Somehow, I peeled the soaked clothes off my body, keeping the voices at bay. Etienne, with a typical flourish, had chosen only the mirrored doors of the wardrobe to interrupt the blinding white monotony of the room, so that his prisoner had nothing but his own wasting body to contemplate during his isolation.
I sneered as I leaned against the mirrors, sneered at the figure reflected in the unbreakable glass. The fat had been burnt from my body, the fibrous ropes of muscle standing out under the thin flesh. To any human, I was still impossibly powerful, and my skin and features were only the more flawless as I lacked the strength to force them into interesting imperfections that many agnates affected.
Black hair, which had been mine since the beginning of time. Blue eyes, an embellishment of the first millennium B.C., though beyond that my memory failed. The patrician arch of the nose, the hard set of the jaw, the high cheekbones, now gaunt: those details had shifted slightly, almost imperceptibly over time so that I was always a human ideal of perfection even as the standards of beauty changed.
We imagined ourselves the lords of humans, but we were utterly controlled by them. Incapable of our own aesthetics, we adopted theirs, which in turn shaped our very bones and flesh to be the objects of their desire. Their lords? They should hardly notice if we were swept from the earth—but we could not survive half a year without their kind.
Here I was, first blood-starved and now shaking like a leaf from being torn from my new cognate’s bedside, because if I had stayed for these first critical days, I would have been so tightly tied to her that neither of us could have borne the agony of the separation of a hundred yards.
If we were the lords of humans, we were even more the slaves of our own unforgiving natures.
I flung open the closet doors to reveal a fashionable gentleman’s undress wardrobe from another age: smallclothes, stockings, a pair of breeches, pressed linen shirts, a waistcoat, and a heavy silken robe de chambre with matching pointy-toed slippers and a soft cap.
The sight was so incongruous in the stark, modernist cube of the room that I laughed. Once I’d begun, I could not stop because the voices in my ears were laughing, too, laughing at jokes told centuries ago, laughing in joy, laughing from bitterness so deep that laughter was the only response left short of madness.
And above all the voices was that of Alys. It was not one laugh, but two: one, the first day she had saved me from the flames, and the second on the day that she had at last given up. Those laughs grew louder, and they flung me into their memories.
We had lived under the same roof for three decades at that point, I in the east wing and Alys in the west. It had seemed easier that way. More sensible.
For some years before, she had been spending every waking moment in the laboratory and had taken over one of the offices to steal moments of sleep. When I had realized that she hadn’t even been to any of her houses in over a year, I had suggested the obvious, that she take quarters in my home. The surgery had been set up not only for me but for every agnate in our program, close to the teams of doctors who would be ready at a moment’s notice to spring into action and study a conversion in progress.
And so it was when she had slaked her blood thirst on a candidate’s eager neck, it had been in my surgery. The silence that followed had led me to indulge in my wildest hopes. But when I called up the closed-circuit video to see what had happened, her bowed body over his told me nothing, for even my sight could not discern whether the man’s bare chest was stirring.
Never before had she hesitated to follow the procedures that we had set in place. Had she not called because she could not tear herself from her new cognate’s side? My heart lifted until it hurt in my chest as I went to her side.
I knocked on the surgery door, and the silence rolled out from within, so thick that my breath seemed to choke on it. I pushed it open and stepped inside.
She had not moved.
“Alys?” I said softly, stepping into the room.
She raised her head and turned toward me. The man’s blood was still smeared on her lips and her chin, her dress and hair were in disarray, and her dark eyes were dead.
“Dorian,” she breathed. “I can’t.”
I had reached her by then, and I looked over her shoulder to see the man’s body sprawled out on the chaise, his skin colorless and his eyes open and unseeing as they stared glassily past the ceiling above. The loose shirt that he was wearing was pushed up past his blood-smeared chest, and his trousers were down nearly to his knees, his penis lying swollen but flaccid across his belly.
“Alys,” I repeated, unable to find the words to express what I meant. She’d broken the vows she held most dear, and the candidate had still died, the one that she’d been certain would be the last, the one, the cognate who would at least spare her from further killing if not give her all that she wanted.
“I can’t,” she repeated as if it were a mantra. “I can’t. I can’t.”
I knelt at her feet, catching her hands and looking past the curtains of blood-matted hair that fell to either side of her face to meet her eyes squarely. “It’s only a short while now. I know this is hard, but the tests are working. The numbers are against us with any one candidate, but in time, as we refine them, they’ll work to our favor in the end.”
“And then what?” she asked. “And then there will be thousands and thousands of us with cognates, making more every year, and we’ll devour the world with our greed. This isn’t what I wanted.”
“It’s the first step,” I said. “What you wanted is not possible yet, but this is. With this, we’ll end all the killing, and the Adelphoi will be triumphant for once.”
“Adelphoi, Kyrioi, they’re all the same in the end,” she said bitterly. “If you step into the home of an agnate, you could hardly guess his political affiliation from the way he conducts his daily affairs. I want us to be free, Dorian. Free from all of this.”
“I know,” I said. “In time.”
She looked down at the man’s body, then freed her hands and slowly, carefully pulled the heavy white blanket from the foot of the chaise up over his body to hide its indignity.
“Maybe for you,” she said softly. “But not for me. I can’t do this again.”
I blinked, and suddenly I was surrounded by glaring white walls. For an instant, a furious disorientation boiled inside me, and I launched myself against the nearest one. My fist made no mark, and I remembered then Etienne’s prison—
And Cora. Cora Shaw, who had pulled me out of death into this madness and pain. I swallowed and closed my eyes, and I could feel echoes of her own agony, the mirror to mine. She was awake in the depths of my Georgetown house, in the throes of her own hallucinations. And I was here, our separation the cause of much of her pain.
It was for the best, I told myself—told her, even though she couldn’t hear me. If I hadn’t come here, I was too old to keep the bond from smashing through barriers that had best stay intact, from washing away her identity until it was only a twist in my meta-personality that would animate—and eventually annihilate—us both.
I looked down. I was wearing the robe, the elaborate dressing gown from another age. Even down to the quilted, tasseled slippers, and a glance in the mirror revealed that I had tied my cravat.
How long ago? Minutes? Hours? Days?
There was no telling in this bright white box.
“Etienne!” I shouted.
No answer. That meant he chose not to answer.
I shivered again, a sick shudder that shook my body and made my stomach turn. Maybe Etienne was working on an obscure political maneuver of his own, and I’d become a pawn. He might have betrayed me. Or maybe he didn’t exist at all; maybe nothing existed but this white box, now and forever, and anything beyond it was a fever dream—
The voices got louder, talking, cooing, arguing in my ears, and I was powerless against them as they swept me away.
***
At some point, Tiberius came for me, and he and others—how many it took, I didn’t know—got me bundled again into a vehicle and carried back to my Georgetown house.
I realized this only after I was deposited into my bedroom and the pieces of myself slowly came back together again, knitting themselves into a whole from the broken fragments that they had been.
Tiberius was alone with me at that point, but I was sure that others weren’t far away. They would not trust me now, just as I would not trust myself.
“Are you feeling more like yourself now?” he asked from one of my armchairs, his words mild but his eyes intent as he surveyed me.
I blinked and looked around. Everything was as it had been, a mahogany and scarlet room in the heart of my house.
“I hardly remember what it is to feel like me,” I admitted.
He relaxed fractionally. “Five days, by the way,” he said in an offhand tone.
I frowned as I stepped through the door into my dressing room. I was still wearing the robe de chambre, I realized. That would never do. I cast off my clothes and stepped into the bathroom, where I cranked on the shower to blast my itchy skin.
Tiberius wandered in after.
“I thought that with medical support, she’d come out of it faster,” I said as I scrubbed the scent of sickness from my skin.
“There was the separation,” he pointed out.
He was right. There was.
“It worked,” I said. I still felt a queasy sickness in the pit of my stomach, but there was nothing like the agony of the past five days.
“The bond was made more resilient, yes. You didn’t have to do it this way,” he pointed out. “You’ll have to remain vigilant, especially at first—”
“I know.” I cut him off. I’d chosen the most difficult road for a myriad of reasons. I was just so old.... I couldn’t see any other path that didn’t end where I’d sworn never to go.
I stepped out of the shower and toweled off. A human would then shave, but I had not chosen to grow a beard, and so there was no need. A human would have brushed his teeth, but vampires lacked the bacterial and viral parasites of other creatures that made such a thing necessary. An agnate’s teeth never grew fuzzy, though it was, of course, quite possible to get food caught in them. But for that to have happened, I would have had to have eaten.
“How long before she wakes?” I asked as I returned to the dressing room to select a suit from among the racks.
“It could be minutes,” Tiberius said. “Could be hours. This will keep you occupied until then.”
He held out my phone, and as soon as I’d finished fastening my cuffs, I took it from him. All of Hattie’s updates would be there.
“Thank you,” I said.
“No worries,” he said, a slightly lopsided smile on his lips that didn’t reach his eyes as his slight Australian accent grew slightly stronger. “It will be my turn soon enough, won’t it?”
“We must hope,” I agreed. “And really—thank you.”
He left, and I finished dressing before retreating to the shadows of my office where I drew the curtains tight against the day. I could not stay in my bedroom. Not when I knew that Cora was just a door away.
My head was throbbing with the need to be near Cora, but I ignored it as I read through the medical data that Hattie had collected over the last several days. As she’d begun to show signs of emerging from her semi-conscious state, the feeding tube had been removed according to the orders that I had left, and she’d been taken from the sterile, clinical hospital room within the laboratory to the bedroom that had been waiting for her since before she was born.
I wanted to order everyone far away from her and guard her side until she opened her eyes so that I was the first thing that she saw with her new eyes so that she would know that she was utterly and completely mine.
But I was wiser than that, and I was in full possession of my faculties again, so I wouldn’t give in. Still, all the wisdom in the world couldn’t change my visceral urges—and my deep and all-pervasive anger at the thought of anyone else touching her, being near her, even looking at her.
So it was when my phone finally dinged an alert and I saw the message from the lady’s maid that Cora Shaw was awake, my first reaction was not pleasure but fury.
I pushed the monster back into the darkness before I typed my reply, and then I took the time to order breakfast for us both before I stalked along the shadowed galleries of the house. I mounted the stairs and went down the mezzanine to the door behind which my new cognate had been laid to heal—from both her cancer and her transformation—and recover her strength.
Bracing myself, I opened it.