“I have an interest in my own condition and so I must have an interest in theirs,” you said, running your finger over a page covered in tight handwriting. I couldn’t read in those days, but I could recognize drawings of human feet and hands, a rudimentary sketch of what looked like a heart. “Don’t you wonder what power animates us after our first death? Grants us our long, unaging lives?”
I gave a little shiver in the drafty hall. I tried very hard not to think about that, most days.
“I couldn’t imagine, my lord. There is no creator other than God, so maybe He forged the first vampire from the clay of the Earth. Instead of mixing the clay with water, He mixed it with blood.”
I had always been a faithful person, sometimes bordering on superstitious. Entering my second life hadn’t changed that; it had simply broadened my existential horizons.
You smiled at me. Condescendingly. Almost pityingly.
“Your priest’s bedtime stories cannot account for us. Whether we are nature’s triumph or her great shame, there’s rhyme and reason to our hungers. To our bodies and their processes. It is my intention to unravel it, to comprehend and map our condition.”
“To what end?” I asked. I could not stop the questions from coming, even though I was learning that more than two in a row tended to irritate you. Sure enough, I saw a flash of annoyance in your eyes. But you sighed and answered me, as though I were a pestering child.
“Power, of course. To know oneself, one’s limits and abilities, is its own power. To know how one may best subdue another with similar abilities is another.”
My heart lurched in my chest. Your words were like splinters of light through the darkness of a tomb, the promise of life in the world outside.
“Another? There are others like us, my lord?”
You hadn’t mentioned others. You spoke of us as though we were the only two creatures like us in the known world, like we had been hand-picked by fate to meet.
“There are never only two of any species. Consider how I sired you, Constanta. You have experienced firsthand how we are born.”
“Does that mean I could sire another?” I said, pressing my hand to my abdomen in shock. An old habit, associating birth with a womb. But it wasn’t childbirth I had in mind.
You gave me one of your surveying glances.
“No, little Constanta. You are too young, your blood is too weak. It would take a thousand years for you to even be able to make an attempt. It’s a weighty power, siring. Best to leave it to those who can manage the responsibility.”
My head was swimming with so much new information, crowded with questions the way your study was crowded with the baubles you had picked up on your travels.
“That means someone sired you, then,” I said, racing to keep up. “If you’re looking for our originating principle, you were made just like I was. Where is your sire now?”
“Dead,” you said, dismissing my question with a wave. “He was not as kind as I am. I was his slave in life and he sired me to be his eternal servant. He did not live long after that, unfortunately.”
Your irritation was manifest now, warning me to mind my place. I was there to ornament your home and soothe your mind, not bludgeon you with questions. So I gathered my skirts in my hands and stood quietly while you narrated your instruments, your studies, your small discoveries to me. Feeding me tiny tidbits of what you believed I was ready to know, a crease of annoyance still written between your brows.
You always hated it when I overreached the carefully drawn limits of my knowledge.
Probably because you so enjoyed dangling the promise of revelation just out of my reach, the way sailors dangle kippers to make cats dance for their supper.
Questions. I had so many questions, and I should have asked them all. I should have worn you down like water dripping away at a rock until I learned everything you knew. But you must understand, I was only a girl. I was alone, and I was scared. I had no home left to speak of.
It’s easy to hate myself for my ignorance now, when I have the hindsight of centuries behind me, but in those first years I was only concerned with surviving. And the best way to survive, I believed, was to surrender myself to you with total abandon and adoration. And God, how I adored you. It went beyond love, beyond devotion.
I wanted to dash myself against your rocks like a wave, to obliterate my old self and see what rose shining and new from the sea foam. The only words I had to describe you in those early days were plunging cliffside or primordial sea, crystal-cold stars or black expanse of sky.