, dark of hair and eyes narrowed, pale as the drowned dead and lips so red that I wondered if it had indeed bitten me. I saw its pupils contract to points at the sudden brightness, leaving behind brilliant emerald irises the like of which I'd never seen; and had only time to take in the foreignness of its features before hands took hold of me from below, pulling me down, to which I cried as if it were the devil himself collecting me.

It is all I remember for a little while then.