Magdalena bit him first, her sharp teeth pricking his fingertip. He didn’t even cry out, just thrust his other hand out to me. How freely he offered himself up! All the enthusiasm of youth with none of the wisdom and caution of age. Hesitation burned in the back of my brain, but the heady scent of blood had started to fill the coach, and Alexi was so lovely and so willing…
I kissed his wrist in an apology before burying my teeth into his skin. His blood was crisp and sweet as a burst grape, dribbling down my chin as I drank from him greedily. I could have drained him dry and still been thirsty for more.
You held him by the throat, watching waves of rapture cross his face while Magdalena and I drank from him. He looked like a lithe young Christ, crucified between two beautiful women with you as his cross.
Alexi gave a little whimper, and for a moment I thought he was begging for the pain to stop. But then I realized he was asking for more.
You tilted his head back and sank your teeth into his jugular, all the way up to the gums. A shudder wracked Alexi’s frame.
We three feasted on him for a few delicious minutes before you pulled back, pupils blown with bloodlust and mouth smeared red, and said,
“Enough. Enough! He needs to stay conscious. Make room.”
Magdalena and I shook off the drunkenness of a freshly opened vein and moved aside so you could lay Alexi down on the seat. His golden skin was alarmingly pale, his breathing shallow and quiet. You gently pulled his head into your lap and I daubed the cold sweat from his forehead with my handkerchief, my fingers seeking his fading pulse. He was dying, and quickly.
Regret, cold and unyielding, settled into my stomach. What had we done?
Alexi moaned something incoherent that sounded close to your name. You shushed him and opened a wound in your wrist with your teeth, staining your white cuffs with blood.
“No need to speak. Just drink.”
He parted his lips and you dribbled your own blood, so thick and dark it almost looked black in the low lighting, into his mouth. Alexi took it onto his tongue like a communion wafer and swallowed obediently.
I had attended to Magdalena during her transformation, but that had not felt so much like sitting at someone’s deathbed. I truly believe I saw the light wink out of Alexi’s eyes before it came back again with renewed brilliance, before he pressed himself up onto his elbows and started lapping at the blood dribbling down your fingertips.
You let out a laugh, all silver and steel, and Magdalena clapped her hands for joy. We were witnessing a rebirth, after all, a dark baptism into a new and unending life. But I could not summon mirth. I had just watched a young boy sign away his life to a pack of demons he barely knew. And now, I believed deeply in my soul, he was my responsibility. I had to protect him from the cruelties of the world, the ravages of immortality. Even from you, my lord.
A lick of anger flamed up in my chest. I had told you not to do this, and here we were again, a growing family despite our incurable dysfunction. But when Alexi’s eyes fluttered open and found mine, the anger was smothered by a ferocious tenderness.
“Welcome back, little prince,” you said with a smile, smoothing a sweaty curl from his brow. “Where would you like to go?”
“Go?” Alexi asked, a little delirious. It takes a lot out of you, dying and coming back, and I knew the way your blood burned through the system like a wildfire. He was probably so disoriented he was tasting color.
“It’s a honeymoon!” Magdalena exclaimed, unable to contain her excitement. I hadn’t seen her so effervescent in what felt like years, but this still didn’t feel right. Alexi was a boy, not a wind-up doll to cheer up a sullen little girl.
But then again, maybe we would all benefit from some new blood in the family.
Yes, I thought of him as family right away. Even though I told you I wouldn’t welcome him into my heart like that. But you’ve always been able to see through my hopeful lies, haven’t you?
“Pick a city,” you said. “A country.”
“Anywhere?” Alexi asked, accepting my offered handkerchief so he could wipe the blood from his mouth.
“Europe is your playground.”
Alexi didn’t have to think about it. He just gave a huge, dazzling smile, and I realized with a horrible sense of finality that I was already falling in love with him.
“Paris,” he said.
Paris was happy, for a time. You rented us a three-story sliver of a townhouse right in the middle of the city, and Magdalena affectionately called it our layer cake. It really did look like one of those delicate French pastries, with a spiked iron gate out front and a wash of pale blue paint over the exterior walls. There was a floor for each of us, not counting the basement, which was set aside for your inscrutable purposes. The longer I spent living with you, the more I came to suspect that you weren’t looking for any huge breakthrough or eureka moment. You research had little other purpose than to keep your insatiable curiosity preoccupied so it didn’t devour you the moment you turned your back on it. It was a sort of narcissistic love letter to our species, to dedicate so much of your life to exploring the natures of vampires and humans, to draw distinctions between the two.