“Why are we running?” I asked, still a little bleary from my fresh meal. A full stomach of blood always made me want to curl up and take a long nap. “We don’t catch illness, or die. You told me. We’re safe.”
You stopped what you were doing and took a deep breath. Then you looked at me, your eyes so dark and haunted I nearly recoiled.
“I’ve seen this before. Plagues come and go and they come again, Constanta. They are one of life’s great constants. We will not succumb to the sickness, but trust me when I tell you we do not want to be here when it overtakes the city. You do not want to see what happens to civilization when half its population is dying in the streets.”
I brought my hand up to my mouth instinctively, as though to ward off the miasma.
“Surely, not half —”
You slammed the lid to the trunk, snapping it closed with brisk efficiency.
“I was only a boy when it happened, in Athens. But I know my own mind, and I couldn’t forget what I saw after another hundred years of life, a thousand. We’re leaving. Finish packing.”
We fled by night, in a creaking carriage stuffed full of our most valuable possessions.
Those years are a dark smear across my memory; everything feels blurry and hollow. Plague drains not only victims but whole cities of life. It freezes trade, decays parishes, forbids lovemaking, turns childrearing into a dance with death. Most of all, it steals time. Days spent boarded up in houses, sick or clean, pass in a swirl of flat grey. Plague time is different, it stretches and looms, and I confess I can recall little of the decades we spent rushing from town to town, taking uneasy sanctuary until sickness came battering inevitably at the city gates.
But eventually, the plague burned itself out. We were able to stay in cities for longer periods of time, and I stopped tasting the sickly tang of disease in the blood of all my victims. Eventually, it was time to choose a new home, to put down roots and build our little empire of blood and gold once again.
Your discerning eye fell upon Vienna, and so to Vienna we went.
Vienna was a whirl of color and sound to my provincial mind, and she was kinder to us, all in all, than Romania had been. We rang in the shining newness of 1452 together, one of the few dates I remember clearly. The city was celebrating an Austrian emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and reveling in her political and mercantile prowess as a major trade hub.
You bought one of the fine townhouses in the market square with the gold I could never quite trace or keep track of, and filled it with all the modern comforts money could buy. I was suddenly awash in the city, with dressmakers and maids and jewelers and butchers at the tips of my fingers whenever I wanted them. They were called to the house to measure me for gowns or deliver finely crafted furniture and they left as quickly as they came, though my heart never stopped fluttering when there was a knock at the door.
I had become so accustomed to your company that I had forgotten how much it thrilled me to walk among humans, but Vienna brought me back to life. I could see it in my mirror, a new shine in my eyes, the ghost of a bloom in my dead cheeks. It was like falling in love all over again, only instead of falling for the lord of death, now I was in love with the seething, shouting mass of life outside my home. I took to waking up early so I could perch in bed, safely out of the stinging light lingering through the windows, and watch the people of the city hurry home for their evening meals.
You were not impressed by the children shrieking through the streets, or the washerwomen calling to each other in the town square at all hours. You only had eyes for the university, and spent long hours haunting the lecture halls with your notebook in ink-stained fingers. I’m still not sure what you studied: maps or abacuses or corpses drained of blood so you could appreciate them with a clear head. But you slipped out at dusk to catch as many evening classes as you could, and you came back with a deep line of thought furrowed between your brows.
We hunted together in those days, your tall figure following me as closely as a shadow through the tight alleyways. The whole city was our hunting ground, and there were meals aplenty in the darkest corners of Vienna. You preferred pretty women with stars in their eyes, or young men you had dazzled with your intelligence in one of the students’ drinking circles. But I had never outgrown my thirst for vengeance, and I preyed on only the most wicked members of society. Men, all of them, who I caught spitting at beggar children or grabbing a working girl’s arm so hard it bruised. I reserved a special sadism for serial violators and batterers. In my mind, I was God’s lovely angel of judgement, come to unsheathe the sword of divine wrath against those who truly deserved it.