If I had been a gentler hand, I would have spent that day with Valentin, but I do not think that I am much of that sort of person even now. Perhaps it would have comforted him, not to be so alone, but I did not see him as my responsibility, or a part of my life. He said, "I do not want a priest," and before I left him for the day, he gestured for me to come close. "Won't you give him my signet? Tell him he may wear it however he likes. Won't you do it?" I took it without a word.
I can't remember what I did. I went to the chemist's, and picked through the many creams and colors. Someone asked me, what are you looking for? I told them arsenic, and I was told that I was looking in the wrong place. But I had Valentin's gold signet on my pinkie finger, turned inward, and I scratched my nose with this finger, and suddenly these things were much more forthcoming.
"I will emphasize to you to watch for signs of overindulgence in this," I was told, and when I said nothing, "Of course. Of course."
I knew little about medicine at that time, and had not undertaken any training, but as anyone, I knew how to kill a man. A sweet young, vampire, and as weak as kitten was, surely it would not be terribly different. After all of my confusion, and the sense that some creature in me were waiting to emerge, I felt only a numb floatiness, a lightness in my limbs and in my head. I wore low white heels, and at the end of the day, they were clean still, as if my feet had never touched the dirt at all. A boy delivered the letter, the invitation. I never saw him at all.
Late that evening, it was a small matter to see Valentin into a hackney coach, and return home, and still at the time I felt nothing.
"Dark one, where are we going?" he asked me, voice as airy as I felt. His light fingers massaged my arm, the rocking of the coach giving him excuse to lean against me.
"When the spirit moves you will drink this," I told him.
Valentin took the glass bottle. "Oh, I am glad to do this," he said, very softly. He did not seem at all concerned that kitten would not want him.
"Be quiet now."
It was as simple as that. And it was not lucky at all that Laurent chose to go to that fete. I knew that he would go. Cold, calculated. They call me this these days. The young ones, they are afraid of me. Do you think there is truth in it? Maybe you think so because of this story. It is true that I knew precisely what I was doing. Maybe you will think me as cold as they say if I tell you I was very curious to watch Leis die. How strange he was, with his illness. How would it take him? Would it be neat?
I helped Valentin from the coach, and he fell against me, and laughed.
"Don't look put out so," he laughed. "I look a drunken idiot. Pay the coachmen."
As I slid my key into the heavy lock, I caught a glimpse of Valentin's arm, as he reached out to lean against the door. I said, "Oh," involuntarily, because the place where Leis had bitten him looked like a black star, snaking its way up his yellowing flesh. Though it was already deep twilight, and cooling off, sweat had beaded in the little hairs of his arm, and I could hear him panting thickly with the effort to stay upright. He had not taken any care with his hair or his clothes, and he smelled of snuff. I turned the key and heard the tumblers in the lock roll back, and let him lean his weight upon me again.
In the house it was very dark; perhaps as dark as any hayloft or similar place uninhabited by humans. And quiet, and still. I quieted Valentin with a finger, closed the door behind me, and locked it. Becoming used to the labored beating of his heart in the silken darkness, I listened, and soon heard that other breath, the softest rasping, and yet so close to me, like a ghost whispering in my ear from opposite the veil, and I whispered, as if shocked, "Valentin, he has gone. To the fete."
"Did he take the other one?"
I looked at him as if he were mad. Could he not hear it? I closed my eyes and rumbled with this breathing. I had been gone only ten days, and yet my body remembered it, and hungered for it, as if he were taking for me the air that I did not breathe myself. It was too dark. The house smelled like old cedar. It dizzied my head. A sound came from me, like the stifled sob of a young boy. I touched my throat.
"Are you sick? Is he here or not?"
"Get to the right. He is here. You will find him sleeping."
"Do you have doubts?"
I didn't.
"Listen, you have been very kind to me," he said. "If I had known he needed more money. If I had known before now that you love that boy, I would have not done as I have done. I would have done good for him, for you."
"Will you be quiet?"
"Take this," he said, and handed me a small sequined purse, and I did without a word.
While Valentin slept in the bed beside Leis, I retired to my secretary in the corner, and the small pile of letters which had accumulated there in my absence. Waiting for me to return, Laurent had put there any envelope which seemed a missive of business. There tucked in one of the small alcoves on the desktop I found a folded paper with my name in Laurent's hand, and I tucked it in my pocket, as personal affairs must needs come after formal matters. In Valentin's purse were a goodly amount of livres, and I counted them into the wardrobe book tucked in a shallow drawer on the right. Money is money, and the money of dead men had done good for us in the past. Running down our accounts took the greater part of two hours, perhaps two and half, and that is when I heard it.
From that distance, fumbling with clothes is like the sound of a rat in the attic. It sounded like the scrabbling of tiny claws and tiny teeth. I sat at my secretary quite still until the screaming began, and then I went quietly to that room.
It was all going very beautifully. And except for the screaming, the house was very quiet, so I could hear it well. I kept to the doorway so as not to be struck, and on the floor was Leis, holding his head and crying like a confused child. But then convulsions, and when he came out of it, he saw me, and reached for my white shoes, and I knelt in case that he might try to speak. What would he say? What does one say on the threshold of death? Might I speak back to him, contented by the proximity of my own? Because surely, if he died, I would not last until first light. Unless I tried to flee, but why would I?
On the bed, Valentin was quite dead, and hemorrhaging so thickly that the white sheets ran scarlet, and his blood dripping began to mingle with kitten's on the floor. And when kitten looked up at me, Leis, his glassy blue eyes had begun to bleed, and the little capillaries in his nostrils had burst, and his lips were so red with poisoned blood that he looked like a macabre painting of Cupid grown. It stilled me. He has always been the palest of us. I felt tenderness. I waited for him to die.
But then I saw, as his pupils began to fix and dilate, and limbs rigid, that his hair had become quite soaked in blood, that beautiful flaxen hair, and I thought, "Oh, the delicate thing needs looking after. Look what has happened to his hair," and this thought struck me dumb, and opened my mouth. It penetrated me quite deeply, as if spoken by a little voice very far buried inside of myself, and I thought, "Dasius, you've gone mad. Don't you know that?" Look how I had made him suffer because I loved him. Look what happened to him because of my own poisonous sorrow. And I began to weep, because my very existence brought only suffering to those around me, and letting go of "madness" made me feel very small, too small.
His face had grown still, though his body continued to convulse. His small lips had parted, and I saw with horror that he was still looking at me.
And if he had died then, what would have happened?
In my life up until then, I had seen a lot of things go badly. The reason I had written Leis off in the first place, beyond abject cowardice, had been due to how many times I had seen conversions go terribly wrong when the subject were in any way ill. I had seen Laurent try many times to push through a bad conversion, to the elbows blooded, murmuring protestations of love. It is not a loving thing, in my opinion, to tear a man apart in service that he might live forever as a shadow of himself. And in any case often futile, as the love were always brief.
Bad conversions were not the end of the gore that I had seen. I hesitate to tell you about the things I have seen Laurent do. But suffice it to say that none of it was as bad as what I felt I had done, because I had done it out of spite, and madness, and when I grabbed kitten with both arms, and tried to lift him, he was still whispering, "Help me," and I wept because I was still in love with him. And the love made me helpless, and it made me afraid, and it made remember all of those times when I had been those things, both before Laurent and after him, and I had no armor of "madness" to protect me from them. When I stepped in his blood, it seeped up into the silk satin of my heels, and wet the stockings beneath. I kicked the shoes away before I could look down and see it, because I feared losing my lucidity.
The silk of his dressing gown was slippery against my hands, and I struggled to hold him while his body twisted and spasmed. Each twitch and jerk drew moaning and crying from his lips, which issued the same from me in miniature, and I dragged him into the washroom in the back of the house, where the copper bathtub was kept.
"I have to cut you," I told him, "I'm sorry, I have to," to his glass-eyed face, to lips which had no ability to speak to me.
I tried to strip him, but his hands were stopping me, even in the delirium which must have taken him by then, and I kept my lips very tight so that whatever blood spattered me would not get into my mouth, but before I could cut him, or make him drink from me, or try to talk to him, something struck me in the face so hard that it felt as if my head had exploded in a white light.
Looking up, I found myself on the carpet, and something sharp in my hand, which had automatically gone to my mouth, and those somethings were several of my teeth. Laurent had hoisted Leis to half-standing in the copper tub, and the silk robe had gone translucent from the water, and I turned away my face.
"Chouchou."
"Tu es un menteur," crying. You are a liar.
"Pet, what did he do to you?"
But Leis kept on with this incredulous, "You are a liar, you are a liar, you have lied to me, who are you, I don't know you, you are a liar," until he was screaming it, and fighting him, and the boy who had been dying had become a lion again, red in the face and towering with rage.
I looked and I saw what he saw, that Laurent was blushing in the face, at the neck above his open collar, that his platinum curls had been love-pulled, and that he seemed fleshly again, and when I closed my eyes I knew how hot against the skin it must feel, to encounter one so full of blood and strength and energy, and I shuddered with desire for it, cold on the floor and half-certain that I had died.
"Come to, pet," Laurent whispered, holding Leis up with both arms, who was shivering wet from the deep water and unable to stand on his own. "You must have blood. Come," in his softest voice, "come now, pet."
But that last rage had tired Leis, and scattered his mind, and he seemed to sleep, and it was all quiet then.
And when after a long time I dared to look up on him, from the floor, it ran my blood cold to see that for all that time Laurent had been staring at me, with a look so dark, and so full of wrath that it withered my ability to speak for many weeks.
Before that day, he had loved me completely. In that look, I saw him seeing at me how I saw myself. And seeing me for who I was, I knew that he would never love me the same. Not ever again. And I was a young boy again, fragile in a hard body, and terrified, sputtering for words that had flown from my head like dirty doves.
"Get a knife, Dasius," he whispered.
We didn't have any knives.