SYNOPSIS: In 1566 Constantinople, a Janissary is bitten by an ancient vampiress and awakens transformed; first into something between genders, then, through blood and hunger, into a woman. Across five centuries she moves through mercenary camps, European brothels, the court of Versailles, Victorian England, two World Wars, and the New World; feeding discreetly, loving unwisely, and burying everyone she touches. Her body is clay, shaped by desire and will. And the woman who made her has been watching all along,

***

Chapter 1 - The Sultan's Path - Constantinople, 1565

"I've been waiting for you," she said.

But for how long?

In the dreams, there had been a woman. Dark hair like a mane; lips whispering words I could barely hold; eyes that looked through me to a self I hadn't known was there.

I walked the Sultan's path at twilight with a sharpened blade in my fist and no memory of having drawn it. The corridor stretched ahead of me like a throat; marble walls inlaid with tiles of lapis and turquoise, hanging lamps casting pools of amber.

The first eunuch had barely raised his hand before I opened his neck. My instructor would have been proud. What little blood that ran from him was thin, spreading across the white marble in a shape that made me think of wings.

I stepped over him and kept walking.

There had been others. Three, perhaps four; I was losing count. All of them had worn that same ashen look. One had been leaning against a pillar, half-conscious, and my blade had found his ribs before he could straighten. Another had simply stared at me as though he had been waiting for someone to finish what had already been started.

"I've been waiting for you," she said.

Her hair was so black it seemed to withhold light.

Emine. That was her name, I knew it without being told.

"Drink," she said.

There was a goblet in my hands. And I drank; the liquid warm, thick, and faintly sweet.

Her fingers found my wrist, and then she was beside me, close enough that I could smell her beneath the incense: something old and strange like the air in a sealed tomb.

"There are powers older than empires," she said. "Older than the faiths that name them. There are those of us who have walked since before your Prophet, before the Messiahs, before the first temples were raised to any god."

I reached for her and found her skin cool and smooth beneath the silk. She placed her hand on mine, and my calloused fingers found the warmth between her thighs and the slick, swollen heat of her sex. I pressed deeper, my thumb finding the hard pearl of flesh at the apex; circling, rubbing; and her breath came in short, sharp gasps.

"I knew I was right to choose you, Hasan ibn Selim," she said.

Her mouth was on my neck now, and I pushed two fingers inside her and felt her clench. I looked down and saw my hand disappearing into the dark fold of silk between her legs, my fingers glistening when they withdrew before plunging back. She hissed and bit her lip. I wanted to consume her.

"Join me," she said.

Then her teeth sank in.

The pain was exquisite, a pleasure so intense it bordered on annihilation. We were tangled together in silk and blood, and for one moment I saw us from above: two women intertwined on the cushions in the golden light.

I closed my eyes and I saw my mother's face. Not as she was when I was taken, weeping at the door of a stone house in a village whose name I had been taught to forget; but as she had been at the church. The little church with its domed ceiling painted blue, its icon of the Savior with his blessed countenance and flat black eyes. Then the surahs and hadiths of my adopted faith. Iblis. The djinn who whisper in the ears of the sleeping.

I shoved her.

"Servant of Satan," I gasped. The words came out in a language I hadn't spoken in twenty years. Then again, in Turkish, louder: "Şeytan'ın kulu!"

She reclined among the bloodied cushions and looked up at me, amused. She did not argue. She did not plead. She simply watched.

And I ran.

The dead eunuchs lay where I had left them, grey and deflated, and I leapt over them without looking down. The palace was a blur of tilework and shadow. I heard no alarm, no shouts.

The courtyard. My mare was tethered where I had left it. The guards, if there were any guards alive to speak of, did not stop me.

I rode with one hand on the reins and one hand pressed to my neck.

The wound burned; and something was changing.

***

Chapter 2 - Blood Fever - Wallachia, 1565

Voices.

The smell of damp stone and something medicinal. Then darkness again, pulling me back under.

The next time, I caught words.

"Male, certainly, but look at the…"

"A hermaphrodite, I've read of such cases in…"

"…angel or demon, that is what I want to know."

The voices swam above me like fish in muddy water. I tried to open my eyes and managed only enough to see the dance of firelight and the heavy shapes of fabric hanging from the walls. This was not the palace. This was not any place I knew.

I tried to move my arms and found that I could not.

The darkness took me again.

When it released me the third time or the tenth, the voices had consolidated into two. One was thick and gravelly, the other was higher and in the careful diction of the educated. I lay with my eyes closed and listened.

"Three days now," the gravelly voice said. "Three days and still changing. You've never seen anything like it, Mihnea. Admit it."

"I will admit it freely, my lord. I have not."

"The hair alone. I swear it was brown or black when we brought him in. Look at it."

A pause. The scratch of a quill on paper.

"Blond, quite remarkably blond. And the skin…"

"Like cream. Like a babe's skin. Not a mark on it."

I opened my eyes.

Two faces hovered above me. The first belonged to a large man with a scar bisecting his left eyebrow, his dark beard trimmed close. The second face was narrower, older, with the pallid complexion of someone who had spent his life indoors with books.

"Water," I said. Then, because the word had come out in Turkish and the faces above me showed no comprehension: "Apă." Romanian. Pulled from somewhere deep, from the village, from the life before.

The large man laughed in delight.

"It speaks! And in the tongue of the land, no less." He snapped his fingers and someone beyond my vision brought a cup to my lips. I drank.

"My name," I said, and then stopped, because the name that almost rose to my lips was Hasan. It would have to be my old name. "Stepan. My name is Stepan. If you could provide safe harbor to a fellow Christian…"

"Stepan," the large man repeated. "I am Boyar Radu. Well, Stepan. You present me with a problem. My men found you collapsed on the road five days ago, half-dead. They brought you here because I am a generous man, and because they thought you might be something valuable."

"I don't understand."

"No," Radu said. "I don't suppose you do." He straightened and made a gesture. "Mihnea, the mirror."

The physician moved to a side table and returned with a hand mirror, the kind a woman might keep on her dressing table. He held it above my face.

The person in the mirror was not me.

She was young, terribly young, no more than sixteen or seventeen to look at her; with an androgynous face framed by pale blonde hair that fell past her shoulders. Her skin was white and smooth and flawless, and her eyes were lighter than they should have been.

I stared at this stranger. She stared back. Her mouth opened when mine opened, forming a small, silent circle of incomprehension.

"You see the difficulty," Radu said.

"This is sorcery. A trick." My voice came out thin, girlish; a stranger's voice from a stranger's throat.

"Three days we've watched it happen," Radu said. He was enjoying himself, that much was plain. "When they carried you in, you were a man, or at least a boy. Dark hair, dark skin, lean as a hunting dog. Then the fever took you, and you began to change. The hair first, then the skin. Then…" He gestured vaguely at my chest.

I looked down.

The blanket had been pulled back at some point during my delirium, and I was naked beneath it. What I saw made no sense. My chest, which had been flat and hard with muscle, now bore two small breasts; barely more than the buds of a girl just entering womanhood, with pale pink nipples. My waist had narrowed. My hips had softened, rounding outward with a layer of fat; and when I strained against the leather straps binding my wrists to the bedposts, the muscles that responded were thin and unfamiliar.

"Fascinating, isn't it?" Mihnea said, leaning in with his leather-bound notebook. He peered at my chest with the detached interest of a man examining a rare specimen of butterfly

"Mihnea." Radu waved a hand. "Enough poetry. Show me the rest."

The physician pulled the blanket away entirely, and I was exposed from throat to ankle, bound and bare on the boyar's bed.

I had never been a modest man. Military life stripped that from you early. But this, being laid out like a specimen, unable to cover myself, unable even to turn away, this was something different.

Between my legs, the evidence of my manhood remained, but diminished. What had been a grown man's equipment now looked almost childlike: smaller, withdrawn, nested in a sparse thatch of fine blonde hair. My thighs were soft and round, my knees smooth and pristine.

Radu reached down and touched me there. Casually, the way you might test the firmness of a pear at market, holding the soft shaft between his fingers, then cradling my much reduced scrotum in the palm of his right hand.

I jerked against the restraints. The leather bit into my wrists.

"Still male," Radu observed, rolling my diminished flesh between his thick fingers with the same unsentimental assessment he might give a coin of questionable minting. "But barely. Mihnea, do you think this will change too?"

"It is... possible, my lord."

"Mm." Radu released me and brought his fingers to his nose, inhaling slightly. "Extraordinary. Truly extraordinary. Write it all down."

"My lord, the scholarly implications alone…"

"Yes, yes. Write it down and then leave it. I want to have a word with our guest in private."

Mihnea hesitated. Caution, perhaps; or the remnant of whatever oath physicians swore. But Radu was already looking at him with the impatience of a man who did not ask twice, and the physician gathered his writing implements and retreated through the heavy oak door. It closed behind him with a sound like a coffin.

I heard the bolt slide home from the inside.

"Now then," Radu said, moving around the bed. "My servants have already cleaned you. Thoroughly. Bathed you, oiled you to my preference."

"Release me," I said.

"In time, perhaps. But I am a curious man, Stepan. And curiosity must be satisfied."

"I beg you, as a fellow Christian."

He was behind me now. I craned my neck but could not see him. All I could hear was the sound of heavy cloth falling on to the stone floor.

"Shh." His hand settled on the small of my back; his thumb traced the ridge of my spine where it met the new curve of my waist. "You know, you really are quite remarkable. More woman than man now, I'd say. This waist and these hips…" His hand slid lower. "And yet still this…" His other hand reached beneath me, finding and cupping what remained of my sex, rolling it almost tenderly; and I wished that I could will my body to die. "So small now. Like a boy's. A little boy's prick on a girl's body."

I thrashed but the restraints held.

"Stop." The word was barely a whisper. "In the name of God... "

"Which god would that be?" Radu asked.

And then he was in front of me, naked and corpulent; the blunt, terrible pressure of him, positioning himself. He entered me without pause or preparation, and the pain was a white-hot lance that drove the breath from my lungs. He was enormous inside me, and every thrust was a violation that tore through my body and my understanding of myself.

"There," he said, as though commenting on the weather. "That's it. You take it well, for the first time. Or is it?" He was gripping my hips with both hands now, his thick fingers digging into the soft new flesh. "Such a girlish little body. Such pretty skin. I could sell you for a fortune in any market from here to Venice."

He leaned forward and put his mouth close to my ear.

"You'll learn to enjoy it," he whispered. "They always do. I'll keep you fed and warm, and in return…"

I turned my head.

Later, I would try to recall what had happened in that moment; what instinct overtook me. But in that instant, there was no thought; there was only the proximity of his throat and a hunger that rose in me like a tide.

It was nothing like the goblet Emine had given me in the palace. This was alive. I drank the way a man dying of thirst drinks water; without thought, without restraint, in great desperate swallows that filled my throat.

Radu screamed but my teeth tore through his windpipe and all that was left was gurgling. I drank deeply and felt the changes as they happened. Each swallow of blood reshaped me from the inside out. The transformation that had taken three days of fever now accelerated in minutes, fueled by Radu's intoxicating blood. I drank until the beating stopped; then drank beyond that, drawing the last dregs from a body that had gone slack and hollow against the bed.

When I released him, he slid to the floor like a sack of wet grain.

The hunger was sated; more than sated, I felt gorged, swollen with stolen life, and in its place was something I had never experienced before. Power.

I pulled at the leather strap binding my right wrist. It snapped like a thin thread.

The left followed, then the ankle restraints. I sat up on the bed and looked down at myself. The body below was undeniably female now: full-breasted, wide-hipped, the skin luminous. When I touched my face, I found high cheekbones, a narrow jaw, and lips that felt swollen and lush.

Between my legs, the transformation was now complete.

Radu lay on his back on the stone floor. He was looked as though every drop of pigment had been drained from him along with his blood; a waterskin that had been wrung dry.

I moved.

First, Radu's clothes thrown carelessly on the floor. Then the bedside table: his coin purse, heavy with gold and silver. A ring set with a dark stone, possibly garnet. A small dagger with a bone handle, sharp enough to shave with. Mihnea's leather-bound notebook, left as ordered. I took everything. Rolled the coins and jewelry into a pillowcase and knotted it.

The bolt on the door slid back at my touch. The corridor beyond was dark, the great hall at the end of it cold and empty, the fire banked to embers. A guard sat slumped in a chair by the main door, his chin on his chest. I passed within arm's reach of him. He did not stir.

Outside, the air was cold and clean. The stables were twenty paces from the main building. Inside, a dozen horses stood in their stalls, drowsing. I could smell them.

I mounted one, and the wind caught my hair and whipped it behind me. And I rode.

***

Chapter 3 - The Ditch Beyond the Reeds, Near Győr, Autumn 1591

For over twenty years I kept myself empty.

Twenty-five years of chewing bread that tasted like sawdust, drinking water that sat in my gut like a stone, watching my skin go the color of old tallow while the thing inside me gnawed at the walls of its cage.

I had made a bargain with myself in the dark hours after Wallachia: I would not feed. I would not become what Emine had made me. I would starve the creature down to nothing. It didn't kill me. It simply hollowed me out. Now I understood what they meant by the Nesuferitul.

By the autumn of my twenty-fifth year of fasting, I looked like a boy of fifteen who had been raised on thin soup and bad air. My cheeks were sunken, my skin a dull, unhealthy grey; my chest flat, my jaw soft and beardless.

The Hajduk irregulars that patrolled the marsh roads west of Győr would pick fights with Ottoman scouts, stripping the dead for pocket money. They called me István and assumed I was simply a runt. A late bloomer, a boy whose balls had not yet dropped.

"You'll fill out," the sergeant told me once, clapping me on the shoulder.

I smiled and said nothing. I was very good at saying nothing.

That morning, the sergeant sent seven of us through the reeds to cut off a band of Ottoman stragglers reported near an irrigation ditch south of the road. The intelligence was secondhand but we went anyway.

I carried a short sword and a buckler that felt too heavy. The weakness was constant now. I compensated with the animal instinct that the thing inside me provided even in its diminished state.

It was not enough.

The ambush came from the willow scrub to our left. Two akıncı riders burst through the curtain of branches, swords already swinging. Behind them came three foot irregulars.

Our column shattered. A German with a red beard took a saber across his face before he could raise his guard. The blade opened him from jaw to temple. To my right, a Hungarian whose name I'd never learned caught a spear thrust in the belly and sunk into the mud.

I raised my sword and managed a parry, barely deflecting a blow. The training was still there but not the strength. The irregular who had swung at me saw how the sword wavered in my grip and laughed. He swung again and I stumbled backward, my boot catching in the mud. I went to one knee and the weakness washed through me, my vision bleaching at the edges. I was saved momentarily when the sergeant engaged the Turk.

This is how I die, I thought, on my knees in a swamp, too stubborn to have done the one thing that would have kept me alive.

Then a hand found my boot.

The gutted Hungarian had dragged himself through the mud to where I knelt. He was dying. I could hear it in his labored breathing. But his hands were bloody, and when his fingers closed around my ankle, they left a smear of red across the leather.

The smell was intoxicating.

The blood was a vibration that resonated in every inch of my starved and shriveled flesh. The thing inside me didn't gnaw at its cage, it tore through the bars.

The first swallow was like breathing after being held underwater. I gorged on the dying man, taking what blood was left in him, leaving him a shriveled husk. I had no recollection of crossing the distance to the first Turk. One moment I was on my knees in the mud having my fill, the next I was on him, dragging him sideways off the bank and into the reeds.

His blood was thick and warm and indescribably alive. The starved thing fed with a fury that obliterated thought. I heard wet, tearing sounds and understood dimly that they were coming from me.

The second Turk was charging, screaming, his sword raised, his face contorted with horror.

I struck him full on the chest and bore him down into the mud. His sword swung pathetically as my fingers tore into his chest, tearing his ribs apart. I consumed his heart whole, then I turned to the rest of the main vessels and the blood pooling in the cavity of his chest, pressing my mouth to the wound like a lover's kiss, drinking him down in great shuddering gulps.

I was remembering now. Each soul had its own flavor, its own signature of experience.

The third man was running. I caught him in four strides. When I was done, I knelt in the rushes, waiting. Inside me, the thing that had been starving for twenty years was purring.

I could feel the changes already. Warmth flooding into my extremities, my skin tingling as color returned to it. My hands were filling out, the skin softening. My face felt different when I touched it: the jaw slightly narrower, the cheekbones higher, the lips fuller than they had been that morning. I pressed my hands flat against my ribs and felt the tissue there, swelling, budding.

Twenty years. Twenty years of discipline, of denial… all lost.

"István," the sergeant said. "What... happened here?"

He was ten paces away, the last of our company. Sometime between the last Turk and this moment, I had devoured every one of them.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. "I handled it," I said.

My voice was higher than it had been that morning. The sergeant heard it. I watched his eyes flicker down to where my doublet strained, then back to my face. Filled, flush, and female.

He did not have the chance to ask again.

***

Chapter 4 - The Baggage Train, 1593, Near Székesfehérvár

My life as a woman was both harder and easier.

Before the men woke up I would begin with hauling water, then scrubbing pots and then stirring whatever Greta told me to stir. I had learned to love the mornings for their simplicity, for their honest demands.

The mercenary camp occupied a muddy clearing beside a road that led, supposedly, toward Komárom, though no one seemed in any particular hurry to get there. The company had made camp beside a half-burned roadside chapel simply because it worked to block the wind.

I knelt at the bank and worked the shirts against a flat rock. Then, because the morning was still early and the camp still half-asleep, I unlaced my bodice, pulled my shift over my head, and waded in to my waist. My skin prickled but didn't numb, another way my body had stopped playing by the rules of mundane humanity. The water ran over my belly and between my thighs.

"Christ's wounds," a young voice muttered.

It was one of the new men filling canteens some ways upstream. One was an old Swabian who carried a halberd. The man who had spoken was younger, leaner, and clean shaven; a mere foal. He tilted his head and gazed firmly at my bosom.

He was attractive and I didn't shrink. My former male inclinations were nowhere to be found, quenched by blood and feeding. Instead, I smiled, arched my back slightly and raised my arms to pull back my hair in a tight knot. My breasts were large, high, and youthful. I scrubbed them both with a small rag, then between my legs, unperturbed by their witness; then walked back to the bank giving them full sight of the hair now matted to my lush lower lips.

I wiped myself down quickly and put on the clothes Greta had handed down to me: an off-white linen shift, a faded red wool bodice that laced up the front, and a dark skirt

It was better this way. Better than murder and rape.

I had learned that in the weeks since the boyar's estate, since the starvation and the slaughter. As a woman, I could control the hunger. I could feed gracefully and precisely, taking just enough from a sleeping drunk or a wounded straggler to sustain myself without killing.

The two men, now joined by a few of their company, murmured appreciatively.

"What's your name," the younger one called out.

"Stefánia," I said. "And yours?"

"Martin," he said. "This is my cousin, Johann."

"You are very beautiful, Stefánia," Johann said looking down.

"What he means is that we would appreciate your company one of these evenings. If you're available of course."

I nodded. "You should speak to Greta," I told them, and returned to the cookfire.

Back at the camp, Greta was peeling onions with a short knife. She didn't look up when I sat down beside her.

"You've been here two weeks," she said.

"I know."

"You're a good girl, Stefánia. Helpful, obedient. But every man in this camp is looking at you like you're the last lamb before Lent."

I said nothing. The fire crackled and spat.

"The women who follow this company," Greta continued, "we eat because we're useful. I cook. Marta mends. Old Katya tells fortunes."

"I help with the cooking and I am learning to mend."

"I know you are. But you must know what it means for a woman to travel in this company. Especially a young woman like yourself."

"I do know."

"Good, then listen to me." She set the knife down. "Choose the first one yourself. If you wait, someone will choose for you, and it might not be gentle. Even worse, you might not be paid." She said the last part in good humor.

I stared at the fire.

"I've known girls who thought they were above it," Greta said. "All of them learned quickly what it meant to be a woman traveling among men."

She was right. I had lived by the sword for years and never thought less of myself for the killing. I knew full well this was what the women in a baggage train did. It was far better than starving to death or being raped.

"I am not too proud," I said. "I will choose."

Greta nodded, as if I had confirmed something she had already settled in her mind. She handed me an onion.

"Good. Now make yourself useful until then."

***

Miklós found me in the early afternoon, while I was hauling a bucket of slop towards the ditch behind the horse lines. He served as the company's runner; carrying messages, settling debts, arranging the kinds of transactions that officers preferred not to do in person.

"Stefánia," he said, falling into step beside me as though we were old friends taking a stroll. "I have news that will improve your evening."

"I doubt that."

"Are you familiar with József Báthory?"

I shook my head.

"A Hungarian gentleman, traveling with the company under some arrangement with the captain. He has seen you and made a request."

I set the bucket down.

"He will pay, of course," Miklós continued. "Handsomely I should add. For an evening in his wagon."

It appeared that someone had chosen for me.

"And if I refuse?"

Miklós shrugged. "Greta said you had agreed to this. Was she mistaken?"

This was better, I reminded myself.

"No, she was not mistaken," I said. "Thank you, Miklós."

***

Greta came for me an hour before sunset.

She took me by the elbow and steered me toward the sutler's wagon at the edge of camp; a heavy, canvas-topped affair that smelled of dried herbs. She heated water in a small pot over a candle, testing it against her wrist until satisfied. Then she took a rag, dipped it, and began to wash my face. She was quite thorough, working around my eyelids, the bridge of my nose, and behind my ears.

When she was done, she applied a small amount of goose fat to my lips. My body received the same treatment. She paid particular care of the parts which would receive the most attention from my customer. My breasts of course, but also my arms, thighs, and belly. The perfume she applied to each part was cloying and slightly rancid.

Then she handed me a new shift and laced up my bodice, tighter this time, cinching it until my waist narrowed and my breasts rose above the neckline. The pressure was uncomfortable, but it seemed to straighten my posture, forcing my shoulders back.

Throughout all of this, I said nothing. I watched it happen as though from a great distance, as though the body being prepared belonged to someone else; a doll perhaps, or a puppet. The old soldier in me understood something of this

"Here." Greta held up a piece of polished brass.

I looked.

The girl in the mirror looked more fetching than I had ever felt. Her hair caught the candlelight and her eyes were large and blue.

"Good," Greta said, tucking the brass away. "Now go and enjoy yourself."

***

The wagon was larger than I expected. A single lantern hung from a hook on the canvas roof. Inside, a narrow cot had been made up with a wool blanket. A small trunk served as a table, with a cup and a bottle of wine set on it.

József Báthory entered at dusk, ducking through the canvas flap. He immediately made himself comfortable on the cot, sitting opposite the trunk and reaching for the wine.

"I'm sorry if I startled you," he said. "It's been a long day."

He was clean shaven, perhaps thirty, and my woman's body told me that he was handsome. Greta had chosen well, at least in this regard.

"I am not startled, Sir."

"Of course not. That's sensible. What's your name?"

"Stefánia."

He nodded, offering me the cup. "Come to me, Stefánia."

I shifted closer to him.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said.

I nodded warily, but there was a kind of weary sincerity to his words.

He reached out and touched my hair and I felt myself lean into his palm. The warmth of his skin against mine was intoxicating. I was always cooler than the living, and his large masculine hand satiated a barely acknowledged hunger.

I had suspected this for some time. In my two weeks with the company, my eyes had begun to wander: the shape of a man's chest under a shirt had become delectable; the way certain men moved, the younger ones especially, produced a heat in my belly; the bulges in their trousers made my nipples harden.

Now, with József's hand on my face and his body close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from him, the suspicion became certainty. I wanted him. Not as a woman is supposed to want a man, demurely and with reluctance, but with a directness that would have appalled the man I had been.

I kissed him first.

His mouth was warm and tasted faintly of the wine. He made a low sound of surprise, then his hands were in my hair, kissing me with devastating tenderness. His tongue found mine, and we teased each other, the sensation sending a shiver through my body.

He helped me unlace my bodice, humming to himself. Then the shift came off over my head, and I was bare before him from the waist up, my breasts pale in the lantern light, the pink nipples tightening in the cool air. He looked at me as if enraptured.

"Beautiful," he said, touching the side of my breast delicately, feeling it's smooth responsive skin. "Truly, a work of art."

His mouth found my throat, then hunted lower. When his lips closed around my nipple, I gasped and gripped his shoulders, and my hips moved against him involuntarily, seeking pressure, seeking contact. He stayed me with a hand, finding my skirt damp with lust.

"Patience," he said.

He laid me back on the cot and undressed me the rest of the way, sliding the skirt down my hips, his fingers grazing the soft skin of my thighs. Then I lay naked before him, shamelessly; and filled with hunger.

He undressed himself quickly, and I saw immediately that his body was lean and hard, the muscles of his abdomen clearly defined. I touched him gingerly with the tips of my fingers, licking my lips unconsciously, which made him let out a small chuckle.

When I looked up at him, he was still smiling broadly, observing me as I explored.

He was hard and fully erect and did nothing to hide himself from me. It was not his confidence that troubled me, it was my own. Something had changed fundamentally in me and it was far worse than I had initially feared.

The sight of his manhood did not fill me with the slightest bit of revulsion or disgust. Instead, what I felt was pure, unbridled lust and fascination. I cradled his tight sack in my palm, then worked myself up his shaft, admiring its girth and length. I pulled back the foreskin and exposed the smooth helmet underneath. Then leaned forward, fighting the urge to plant my lips on it.

He had bathed and perfumed himself before arriving, which was a surprise. I had no idea a man would do this for a mere whore. But his male musk was still under all of that, and I breathed in deeply filling my nostrils with his scent.

"They told me you were a mere maid," he said. "Not something so… wanton."

I pursed my lips, gazed up at him, and pretended to sulk. "Would you prefer that I acted the innocent virgin, my Lord?"

He laughed softly, then gasped as I took him between my lips.

The taste was stronger, cleaner; his maleness engulfing my senses. I lapped him gently, tasting him, bringing him deeper into my mouth. I wanted him; all of him; the mere sensation of his hardness in my mouth made me slick; the smoothness at the tip of his cock was nothing less than ambrosia.

At some point, he began to slowly thrust into my mouth, carefully so as not to gag me. I made sure not to injure him, hiding my teeth behind my lips. He seemed to harden even further in my mouth which seemed to surprise him.

"Oh, sweet Jesus," he groaned

It was obvious that he could control himself no longer. He seemed almost in a rush to enter me now, pushing me back on the cot, placing himself hurriedly between my legs. When he slipped into me, we both stopped.

There was a sharp tearing beneath that made me cry out for a moment, my fingers digging into his back. He froze above me, surprised.

"You're…" he started. "But…"

"Don't stop," I whimpered. "Please. Don't stop."

He moved again, my wetness easing his way. His throat was inches from my mouth, the vein blue beneath his skin. I could have taken from him so easily… I turned my head and bit the pillow instead and let the pleasure take me.

It was as delicious as when I took someone's blood; waves of it, cresting and breaking, making me tighten on him, extracting every scrap of friction until I shuddered. He followed moments later; he had barely lasted a minute.

He lay upon me, utterly drained, falling into a deep sleep. I could feel him gradually softening inside, but I was not fully satisfied. The hunger was so profound it frightened me. When he slipped out of me, I glanced down at his manhood and considered taking it into my mouth again; so sure was I that I could get another erection out of him. But I resisted and settled for his lips and gentle nips and licks of his skin, occasionally drawing a few drops of blood.

Near dawn, he rose seemingly refreshed, dressed, and set something on the trunk. A whole forint, much more than a soldier's daily wage.

Then he was gone. The canvas flap swayed in his wake, and I was alone with a hunger between my legs.

***

Greta was waiting at the cookfire. She said nothing when I approached, she simply held out her hand.

I gave her the coin. She raised it towards the light then took out her purse and deposited it. Then she counted out forty kreuzers. "Your cut," she said. "As this is your first time. Next time, I will take half. That's the standard rate."

She stroked my head gently for a moment, then told me to get changed. There was work to be done in the camp. That was all. No questions about how it had gone, no sympathetic clucking or congratulatory warmth.

Later that night, when the work was done, I lay in my blankets among the other women, listening to the sounds of the camp settling into sleep. I could still feel how it felt to have him inside me, a tenderness that was half-pain and half-something else. And when I shifted my thighs I felt the slickness there and the memory of the pleasure rose up like heat from a banked fire.

And then the other hunger came.

It arrived the way it always arrived; gradually, then all at once. A tightness in the throat. A sharpening of the senses until I could hear the heartbeats of every person within fifty paces. The sound was maddening, like a feast being described to a starving woman. The previous evening's intimacy had done something to the curse, had stirred it or stoked it.

I lay rigid in my blankets and counted heartbeats. Marta's-slow, thick with sleep. Katya's-irregular, the stuttering rhythm of an old woman's overtaxed heart. Too close. Too known. If I fed from them, there would be questions.

I rose quietly and moved through the camp, keeping to the shadows. Far from the camp's edge, I found what I was looking for, what I had sensed. A deserter, or what was left of one. He had crawled this far before the wound in his side had drained his will. Now he lay propped against a fallen log, his breathing shallow and ragged. He was young, his uniform crusted with mud and blood.

I knelt beside him, and he opened his eyes for a moment.

"Angel," he murmured. "Are you an angel?"

"Yes," I said.

I pressed my mouth to the soft skin below his jaw and bit down gently, carefully, the way I had taught myself. The blood came in a warm rush, and I drank in measured sips. Just enough to silence the hunger.

Then I walked back through the camp and settled back between the women. In the darkness, I could feel my skin tighten and smooth, my breasts press more firmly against the linen of my shift. The curse fed on blood, and blood fed the curse. It was not lost on me that the more I fed, the more beautiful I would become; and the more beautiful I became, the more men would want me.

When Greta shook my shoulder the next morning, the camp was already stirring with the clatter of pots and the cursing of men.

"Up, girl," she said. "A second man has already asked. He saw you at the stream and would like to meet you before we move off to the border."

I reached for the basin of water beside my blankets, dipped the rag, and began to wash myself. Then the goose fat on my lips, and the bodice, laced tight.

Outside, men moved in the grey light, and somewhere among them a man was waiting for me, and beyond him another, and another after that. I laced the bodice tighter and stepped out into the morning.

***

Chapter 5 - The Monastery of Snakes, Carpathian foothills, c. 1605

Five weeks without feeding and the world had taken on the quality of a painting left out in rain, the colors bleeding, the boundary between solid and phantom growing unreliable.

I had learned of the monastery from a dying priest in Sibiu, a man whose blood informed me of a place in the Carpathian foothills where monks of the Hesychast tradition kept prohibited books and did not turn away those marked by afflictions. I had committed the directions to memory and set out the following morning.

Weeks of fasting had reduced me to something barely recognizable. My body had retreated from its feminine fullness the way a tide retreats from shore, leaving behind an ambiguous terrain that was neither man nor woman.

The monastery gate was oak and set into a wall of rough stone. The man who appeared in the doorway was stooped and grey.

"You've come a long way, stranger," he said. "I suspect you carry a burden heavier than most."

"Heavier than you know."

He nodded. "I am Brother Gavril. Come in. You look as though you haven't eaten in some time."

He led me through the gate and across a courtyard. The monastery was modest: a chapel with a domed roof, a long dormitory building, and a kitchen from which the smell of bread drifted.

We sat on a stone bench among the herbs of a small garden. Gavril brought bread and some wine. I ate slowly. The food tasted like nothing, another consequence of the fasting.

Gavril watched me eat, his hands folded over the prayer rope at his belt.

"You know what I am." I said at last.

"I know what you might be," he corrected. "I have read accounts. But I have never met one in the flesh, if you'll forgive the expression."

Before I could respond, the garden gate crashed open.

The man who staggered through was tall, his hair wild and unwashed.

"Strigoaică!" he shrieked. "I know what you are! I've seen your kind on the battlefield!"

I continued with the bread, barely looking up.

"Hush, Nicodim," Gavril said, his voice dropping to a soothing measure. "Sit down, my dear friend."

"They walk among the dying!" the man raved, pacing in a small circle. "I saw one at Mohács. It drank from the wounded while the cannons still fired! It took my soul, my eternal soul, God help me… " He slapped his skull with both hands repeatedly as though trying to physically beat the memory out of himself.

"I have sinned terribly, Brother. They are beautiful and terrible… beautiful and terrible… I laid down with one, Brother. God help me, I laid with one and enjoyed it. I want to confess my sins."

"You have confessed them many times, Nicodim." Gavril rose and placed both hands on the man's shoulders. "And each time I have told you that if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. You must only believe."

"I do believe," Nicodim said.

"Then you are forgiven. You are safe. This person is a guest. Come, let me take you to Brother Teodor. He has your medicine prepared."

The wild-eyed man allowed himself to be guided, but over his shoulder he fixed me with one last look.

When Gavril returned, he settled back onto the bench as though nothing had happened.

"Nicodim was a mercenary," he said. "He arrived here two years ago, quite broken. He speaks of many things that most dismiss as ravings. But God's creation contains more wonders than our scripture and the church fathers have named." He met my eyes. "And I believe you did not come all this way for bread and water."

***

He came for me after compline.

"Follow me," he said.

We moved through the monastery's winding corridors in near darkness, then descended a narrow staircase I had not noticed during the day.

At the bottom, Gavril unlocked a heavy oak door. The smell that emerged was unmistakable: old parchment, ink, and leather. The chamber was small, carved from the living rock beneath the chapel. Shelves lined every wall, packed with texts whose spines were cracked and darkened with age.

"I have studied creatures like you for thirty years," Gavril said, setting his lamp beside the manuscripts. "Through texts, through correspondence, through the testimony of men like Nicodim. But I have never had the opportunity to examine one directly. Will you permit it? In exchange for other forms of knowledge."

"An examination…" I said.

"A scholarly one. I am not a physician, but I am meticulous. And what I learn may help us in unexpected ways." He paused. "First, our agreement. I will share everything I know; every text, every theory, every scrap of knowledge I have gathered. In exchange, I ask only to observe and document. Nothing more."

I studied his face. This was not Radu. This did not seem like a man who took.

"Very well," I said.

I unlaced my shirt and pulled it over my head. Then the trousers, the worn boots, and the binding cloth I had wrapped around my chest more out of habit than necessity. I stood naked before him in the candlelight.

My breasts were barely there; small swellings, the nipples flat and pale, like those of a girl of twelve who had only just begun to change. My waist curved inward slightly, and my hips held a shadow of width that contradicted my otherwise boyish frame. Between my legs, what remained was vestigial, my cock shrunken to something no larger than a child's thumb, resting against a scrotum that had drawn up and tightened into soft folds that suggested, unmistakably, the beginning of labia. The whole arrangement looked unfinished, as though God had only taken half a rib from Adam.

Gavril looked up from his notebook. "May I?"

I nodded.

He knelt before me with the careful deliberation of a man examining a manuscript page. His calloused fingers were gentle as they parted the folds, tilting the lamp closer. He turned the diminished shaft this way and that, pressed lightly on the tissue surrounding it, felt the shape of what lay beneath the drawn-up scrotum.

His touch was entirely without desire. He made notes in his book. Small, precise drawings. Measurements estimated by eye. When he was done, he stood and stepped back, and I dressed quickly.

"Thank you," he said.

We turned to the manuscripts.

The illustrations were old: Strigoi with elongated limbs and hollow eyes; Revenants dragging themselves from shallow graves; and others, male, female, hermaphrodite; drawn with a precision that suggested the artists had seen what they depicted.

"The Brides of Constantinople," Gavril said, tapping a passage in Greek that I could not read. "An account from the eleventh century. A sect of blood-cursed beings who served in the Byzantine court. They could shift their forms through the consumption of blood; male to female, old to young; even taking on the features of specific individuals." He translated as he read, his finger tracing the lines. "'The blood sustains more than just life, it shapes the vessel. Or, perhaps, the blood allows the vessel to become what it desires."

I traced the illustrations with trembling fingers. One showed a figure mid-transformation, caught between two bodies. Another depicted a woman of extraordinary beauty feeding from the throat of a sleeping emperor.

"When you feed," Gavril continued, closing the Greek text and opening a Latin one, "youth is preserved and feminine traits intensify. When you starve, you revert. You become ambiguous." He gestured at my body. "As you are now."

"Yes," I said. "But there is more. Different victims yield different gifts. I've absorbed languages, memories, even mannerisms through feeding. Not completely, but enough. A merchant I fed from in Brașov; I woke knowing a few sentences of Yiddish I had never learned. A Frenchman gave me an ear for Occitan. It is fragmentary, perhaps dependent on how much I take from each of them."

Gavril set down his quill.

"And the female form," he asked. "Did you desire it?"

"No!" I answered, a bit too vehemently. "Never. I have never had the desire to be female."

"Nevertheless, what you say aligns with the older accounts. The Brides were said to retain their victims in small ways; adopting gestures, speech patterns, even physical features." He leaned forward. "Tell me, have you ever tried to direct it? To hold an image in your mind as you feed; a specific face, a specific form?"

"No."

"I believe you could. The texts suggest that the blood is clay, and the mind is the potter's hand. If you were to imagine a form as you fed; truly imagine it, hold it fixed in your thoughts; the transformation might follow your will rather than your hunger."

I stared at the manuscripts. Had there been something in me which had wished for this? To be a woman?

"Is that all you have?" I asked.

"There is nothing more in this library, but there is a community in Buda," Gavril said. "Ottoman merchants, scholars, physicians. There might be those who know of your kind among the infidels. And if you choose to feed discreetly, you might attain the knowledge you seek."

Buda had been conquered by Suleiman the Magnificent in the middle of the last century.

"Remember that you are still a child of God. The hesychast practice katharsis, the purification of the mind through the repudiation of all temptation. You have told me in confession that you repressed your desires for twenty years before Satan devoured you. You must do so again or your very soul might be in peril. The hunger shapes more than just your body. It shapes your mind, your desires, your very self. Be careful what you become."

I left before dawn, while the monks were at matins.

The Carpathian foothills fell away behind me as I walked east toward Buda, and I could feel the emptiness in my veins waiting to be filled.

***

Chapter 6 - The Velvet House - Buda, c. 1618

The mirror was Venetian glass, a luxury only I was afforded since it was a gift from an admirer.

I watched myself in it, naked and freshly oiled, the rose-scented unguent gleaming on my skin.

The bath girls had come at dawn, as they did every third day, and stripped me of every hair below my eyebrows. What remained was a body smooth as polished stone. My breasts had filled out beautifully since the last feeding; heavy enough to draw the eye, firm even without a corset, the nipples pink and responsive. My waist curved inward dramatically above my hips and below, between porcelain thighs, there was the soft, plump cleft.

I turned in the mirror to examine the rest: the swell of my backside, the long line of my back, the unblemished expanse of pale skin that stretched from my shoulders to the cleft of my buttocks.

The Seven Stars or Yedi Yıldız as the Ottoman clientele preferred to call it, occupied three floors of a stone building at the Víziváros, along the Danube riverbank. My chamber was on the uppermost; small but private.

A harem slave, that was the fantasy I had been hired to embody

The chemise went on first. It was of fine silk imported at considerable expense and clung where the oil still lingered. Through the fabric, the dark circles of my nipples were plainly visible, as were my nether lips. This was, of course, entirely by design.

Next the fitted trousers (Şalvar) of blue brocade and an Ottoman-style robe (entari) which in this incarnation owed more to European fashion than the Harem-i Hümâyun. The neckline plunged lower than any respectable Ottoman woman would have tolerated, framing my breasts and pushing them upward so that the upper curves spilled over the chemise like cream from a bowl. The effect was not especially decorous but not undeniably indecent. It lay somewhere in between, allowing men to imagine the unwrapping.

I practiced while I pinned my hair. "Efendim, bu akşam çok naziksiniz," I said to the mirror. Hungarian for the local merchants: "Igen, uram, nagyon kedves." German for the Habsburgs who still slipped across the border on unofficial business: "Ich bin Ihnen sehr dankbar, mein Herr," and French for the Jesuits and diplomats: "Vous êtes trop aimable, monsieur."

Each language I had taken from the men who had attended me; through blood of course but also through conversation and literary tokens I requested of them. I could argue points of Hanafi jurisprudence with a scholar or debate the merits of Copernicus with a Jesuit astronomer, because the men who frequented the Seven Stars paid not merely for beauty but for the illusion of a woman who could match their intellect while submitting to their wills and desire.

The door opened and Ilona entered without ceremony.

"Turn," she said.

I turned. She circled me once, her gaze moving from hem to hairline. Then her hands were at my neckline, tugging the chemise lower, adjusting the entari's bodice until my breasts were pushed higher, the upper globes fully exposed, the nipples barely concealed beneath a single layer of translucent linen.

"Four whole years here," she said. "And still you still play the modest maiden. Why?" She shook her head. "The kethuda knows exactly who you are."

"Men like mystery and naïveté," I explained.

"Not with this man, you know that."

She pulled the chemise aside, exposing my left breast entirely. She ran her thumb across the nipple once, firmly, and it stiffened obediently under her touch. Then she tucked the fabric back into place, but loosely, so that the slightest gesture would displace it again. She repeated the adjustment on the right, her fingers quick and impersonal, pinching the nipple between thumb and forefinger to ensure it pressed visibly against the silk.

"Better," she said, patting me on the cheek.

She crossed to my writing desk and slid open the drawer. From her sleeve she produced a leather purse and counted out coins with the speed of a moneylender.

"Twenty-five thalers. Your share for the month."

About forty forints by the current exchange rate. A Hungarian cavalryman earned perhaps ten in the same period, if he was lucky and his captain was honest. A rural laborer might not see that sum in an entire year.

"The kethuda requested you specifically," she said, turning as she made to leave. "Don't disappoint."

The envoy. Atakan Kethuda. His blood had tasted of cloves and saffron; and in the weeks since his last visit, I had dreamed of the warm rush of his memories. The hunger stirred in my belly and I pressed my thighs together against the sudden warmth between them. Both hungers seemed intertwined and inseparable.

***

His cock tasted of clean skin and rosewater; which was to be expected since I had bathed him before taking him into my mouth.

My world had narrowed to the weight of him on my tongue, the thick, veined shaft that filled my mouth, the musky scent of his groin where I had buried my nose. The envoy sat with his back against the bolsters, his kaftan open, his shalvar long since disposed of.

I could not explain the hunger. There was mere desire of course, though few of my fellow workers professed to enjoy this act to this degree. No, it was something older and deeper than lust, a thirst that lived in my marrow, and it fastened itself to the maleness of him.

I drew back and held him in my hand, studying him. His cock was thick, dark, and circumcised; its glistening head flushed purple and red. A bead of moisture gathered at the slit, and I licked it away with the tip of my tongue, tasting him. He enjoyed this I knew, the tentative kisses and licks.

The shaft pulsed in my grip. I traced the largest vein with my lips, feeling the blood rush beneath the skin; my nostrils firm against the hard flesh. I would not take him this way, but my mouth watered nonetheless.

"Stefánia," he breathed. His voice was strained, the cultivated restraint of an educated man beginning to fray at the edges. His hand found the back of my head; not pushing, there was still some inhibition due to his religion.

My eyes were still on him when I took him back into my mouth. I wanted to swallow him whole, draw from him everything he contained: his warmth, his vitality, the life that pulsed through his body. My nipples hardened, and the wetness between my legs became a slow, insistent trickle down my inner thigh. Each motion of my mouth along his shaft seemed to pull something from him and with each pull I felt myself growing stronger.

He had lasted longer than most but I could feel the moment approaching.

"Turn around," he said, his voice tense.

I obeyed. I turned my bare posterior to him, my face pressed down into the cushions. My hairless sex was exposed and slippery, and I felt him hesitate, torn between touching me and the urgent need to enter. I felt him slide into me, and I encouraged him with a long seductive sigh. His rhythm was unhurried, the restraint of a man who had no desire to spend himself so quickly. But I had no intention of prolonging this. I pushed back against each thrust, taking him deeper, clenching around him. I felt the hot pulse of his release within a minute. He groaned, making two more futile thrusts, and collapsed against my back, his breathing heavy, his skin damp with sweat.

Within seconds his weight went slack, and he slept. Not the gradual drift of a satisfied man but the sudden, heavy unconsciousness of someone whose reserves had been emptied. I eased myself out from under him and arranged the cushions around his body.

He slept for two hours while I prepared a meal and some condiments.

When he woke, he seemed quite refreshed. He blinked, found me, and smiled.

"I must have been more tired than I thought," he said, sitting up and reaching for the wine I had already poured.

"The road from Constantinople is long, Efendim." I handed him the cup and settled beside him on the divan, close enough that my thigh pressed against his. "You carry the weight of empires on your shoulders."

He drank, and we talked. He knew I was discrete and I made sure that my breasts and cunt were ever at his disposal even as we did this.

Atakan was a steward attached to the provincial governor's household and his mind was as finely calibrated as any instrument. He spoke of the tensions along the Habsburg border and the movement of sipahi cavalry toward the frontier.

"You have heard, no doubt, that in Prague the lords have taken to throwing one another from windows." He seemed to enjoy this, the misfortunes of your enemies always brings delight I understood. "The Emperor's men were seized and cast down from a great height. A dragoman in my pay tells me that they lived, which the Catholics have called a miracle. The Protestants suggests they survived by falling on to a dung heap. A divine dung heap one presumes." He chuckled to himself, then grew more serious. "For now, it is far away. But do not be deceived by distance. There are fortunes to be made not by loyalty, but by timing."

In my years at this house, I had already begun lending small discrete sums to Ottoman officers of high repute in return for gifts and patronage. I was now ready to turn my thalers into cloth or even horses if the signals pointed to escalation.

I took his flesh in my palm and began to stroke it gently, easing it erect again. "My love," I said. "Do you remember the Armenian to whom you provided safe conduct?"

He lay back on the cushions. "The one who wanted to discuss standardized duties at our border? Wasn't he Greek?"

"Yes," I said. "The very one. He wishes to send you some gifts in appreciation for your help. Would next week be appropriate?"

"Of course. Tell him that the silk brocade and ambergris he sent the last time was quite exceptional. Perhaps he could find it in his heart to find me some gold threaded fabrics this time?" He smiled and tweaked my nipple playfully. "Does Ilona know that her favorite is playing at being a merchant in her spare time?"

I had no time answer. He pulled me to him, his hands brushing aside my loosely worn robe to cup my breasts. I allowed it with feigned reluctance; a small shake of the head, a murmured protest, then the slow yielding that made men feel they had conquered.

My head was on his chest and I tilted my head as though in pleasure and drew my fingernail across the soft skin below his clavicle. A small cut, no larger than a scratch from a brooch pin. The blood welled in a thin crimson line, and I pressed my lips to it:

The dusty heat of a childhood courtyard in Edirne, pomegranate trees heavy with fruit. Karakaş Mehmed Pasha, the new governor of Buda. Transylvania and its ruler, Bethlen Gábor. The Protestant nobles looking to him for protection from the Emperor and his successor.

I drank sparingly. Three swallows. Then I kissed the wound close and nuzzled against his throat as though I had simply been nipping at his skin in passion.

He left an hour later, adjusting his robes. I stood at the door and watched him descend the stairs, his step only slightly less vigorous than when he had arrived. Outside, the muezzin called the faithful to evening prayer, and I stood at the window listening, my lips still warm with blood.

***

She arrived on a Tuesday, though I did not learn her name until that evening.

I noticed her first in the common room, where Ilona allowed select guests to mingle before making their choices. The woman sat apart from the others, a cup of sherbet untouched before her. Her dark hair was pulled back severely and she wore a traveling cloak of good wool over a silk gown. Her eyes found mine across the room and something in my blood responded, a resonance I had not felt since I was first drawn to Emine.

That evening, she sent word through the madam that she wished to see me.

I waited in my room, dressed in the manner of a Viennese Kurtisane: a gown with a low, square neckline that exposed the shoulders and upper chest; a tightly fitted bodice; and a full skirt. I stood as she entered, curtseying.

"Come to me, little one," she said, motioning with her hand.

I did so, and she kissed me.

Her mouth was warm and commanding. One hand gripped the back of my neck; the other worked the laces of my bodice. Within moments my gown was pooled around my waist and her mouth was at my breast. I gasped and arched into her, seeking the fingers which were gliding along my inner thighs.

She sat back on the divan and pulled me on to her. Her fingers had not left my cunt, two fingers thrusting rhythmically, sometimes withdrawing almost completely before pushing hard against my cervix. She turned my head to face her even as she did so.

Her face was impassive, even as my own was twisted in barely contained pleasure. I was mewling now, my breath hitching with each thrust of her hand; but she was still detached, observing. Then she nodded as if to give me permission, and I came, a whole body spasm that left me jerking in her arms.

When I was done, I clung to her, head on her chest. I looked up at her stolid eyes and pleaded. "More, please…"

Instead, she released me, allowing me to fall gently to her feet.

She extended one bare foot.

"Kiss it, Stefánia," she said.

I looked up at her. The old soldier in me recoiled but that man was barely a whisper now. The hunger that lived in me obeyed a different chain of command.

I lowered my head. Her right foot was slender, the arch high, the skin smooth and warm. It was unquestionably beautiful. I pressed my lips to the instep and felt a shiver pass through me. Her toes were long and elegant, and I took them into my mouth one at a time, laving each with my tongue, tasting the faint salt of her skin and something beneath it; the sweetness of ancient blood. My eyes closed. The sensation of submission was intoxicating, and I hated myself for it, but I did not stop. I licked the sole of her foot from heel to toe, and she watched me with detached satisfaction.

"Good," she said. "Now come higher. Feed."

She parted her thighs, and I knelt between them and pushed back the hem of her gown.

The scent of her reached me before my mouth did: rich and dark, like ripe figs warmed in the sun; an undertone of musk that made my head swim.

Her sex was beautiful in its own way: the outer lips full and dark, fringed with fine black hair trimmed short with scissors, parting to reveal the glistening pink within. The inner folds were delicate and intricate, deepening in color from rose to dusky crimson toward the center. At the apex, her clitoris stood swollen and proud beneath its hood.

I leaned in and pressed my mouth to her.

The taste was warm and salty-sweet. I licked along the seam, parting her folds with my tongue, exploring the ridged texture of her inner walls where they met the wet heat of her opening. She was impossibly soft there, yielding and responsive, and when my tongue found her clitoris and circled it, she made a low sound, guttural and approving, that sent a flood of wetness between my own thighs.

I sucked her clitoris between my lips, flicking it with the tip of my tongue, and her hips lifted off the divan. Her hand found my hair and gripped. I was drowning in her; the taste, the texture, the velvet clench of her thighs around my ears. I slid two fingers inside her, curling them upward, and felt her tighten around me, her inner muscles gripping.

"I know what you are, little one," she said.

I tensed. My fingers stilled inside her, but I did not withdraw.

"Don't stop," she admonished but there was laughter in her voice. "We'll talk after."

I did not stop. I worked her with my fingers and my tongue until her back arched off the divan and her thighs clamped around my head and she came with a shuddering cry that she muffled with the back of her own wrist. The contractions pulsed around my fingers, and I stayed there through all of it, licking her gently through the aftershocks, savoring all of her until she pushed my head away and brought her lips to mine again, as if in thanks.

We drank wine in the aftermath, both of us flushed.

"Do you know my name?" she asked.

The memory was there, a gift from her. "Leyla, from Salonika."

Leyla reclined against the cushions, her gown in disarray, and regarded me.

"Watch," she said.

Her face changed. Not gradually, not with the fevered agony of my own first transformation, but with the fluid ease of water finding a new vessel. Her jaw squared. Her cheekbones sharpened. The fullness of her lips thinned, and a shadow of stubble darkened her chin. For a moment, a lean, handsome man looked at me from Leyla's face. Then the features softened, flowed, and the woman returned.

"Some of us are made," she said. "Crafted with care by our creators. Shaped, instructed, given the tools to manage what we have become." She tilted her head. "Others, like you, are tainted at birth, abandoned before the transformation is perfected."

"Emine," I said. The name tasted like ash.

"Your maker? Yes. I know of her, though our paths have rarely crossed." Leyla took a sip of wine. She is an old one, very old; though like most vain women she doesn't care to be reminded of it. She has gone by many names: Enheduanna; Eudokia; Elvira. She has not begotten a child for at least half a millennia, or so my sisters tell me."

Leyla stroked my cheek with the tips of her fingers. "I like you, Stefánia. You have a pleasing personality. Perhaps it is because you are a Christian." She laughed.

"Tell me how to reverse it," I said. "How to return to what I was. Please, sister."

"And so polite too," she added. "Which is why I sought you out. My sister, Elizabeth, informed me of a vampir who starved herself senselessly for twenty years. You poor uneducated thing."

She set down her cup and looked at me with something that might have been compassion.

"You left your mistress before being fully formed. You will remain hungry until you find your maker and demand what she failed to give you." She waited, letting the words settle. "There is no going back to the man you once were. There is only forward, and forward means learning to manage what you are."

"I wish I had the time or authority to teach you," she added, more softly. "But that privilege belongs to Emine, and she is not here. I have given you what I can." She reached across and touched my cheek again. "It was wise that you came to Buda, to this velvet house. But feed discreetly, if you know what is good for you. The Christians and the Turks agree on very little, but they agree on burning what they cannot explain."

"And you?" I asked. "What do you do?"

"I move. I change. I become someone new before the questions begin." She stood and began to rearrange her clothing. "Our kind are hunted by those who fear what they cannot understand. The moment they begin to notice that you do not age, that your beauty does not fade, it might be too late."

She fastened her cloak at the throat and looked back at me.

"When you tire of Buda, and you will tire of Buda; come to France. The courts there are filled with women who trade in appearance and desire, and a creature like you will find ample cover among them." She smiled. "Find me in Paris, in ten years or twenty. Ask for Leon de Vries. I may be wearing a different face, but I will know yours."

Then she was gone.

I sat in the dim light and pressed my fingers to my mouth. I could still taste her on them.

I blew out the lamp and sat in the darkness, listening to the sounds of the brothel below; and I began, reluctantly, to plan.

***

Chapter 7 - The Sun King's Mirrors Versailles, c. 1683

Nearly a hundred years as a woman, and my vanity had only grown with each new incarnation.

Stéphanie de Villon was a woman of exquisite construction: golden hair arranged in elaborate curls, a swan's neck rising from a cascade of Alençon lace. The gown was a confection of blue silk over a few petticoats that widened my hips to fashionable proportions. The bodice was of brocade and heavily boned, my breasts pushed upward until the upper curves trembled with each breath. I adjusted the fichu at my neckline, pulling it lower until the dark shadow of my cleavage was visible but the nipples remained hidden.

My already pallid skin was further whitened with Venetian ceruse; to appear without it would have been unconscionable. I dabbed it along my collarbone and across the swell of my breasts.

When the court was at mass, I dismissed the servants and slipped from my apartment. The Comte's private library occupied a room on the ground floor of his wing. The shelves rose to the ceiling, packed with volumes in Latin, French, Italian, and Greek. Under glass cases along one wall lay artifacts: a Byzantine reliquary, a bronze head from Africa, and a sealed jar containing something dark and desiccated.

I worked methodically, starting at the eastern wall. My fingers traced the spines: Histories of the Levant. Diplomatic correspondence. Jesuit mission reports from Constantinople.

Then I found it; a slim volume bound in calfskin, its distinctly unappealing title stamped in gilt: My Journeys (On the Marvels of Traveling). An excerpt from an Arabian travelogue translated by a Jesuit priest. I opened it carefully and scanned the pages.

In the Harem of the Sultan, there resided a woman called Emine, a favorite of remarkable beauty who, by the testimony of the eunuchs, did not age in the manner of other women.

...the death of this Emine occurred in childbed, though "death" may be an insufficient word. The delivery chamber was sealed by order of the Valide Sultan, and none were permitted to view the aftermath save the Valide herself. I learned of this through an interview with one of the Valide's trusted servants some years later, the very same from whom I gleaned stories of the Imperial Harem and its ways as recounted earlier in this volume. Of the incident she indicated that the consort's room was awash with blood, the midwife drained completely and grey as ash, the favorite mutilated beyond all recognition...

I set the travelogue aside and moved to the Comte's writing desk, where a stack of leather journals sat beside an inkwell. His private diaries. The Comte had been busy. His journals documented encounters with immortal beings across Europe; not as folklore or superstition, but as business arrangements. Financial agreements. Political intermediaries. And there, recurring like a refrain: La Dame Pâle. A woman who created companions and maintained a network of influence spanning centuries.

The library door creaked open.

The Comte de Montmorency stood in the doorway, a candle in one hand. He was a man of fifty, handsome in the ruined way of the French aristocracy, good bones obscured by excess, intelligent eyes dulled by wine. I had been introduced to the court as his young mistress, a minor heiress from Lorraine, his pet curiosity, his magnificent investment. He looked at me, then at the open journal, and smiled.

"We had an agreement," he said. "Your body in exchange for access."

"I grew impatient with the schedule."

He closed the door behind him and crossed the room. His hand found my breast through the silk of my bodice, gripping it roughly, his thumb pressing hard against the nipple through layers of fabric. He fancied himself a libertine, the kind who confused cruelty with sophistication.

"You forget yourself, Stéphanie." He squeezed harder, enjoying the give of my supple flesh under his fingers. "I installed you here, I clothe you, I presented you to the court…"

I caught his wrist.

The techniques Leyla had taught me in Buda were not merely physical. I held his gaze and pressed his hand more firmly against my breast, then guided it lower, across the rigid stomacher, down to the front of my skirts. His breathing changed. I leaned in close enough that my lips grazed his ear.

"Kneel," I said.

He knelt.

There was no resistance. There never was, not anymore. The Comte, whose ancestors had been Constables of France, whose name appeared in the genealogies of half the noble houses of Europe, sank to the floor with the obedience of a well-trained hound.

I lifted my skirts. I wore nothing beneath them. The Comte's face was level with my sex, and I gripped the back of his head and pulled him forward.

"Gently," I instructed.

He obeyed. His tongue found me with the desperate attentiveness of a man who had learned, through repeated instruction, exactly how I wished to be served. I leaned back against the chair, my eyes flitting over his journals, as the top of his head moved between my thighs. The sensation was pleasant enough. His tongue was practiced now, circling my clitoris with the careful pressure I preferred.

"Is it to your liking?" I asked, my eyes still fixed on his journals.

"Completely, mistress," he said. He returned to his work, making small, muffled sounds of abject devotion.

When I was finished with him, I turned his head to one side and pressed my lips to the soft skin behind his ear. The cut was small. A nick, really. He barely flinched. I drank three swallows, enough to taste the shape of his recent conversations, the names of his correspondents, the location of the cardinal's letters. Then I kissed the wound closed.

"Thank you, my Comte," I said. "You've been most generous."

He blinked at me from the floor, dazed and diminished, and I left him there among his books and secrets.

***

The salon of Madame Giselle Fournier was, by common agreement, the most dangerous room in Versailles that did not contain the King.

The room was stifling, and I could taste the heartbeats of every person in it. A duchess whose husband had recently been appointed ambassador to the Sublime Porte was holding forth on the barbarism of Turkish coffee. I positioned myself nearby and listened, filing away the names she dropped while offering sympathetic noises at appropriate intervals. An elderly marquis attempted to corner me near the harpsichord, his hand finding the small of my back with the practiced ease of a man accustomed to female availability. I deflected him with a smile and a murmured excuse about the heat.

It was there, beside a marble bust of Marcus Aurelius, that the Chevalier Armand de Ségur found me. He wore the black coat of a physician beneath a modest wig, and he had been watching me for weeks.

"Mademoiselle de Villon," he said, bowing precisely. "You look remarkably well this evening."

"You are too kind, Chevalier."

"Not at all. I speak as a physician. Your complexion, for instance." He tilted his head, studying my face. "Flawless. Not a single mark. No scarring from smallpox, no blemishes of any kind. For a woman who claims provincial origins, where the pox rages unchecked, it is quite extraordinary."

"Good fortune and clean living," I said. "My mother was meticulous about hygiene."

"Your mother," he said, quite undeterred. "Yes. Tell me, where precisely in Lorraine does your family hold their estates? I have some acquaintance with the region."

"Near …pinal. A small holding. It is unlikely that a man of your standing would know it."

"You're right, I would not. Because I have made inquiries, and no family named Villon holds property within fifty leagues of …pinal." He said this pleasantly, as one might comment on the vintage of a wine.

Around us, the salon continued as if nothing was amiss. My own expression was perfectly agreeable. "Then you must allow me to bring you there," I replied. "When the Comte feels able to make the journey, of course."

"I find it curious," de Ségur said, raising his voice just enough that the three nearest guests could hear, "that a woman of your... constitution shows such remarkable resistance to aging. The Comte de Montmorency introduced you to court four years ago. You have not changed by so much as a single line. Your skin, your hair, your figure, all precisely as they were. I have been a physician for thirty years, Mademoiselle. Nature is not so generous."

"Perhaps Nature makes exceptions for those who do not bore her," I replied, snapping open my fan.

The nearest guests had turned. A baroness with rouged cheeks and predatory eyes was listening openly now.

"Perhaps," de Ségur said, undeterred. "Or perhaps the exception is of a different kind entirely." He stepped closer. "I have examined the Comte recently. He is a man in precipitous decline. Pale. Weak. Drained, one might say, of his essential humors. And yet his mistress blooms like a rose in winter. It raises questions. About the nature of the arrangement. About the nature of the mistress."

"I am young and he is old. I take what I need while he takes whatever his heart desires. Gluttony is the vice of those who eat too much, but not of those who eat well," I replied. "You forget yourself, Chevalier."

"On the contrary. I remember everything perfectly." His eyes moved down my body. "I have observed certain irregularities. Your hands, for instance, the set of your shoulders, the musculature of your forearms when you raise a glass." He was performing now, and he knew his audience. "It is my professional opinion that you are not a woman in truth, Mademoiselle. You are either a very clever young man, or something far rarer. A hermaphrodite, perhaps; a creature of uncertain sex passing itself off as a lady of quality."

The silence that followed suggested the ravenous attention of the entire salon.

"A fool's lips enter into contention, and his mouth calleth for strokes," I informed him, over slitted eyes. "You will retract that."

"I will not. And I will say further that the Comte, who has sponsored this deception, is either a fool or a conspirator." De Ségur turned to address the room with the confidence of a man who believed himself protected by truth. "I challenge the Comte de Montmorency, or this thing…" He gestured at me."…to settle the matter with steel."

The Comte was not present. He was in his chambers, weakened from weeks of my feeding.

I closed my fan. "Might is the queen of the world, not opinion; but opinion is that which makes use of might," I said. "The Comte is indisposed, but I accept your challenge, Chevalier. I trust you have no objection to being defeated by a woman."

A murmur ran through the salon. De Ségur's composure flickered, then he bowed stiffly and withdrew.

I turned back to the room. Madame Fournier was staring at me with undisguised fascination. I raised my glass to her and drank.

***

The cardinal's correspondence was kept in a locked chest.

The Comte had arranged access through his connections with the Archbishop's secretary, a transaction that cost him two hundred livres. I worked through the papers: bundles of letters tied with faded ribbon, sealed with wax that crumbled at my touch.

Most of it was ecclesiastical tedium. Disputes over benefices, complaints about Huguenots. But buried among the dross, I found what I was looking for.

The letters were written in a cipher that mixed Latin with Greek, but I had absorbed enough from the Count's blood to recognize the system. One correspondent signed herself only with a symbol but the cardinal's marginal notes identified her plainly: Emine, qui se nominat La Dame Pâle.

I read for two hours, translating as I went. Emine had created companions across centuries. A Byzantine soldier in the eleventh century was the latest; a Cappadocian Father her most infamous. "She does not create equals," the cardinal had written. "She creates mirrors, then shatters them."

The freshest documents were letters from informants across Europe, dated within the last decade. Reports of a blonde woman of unusual beauty working in a brothel in Buda. The same woman traveling with a party of irregulars near Komárom. A creature of shifting appearance seen in the company of an Armenian merchant. Each report was addressed to Emine, care of intermediaries in Venice, Paris, and London.

She had been watching me. Every city, every identity, every bed I had occupied. And the intermediary in Paris was the Comte de Montmorency.

I found him in his chambers, propped against pillows, looking ten years older than when I had first arrived at Versailles. His skin had the yellowish tinge of a man whose blood had been thinned too many times.

I set the letters on his lap. "How long?" I asked.

He did not pretend to misunderstand.

"Since before I met you," he said. "She contacted me through a Venetian intermediary. Offered me... knowledge. Protection. Access to circles I could not have entered otherwise. In exchange, I was to provide shelter for a creature she described as her wayward child."

"And report my movements."

"Yes."

I sat on the edge of his bed and took his wrist. His pulse was thin and rapid. "Tell me everything," I said, and pressed my mouth to the vein.

The blood was watery now, depleted, but the memories were still vivid, now that I knew where to look: I was to be made comfortable; not to be allowed to leave without her knowledge; promises of knowledge, of youth, of discipleship. Beneath it all, the Comte's own craven certainty that he could manipulate something beyond his comprehension.

I released his wrist and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

"Where is she now?"

"Everywhere," the Comte groaned, cradling his arm. "The New World. The Levant. She changes her name, her appearance, her sex. She watches you as would any concerned parent. She loves you, Stéphanie."

I almost spat.

I gathered the letters and the journals and tied them into a bundle. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the first grey light of what would be a consequential dawn was beginning to show through the curtains.

***

It had rained the night before, and the grove beyond the Orangerie smelled of wet grass and the faint sweetness of rotting oranges.

The dew was heavy on the ground, soaking through my shoes as I walked to the clearing. I had not changed into men's clothing. I wore a simplified riding habit, the skirt shortened to mid-calf; but I was still unmistakably a woman.

They stood at the edge of the clearing in a state of visible distress, two minor nobles who had agreed to serve a physician's honor. Dueling was illegal under the King's edicts, and dueling against a woman was the kind of spectacle that attracted the wrong sort of attention. De Ségur had already removed his coat, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. He held his smallsword with the easy grip of a man who had practiced regularly.

My own sword was borrowed from the Comte's collection; a clean, well-balanced blade with a simple guard.

"I had hoped the Comte would come himself," de Ségur said. "But this will serve to prove my point."

"En garde, Chevalier," I said.

He attacked first, which I had expected. His style was French and classical: the lunge direct, the blade seeking center line. But there was calculation beneath the orthodoxy. His first thrust aimed low, toward my hip; a location designed to draw blood and shame, to force me to lift my skirt or expose the shape of my body beneath the fabric.

I parried in quarte and disengaged, stepping offline. The old reflexes were there; faster and more precise than anything a human woman should possess and I had to throttle them deliberately. I had to fight like a gifted amateur, nothing more.

De Ségur pressed forward. A feint to my shoulder, then a cut toward my forearm. I deflected and riposted, my blade kissing the air beside his cheek.

"You fence well," he said, circling. "Unusually well for a lady of provincial upbringing."

"My father employed a master-at-arms. He was Italian."

"How convenient."

He lunged again. This time, I let him come deeper before I parried, binding his blade and redirecting it wide. The movement brought us close, corps-à-corps, and I could smell his blood moving beneath his skin. Then I stepped back and thrust.

The blade caught his forearm, a shallow slice precisely placed. Blood welled in a thin red line and dripped onto the wet grass. De Ségur hissed and stepped back, his sword arm faltering.

The hunger rose in me like a hand closing around my throat.

Two more exchanges, then I beat his weakened blade aside and set my point against his throat. A single bead of blood appeared there.

"I yield," he said.

I withdrew my blade and knelt beside him as he sank to one knee, cradling his cut forearm. The gesture appeared solicitous, a woman's natural compassion, the witnesses would later say, shown even to the man who had insulted her.

What they did not see was my hand closing gently around his wounded arm, my thumb pressing against the cut, and that blood reaching my lips surreptitiously.

His pupils dilated. His jaw slackened. The rigid intelligence behind his eyes softened into something pliant and confused.

"You were mistaken, Chevalier," I said softly, though our seconds were close enough to hear.

"I was mistaken," he repeated. His voice had gone flat and obedient.

"Will you apologize?"

"I apologize," he said. "I apologize unreservedly. Mademoiselle de Villon is... she is entirely what she claims to be. I was deceived by my own jealousy. Forgive me."

I helped him to his feet and pressed my handkerchief against his wound. The seconds were already murmuring among themselves, relieved and scandalized in equal measure.

"Think nothing of it," I said, and smiled like a woman who had already forgiven everything.

***

The candles had burned low by the time I finished.

The Comte's bedchamber was the finest room in his wing. The remains of a supper lay on a side table: wine; sweetmeats to improve his chlorosis. He lay on his back in the center of the bed, naked, his arms arranged at his sides. A dagger protruded from his chest at a slight angle.

I had drained him first, of course.

Beside him, the Chevalier de Ségur slept the heavy, dreamless sleep of laudanum. I had summoned him to the Comte's chambers that evening using the hold I had established, and he had come like a man sleepwalking. I made him disrobe and placed the dagger in his hand. All he had to do was slip the blade between the Count's ribs and lie down beside him. Which he did, without complaint.

Two men, naked, in a bed. The scandal would be prodigious. The investigation would be cursory. To investigate would be to acknowledge, and to acknowledge would be to implicate oneself in the knowing.

I paused at the door and looked back once.

The candlelight made the scene almost beautiful. It could have been a painting: The Death of the Libertine, perhaps, or Justice Among the Aristocracy.

I closed the door and descended the servants' staircase.

The carriage was waiting in the stable yard, arranged through the same network of discreet contacts I had cultivated during my years at court. Dawn was breaking over Versailles as we pulled away. The palace rose behind me in the grey light, its windows beginning to catch the sunrise.

Leyla had told me to come to France, and though I did not find her, France had given me what it could. The hunger stirred in my belly, patient and familiar.

***

Chapter 8 - The Ash Orchard - Rural Kent, England, c. 1790

He was looking at me again but I ignored him. The work required all my concentration or I would hear no end of it. I had already consulted Jean-Baptiste's Instruction pour les jardins fruitiers et potagers; it wasn't that complex.

I was perched on a wooden ladder, a small pruning saw in my right hand. The trees must be guided, not forced; overgrowth is the main enemy; sunlight and air are essential; and every cut has a consequence. It was simple.

"That branch has seen better days," he said. He had been by my side for the past ten minutes, ale in hand, holding the ladder steady.

"Hush!"

"But…"

"I saw Jean-Baptiste instruct his gardeners to do it in this manner."

"Do you mean La Quintinie from that book you borrowed?"

"And who else would that be, my dear?"

He gave my posterior a small squeeze through my skirt. I did not object.

"Mrs. Beecham is watching," I warned, leaning into his hand.

He looked around but the old biddy was nowhere in sight. "Mrs. Beecham wonders why a French girl from Lyon is acquainted with various persons from Versailles. Who have been dead this hundred years, I should add."

"That is easily answered. I visit them in my dreams. And I speak to Mrs. Beacham of nothing but the price of fish and bacon."

Behind me, the house stood solid and unpretentious; red brick darkened by age, the chimney already sending up a thin ribbon of smoke where I'd banked the fire before coming out. The front garden was a modest affair of herbs and Chamomile.

I cut away cankered wood and removed such fruit as showed rot, then pared a little lichen from the bark where it lay too thick.

"Come down," he said, patting the back of my thigh. "You've been up there too long."

He helped me down, glanced about once more, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.

"The western trees lean," he said. "The ground is over-wet on that side. I could build a drainage channel, run it down toward the brook."

"You could also eat your breakfast first."

"I am at breakfast." He took another draught of his ale and smiled. "The Ashford commission is settled by the by," he said, settling himself on the stone bench beneath the oldest apple tree. "They require the full survey by Michaelmas. The line of the canal must take account of the chalk near Wye.."

"And if you go about?"

"Three miles more, half a year's additional labour, and a conversation with Lord Faversham concerning his hunting grounds, which I would as soon avoid."

"Then go around," I said. "Lord Faversham will survive the inconvenience."

"Spoken like a woman who's never had to explain hydraulic engineering to a man whose primary qualification is that his grandfather owned the land."

It was my turn to rub his shoulders. He looked up at me, squinting against the early light, and I bent to kiss him, my dark hair falling across his face. His hand found the back of my neck, holding me there for as long as propriety permitted.

"I'll be home before dark," he said.

"I shall expect it. A wife has her claims."

"I declare myself the most willingly governed husband in Kent."

He gathered his coat and his leather satchel of drawings and walked out through the garden gate, his mind already at work on the problem ahead. I watched him until he reached the lane, until the hedgerow swallowed him.

I sat down on the stone bench.

The hunger had been growing for eleven days. I had managed it carefully for years, discrete trips to Canterbury, where the poorhouse afforded a steady supply of the dying and the delirious from whom a few careful mouthfuls could be drawn without detection. But the new warden was vigilant. I would have to go to London, and London lay a day's journey by coach.

Excuses would have to be made.

***

Four years can be measured in many ways.

In Thomas's case, it was measured in commissions: the canal at Ashford completed, the bridge at Faversham redesigned, a new drainage system for the Romney Marsh that had earned him a modest reputation and a steadily growing correspondence with engineers across the south of England.

In mine, it was measured in the small, warm body that sat cross-legged on the hearth rug, frowning at a hornbook with the intense concentration of a general surveying an unfamiliar battlefield.

Elinor had Thomas's grey eyes and my dark hair, though hers fell in soft curls where mine hung straight.

I had not expected her. For centuries, I had assumed that my body's transformations had rendered conception impossible; that whatever Emine's blood had wrought was too unstable. I had been wrong. I now knew that the same will that shaped my features when I fed could also open doors I had assumed were sealed.

I had wanted a child. My body had obliged.

"Mama," Elinor said, jabbing her finger at the hornbook. "This letter is broken."

I set down my mending and leaned over her shoulder. "That's a 'G,' darling. It's not broken. It simply has a tail."

"Why?"

"Because the man who designed it thought it needed one."

"I don't like G."

"You don't have to like it. You only have to read it."

I had learned more languages than I could reliably count. Ottoman Turkish, Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, German, French, Latin, Italian, and Arabic; absorbed through blood, study, and the long attrition of centuries. I had debated Jesuit astronomers, French philosophers, and Ottoman scholars.

And none of those conversations were as dear to me as the sound of Elinor's voice.

"C-A-T. Cat!" She looked up at me, and I gathered her against my chest and held her there, my face buried in her hair.

She would not always smell this way. She would grow old. She would lose the radiance of her skin, and she would die. While I would not. But she was here with me now.

That evening, the three of us occupied our usual positions: Elinor drowsing on the rug, her hornbook abandoned beside her; Thomas at his desk, bent over a drawing of what appeared to be a lock gate mechanism; and I in the chair by the fire, darning one of his shirts.

Thomas looked up from his work and caught my eye and nodded his head at our sleeping child. I shook my head: Let her be, she's peaceful. He smiled and returned to his drawing.

I could have lived inside that moment forever.

Then Thomas coughed.

It was nothing exceptional, and he pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and frowned. But the cough came again, deeper this time, and when he pulled his hand away there was a faint pink smear on it. Not much.

"Thomas," I said.

He looked at me, then reached for his handkerchief and pressed it to his lips, and when he took it away, the white linen was stained with a shade of red that no amount of washing would remove.

***

First the walks.

Thomas had always walked the property each morning before settling at his desk. Then one morning he did not walk but sat on the stone bench and watched the garden from a distance.

Then the appetite.

His plate went from full to half-full to nearly untouched. The doctor from Canterbury came twice, bled him once, prescribed rest and fresh air and a tincture of laudanum that did nothing except grant him a few hours of quiet. Consumption, the doctor said.

I did not leave his side. Instead, I watched him waste away in front of me. My own hunger was irrelevant. I changed his sheets and spooned broth between his cracked lips and held the basin when the coughing came.

One evening in the fourth week, I sat at his bedside wringing out a cloth in cool water. Elinor was asleep in the nursery having been told that Papa was tired and needed quiet.

I was wiping him down when his hand found my wrist.

His grip was weak but his eyes were clear. The fever had broken an hour earlier, leaving him in that strange state where the dying sometimes see and say things more plainly.

"You're changing again," he said.

"Thomas…"

"Hush, my sweet." He considered my face and let his gaze move down to my chest, where the bodice hung looser than it should have. "I've watched it happen before. After Elinor was born, you went to London to check on your inheritance again and came back softer. Fuller." He paused to breathe. "You never age, my love. Three years, four, seven now. Hours in the orchard and in the sun. Not a single line."

"You're feverish," I said, realizing that carelessness and vanity had undone me. "You should rest."

"There is no need to hide, Anne. I have wondered for years. I just never knew how to ask."

"Please…" I said, "do not hate me. I could not bear it." The tears that followed were full of every lie I had told him, every performance of normalcy.

"I could never do that," he said. "Will never do that."

I set down the cloth and decided on the truth.

"I need blood," I said. "To maintain this form. To remain as you see me. Without it, I change. I become… something else."

"If only you had told me earlier," he sighed. "You could have taken your fill from me."

I shook my head and sank my head into his chest, wiping my tears on his nightshirt.

"How old are you?" he asked, stroking my hair.

"Old enough to walk the sun king's palace. Old enough to see kingdoms fall and empires pass away."

"I guessed correctly. An immortal. I thought you might have been a princess or a queen in another life. You had such fine ways when we first met." He coughed and drew his breath slowly for a few moments. "Or that you were an angel sent to torment me with happiness."

Thomas raised his wrist.

"Take what you need," he said.

"No," I said. "Never."

"This isn't for me. This is for Elinor. She needs her mother whole."

"There are other ways," I said.

But he was insistent. Our child could not be alone; not now and certainly not in the years to come. His skin was thin and papery, the veins visible beneath it like channels on a map. The hunger rose in me, now that he had offered, and I hated it with a thoroughness that surprised me.

I lifted his wrist to my lips.

His blood was thin but it was warm, and it tasted of everything I was about to lose. I felt my skin soften and the fullness return to my body.

"There you are," he said. "There's my Anne."

He pulled me to him, and we kissed for the last time.

He died that night, and I sat beside him until dawn.

***

The house was quiet now. Thomas's study door stood closed. His boots sat by the kitchen door where he had left them, his coat still hung on its peg. I had a basin of water before me and vegetables from the garden that needed to be washed. I saw through the little window that the trees of our small orchard needed pruning again.

"Mama."

Elinor stood in the kitchen doorway, her dark curls crushed on one side from sleep. She held her arms up.

I dried my hands on my apron and gathered her to me. Her arms went around my neck and her face pressed into my shoulder. She was all that I had left. And I would be with her till the very end; when she finally grew old, when she returned to be with her father.

Thomas's blood was still in me, and my body was pliant, responsive like clay. I closed my eyes and concentrated.

The skin at the corners of my eyes creased and the flesh beneath my jaw softened, losing its taut definition. A thread of grey appeared at my left temple, then another at the right. The skin of my hands coarsened slightly, the faintest suggestion of age spots appearing at the wrists. My breasts settled lower against my ribs.

That would be enough for another five years at least.

When I opened my eyes, Elinor was staring at me, her small hand reaching up to my cheek. She would forget this, like all children.

The woman reflected in the basin water was a distortion; not the ageless creature who had moved through courts and battlefields and brothels for two centuries. She was a widow of perhaps thirty-five, tired and grief-worn, with grey beginning at her temples and lines of care around her mouth. She looked like a woman who had loved someone and lost him. She looked like someone who belonged to the world she inhabited.

"Don't be sad, Mama."

I wiped the tears from my eyes and gave her a smile. "Let me show you something."

I carried her out the back door, across the yard. The morning was cool and the apple trees were in the first stage of blossom.

"Look," I said, tilting her so she could see. "Do you know what those are?"

"Flowers," Elinor said.

"Apple blossoms. Your father planted these trees the year before you were born. And in autumn, they'll give us apples."

She reached for the nearest branch, her small fingers grasping at a cluster of buds. I held her steady while she touched them.

There is only forward, someone had told me once.

I pressed my lips to my daughter's temple and breathed.

***

Chapter 9 - The Anatomist, London, 1835

The toast was burning.

I could smell it from the parlor, where I sat pretending to read the morning gazette. Elinor's kitchen was always producing some small domestic crisis or another: a pie crust collapsed, a scullery maid in tears over a dropped tureen.

"You're not reading that," Elinor said, appearing in the doorway with a fresh rack of toast and a pot of marmalade. "You've been staring at the same page for ten minutes."

"I am reading it. There is a very interesting article about the price of wool."

"You don't care about the price of wool, Mama."

"I care enormously about wool. I have investments. I am wearing wool at this very moment."

She set the toast rack down and kissed the top of my head, then settled across from me at the small table by the window. The townhouse on Lamb's Conduit Street was comfortable without being ostentatious; her husband's solicitor's income provided well enough, and Elinor had inherited her father's talent for making a modest space feel ample.

"You look well this morning," Elinor said, pouring herself tea. She said it casually, but I caught the slight narrowing of her eyes. Her dark hair was threaded with a bit of silver at the temples and gathered in a practical knot at the nape of her neck. She was forty-three but still quite attractive.

"What is it now, dearest?" I didn't look up from the wool report.

"Mrs. Pemberton asked me last week whether you'd found some elixir at the apothecary. I told her you simply refused to age out of sheer stubbornness."

"Mrs. Pemberton should take less nightcaps and cigarettes."

That made Elinor tut; it wasn't polite to proclaim another's vices so loudly.

I had aged myself as delicately as I dared. A line here, a softening there; grey at the temples progressing to grey throughout, though I confess I had been less thorough than I should have been. At seventy, I ought to have looked seventy. Instead, I presented perhaps sixty. Vanity, the old vice. I could shed an identity and cross borders but I could not quite bring myself to look properly old.

The door to the parlor burst open and two small bodies hurtled through it with total disregard for the furniture. The boy, William, launched himself at my knees. His sister, Charlotte, followed at a more considered pace and stood beside my chair with one hand on the armrest.

"Grandmother," William announced, "I have found a beetle."

"Have you indeed."

"It is in my pocket."

"Then I suggest it stay there until after breakfast."

Charlotte tugged at my sleeve. "Grandmother, I should like to hold the beetle."

"No one," I said, "is holding any beetles at the breakfast table."

I offered them both a piece of toast halved. Then the nursemaid appeared in the doorway, flushed and apologetic, and collected them both. I watched them disappear up the stairs and fought the urge to follow them.

I drew Thomas's pocket watch from the folds of my shawl and checked the time. Half past eight. The appointment was at ten.

"An appointment?" Elinor said.

"Yes, with a physician."

Elinor's cup paused halfway to her lips. "Are you unwell?"

"Perfectly well. It is a consultation. Nothing to concern yourself with."

She set the cup down. "Mama?"

"Elinor, there is absolutely nothing the matter. It concerns my hobbies. You are familiar with those, aren't you?"

"You mean the strigoi and the Brides? The Illuminés; Swedenborg, and the Masons?" Elinor made a low grumble but didn't press further.

I rose and smoothed my skirts. Elinor walked me to the front door. I turned and took her in my arms.

She was taller than me by an inch. I held her, my face pressed against her shoulder, breathing her in. Her scent was distinct despite the faint sweetness of rose water she had dabbed behind her ears.

"Mama," Elinor said, her voice careful. "You're squeezing rather hard."

I released her and stepped back. "I shall be back for supper."

"Promise?"

"I promise."

***

The coach stopped before a modest house of brown brick. A brass plate beside the door read: DR. J. HARROW - PHYSICIAN & ANATOMIST

I paid the driver and went in.

The office was a cabinet of curiosities masquerading as a consulting room. Anatomical drawings covered nearly every surface of the walls; muscles flayed and labelled in precise Latin script. Glass specimen jars lined the shelves: a human hand carefully dissected to display the small muscles; a uterus with ovaries and fallopian tubes still attached by some vivisectionist's art; and a human brain halved to display the hypothalamus and pituitary.

The man himself was thin to the point of severity, with sharp cheekbones and wire-rimmed spectacles. He extended his hand as his footman closed the door behind me.

"Mrs. Vale," he said. "A pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"Dr. Harrow." I took the chair he indicated.

"You wrote to me regarding a matter of some delicacy," he said. "You wished to discuss certain legends pertaining to blood-taking immortals, with particular reference to the Brides of Constantinople."

"I did."

"Then allow me to provide some context. The legends of blood-drinking entities are as old as civilization itself. The Lamia of Greek mythology for instance, a woman transformed by the gods into a creature that devoured children and drank the blood of young men. Lamashtu of Mesopotamian tradition, a demoness who preyed upon pregnant women and infants. In both cases, note the association with feminine corruption and sexual transgression."

I shifted in my chair and my foot began to tap against the floor.

"The connection between blood-taking and feminine sexuality persists through the medieval period: the succubus, the revenant bride, Black Sabbaths and their attendant sacrifices." He paused to adjust his spectacles. "All of which you know, I suspect."

"I do."

"What interests me is not the mythology but the mechanism. I have been conducting research into the properties of blood for some years: its composition, its decay, its capacity to carry information between bodies. I believe that the blood of a male donor carries within it the essential pattern of maleness, not merely in its gross physical properties but in its organizing principle. And conversely for female blood."

I knew this. I had lived this.

"Furthermore," Harrow pressed on, apparently oblivious to my mood, "I have observed in certain marine organisms the capacity to change sex in response to environmental conditions. A female wrasse, when the dominant male is removed from a group, will transform herself into a male. The gonads restructure. The behavior shifts entirely." He spread his hands as though presenting evidence to a jury. "Is it not possible that the condition you investigate represents an analogous process in a higher organism?"

"I did not come here for a lecture on Greek mythology or fish," I said. "I came because your correspondence suggested you possessed knowledge that I do not. If that was a misrepresentation, Doctor Harrow, I should like to know now, before I waste any more of the morning."

He regarded me across the desk and sat back.

"Then perhaps you should tell me what you know."

***

I gave him a smattering of truth, all told in the third person.

I ended with a couple who once resided in Bath, the husband deceased some decades ago. "He died of consumption," I said. "Or so the doctor believed. He wasted away over the course of six weeks."

"And did this woman love her husband?" he asked.

"With all her heart, though that hardly seems relevant under the circumstances; unless you are implying a moral basis to the corruption."

"I understand now; everything is perfectly clear," Harrow said, nodding sagely. He removed his spectacles and set them on the desk.

"It is painfully clear," he said solemnly, "that you are an idiot."

I stood. The chair scraped against the floor behind me, and I reached for my shawl. "Thank you for your time, Doctor. I shall not trouble you further."

"No, not an idiot," he continued, as though I had not moved. "An imbecile."

I turned.

"No," he said decisively. "A cretin. That's what the Swiss call poor creatures like yourself. Those born without the capacity to see what is directly in front of them."

His face was changing.

It was fluid, effortless, like water finding a new shape. The thin, scholarly face filled with a lean androgynous beauty that I had last seen in a room above a brothel in Buda, more than a hundred years ago.

"Leyla," I said.

She sat behind Harrow's desk in Harrow's black coat, her dark hair cropped short in a man's style.

"Hello, Stefánia," she said.

My hands had balled into fists at my sides. The relief of seeing her was tangled so thoroughly with fury that I could not separate the two. "You let me sit here for half an hour listening to a lecture about fish."

"The wrasse was a nice touch, I thought."

"I will strike you."

"You will not." She took my hand in both of hers as if in apology. "Sit down, Anne. I did not arrange this meeting to discuss marine biology. I am here to help."

I did not sit. "Help? In what way?"

"As a physician, I have learned to convey bad news directly and without subterfuge. Your husband, Thomas. You drained him."

"I did no such thing. I fed from Thomas once. Once, and only because he offered, and only at the very end when he was already dying. I was careful. I have always been careful. I fed in Canterbury, from the poorhouse…"

"Not the blood, Stefánia." Her tone seemed almost consolatory. "The bed."

I stared at her.

"Every time you lay with him," she said. "Every time you took him inside you, every time his body gave itself to yours. You drew from him. You drained him the way a river drains a bank; slowly, imperceptibly, over years. And he withered."

"No."

"The consumption was not consumption. It was you."

"No." I said it again, but my world was breaking together with my voice.

I thought of Thomas's cough. The first spot of blood on his handkerchief. The way his appetite had diminished. I had sat beside him and nursed him and wept for him, and all the while…

"Every night," I said. My voice was barely audible. "Every night we…"

"Yes."

My knees gave. My hands pressed flat against the cold boards and my vision blurred with tears that I could not stop and did not try to.

Our final communion, the blood from his wrist. There you are. There's my Anne. I had told myself it was the consumption. But I must have known. It was obvious.

"I was too harsh," Leyla said. She was beside me now, cradling me. "Your sister provided you with knowledge that was not easily decipherable. That is her way. A bad habit which I have failed to correct."

I could not speak. The tears came in silence, which was worse than sobbing, because there was no release in it; only the steady, unrelenting knowledge of what I had done.

Elinor.

Elinor, whom I had held this morning with unusual intensity. Elinor, whose cheek I had kissed a thousand times. Elinor, whose hair was prematurely greying; whose children I had gathered in my arms and bounced upon my knee.

"The children," I whispered.

"No, there is no risk there."

"But the possibility… It is a possibility, is it not?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"To your knowledge…"

I looked up at her. The decision was already forming inside me, cold and absolute, and with the terrible clarity of someone who has just seen the truth.

"I have to leave her," I said.

Leyla frowned.

Somewhere across the city, in a comfortable townhouse on Lamb's Conduit Street, my daughter was clearing the breakfast things and wondering when I would return for supper.

I had promised her. I had promised.

The solicitors and bankers in Amsterdam, here in London, Frankfurt. I could arrange everything in a matter of weeks. There would be enough for Elinor, William, and Charlotte to last them many lifetimes over.

I rose from the floor and wiped my face with the back of my hand, and I did not look at Leyla, because I knew that if I saw compassion there, I would break entirely. Instead, I straightened my shawl and smoothed my skirts and walked toward the door.

"Child," Leyla said. "Where will you go?"

I stopped but did not turn.

I thought of the apple trees in Kent, planted by a man whose death I had caused. I thought of Elinor reaching for apple blossoms with small, trusting fingers.

"Forward," I said. "There is only forward."

I opened the door and walked out into the grey London morning, and I did not look back.

No Man's Hunger: Chapter 10 to 19 (End)

Author:

Occult Samantha

Caution:

CAUTION: Rape / Sexual Assault

Audience Rating:

Mature Subjects (pg15)

Publication:

17,500 < Novella < 40,000 words

Genre:

Transformations

Character Age:

College / Twenties

TG Themes:

Disguises / On the Run / In Hiding

TG Elements:

Prostitution

Permission:

Posted by author(s)

NOTE: This story was originally posted in single large chunk. But some readers have indicated that it was hard to navigate, so I've split it into two parts.

***

Chapter 10 - No Man's Hunger - Somme sector, France, 1916

The rat sat on the edge of the surgical tray, cleaning its whiskers with the fastidiousness of an odalisque, while I extracted shrapnel from a boy. He was unconscious, which was a mercy. The chloroform was running low and I had begun rationing it three days ago, reserving what remained for amputations.

I flicked the rat off the tray, and it landed in the mud with a wet plop and scurried away.

"That's Gerald," Lance Corporal Bell said.

"Don't name the rats, Bell."

"Too late, sir. Gerald and I have an understanding. He stays off the bandages, I don't step on him." Bell set a pan of clean water down and peered at the boy on the table. "Will he keep the arm?"

"Probably."

"That's practically optimistic, coming from you."

Bell was twenty-two and constitutionally incapable of falling into complete despair.

I moved to the next stretcher. Corporal Jameson, Lancashire regiment, both legs shattered below the knee. His face was grey, his pulse thready. I checked the tourniquets that had been applied in the trench. The femoral artery on the left side had been nicked and he had already lost far too much blood.

"Morphine," I told Bell.

Bell didn't question it. He administered the injection and withdrew to the next patient, and I drew the canvas screen around Jameson's stretcher. The corporal's eyes were already glazing when I leaned close. I pressed my mouth to the hollow beneath his jaw and drank: a childhood in a mill town and some girl who would mourn him and then probably forget. He was right in that last assumption. Then he was gone. It was a kindness I told myself.

The male body I inhabited was a construction of will and careful feeding. Leyla had taught me the technique over the course of the last century. The blood was clay, and the mind was the potter's hand. But holding a male form required constant effort, like flexing a muscle that wanted to relax.

The male body was a shirt I wore as penance.

The name surfaced and I pressed it back down. Thomas, whose blood I had tasted only once but whose life I had drained over years of love. I had kept his name-Stephen Vale-because I deserved to flinch every time someone spoke it.

"Doc!" Bell called from beyond the canvas. "Another one coming in."

The orderlies carried a Private in on a stretcher. A stomach wound; peritonitis from perforated bowel. The pungent faecal matter hadn't been cleaned out. The boy's hands were pressed to his abdomen, his fingers laced through a mess of blood and intestine. It was clear to everyone involved that he had arrived several hours too late.

"Behind the screen," I said. "And morphine."

They set him down and left. Bell hovered at the partition's edge, and I caught his eye and shook my head. He understood and moved away, closing the canvas as he left.

I knelt beside him. His eyes found mine. "Maman?" he whispered.

"Oui," I said. "Je suis là. Tu es en sécurité maintenant."

I smoothed the hair from his forehead with my free hand and leaned close, pressing my lips to his temple as though in comfort. Then lower, to the pulse point below his ear. His skin was hot with fever and smelled of dirt and terror. I drank. His memories came with the blood: his mother in a stone farmhouse in Picardy, almost a local to this madness; a dog named Bijou; a girl with braided hair who waited by a gate. I took it all, gently, shaped my face to that of his mother, just for a moment, so that he could see her one last time.

When I pulled away his chest had stopped its labored rise and fall. I cleaned my mouth. Pulled the blanket up.

When I emerged from behind the partition, Sergeant Wilkes was waiting with a cigarette between his lips.

"You look better than the rest of us, Doc," he said. "What's your secret?"

I peeled off my gloves.

"Clean living," I said.

Wilkes grunted and walked away. I stood in the mud between the stretchers, listening to the guns as the boy's blood settled into me.

***

The orders came at half-three in the afternoon, carried by a runner.

"Medical station to advance," he recited, "in support of the infantry push along the Bazentin Ridge. Captain Vale to establish forward aid post at map reference…" He fumbled with the paper."…eh…captured enemy position."

"When?"

"Now, sir. Immediately."

I dismissed him and turned to Bell. "Pack the essentials. Morphine, chloroform, bandages, surgical kit. Leave the heavy instruments for now."

Bell was squatting on a wooden plank having a conversation with Gerald. I had seen far worse; talking to a rat was perfectly harmless in the grand scheme of things.

"What's Gerald saying?" I asked.

"Not Gerald," he said. "Gwendoline, his cousin. And she's telling me everything about the German machine guns and snipers; not that it's going to really help us in the end."

I allowed him his momentary fit of madness

Gwendoline scurried away and he shook himself free from his stupor. "The autoclave, sir?"

"Leave it."

We moved out in a party of six: myself, Bell, two stretcher-bearers, and a pair of orderlies. The communication trench was a winding channel barely wider than a man's shoulders, its walls shored up with corrugated iron and timber that bowed inward.

We moved in single file and, at a junction, I climbed a fire-step and carefully looked over the parapet.

The landscape was a hellscape of craters filled with brown water. Between them lay the detritus of industrialized slaughter: a wagon wheel standing upright in the mud; coils of barbed wire flattened and twisted; a rifle with its bayonet fixed, driven point-first into the ground. And the bodies of course; they lay everywhere: limbs at wrong angles, faces pressed into the mud as though listening for something underground, or turned skyward, mouths agape; sometimes with expressions of mild surprise, though death was hardly an unexpected guest at this dinner.

I had seen battlefields before. The siege at Buda; the skirmishes along the Habsburg frontier where I had followed the mercenary company. But those had been human in their scale. A man killed another man, and the body fell. Here, the killing was mechanical and anonymous.

I dropped below the parapet and we continued.

The Geneva Convention. I had read it. A fine document, drafted by reasonable men in clean rooms. It promised that those who tended the wounded would be respected and protected. And yet I counted three medics in the space of two hundred yards. The first lay face-down in a shell hole, his Red Cross armband still bright against his sleeve. The second was propped against the trench wall with his medical bag open beside him, its contents scattered in the mud. He had been trying to treat himself, it seemed. The third I recognized: a young Welshman named Evans who had shared his tobacco with me a week ago and told me about his fiancée in Swansea. He lay across the duckboards with his arms outstretched.

The captured German dugout was deeper than I had expected.

Bell unpacked the supplies with his usual precision. The stretcher-bearers took positions at the entrance, ready to receive casualties from the line. The orderlies laid out blankets on the dugout's wooden bunks.

"Not bad," Bell said, looking around. "Almost cozy. Gerald would approve."

The first casualties arrived within the hour. A lance corporal with a shattered femur, a private who had lost half his mandible, and another clutching the stump of his wrist. I knelt beside the lance corporal and began cutting away his trouser leg to assess the damage, ignoring the commotion and machine gun fire just above my position.

That was a mistake. The bullet entered straight through my frontal bone.

I was aware of falling, and then the mud was in my mouth and my eyes. The last thing I registered was the distant voice of Bell saying my name, and then the sound of men running and bayonets doing their work.

***

I woke in a shell crater with half my skull knitted back together.

The mud had covered me like a burial shroud, and when I clawed my way out, the aid post was empty apart from a dozen other bodies. The guns had moved on to some other stretch of the line.

My male form had dissolved during the regeneration; my body, left to its own devices, had reverted to its natural inclination. I crawled out of the crater and found myself female: slight, blonde, and still in uniform.

I found new clothes in an abandoned farmhouse two miles behind the lines. A plain wool dress, a faded cotton shift, and a pair of wooden sabots. A refugee farm girl. France was full of them that autumn and no one would look twice. The transformation felt as much punishment as liberation.

I walked south through the wreckage of the countryside following a familiar trail. Now that I was a woman again, I could sense her presence. She was close, waiting for me.

The road passed through what had once been a village. A church steeple lay across the main street like a felled tree. Most of the houses had been disgorged, their walls blown out; and the carcass of a boulangerie sat stolidly among the rubble

It was in front of this bakery that I found her. Leyla, my old friend from all the way back in Buda; or Leon as she was now called, at least for the time being. He was crouched in the rubble photographing the remains of the shop front. He wore a correspondent's uniform and a press armband; his hair cropped close and his jaw lined with stubble.

"Leon," I said.

He looked up.

"Ah, at last, I've been waiting for you," he said. "You look awful by the way."

"Just died."

"It happens," he grunted.

"The church," he said, tilting his head toward the steeple lying across the road. "We can talk there."

We picked our way through the debris. The nave was open to the sky, the roof collapsed inward, but the apse still stood. The crucified Christ gazed down at us with one eye, the other half of his face blown away by a shell fragment. Leon cleared a space on the stone floor and sat; I sat across from him.

"Twenty years ago," I said. "Jerusalem. That's when we last met?"

"Jerusalem," he confirmed.

"Rome before that. You were selling antiquities to English tourists and I was cataloguing Ottoman archives. A simpler time. I think. Before Rome, Vienna; and before Vienna, London"

"Not London," he said. "That was Emine disguised as me. I've told you that. Don't you believe me?"

"No, I believe you; it's just difficult to think of it otherwise."

He raised his hand to stop me. "We don't have to discuss it."

"No."

We compared notes as was our wont, every twenty years; our positions and rendezvous marked by messages dropped at certain locations in London and Paris; old places which Leon had arranged soon after the Peninsular War.

"Not religious any more?" he asked, glancing up at the Christ.

"I still believe in God if that's what you mean." We had spent months travelling together as missionaries in China as part of the China Inland Mission. It was all coming back now.

"It was not you in London then?" I asked again.

"No," he said. "I gathered it was unpleasant. Emine seemed unhappy with what you did…em… to your husband."

He produced a cigarette from somewhere and lit it. The smoke rose through the broken roof and dispersed into the grey French sky. "By the way, Emine has left Europe."

I went still.

"America," Leon continued. "She's been there for decades. Building something new; a new identity, a new network presumably. She saw the war coming long before the rest of us." He drew on the cigarette. "She asked after you. I declined to respond."

"We really are sisters, aren't we?" I said.

"Mind is coming back, I see," he said, tapping his temple. "We were both made by her. Be patient, the brain matter takes longest."

"You made me lick your toes when we first met." It was a sudden recollection. "No sister would do that."

"That was three hundred years ago," he said, shaking his head. "And you enjoyed it."

"I suppose I did," I said, frowning. "Thank you. For not talking. To Emine I mean."

"Don't thank me. I did it because she irritates me."

I knew it was a lie, and he smiled at me, tilting his head.

"Don't be angry with her for too long," he continued. "She has been protecting you after all. From the Hunters, you understand? Though you've escaped their notice for the most part. The hunters are only interested in us if we interfere with the workings of this world. If we choose solitude and the company of the lower classes, that is our business entirely."

He stubbed out the cigarette on the stone floor and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "The world is changing, Stéphanie. Not in the way it has always changed. This is different. Photography. Fingerprinting. Identity papers with descriptions and photographs attached. National registries. Border controls that function. Every war produces more bureaucracy, and this war has produced more than all the others combined. Our kind must adapt."

"We have always adapted."

"We have always moved. That is not quite the same thing." He paused. "I have contacts in Switzerland. Neutral ground, discreet professionals who can produce documents that will withstand scrutiny. After the war, when the borders reopen, I can establish you. A new name, a new history, properly papered and backed by records that will hold."

"And in exchange?"

"In exchange, you stop punishing yourself with this ridiculous male martyrdom and accept what you are."

"I wasn't aware you had opinions about my gender."

"I have opinions about everything." He chuckled.

I looked away. Through the shattered nave, the ruined village stretched in every direction, the landscape scraped raw. A fragment of stained glass still clung to the window frame; a shard of blue and gold depicting a wing; an angel's wing, perhaps, or a dove's.

I stood and walked to it, saw myself in its reflection. A girl. A woman. A creature of uncertain origin and indeterminate future; a blue-gold Byzantine icon, with an expression of serene and total detachment from the suffering of the world.

"If men built this," I said, "I want no more of it."

Outside, the guns continued their work, and the sky over France was the color of ash.

***

Chapter 11 - The House on Rue des Phocéens, 1918

His mouth was adequate; he had been thoroughly domesticated after all.

I lay on my back on the narrow bed, my thighs spread, fingers threaded through his hair.

"Use your fingers, my love," I urged.

He introduced one finger and then another which gave me just the right amount of fullness. My breath hitched when he curled and found the ribbed area within. He glanced up appreciatively when I did so, eyes fixed on my breasts which I had bared. He reached up to knead them with his left hand and I let him.

Between my thighs, where his tongue now worked, the flesh was young and responsive; younger than it had been for well over a century. I pressed my hips upward against his face and felt the pleasure as his finger thrusts increased apace. I tightened my fingers in his hair and held him there, the muscles of my thighs and cunt contracting as my back arched.

He surfaced, flushed and gratified, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He was Chef de Service of a shipping firm; thirty, well-mannered. He visited me on alternate Tuesdays when his wife was visiting with her mother.

I used a moist, perfumed towel to wipe his face, leaning forward so that my breasts were full in his face. In my right hand, I cradled his manhood and urged it awake; too soft to enter me this week, but just enough that I was able to urge a small amount of ejaculate from it while he suckled on me.

"You are so beautiful," he said.

"And you are one of the kindest men I've known."

He dressed while I remained on the bed, propped on one elbow, the sheets gathered loosely at my waist, my bare sex open to his gaze. He sat on the edge of the mattress to tie his shoes, and I rose behind him and put my arms around his shoulders, pressing my bare breasts against his back, my lips finding the soft skin of his neck. He sighed and leaned into me.

The puncture was small. A pinprick, nothing more, and the blood that welled from it was rich and warm and tasted of sardines, cheap tobacco, and an unremarkable childhood in Aix. I took four sips and sealed the wound with my tongue. He shivered pleasantly.

"Same time in two weeks?" he murmured.

"Of course," I said. "And next time, you will fuck me, Monsieur. I insist."

He left a little unsteady on his feet, his eyes soft and unfocused. He would think of me constantly for the next several days. He would be unable to concentrate at his desk; and he would return, as they all returned, drawn by something he mistook for love.

I washed at the basin, dressed in a simple cotton frock, and went downstairs.

The common room was a large chamber on the first floor furnished with mismatched chairs. The salt air crept through the shutters from the Vieux-Port. The evening's trade was slow and the girls who were not occupied sat smoking or reading the illustrated papers. A gramophone in the corner played something anonymous and mirthful.

Margot was curled in an armchair near the window, a cigarette in one hand. She was perhaps nineteen, dark-haired, with pleasant features. She had arrived at the house three months earlier from Toulon and had attached herself to me with the tenacity of a stray cat. I knelt and gave her a small shoulder rub.

"You look pleased with yourself," she said.

"I am always pleased with myself."

She snorted and offered me a cigarette. I sat in the chair beside hers.

"I heard something today," she said. "From that antiquaire on the Rue Paradis. The one with the moustache who cries when he finishes."

"I know the one."

"He's been buying Ottoman pieces. Old ones. Miniature paintings, illuminated pages, that sort of thing. He says the market's gone mad for it. There are collectors in Paris and London paying fortunes for anything with a provenance from the old empire."

"The empire isn't done quite yet," I said. "Though why anyone would pay a fortune for items which will soon be flooding the market is anyone's guess."

"Well, maybe not real fortunes," Margot said, uncertainly. "Just a lot of money to me."

I lit a match for her fresh cigarette and said nothing.

"But here's the interesting part." She leaned closer. "He mentioned a sealed miniature portrait that's been circulating. A woman. Dark hair, pale skin, very beautiful. No one knows who she is, but the portrait itself is old; sixteenth century at least, maybe older. And every collector who's handled it has tried to buy it, and every one has been outbid by someone they can't identify."

"Did he describe the portrait in any detail?"

"Only that she looked like she was staring through you. His words. He said her eyes followed him around the room." She laughed. "He's being dramatic, of course. But the money is real."

Emine, perhaps. The Pale Lady. My maker, the woman who had watched me across centuries with the patient attention of a collector. How a seal miniature would be of any use to me was hard to fathom; the buyers on the other hand. I still needed money for a sojourn in America where she was last seen; that was my main priority.

"If you hear more," I said, keeping my voice light, "about the portrait or the buyers, I would be interested."

"Why? Are you a collector now?"

"I collect all sorts of things."

She gave me a peculiar look and returned to her coffee.

I was reaching for the evening paper when the house's maid appeared in the doorway.

"The madame wants you," she said. "In her office. Now."

"Did she say why?"

"There are men with her."

The younger girl raised her eyebrows at me. I smoothed my frock and followed the maid down the corridor.

The madame's office was at the rear of the house, a small room heavy with the scent of violet perfume. She sat behind her desk, and beside her stood a man of perhaps sixty in an expensive grey suit. Flanking the door were two gendarmes in uniform and, slightly to the side, a small inconspicuous man in a dark coat.

The man in grey turned when I entered.

"Claudette," he whispered.

I stopped in the doorway and looked at the madame, then at the gendarmes, then at the man who had spoken.

"I'm afraid there has been a mistake," I said. "My name is Stéphanie. Stéphanie Deval."

But the man was already crossing the room toward me, and the gendarmes had shifted to block the door behind me. There were tears in his eyes and he would have hugged me if I hadn't taken two steps back.

The small man was prepared for this and presented a thin dossier to the gendarmes expectantly. Inside were three sheets of typed correspondence, a letter from a private investigator's firm in Lyon, and a photograph mounted on stiff card.

The senior gendarme had clearly seen it all before and simply presented the photograph to me, face up.

The girl in it was perhaps eighteen. She stood before an ornamental balustrade in a white dress with a high lace collar, her blonde hair pinned up in the style of the pre-war years. Her face was oval, her lips set in an expression of suppressed amusement. She looked, for all intents and purposes, exactly like me.

The date stamped on the reverse was 1912. Six years ago. I had not changed by so much as a freckle since then.

"Claudette D'Arboussier," the small man said, clearly an investigator of some sort. "Monsieur D'Arboussier's daughter. She disappeared in the autumn of 1914, shortly after the mobilization. She was eighteen years old, and her parents have been searching for her for the past four years."

"Monsieur," I said, with all the gentleness I could summon, "I am very sorry for your loss. But I am not your daughter. My name is Stéphanie Deval. I was born in Lyon. I came to Marseille less than a year ago."

"Born in Lyon," the investigator repeated. He consulted his notebook. "We found no record of a Stéphanie Deval born in Lyon in the years your apparent age would suggest. No baptismal certificate, no school enrollment, no family registry. Your identity papers were issued in Geneva in 1917 by a notary who has since been struck off for forgery."

Leon's Swiss contacts, it seemed, were not quite so talented as advertised.

"Claudette," my purported father said. "Is it something we did? Why won't you recognize Papa?"

"What kind of petulant child does this to her parents?" the investigator said indignantly. "Your mother has been inconsolable for the past four years. You must return at once…"

D'Arboussier simply raised his hand to make him stop.

"This is a mistake," I said again, turning to the madame. "Tell them."

She examined her fingernails. "I'm afraid, my dear, that I have a responsibility to cooperate with the authorities. If these gentlemen believe there is a question of identity to be resolved..."

The bribe had been generous. I could see it in the way she held herself and the careful avoidance of my eyes. Whatever loyalty she felt toward the girls of her house extended only as far as her ledger book.

"Mademoiselle," the elder gendarme said, "you will accompany Monsieur D'Arboussier to his residence, where the matter of your identity can be established to everyone's satisfaction. If you are not Claudette D'Arboussier, the investigation will confirm it. If you refuse, we will be obliged to detain you on suspicion of identity fraud, given the irregularities in your papers."

I could have broken both gendarmes before they cleared their holsters. I could have put the investigator through the wall and been out the window and across the rooftops in the time it took the madame to scream. I had done worse, for less reason.

But Leon's voice was in my head. Photography. Fingerprinting. Identity papers. The Hunters are only interested in us if we interfere with the workings of this world. A woman who fought off four men and vanished into the night would attract exactly the kind of attention I had spent centuries learning to avoid.

"Very well," I said. "I will come with you. But under protest."

The automobile was a black Citroën, driven by a chauffeur in black livery. I sat in the rear beside D'Arboussier while the investigator sat in the front passenger seat. My "father" watched me with an expression that hovered between hope and terror, as though he feared that looking away for even a moment might cause me to vanish again.

I considered the possibilities as the streets of Marseille scrolled past the window.

First: coincidence. The world was full of faces, and over centuries I had worn enough of them to know that resemblance was cheaper than people supposed. My features, sculpted and influenced through feeding, tended toward a particular ideal of European beauty. It was entirely possible that the real Claudette D'Arboussier had simply possessed a face that fell within the same parameters.

Second: D'Arboussier knew what I was. This was less likely but not impossible. Rich men collected dangerous knowledge the way they collected art, and if he had encountered accounts of blood-cursed beings, he might have orchestrated this charade to capture one.

Third: Emine.

The Citroën turned through iron gates and onto a gravel drive lined with plane trees. The house at the end was substantial, a villa of pale stone with blue shutters and a terracotta roof. Bougainvillea climbed the southern wall in dense profusions and the garden was meticulously kept.

D'Arboussier stepped out first and offered me his hand. I took it, because I could see that he was trembling and it was the least I could do to settle him.

The front door opened before we reached it.

The woman who appeared was perhaps fifty-five, thin to the point of fragility, dressed in dark blue silk with a cameo at her throat. She gripped the doorframe with one hand, and her face underwent a transformation more dramatic than any I had ever performed.

"Claudette…"

Then she was across the threshold and her arms were around me and her face was pressed into my hair and she was weeping with desperate, gulping sobs.

I stood very still. Her hands clutched the fabric of my dress as though I might dissolve any moment. Her body was shaking so violently that I had to steady her or she would have fallen.

"Maman," I said, because it cost me nothing and I was, even after all these centuries, still capable of pity.

She pulled back and cupped my face in both hands.

"My darling," she whispered. "My beautiful child, you've come home."

"I'm so sorry for making you worry, Maman."

Over her shoulder, D'Arboussier stood in the doorway, his composure finally broken, tears flowing down his weathered cheeks. The investigator waited by the car, already irrelevant. This family's conviction did not require evidence. It ran deeper than documents or photographs, and would accept any miracle rather than face the alternative.

I let myself be held; moved despite myself by their happiness.

***

Two years as Claudette, and I had become her as much in mind as in body.

It was not difficult. The D'Arboussiers asked so little of me beyond presence. They did not question the gaps in my memory of childhood because they had already decided that whatever horrors had befallen their daughter had mercifully erased the worst of it. The idea of even broaching the topic of the brothel was simply unthinkable.

A fashionable alienist was consulted and he pronounced my amnesia consistent with severe emotional trauma and prescribed rest, sunshine, and the avoidance of distressing subjects. In other words, he prescribed exactly the life they already intended for me.

My father was one of the nouveau riche; an industrialist who had profited from the war, which would have been slightly problematic from a moral perspective if I had one. He had begun with a factory producing traditional Savon de Marseille made from imported olive oil, before graduating to vegetable oils and investments in petroleum products; and finally to shares in merchant ships moving goods between France and North Africa and the Levant.

He was disciplined and possibly harsh with the old Claudette; something which he clearly regretted at this point in his life. I was his only child and his wife, my mother, had not forgiven him for chasing their only daughter away from the house. He saw my rescue as a moral duty and a chance to restore something broken in his life.

And so I was chaperoned. To the opera at the Grand Théâtre, where I sat in the family box and allowed my bare shoulders to catch the light. To salons in Aix and Cannes, where I smiled and said little and was pronounced enchanting. To winters on the Riviera, where I lay on the terrace of the villa and looked out over the Mediterranean.

At all times, I played the dutiful daughter who they probably never had. I would call him Mon Père or even Monsieur before my mother chided me and insisted that I call him Papa as I always did before. I made a point to be perfectly presentable when he returned from work, waiting for him and greeting him properly every evening before dinner. Then showing interest in his work and delighting him with the knowledge I had acquired over the centuries, though always in moderation.

"It seems like my life's work is destined to be in safe hands," he would say, every time I presented an interesting idea.

In the same way, I accepted my mother's guidance in all things without question: in clothing, posture, etiquette; everything. For the first few weeks, she insisted on brushing my hair each evening in lieu of the maid. She would personally wash my hair every two weeks as if I was still a little girl, until I told her that she had to stop for fear of damaging her hands. I would offer to brush her hair in turn and sit quietly with her in the evenings, reading to her or playing the piano if she asked me to. It was the first time I had ever been a daughter to anyone, and the gradual relinquishing of responsibility and the rigid familial structure was altogether welcome.

My feeding remained as always discrete. The sons of industrialists and the younger officers of the naval garrison provided ample material. A dance at a charity ball, a whispered suggestion, a few moments alone in a darkened garden. Then a few sips that left them dazed and devoted. They would call the next morning with flowers. They would write poems of indifferent quality. They would pine for weeks, certain they had fallen in love, and I would accept their attentions with the modest reluctance expected of a well-bred young woman rediscovering society after a long absence.

The marriage was arranged in the autumn of my third year. I was now by their count, twenty-five though I still looked no older than in their photograph. My mother was reluctant but my father knew that I was of age; and he had made certain calculations.

The Comte de Montfort arrived at the D'Arboussier villa for dinner on a Thursday. He was fifty-eight and had the disposition of a man who had spent his patrimony on horses, cards, and women. His title was ancient and his estate was mortgaged. My parents were quite unaware but the syphilis he had contracted in his youth had left him with a tremor in his right hand.

D'Arboussier wanted a title for his grandchildren, the Comte wanted money, and I was the currency of exchange. And so we were married.

The Comte visited my bed perhaps once a month, which was more than I expected given his condition. He was perfunctory about the act itself and I encouraged his brevity, partly because his touch revolted me though each encounter provided an opportunity to feed. I was not especially gentle with him, and his existing ailments provided cover for his gradual wasting.

I willed my body fertile as I had done once before, coaxing the clay of my body into compliance. The first son arrived in the spring. The second followed two years later. Both were healthy, dark-haired, and bore enough of the Comte's features to satisfy the genealogists while possessing enough of mine to ensure they were beautiful. He named them Henri and Louis, because his family expected it.

Motherhood the second time was different. With Elinor, I had been naive enough to believe the arrangement could last deep into Elinor's old age. Now I knew that I would have to leave my children far earlier than I wanted, and the knowledge made each moment with them both sweeter and more terrible. I held them the way one holds a bird that has landed on your hand: lightly, aware that it will soon depart.

The Comte died in his sleep on a November morning, eight years after our wedding. The physician attributed it to the cumulative effects of his long illness and signed the certificate without hesitation. I wore black for a year and received condolences with appropriate gravity.

By that time, I had already moved back in with my parents, my two sons in tow; to their utmost delight I should add, since the move finally allowed my mother to forgive Papa for marrying me off to a corpse twice my age.

What followed was a liberation I had not anticipated. The revolution that Chanel and others had begun-the dropped waistlines, the shorter hemlines, the sleek silhouettes that did away with corsets and petticoats-suited me. A straight-cut dress forgave variations in the bust and hip that a boned bodice would have betrayed. I cut my hair to the jaw in the style of the garçonne and discovered that the androgyny it suggested was not merely fashionable but true.

I hosted salons in my father's name. Small, intimate gatherings in the drawing room of the Montfort townhouse in Paris, where politicians and industrialists and military attachés drank my champagne and discussed the topics of the day with the comfortable indiscretion of men who believed a beautiful widow incapable of understanding what she heard.

When poor Papa died two years later, I was his sole heir. The lawyers found no irregularities. My mother received the family mansion and a large annuity, and was more than happy to have me deal with the day to day aspects of the business. The estate passed to me without contest: the factories; the shipping interests; the properties in Marseille, Lyon, and Paris; the accounts in Switzerland that I had been quietly supplementing with my new reserves.

I was, by any measure, one of the wealthiest women in France.

It was exactly the kind of visibility that killed our kind.

I understood this even as I signed the documents. Leon had warned me that the Hunters took no interest in vampires who lived quietly among the proletariat. A courtesan in a Marseille brothel was invisible. A comtesse and industrialist whose photograph appeared in Le Figaro was not.

***

Maman dropped a newspaper into my lap.

The children were playing and she had closed her eyes, hands folded in her lap; a clear sign that she wanted me to read to her. My face looked up at me from the society page: Comtesse de Montfort, née D'Arboussier, at the opening of a new wing of the Musée des Beaux-Arts. 1932. The photograph was sharp and clear, the product of modern equipment that captured every detail. My face, unchanged; my skin, unlined. My eyes as bright and depthless as they had been in a photograph taken in 1914.

Someone would notice. Someone always noticed. The Chevalier de Ségur had noticed at Versailles, and that had been in the age of candlelight and gossip. Now there were cameras, newspapers, and filing cabinets full of indexed records.

Upstairs, my sons were arguing over a wooden horse. Their voices carried down through the floorboards-Henri's imperious, Louis's aggrieved-and the sound was so ordinary, so perfectly, wonderfully mundane.

I had built this. And I would have to leave it, as I had left everything.

***

Chapter 12 - 16th arrondissement, Paris, 1936

The last of them left in pairs, arm in arm, slightly drunk on champagne and their own cleverness.

I stood at the door of the townhouse on the Avenue Foch and did the needful: the double kiss, the light touch on the elbow.

"Bonsoir, Claudette. A magnificent evening as always," an actress said waving gently to me.

"You are too kind, Jeanne. The pleasure was entirely mine."

Behind me, the servants had already begun their work. The crystal glasses disappeared and the small plates bearing the remains of the canapés were spirited away toward the kitchen.

From upstairs, came the scent of my mother's perfume. Jasmine and orange blossom, the same fragrance she had worn the day she pulled me into her arms on the threshold in Marseille. Beneath it I could detect the medicinal tinctures her nurses administered three times daily. Her heart was failing; the specialist from the Hôpital Necker had suggested, bluntly, that it would take her in a matter of years. She was only sixty-eight.

I closed the front door on the last departing couple and turned to find Henri watching me from the landing.

My eldest was fourteen and already wore his father's face though the dark eyes were mine. Beside him, Louis leaned against the banister nonchalantly.

"Bed," I said.

"It's only half past ten," Henri protested.

"Bed," I repeated.

Louis, took his brother's arm and steered him toward their rooms. Henri went, though not without a backwards glance that contained both reproach and adoration. I watched them disappear down the corridor and listened until their door closed. Then I turned back to the foyer.

He was still there.

Günter Möller stood beside the sideboard, examining a small bronze by Rodin.

He had been watching my home all evening: the arrangement of rooms and the servants' movements. I had caught him studying the lock on my study door while pretending to admire a Fragonard in the hallway. He had noted which guests arrived together and which departed separately. These were not the observations of an industrialist with an interest in French manufacturing, which was how he had been introduced to me three weeks earlier at a reception at the German embassy.

"Herr Möller," I said, crossing the foyer toward him. "I thought you had left with the Beaumonts."

"Forgive me, Comtesse." He set down his glass and straightened. His French was excellent though accented. "I found myself reluctant to end such a stimulating evening. Your circle is remarkable; artists and captains of industry in the same room, and none of them at each other's throats."

"The secret is the champagne."

He laughed.

I studied him as I approached. Forty-two. His skin was slightly weathered in the way of men who spent time outdoors, but he filled out his clothes nicely, and his bearing showed no signs of the gluttony so typical of men of his class. He was quite beautiful to behold. The scent of his blood reached me before I was close enough to touch him. I touched his arm lightly.

"You must allow me to offer you one last cognac," I said. "I have a bottle of Rémy Martin that I've been saving for a guest who can appreciate it. My study is just through here."

I saw momentary surprise, a shade of suspicion. Then it passed, and he smiled.

"I would be honored, Comtesse."

I led him down the corridor toward the study door. The lock turned and the study enclosed us.

It was my favorite room in the house, and the only one I had furnished entirely to my own taste rather than the decorator's. The walls were paneled in walnut, darkened by age to the color of strong tea. Leather-bound volumes lined the shelves. I had read every one of them, though not all in this particular lifetime. A carpet from Esfahan covered the parquet floor, and the desk was Louis XV.

I crossed to the sideboard and lifted the crystal decanter.

"The Rémy Martin," I said, pouring two generous measures. "1875. A very good year, if you believe the merchants."

I could see his eyebrows rise momentarily.

"Distilled during the height of the 19th-century Phylloxera crisis," I continued

"I am quite aware of that, Comtesse, though I stand by the tongue more than the merchant," Möller said, accepting the glass. He swirled it once, inhaled, and drank. His eyes closed briefly. "Exceptional."

"I'm glad it meets with your approval."

"Your collection is impressive, Comtesse. I noticed several first editions; the Montaigne, the Rabelais. Are they for display, or do you read them?"

"I read everything. It is my principal vice."

"A modest vice for a woman of your position."

"I have others," I replied. "Tell me, Herr Möller, your factories in the Ruhr. I understand the steel industry is experiencing something of a renaissance."

"Renaissance is a generous word. Recovery, perhaps. The Führer has invested heavily in industrial capacity. There are many who see opportunity in this."

"And those who see danger?"

"Only for the enemies of the Fatherland." He met my eyes. "You understand this, I think. Your shipping interests. The routes through North Africa, the Mediterranean trade. These are not the concerns of a woman who fears complexity."

He was testing me, probing the edges of what I knew and what I might be willing to discuss.

I rose from my chair and carried my cognac to the bookshelf nearest him.

"Complexity does not frighten me," I said. "What concerns me is the man who believes he understands everything and learns too late that he understood nothing."

I turned to face him fully. Then I reached for his tie.

His breath caught. A slight dilation of his pupils, the rush of blood to the surface of his skin. The tie slid free, and I draped it over the arm of the chair.

"Comtesse…"

"Claudette," I corrected. My fingers moved to the buttons of his shirt, working them open one at a time. Beneath the starched cotton, his chest was broad, firm, and lightly furred with hair. I ran my fingers over his torso; he was absolutely delightful.

I kissed him; my tongue parting his lips, tasting and playing with him. His hands came to my waist, uncertain at first, then gripping with sudden need. I guided him backward toward the chaise, one hand flat against his bare chest, the other sliding his shirt from his shoulders.

He sat. I stood over him for a moment, letting him look. Then I drew the silk strap of my gown from my left shoulder and let the fabric fall, exposing one breast. It was, like all of me, a product of centuries of careful attention: full and firm; the nipple young and pink and already stiffening in the cool air of the study. It was not the breast of a mother of two.

"Here," I said, and guided his mouth to it.

He took the nipple between his lips with the reverence of a man who has been offered communion. I cradled the back of his head and let him suckle, his tongue circling, his breath hot against my skin. I let the other strap fall, and the gown pooled at my waist, then slid to the floor. I wore nothing beneath it save my stockings and a pair of silk step-ins. His eyes moved over me: my skin unblemished and soft like that of an eighteen year old, the waist narrow, the sex between my thighs smooth and bare.

His cock strained against his trousers unabashed.

"Take it out," I told him. "Let me see what you have for me."

He did as instructed, and I took his erection in my hand. He was already uncomfortably hard.

"Please…" he pleaded.

"Not yet," I said.

I rose and swung one leg over the chaise. Below me, his face was flushed, his lips parted, and I lowered myself onto his mouth with the brazen confidence of a cabaret performer.

His tongue found me immediately; clumsy at first, too eager, pressing too hard. I shifted my hips and guided him with gentle words as a mother might to her child. He learned quickly. The flat of his tongue dragged along my seam, parting the folds, and when he found the right pressure on the swollen bud at the apex I inhaled sharply. His hands gripped my thighs as I rocked against his face, my fingers braced on the curved back of the chaise. I could feel myself growing slick against his chin, his cheeks, the wetness gathering and flowing with each movement.

"There," I breathed. "Yes. Just there."

I leaned forward and pressed my lips to his throat and whispered, "Give me everything."

He did. And I bit down.

The skin of his neck parted beneath my teeth with the ease of ripe fruit. And I drank. His body shuddered through the last spasms of his climax, his consciousness dissolving,

The memories came with the blood.

The Rhineland. Troops crossing the Hohenzollern bridge in Cologne. The exhilaration and fervor of men who believed they were building something holy from rubble and resentment. Then: Austria, Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland marked with arrows.

Möller had attended these briefings not as a principal but as an observer, an industrialist whose steel production entitled him to a seat near the back of the room.

I drank deeper. The memories shifted, and the room changed.

The men around this table were fewer and they wore no uniforms. A symbol was embossed on the leather folder before each of them: The Vespertine Circle. Hunters. Möller was mid-ranking. A financier, not an operative. He funded expeditions, procured equipment, facilitated introductions between the Circle's leadership and sympathetic elements within the German military and intelligence services. The Abwehr connection I had suspected was real.

All his secrets were laid waste by my feeding. The Circle had existed for centuries, claiming descent from the ašipu of Akkad and the fangxiangshi (方相氏) of the Han. They had been scribes, shamans, medieval church inquisitors; all evolving into a modern network that spanned borders and ideologies. They hunted what Möller called Nachtblüter. Night-bloods, though I was hardly constrained by mere daylight.

I took as much as I needed, enough for control. Seven full swallows. His body went slack beneath me, his breathing shallow and labored. A thread of compulsion formed as it always did when I drank deeply.

When he woke again, he would obey. Completely.

I rose and dressed.

Möller lay on the chaise like a discarded marionette, his shirt open, his trousers around his knees, the puncture wounds on his neck already closing to faint pink marks that would be invisible by morning. His breathing was regular now, though his color was poor.

I poured myself a measure of cognac and sat in the chair across from him.

"Günter," I said.

His eyes opened. They were glassy, unfocused. The thrall looked back at me from behind them.

"Tell me about the Circle's operations in France. And England, if you have anything."

He crawled to my feet and told me. I crossed my right leg over my left and let him have my toes. I preferred the more assertive, masculine person he had been before, but he had to know his place; just this once.

Günter suckled on my toes with complete adoration and his words came in an uninflected stream: safe houses in Lyon and Bordeaux, a network of informants within the Catholic hierarchy, surveillance operations in Paris, Marseille, and the south. They had killed at least three of my kind in the past decade. One in Vienna, one in Prague, one in London; all had been in the higher echelons of power. The London operation had been led by a woman.

"Her name," I said.

"Charlotte Vale-McKenzie."

I set down the cognac glass because my hand had begun to tremble.

"Describe her."

"English. Perhaps thirty. Dark hair, grey eyes. Her maiden name was Vale. She chairs the Circle's British operations from a house in Kensington." He paused, his brow creasing with the effort of retrieval. "She is considered... passionate. Her great great grandmother was obsessed with the subject. Wealthy, created an esoteric society. Kept journals. Documented everything. Her name…"

Elinor.

Elinor, who had called me Mama. Elinor, whose dark curls I had smoothed from her forehead a thousand times. Elinor, who had reached for apple blossoms with small trusting fingers while I held her steady.

Of course she had kept journals. She was her father's daughter; methodical, precise. I had left Elinor to protect her. I had left her without a word and never returned; and the money I had arranged through solicitors and bankers had provided for her family for generations. But I had not considered what else I might have left behind.

"Is Charlotte Vale-McKenzie aware of my existence?" I asked.

"Unlikely," Möller said, still sucking delightedly on my toes. "The Circle has other priorities; those who would create the circumstances to feed and enrich themselves. But there are portraits and photographs from different eras; women who do not age. We have names for some of them: the Queen; the Scholar; the Beast; the Evangelist; and also La Biche; because she always runs.

"It is a blood feud. Frau Vale-McKenzie believes that your kind have tormented her family for decades; killed her ancestors Thomas and Anne Vale. She will not rest until she has put each and every one of you down."

I closed my eyes.

I could hear Maman's heartbeat; irregular, a faltering rhythm. Beside her, the night nurse turned a page of her novel. The jasmine and orange blossom perfume had settled into the fabric of the house itself, inseparable from the plaster and the wood and the air I breathed.

Helene was not my mother. And yet she was in every way that mattered for the past twenty years; in the brushing of hair, in the quiet evenings of reading and piano, in the steadfast fiction of love that we had both agreed to maintain until it ceased to be fiction entirely.

"Claudette. My daughter." she would say. "You look exactly the same as when you returned to us. Are you doing that for me?"

I could not lose her to the Hunters. I could not lose her to the war that was coming, the war I could now see in Möller's blood.

America. Leon had said Emine was there, building something new. She was always ahead of the rest of us. The war would remake Europe's borders and bureaucracies, and in the chaos, the Circle would move freely, hunting in the rubble. But in America, we would be safe. For the time being.

I stood and crossed to the study window. The Avenue Foch was dark and quiet, the chestnut trees lining the boulevard bare in the autumn chill. Somewhere out there, in a house in Kensington, a woman was studying photographs and planning how to kill me.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass.

Behind me, Möller lay curled on the carpet, sleeping the heavy sleep of the enthralled. Down the corridor, my sons dreamed whatever dreams boys dream of.

I would move Helene first. Then the boys. Then the factories, the shipping routes, the gold and other deposits; everything that could be liquidated or transferred. I would dismantle this life the way I had dismantled every life before it.

It would take years to complete, But I still had a minute to myself in this room that smelled of cognac and sex; and I would allow myself one more minute of believing that this was home.

***

Chapter 13 - Mother Courage, Marseilles, c. January 1943

The streets of Marseille were blacked out. Every window shuttered, every lamppost extinguished, the city reduced to shadow and darkness.

The Café Beaumont sat halfway down the block, its awning retracted, its doors padlocked. In the thirties, before all of this, I had hosted literary evenings in the upstairs room: poets and novelists and the occasional philosopher who believed that civilization was a permanent condition.

I walked on and turned onto the Rue de la République.

Two soldiers materialized from a doorway thirty paces ahead. They stiffened when they saw my major's uniform.

"Heil Hitler, Herr Major!" they said in unison.

I returned the salute and walked past them without breaking stride. Major Erich Brandt had a face which didn't invite conversation or interrogation. Behind me, the soldiers relaxed and continued their patrol. I listened to their footsteps recede and then I was alone again in the dark.

I found Henri's scent and followed it beyond Place de la Joliette, past shuttered warehouses and the hulks of barges tied up along the quays.

The chandler's warehouse was a squat building of grey stone wedged between a rope works and a coal depot. A wooden staircase clung to its exterior wall, leading to a door on the upper floor. I climbed the stairs and through the door, I could hear the scratch of a pen on paper. My son's breathing.

I shifted slowly back into Claudette and opened the door without knocking.

The room was perhaps twelve feet square, lit by a single desk lamp. The walls were bare plaster, stained with damp. The desk itself was grey steel, a half-eaten meal on a tin plate sat to my son's left. A Wehrmacht-stamped ledger lay open to a page of factory output figures.

Henri looked up from behind this wreckage. His dark hair was cut short and there were shadows beneath his eyes.

When he saw the uniform, he seemed surprised for a moment; then he nodded to himself, as if my presence in this form had settled something in his mind.

"I wondered when you would come," he said.

I removed the peaked cap and set it on the corner of his desk,

"Henri," I said.

"Maman."

He did not rise. He did not reach for me.

"I wanted to come earlier," I said.

"But you didn't," he said, sitting back on his chair. "So I did what I could."

He said it without self-pity, which made it worse.

"Well, do you want to know what has happened since you left?" He stood up and lit a cigarette. I could see that his fingers were shaking.

I nodded.

"When the armistice was signed," he began, "the Wehrmacht requisition office gave us seventy-two hours to convert the Villeurbanne production line to their specifications. Seventy-two hours or they would seize the factory outright and install their own management.

"I signed the conversion orders. I met with their procurement officers and I shook their hands. I redirected forty percent of our output to German supply chains: bearings, machined parts, small components for vehicles. In exchange, I retained operational control of the main factory in Lyon and the workforce."

"You don't need to do this anymore, Henri. You can leave. With me."

I took a step towards him but he distanced himself, moving towards the curtained window behind his desk.

"You don't want to hear about your old employees?" he said. "You hired some of them yourself."

"Yes," I said. "Tell me."

"Every quarter, they send new forms. Names, ages, occupations. Anyone flagged as a security risk-communists, anyone with the wrong surname -was subject to conscription for the Service du travail obligatoire."

"And Pelletier?"

"I told the auditor that he was a simpleton who couldn't spell his own name, let alone read Marx. He still works at the foundry."

"Madame Lévy?"

"Our bookkeeper. Yes, I listed her under a false name on the payroll. She stayed on the books for fourteen months until someone in La Résistance could arrange passage. She's in Switzerland now, or so I'm told."

"You did a good thing," I said, but he wasn't really listening or looking for my affirmation.

"The Villeurbanne annex," he said. "I had to sign it over to Rheinmetall's French subsidiary. It employed sixty-three workers. When Rheinmetall took control, thirty-eight of them were transferred to factories in the Ruhr. I don't know how many are still alive.

"That is what I did," he said.

I had listened without interrupting for the most part, but beneath the composure, I was crumbling. The knowledge that my son who was barely a man had been forced to make these calculations at all; had signed forms that determined whether people lived or were shipped east was more than I could bear.

I decided to say it plainly because there was no other way about it; and the events were still fresh on my mind.

"Henri," I said. "Louis is dead. He was killed at Bir Hakeim in June. In Libya."

Henri's jaw tightened and he turned his face toward the window.

"What was that fool doing in Africa?" His voice cracked. "Why did you let him go?"

"He volunteered. I could not have stopped him even if I had known in time." I did not tell him that I had been there when it happened.

"You could have stopped him. You could have stopped anything."

Henri's hand pressed flat against the desk, as if he were trying to hold something in place. When he turned back, he wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist in a single quick motion.

"He was always the good one," Henri said.

I waited until his breathing steadied. Then I shifted.

"The war is already decided," I said, as calmly as I could. "The German Sixth Army was encircled at Stalingrad last November. Three hundred thousand men. The Russians will push west soon, and they will not stop until they reach Berlin. It's only a matter of time now."

Henri watched me with the same careful blankness he had worn when I entered.

"When that happens," I continued, "every name on every requisition form, every signature on every collaboration document, becomes a liability. The liberation will not be gentle, Henri. Our people have a long memory for traitors and a short one for context."

I watched him closely but he betrayed nothing. "I have a route prepared. Spain first; I have contacts in Barcelona who can move us across the border. Then Lisbon, where a ship departs for New York every ten days. I have the papers, for both of us."

He was quiet for a long time.

"No," he said.

"Henri."

"I've heard from a contact in the French National Police. Bousquet is planning an operation in Marseille. A cleansing, like scrubbing a kitchen floor. Dissidents, Jews, vagrants; anyone with suspect papers." He pulled on his cigarette and turned it between his fingers. "I still have access to transit documents. I still have contacts at the prefecture. I can get papers for perhaps a dozen people, maybe more, before the operation begins."

"And after?"

"After, I'll manage," he said. "Call it penance. I'm sure you are pleased to hear that I haven't lost all my conscience."

The silence that followed was the kind that precedes an earthquake. Henri's fingers were still clinging to the glowing remains of his stub, but they had gone white at the knuckles.

"You never told us," he said. "But Louis and I both suspected. We used to talk about it when we were boys, after you'd gone to bed. How Maman never got sick. How Maman never aged. How Maman's skin was perfect in every photograph, in every light, at every hour. Louis thought you were a saint. Some kind of miracle." He stubbed out his cigarette. "I was less romantic."

He reached beneath the desk and produced a slim leather notebook, its cover cracked with age. He set it between us but did not open it.

"I've done my own research," he said. "Our German friends are especially concerned about this sort of thing, as it turns out. There's an entire department-SS-Ahnenerbe, the ancestral heritage office-that collects folklore and artifacts related to vampirs. They consider it a matter of racial science."

I flipped the notebook on to its front. A journal from my London years, written in a cipher that mixed French with Ottoman Turkish. I had thought it lost in the move from Marseilles to Paris.

"You're forty-seven this year, Maman," Henri said. He gestured at my face, the skin luminous even under the merciless white of the desk lamp. The face of a woman no older than thirty. "Look at yourself."

I shook my head.

"Or have these slips been your way of gently letting us know the truth?" he added.

I could have lied. I had lied for nearly four hundred years, to lovers and children and kings and priests, and each lie had come as easily as breathing. I had lied to Thomas, my gentle engineer who planted apple trees. I had lied to Elinor, my daughter, whose dark curls I could still feel beneath my fingertips. I had lied to Maman, and to every man and woman whose blood I had taken while whispering endearments.

But I could not lie to Henri. Not now.

"I understand," Henri said, when I did not deny it. "I haven't even asked you how a woman of forty-seven, a socialite at that, managed to get past German checkpoints and into the …tat Français." He tilted his head. "Or how she planned to bring her son safely out. By persuasion? By charm?" He paused. "Or by something else?"

He knew what I could do, the way children guess at the adult secrets that shape their world. He was taller than me by several inches, and in the dim light he looked less like the boy I had held against my chest and more like a man who had been forged in a furnace I could not control.

"Please, Henri." My voice broke on his name. "I'm begging you. Your mother is begging you. Please come with me."

His eyes were moist again, and I could see the effort it cost him not to look away.

"Henri, I can't lose both of you. Please. Come with me."

"You've already lost me, Maman."

I shook my head desperately. "No, no, no. Don't… don't say that."

"Then take my will, Maman," he said. "It's the only thing you haven't already taken."

I looked at him, wild-eyed. Surely he knew that I would never do such a thing. There were limits, and those limits were all that was left of my humanity.

My hand moved toward him, a small, involuntary motion, the hand of a mother reaching for her child across a table, across an apple orchard, across an unbridgeable distance. My fingers extended, trembling slightly, reaching for his wrist, any part of him that I could hold.

Then they curled back. My hand returned to my side, the fingers closing into a loose fist that pressed against the seam of the major's trousers.

I picked up the peaked cap from the corner of the desk and settled it on my head. I turned to the door.

"Maman," Henri said.

I stopped. I did not turn.

The silence filled with everything he might have said-I love you or Don't go or I forgive you-and everything I might have said in return.

I opened the door and stepped into the stairwell. The bolt slid home behind me and I stood there on the landing for a moment, listening to it echo.

Then I descended the stairs, and the darkness swallowed me whole.

***

Chapter 14 - The Descendants, New York, c 1980

His hand was in my hair before I could catch my breath.

Tim yanked me off the mattress and onto my knees on the stained carpet. The fluorescent tube above the bathroom door cast everything in a sickly yellow wash that made his skin look jaundiced. He was already hard, his cock jutting from the open fly of his jeans, and he gripped the back of my skull with both hands and shoved himself into my mouth.

"Open wider, you dirty whore," he grunted.

I opened. He pushed deep, well past my tongue into my throat. The spit gathered at the corners of my lips and spilled down my chin. I knew he liked the mess and the sheer obscenity of it. His hips snapped forward and I took him to the root, my nose pressed against the wiry hair of his groin. He held himself there until my eyes watered.

Then he pulled out and slapped his cock across my face. The shaft was slick with my saliva and it left wet streaks across my cheekbone. He tilted my chin up with one hand, admiring his work.

"Fucking beautiful," he said.

He hit me with it again, harder this time, the swollen head catching the corner of my mouth. I looked up at him through the tangle of my bleached hair, which was half-plastered to my face with spit and sweat.

Then he grabbed my shoulder and spun me around, pushing me onto all fours. I allowed myself to relax, aware of what was coming next. He bunched my skirt up around my waist and entered me in a single hard thrust that drove the air from my lungs. I moaned. I couldn't help it. Whatever else Tim was, he fucked like a man with nothing to lose.

"That's it, bitch," he said. His fingers knotted in my hair, pulling my head back until my spine curved. "Take it."

He slammed into me hard enough that it shook the bed frame against the wall. Then he came inside me with a strangled groan, his warm seed flooding my cunt.

"Clean me up," he said, pulling out and rolling onto his back on the bed. "And make sure that you enjoy it."

I turned and took him in my mouth again. He was softening, slick with both of us, and I licked him clean; moaning and smiling as if I was having the best meal in my life.

"You missed a spot," he said, pointing to his balls.

I took each of them into my mouth, removing any residue cum on them. Then I swallowed, wiped my lips, and sat back on my heels.

Tim reached for the nightstand drawer.

I knew what was in it before he opened it.

"Don't," I said.

"Piss off, Stella."

"You're killing yourself."

He had already tied off his arm, the tourniquet clenched between his teeth while he worked the lighter beneath the spoon.

"I said don't."

"And I said piss off." The needle found its mark, and he pressed the plunger. His eyes rolled back. His jaw slackened. For a moment he looked almost peaceful.

"You stupid bastard," I said quietly.

He should have gone under for at least a half hour but he soon came back to himself. His supply had clearly been cut with more sugar than actual product. A fucking idiot; a fucking idiot that I once thought I loved or at least liked enough to shack up with.

Something shifted in his face, the non-existent chemical warmth curdling into aggression.

"Don't you fucking lecture me," he snarled. He lurched off the bed and swung at me with the flat of his hand.

I caught his wrist and redirected him with as much effort as one might use to close a door. He hit the far wall shoulder first and slid to the floor.

He stared up at me, panting despite the junk in his veins, his mouth open.

I stood over him and felt the hunger coil in my belly. His pulse was visible at his throat. It would be easy. He coughed and his ribs showed through his skin like the scaffolding of a tent. He was dying, another epidemic of consumption was crawling through the land; and the smack was his only comfort.

He looked like Maman before she died. She had gone the same way; cancer and morphine. She had died believing I was her daughter, and in every way that mattered, I was.

And the rest? Louis' body was somewhere in North Africa. Henri survived. He had run the factories under Vichy, made the decisions required of him to survive, and after the Liberation he had stood before a tribunal and been acquitted but not forgiven. He was sixty now, living quietly in Normandy with his wife. I sent money through intermediaries, from accounts that bore names he would not recognize. He lacked for nothing except a mother.

I carried Tim, still wide-eyed, to the bed where he quickly dozed off.

I moved to the cracked mirror above the sink. The face that looked back at me was twenty-two, perhaps twenty-three. I had bleached my hair platinum and cropped it jagged with kitchen scissors. Hasan ibn Selim. Stefánia. Stéphanie de Villon. Anne Vale. Stephen Vale. Claudette D'Arboussier. Comtesse de Montfort. Now Stella Vane, guitarist and backing vocalist for a band that played to crowds of fifty in venues that smelled of stale beer and vomit.

Love hadn't helped me forget. The abuse hadn't made me forget.

I pulled on the torn fishnets, working them up over my thighs. My leather jacket was worn and heavy with band pins, my boots steel-toed and scarred.

In the mirror, Tim stirred.

"We're on in two hours," I said. "Get yourself together."

Then I grabbed my guitar case and walked out into the hallway.

***

Charlotte Vale-McKenzie was seventy-eight years old but carried herself like a much younger woman.

I had chosen a corner table and was wearing a nondescript trench coat over a black dress, my bleached punk hair hidden beneath a silk scarf.

She saw me and crossed the terrace, walking stick in hand.

"Miss Vane, I presume," she said.

"Stella will do. Tea? Or would you prefer coffee?"

I counted three men: one at the neighboring table pretending to read the Times; one standing near the entrance with a newspaper folded under his arm; and a third at the corner of the block, leaning against a mailbox.

"Your men are very professional," I said.

"They should be. I trained most of them personally."

"I did request to speak alone." I brought the teacup to my lips.

By the time I took my third sip, the man at the entrance was gone. At the corner of the block, the mailbox stood alone. And the third man at the neighboring table had left his coffee half-finished and had begun a leisurely stroll south on Madison.

Charlotte's jaw tightened, but she did not panic. She turned back to me with a composure I had to admire.

"Compulsion," she said. "You fed on them."

I didn't answer her.

"Then you could take me now. Make me your puppet. Add me to your collection."

"I could."

"But you won't." She reached for her tea and poured some milk with steady hands. "Because if you make me your thrall, my people have standing orders to kill me on sight."

She said it as a simple statement of fact. The Vespertine Circle had survived for centuries by treating sentiment as a vulnerability to be eliminated.

She set down her spoon. "What do you want?"

Even with the passage of years, I could see the traces of Anne and Elinor on her face. She was my blood, however distant, however hostile.

"Thomas Vale did not die of consumption," I said.

"Elinor Vale, his daughter, thought as much," she said.

"He died because his wife loved him," I continued. "Because she lay beside him every night and drew the life from him without knowing it. The consumption was a convenient explanation, and the doctors of the time knew no better."

"His wife. You mean Anne Vale."

"Yes."

"Anne Vale, who disappeared without a word," Charlotte continued. "Who left behind a legacy that Elinor spent the rest of her life trying to decipher."

"The very same," I said, "She left to save her daughter from the same fate as her husband. And arranged finances through solicitors to ensure that Elinor and her children would never want for anything."

I removed the silk scarf from my head. My bleached hair caught the sunlight, but it was not the hair Charlotte was looking at. It was the face beneath it.

"I am Anne Vale," I said. "Your great-great-great-grandmother. And I killed Thomas because I loved him too much. And I left Elinor because it was the only thing I could do to protect her."

Charlotte stared at me. Her teacup sat forgotten in her hand, the steam rising between us.

"Elinor believed whatever took her father took you as well," she said.

"Elinor was half right. I was her mother, and I was something else besides."

The silence between us was filled with the sound of traffic, the clink of other people's china and the vast, unbridgeable distance of two centuries.

"Not all of us deserve to die," I said. "Some of us have only ever tried to love the people we were given, and failed."

Charlotte set down her tea. She gripped the silver handle of her walking stick and rose from her chair.

"This changes nothing," she said. But her voice had lost its edge.

She walked away across the terrace without looking back, her stick clicking against the flagstones.

I sat with my cold tea and watched her go as if she was somebody else's child.

***

The paintings hung in pools of muted light against red walls. Unfashionable Old Masters mostly: a middling Titian, a Caravaggio of questionable provenance, and an oil by Lucas Cranach were among the highlights.

I moved through the preview gallery with a glass of champagne I had no intention of drinking, my heels clicking softly on the marble floor. I had changed for the occasion: a black sheath dress, my hair now dark and straight. The punk wardrobe was folded in a suitcase at the Waldorf Astoria. Stella Vane, punk rocker, did not attend stodgy gallery shows.

She was standing in front of the painting by Cranach when I found her. Dr. Ilona Harrow-or Leyla or Leon-wore a tailored jacket of dark blue over a cream silk blouse, her hair cut in a sharp bob. She was presenting female again for God knows what reason.

"You've got nerve showing up here," she said, without turning around.

"And a lovely evening to you too, Ilona."

She turned and gave me a fast once over.

"Back to your usual self I see. Too much of a taste for riches and decadence?" She took a sip of her champagne. "Emine has spoiled you. Just like she spoils herself."

"Emine hasn't spoken to me in over a century."

"That you know of." She gestured at the Cranach. "This was hers. Half the lots in this auction are hers or passed through her hands at some point. She's liquidating. Maybe she wants to buy you a present."

I studied the painting, a hitherto unknown version of The Procuress, probably of lesser quality than the one in the Georgian National Museum.

"You think she arranged the D'Arboussier business," I said.

Ilona tilted her head, a mannerism she had carried across centuries from Leyla to Leon.

"A wealthy French family loses their daughter in 1914. Four years later, a private investigator locates a woman of identical appearance working in a Marseille brothel. The resemblance is perfect. The family's gratitude is boundless. And a vampire who had been living hand to mouth suddenly finds herself installed in a villa with access to shipping networks, industrial wealth, and social connections that span the Mediterranean." She paused. "It would be just like her to do so. Did it happen on your birthday perhaps?"

Ilona had told me on more than one occasion that she found the daughters of Emine to be positively insufferable.

"Impossible," I countered. "She can't control what form I choose to take. Unless… your Swiss contact was compromised."

Illona raised her eyebrows.

"The real Claudette," I said. "What happened to her? Do you know?"

"Dead, I suspect. Probably before the war." She shrugged. "Emine is patient. We both know that."

I thought of Papa weeping in the madame's office. His tears had been real. His love had been real. The entire edifice of the Claudette years, built on a foundation of genuine human grief that Emine had identified and exploited.

"She's a monster," I said.

"And yet you loved them. Your parents I mean; you told me so," Ilona corrected. "And she is your maker, you have no right to complain."

"Enough with the potter and clay analogies. Emine isn't God."

She turned back to the painting, and we stood in silence for a moment. Around us, the preview crowd murmured and sipped. A man in a pinstripe suit raised his catalogue toward the Caravaggio and whispered something to his companion about investment potential.

Then I felt it.

A resonance in my blood. Ilona stiffened beside me, her champagne glass arrested halfway to her lips. We both turned toward the gallery entrance.

The woman who entered was Chinese, in her forties, dressed in a silk blouse of deep burgundy with a mandarin collar. She approached us directly, with no pretense of browsing.

Ilona exhaled. "It's only you," she said.

"Did you think someone was coming to eat you?" the Chinese woman said, elbowing Ilona's upper arm.

"And what would be the point of that?" Ilona replied. "Stella, this is Mei Xue [美雪]."

The woman inclined her head. "Āimǐnà's child," she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"埃米娜," Mei Xue repeated. "Your maker's name, or the one she used when we first met. It was some centuries ago. She was trading porcelain in Chang'an, and I was still pretending to be a concubine in the court of Emperor Xuanzong." A faint smile crossed her lips. "A tedious assignment, though the poetry was exceptional."

"Tang Dynasty," Ilona murmured beside me, as though offering a footnote.

"You knew Emine," I said.

"Knew her. Argued with her. Avoided her where possible." Mei Xue's eyes were fixed on Illona.

Ilona touched my elbow and steered me a few steps from the nearest patrons. Mei Xue followed, and the three of us formed a small constellation beneath a small Rembrandt etching.

"You need to disappear," Ilona said. Her voice had dropped the wry amusement. "The Hunters are active. Charlotte Vale-McKenzie may have left you standing in that café, but she will not leave you standing forever. What you did during the war, the thrall you made; it's too much, Stella. You've forgotten the first rule."

"I haven't forgotten anything."

"Then act like it." She glanced at Mei Xue. "Our sister has resources in the East. Networks that the Vespertine Circle hasn't penetrated. If you're willing to let go of the leather jacket and the electric guitar for a decade or two, she can help you become someone the Hunters cannot find."

Mei Xue regarded me dubiously.

"I have a place in Singapore," she said. "Quiet. Beautiful. Far from the concerns of Europeans who believe they invented immortality."

I looked across at the Cranach one last time but Mei Xue tapped me on the shoulder.

"That isn't the one for you," she said, opening a catalogue and pointing at one of the lots. "This is what Āimǐnà wants you to buy."

I looked down where her finger was: an 1863 first pressing of Goya's Disasters of War, whole and intact. $20,000 high estimate without the juice.

"I'll think about it," I said.

"Think quickly," Ilona replied.

She kissed both my cheeks and then both she and Mei were gone, absorbed into the gallery crowd as smoothly as blood dissolving in water.

***

Chapter 15 - The Book Critics, Singapore, c. 1982

The girl appeared in the doorway like a wet cat.

She was nine, maybe ten, school uniform plastered to her small frame. White blouse gone translucent, pinafore dark with water, white socks soaked through inside canvas shoes. She clutched her school bag to her chest with both arms as though it contained state secrets rather than a pencil case and a maths workbook.

She slipped down the far aisle, squeezed herself into the gap between two shelves, pulled her knees up to her chin, and opened a book she had clearly chosen before hand. A small puddle began to form beneath her.

She had first appeared two months ago, locked out of her flat because she'd forgotten her keys, with nowhere to go until her parents finished work.

As for myself, I was where I usually was from Monday to Saturday-behind a counter re-stickering returns.

The shop occupied a narrow slot on the second floor of Bras Basah Complex; a few walls of wooden shelving lined deep with dog-eared paperbacks: Danielle Steele, Sidney Sheldon, and Jackie Collins on one side; Ludlum, Clavell, and le Carré on the other; and the children's section crammed into the back corner where the spines of the Famous Five, Secret Seven, and Nancy Drew were arranged in order of publication.

It was Mei Xue's of course, but I got to keep all the "profits" after rent. She had set me up here twelve months ago with a lease, an awesome inventory, and instructions to be boring. "No salons," she had said. "No industrialists. No champagne. Just sell books and be nobody."

The shop operated on a rental system: buy a book, return it within a week for a partial refund. The girl had never paid for anything. The New Yorker in me almost told her: "This isn't a library, kid." But I let it pass.

After about ten minutes I set down the pricing gun, picked up a stack of returns that needed reshelving, and drifted down the aisle on the pretext of straightening the children's section. I slotted a Hardy Boys back into its place and glanced down at the cover in the girl's hands.

The Crooked Bannister.

"You should skip that one," I said. "It's kind of stupid."

She looked up, not exactly surprised at my critique. This wasn't the first time I had commented on her reading choices.

"The robot is fun," she said.

I considered this. The robot was, admittedly, not the worst thing about The Crooked Bannister.

"Hmm," I said. I reached up to the shelf above her and pulled down a copy of The Mystery at Lilac Inn and held it out to her.

She eyed it with open suspicion. The look on her face suggested I had offered her a plate of vegetables.

"That one's for old people," she said.

I raised an eyebrow. "Are you calling me old?"

She regarded me with a slight frown. "All aunties are old," she said.

I pursed my lips for a moment, then let out a small chuckle. She was right of course; and The Mystery at Lilac Inn was a teensy bit racist. I set the book on the shelf beside her, within easy reach, and went back to the counter without another word.

The rain continued. She read. I worked.

It was late afternoon when the door burst open and a woman stumbled through it, umbrella dripping.

"Xiao Lin!" she called. "Xiǎo Lín! Nǐ zài nǎlǐ?"

The girl scrambled to her feet, remembering to return The Crooked Bannister to where she found it. Her mother spotted her and the relief that crossed her face was immediately replaced by fury. She seized the girl's hand and began scolding in rapid Mandarin.

I came around the counter, picked up The Mystery at Lilac Inn from the shelf where I had left it, and held it out.

The girl looked at me. Then at the book. Then at her mother, who was already pulling her toward the exit; then took it with her free hand and pressed it to her chest. They were halfway down the stairs when the girl twisted back to look at me over her shoulder.

I lifted one hand in a brief wave.

I stood behind the counter for a moment, my hand still raised. Then I lowered it and picked up the pricing gun and went back to my stickers.

***

Chapter 16 - The ingénue, Paris, c. 1990

The fifth casting of the day took almost two hours.

I had changed out of my sneakers into heels the moment I arrived; then stood in line with the rest of them, my portfolio beside me. By the time my turn came up, there were fourteen girls in the waiting area, all of them smelling of desperation and hunger.

As for myself, I was seventeen on paper, with a body that fulfilled industry expectations: sharp collarbones; ribs faintly countable through my shirt; almost prepubescent in form. The industry wanted girls who looked like they might snap in a strong wind, and I had obliged.

"Samantha Petit."

I stood, tucked my portfolio under my arm, and walked through the door.

A single casting agent in a charcoal turtleneck held court behind a wooden table, flanked by her assistants. She did not look up. I stopped at the mark on the floor, exchanged a few pleasantries. My manager said that they were looking for girls with a good personality though all that really meant in reality was girls with the right look and who were thin enough to fit the clothes.

The agent nodded expectantly, and I walked.

Away from them first, to the far wall, then back. The agent marked something on her clipboard. "Fitting," she said, and a woman with a fringe gestured me towards the adjoining room.

The first outfit was a Lagerfeld reimagination of the house staple: a skirt suit in candy-pink tweed, the hemline shortened to mid-thigh, the jacket cropped and collarless with gold-chain trim at the pockets. They dressed me with the brisk efficiency of stable hands tacking a horse. The tweed was heavier than it looked, beautifully constructed. I walked in it. The agent made another mark.

Back behind the partition. The suit came off and the evening gown went on: blue velvet, panels of silk chiffon at the sides that showed my flanks, mesh inserts at the décolletage scattered with seed pearls.

I walked again. The agent nodded and her assistant confirmed my contact details.

They brought me to a second changing room further down the hall: smaller, windowless, lit by a single floor lamp. A copy of a Louis XVI fauteuil armchair sat in the corner, its gilt frame incongruous against the concrete walls. Three assistants waited: two women I had not seen before and one of the assistants from the casting room.

They began removing the gown. Their hands were practiced, but as the silk chiffon slid from my arms, something shifted in the quality of their touch. The one behind me smoothed the gown's bodice with a palm that pressed too long against my ribs. Another let her fingertips trail the length of my bare arm with the unhurried deliberation of someone appraising livestock. The third knelt to unpin the hem and, as she did, ran her thumb along the inside of my ankle.

Then I felt it, a faint sting at the base of my neck. A needle, delivered through a ring-mounted pin. The compound entered my bloodstream and was metabolized instantly. A compliance drug.

I let my eyes go soft. My posture loosened and I let myself fall into their arms. I gave them exactly what they expected.

Their faces first. A woman with a severe-fringe appeared to be the main handler; mid-thirties, a scar at her left ear. The second was younger, dark-haired, with the posture of a former dancer. The third was in her thirties, tall and gaunt in a way that suggested she had once been one of us. All three shared the same quality behind their eyes: a flatness, the particular vacancy of a mind that had been drunk from and refilled with instructions. Thralls.

"Trop parfaite," the dark-haired one whispered.

"Madame will want to see her," the handler replied.

"Is she still awake?" the gaunt one asked.

The handler turned to her. "Go watch the door."

The gaunt woman slipped out. The other two turned back to me.

They stripped me completely and arranged my body in the Louis XVI chair as if I were a doll being posed for a portrait. The dark-haired one lifted my left leg and draped it over the armrest, opening me entirely. They examined me with the impersonal attention of horse traders inspecting teeth.

"No marks," the handler said, running a finger along the inside of my thigh. "No scarring. No stretch marks. The skin is…" She paused. Her jaw tightened. "Flawless."

"Elle a le corps d'une chienne," the dark-haired one said. She has the body of a bitch.

The handler cupped my left breast and squeezed, her fingers pressing deep enough to leave marks on anyone whose skin did not heal in seconds. "Boyish tits on a girl who probably opens her legs for anyone with a camera." She released me and wiped her hand on her skirt in mock disgust.

I heard a polaroid being taken.

The dark-haired one was staring at the juncture of my spread thighs. She reached down and flicked my clitoris with her middle finger, a sharp, contemptuous snap; then roughly forced two fingers into my vagina.

"A slut. Built for one thing," she muttered. "Madame picks them like this. Always like this."

"Keep your voice down," the handler said. But she didn't disagree.

Then they pulled back. I heard them gathering the discarded gown, folding it with care-the couture, at least, deserved respect. Then they threw a rough wool blanket over me and were gone.

I lay in the chair with my left leg draped over the gilded armrest, my body half exposed to the empty room. I held the stillness for thirty seconds, cataloging what I had learned.

Three thralls. A handler with a network. A "Madame" who selected girls by physical perfection and used fashion castings as a procurement system. The jealousy was real, which meant the thralls retained enough of themselves to feel, which meant their maker was either careless or cruel.

I dressed myself, waited for the hallway to empty, then left.

Outside, the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was doing what it always did: selling beautiful things to people who believed that beauty could be bought. Which was not completely untrue.

I stepped into the October air and felt the hunger stir.

***

The flat on the Rue de la Roquette had been arranged by Mei Xue and was four flights up a stairwell. Two single beds, a hotplate, a window that looked onto a brick wall close enough to touch if you leaned out.

Tammy Briggs was on her third cup of instant coffee and her first cigarette of the evening; seated cross-legged on her bed in a cotton slip. Her shoulder blades jutted through the fabric and her ribs showed even more than mine. She had been two years with Mei Xue's agency.

"I may have got one," I said, setting my portfolio against the wall.

"Which one?"

"Chanel. What about you?"

"Nothing firm but I'm booking more compared to last fashion week. So I'm fine," she said, though she didn't seem that fine. "The last casting was the worst. He didn't even look at me. He just marked something and waved me on. I might as well have been a coat rack."

Tammy laughed, and for a moment she seemed like the girl who arrived in Paris two weeks ago, fifteen pounds heavier and crying because she knew she would be turning twenty in two months time.

I crossed to the hotplate and filled the kettle.

"Coffee?" I asked.

Tammy nodded; I knew she needed the caffeine to reduce her appetite, which wasn't ideal but preferable to inducing vomiting after a meal. While the water heated, I set a baguette on the counter near Tammy's elbow. She glanced at it and looked away.

I had seen famine. Real famine; the kind that followed sieges and scorched-earth campaigns, that turned villages into open graves. This was something different; a famine of the will.

The bread sat untouched on the counter but she took the cup of coffee I offered.

I changed out of my tights and crawled into bed with her. We could have been twins apart from the differences in hair color: faux prepubescent girls with flat chests, skin stretched tightly over bone.

I cuddled up to her back. "As a man, it was always about strength," I said, half to myself. "For a woman, it's this. But beauty for a woman is power. Every door is open to you when a woman is beautiful."

"Mm." Tammy was staring at the brick wall through the window. "And neither of us has enough of it, apparently."

I didn't correct her; she had heard too many casting agents and managers recount the flaws in her body and "personality" to think otherwise.

"I should wash my hair," Tammy said, without moving.

"You should eat that bread."

"I had lunch."

She hadn't. I knew because she had been at castings since nine and the agencies didn't feed you and the cafés near the Faubourg were too expensive.

"I could force you…" I said whimsically.

"Right…"

I let it go. You could not force someone to eat any more than you could force them to live. And Tammy was nearly twenty, a young woman who knew exactly what she needed to do to get what she wanted.

At half past eight, Tammy swung her legs off the bed and reached for her coat.

"Going out," she said, buttoning it with fingers that fumbled slightly. "Some girls from last year's Lanvin show. Drinks at a place in the eleventh."

"Which place?"

"New one. Very exclusive apparently. Members only sort of thing."

"Have fun," I said.

"Always do, darling."

Mei Xue had told me that this would happen; asked me to look into it because I had a bit of French.

Tammy left. I listened to her footsteps descend the four flights, then the street door opening and closing.

Then I pulled on my coat and followed her out into the wet Paris night.

***

I followed at a distance of thirty meters, close enough to keep her coat in sight.

She turned onto the Rue Oberkampf, then turned into a narrow courtyard through a passage between two buildings. At the far end, a door in the stone wall stood open just enough to reveal a slice of interior: low red light, the gleam of polished wood. Tammy disappeared through it, and the door closed behind her.

I waited.

The presence came before any sound or sight. Another immortal; close, younger than myself by a significant margin. The signal was uncontrolled, which told me the creature inside was either arrogant or untrained.

I pressed my back against the wall and did what Emine had once done to me: I folded my presence inward, dampened it. It was a trick I had spent decades learning, to become a shadow that cast no shadow.

Twenty minutes. Then a side door opened in the alley, and a woman stepped out.

She was dark-haired and olive-skinned, appearing to be in her late twenties. Her coat was too large for her frame and cut in a style that belonged to a decade earlier; an army surplus piece, perhaps, or something scavenged from a charity bin. She moved with unguarded confidence, and she did not sense me standing six feet away in the dark.

I stepped out of the shadows.

"You're the one running the girls," I said, in French.

She moved first; faster than any human, her fingers shooting toward my throat like razors. I caught her wrist and pulled it firmly behind her, then kicked her legs from out under her. I leaned over and drank from the base of her neck.

The memories came in fragments, unprocessed by the centuries of reflection that eventually organized creatures like us.

A French soldier in the mud outside Zaragoza, the stink of powder and shit, the Spanish heat. A woman beneath him, her mantilla and bodice torn but seemingly unafraid, smiling curiously at him. Then the same woman's face above him, beautiful and terrifying, her mouth all red. Then waking in a body that was rearranging itself. Weeks of confusion, rape upon rape by his fellow French soldiers who do not recognize him. Years in a cheap Spanish brothel, learning to hunt and feed. Then the long trek back to France; decades of feeding without understanding, killing without intention, creating thralls from the wreckage of her appetites.

I released her wrist.

Clémence did not run. She stood in the alley glaring at me, her hands balled into fists.

"Peace, sister," I said. "I understand your situation. I want to help."

"You're going to tell me to stop."

"No, to be careful." I leaned against the alley wall and crossed my arms. "Your body has needs, but I've buried two of our kind who thought they were careful. Too many bodies, too many people who notice."

"I don't kill them," Clémence said. "I wouldn't do that. They're only girls, like… me."

"The thralls," I said. "The girls you recruit through that door. You don't kill them, but you take their will and replace it with your own. You tell yourself it is a kindness because they're still breathing. But the real reason is that you don't know how to do otherwise. I can teach you."

Her jaw clenched.

"The last one you took," I pressed. "Did you learn her name? The family she left behind to be with you?"

The silence that followed was its own answer.

"In 1713, I fed from a child in Austria. A plague orphan. I told myself it was mercy, that I was easing her passage. And perhaps I was. But I felt her fear. She was four years old and she was terrified." I paused. "I still feel it. Three hundred years, and I can still feel her fingers clutching at my sleeve. But only because I want to; because I want to make each life weigh enough to notice."

Clémence's shoulders dropped but she was still defiant.

"A pretty story," she said.

"A hundred years from now," I said, "you will either be someone who chose how to feed, or someone the feeding chose. The first kind can sit in a café, feel the hunger in her belly and not act. The second kind becomes the hunger entirely.

"Taking without choosing makes you a slave." I held out my hand. "Let me show you what freedom looks like."

From inside the club, Tammy's laugh floated out through the stone wall. It was bright and unguarded and entirely unaware of what moved in the dark around her.

Clémence flinched at the sound.

She did not take my hand. But she nodded.

I lowered my hand and turned toward the lit street at the end of the alley. Clémence fell into step beside me. Behind us, the red door stayed closed, and Tammy's laugh faded into the wet stone and the night air.

***

Chapter 17 - The Visit, Normandy, 1998

The neighbor who let me in was a stout woman in a wool cardigan.

"He has been sleeping most of the morning," she said. "The doctor was here at ten."

The room was small. A single window with white cotton curtains let in a flat, milky light. A bedside table held a glass of water, a row of prescription bottles, and a small framed photograph of a woman. Henri's wife. She had died four years ago according to my solicitors.

Henri himself lay propped on two pillows, his breathing shallow, his hair white and fine.

I sat in the wooden chair beside the bed and took his hand in both of mine. His skin was thin and cool, his fingers curling slightly inward.

His eyes opened. A momentary frown-I was still Samantha Petit, barely twenty-six-and then he understood.

"Maman," he said.

I squeezed his hand, nodded, and was quiet for a moment.

He was too drowsy and too weak to carry a conversation. His eyes drifted, caught on my face, drifted again. So I began to talk, as you would to a child who needs the sound more than the sense.

"Before France," I said. "Before Claudette. Before any of that, I had a life in England."

His eyes found me again for a moment.

"A modest house," I continued. "Red brick. And there was an apple orchard which I tended to for years. He was an engineer, like your grandfather. He built canals and bridges, and he came home every evening before dark because he promised his wife that he would."

"You had a sister," I said. "She had dark curls and grey eyes, and she learned to read by the fire while her father drew lock gates at his desk. And her mother…" My thumb pressed lightly into his palm. "Her mother loved them both but it was not enough to save either of them."

Henri's breathing had steadied. His eyes were half-open, tracking my face.

"I left her," I said. "I left her because I thought that staying would have killed her. I failed that time, as well. As a mother."

Henri's fingers tightened around mine.

I sat with him, his hand still in mine.

The coughing came without warning.

His chest seized and his body curled forward, and he held his sides because of the pain it caused. I rubbed his back and held a handkerchief to his lips and waited.

It passed. He settled against the pillows, his breath ragged. But after a moment, impossibly, the corner of his mouth lifted.

"And where," he said, "did you develop a green thumb, Maman?"

I let out a low, warm laugh and smiled at him. He was right, of course. I had never demonstrated any inclination for plants in all the years he had been with me. But I had an explanation.

"I once walked the gardens of Versailles, my darling," I said. "During the reign of Louis the Fourteenth."

Henri's eyebrows lifted.

"Allow your mother to impress you," I said, with a raised finger. "The director of the royal fruit and vegetable gardens was a man named Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie," I continued. "He was an extraordinary man. A lawyer by training, turned gardener by conviction. His Instruction pour les jardins fruitiers et potagers is one of the bibles of modern horticulture and agronomy."

Henri shook his head; in wonder or ignorance I could not tell; but his eyes were open now. I drew a breath and recited his dedication from memory:

"'Nature, which-it seems-takes pleasure in denying Your Majesty nothing, whom you indeed regard as the most perfect of your works, has doubtless reserved for your august reign what the earth has hidden from all past ages. It is only through sheer toil that ordinary people wrest from the bosom of this common mother what they are obliged to ask of her every day for their sustenance, because her strongest inclination is to produce only thistles and thorns; but if Your Majesty continues to favor with your gaze those who have the honor of cultivating her in your gardens, we shall see, to the glory of our monarch and to the advantage of humankind, that what was unknown to all antiquity will no longer be unknown to anyone. This Earth, which seems so stubborn towards everyone, will finally yield, even, so to speak, with some joy to the slightest command of a great Prince...'"

I paused, then added, a line from the Encyclopédie:

"'Tout le monde coupe, mais peu savent tailler. La taille des arbres est contre nature. Ils ne furent point faits originairement pour être troublés et arrêtés dans leur action de végéter.'"

[Everyone cuts, but few know how to prune. Pruning is against nature. Trees were not originally made to be disturbed and arrested in their act of growing.]

Henri was quiet for a moment, lost in thought.

"You met a royal gardener? I thought you would tell me you had met Racine. Or La Fontaine. Or Fontenelle."

I clicked my tongue. "I was a mistress and courtesan," I said, "not a scholar."

He laughed but it caught in his chest immediately and became a cough. I leaned forward and rubbed his back again, until it passed and he sank against the pillows, his eyes moist.

"I did see Le Misanthrope in Paris once," I said, defending myself. "But Moliere was on his death bed by then."

He lay still for a moment, getting his breath back. Then he turned his head on the pillow and looked at me.

"I really do have the most wonderful mother in the world," he said.

My face held its composure for exactly one breath.

Then it didn't.

The tears came without sound. No sobbing, no gasping. Just water filling my eyes and spilling over, running down my cheeks and dripping from my jaw onto the collar of my coat. I pressed my free hand over my mouth, my other hand still gripping his.

Henri did not try to comfort me. He simply kept hold of my hand.

When it passed, I wiped my face with the back of my hand. I straightened my coat. I stood, leaned over the bed, and pressed my lips to his forehead.

"Sleep," I said. "The nurse will be here in a few hours."

I was at the door, when he spoke again. His eyes were closed and his voice was barely a murmur, the words drifting up from somewhere between sleep and surrender.

"I know you've been taking care of me all these years."

I stopped. My hand tightened on the doorframe, but I did not answer.

I stepped into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind me. I listened to the silence from behind the door where my son was breathing for a moment, and left.

***

Chapter 18 - Sor Juana, Mexico City, c. 2005

I walked beneath the archways of the Universidad, my sandals slapping softly against the worn stone paving.

The October sun fell in clean rectangles between the columns, and somewhere behind the far wall, in the gastronomy kitchens, someone was making mole, and the smell of toasted chiles and chocolate drifted through the warm air.

I was wearing jeans and a cotton blouse and carrying an inexpensive bag with a small skull motif. I was still mostly Samantha Petit though my hair was dark now and straight, parted in the center.

Mexico City had been good to me. The city was vast enough to disappear into and old enough to feel familiar.

A group of students crossed my path, young women in jeans and backpacks, one of them gesturing emphatically about something while the others laughed. They parted around me without a glance.

I found a bench in the shade of the colonnade and sat. The stone was cool through my jeans. I pulled my Nokia from my handbag and opened the email I had already read.

A time. A date. This place.

I read it once more, then closed the phone and put it back.

I was looking at a service door set into the far wall of the colonnade when the memory surfaced without invitation.

***

Three years earlier, the same city, the same university.

Clémence's voice on the phone had been desperate, tearful breaths with my name and a place buried somewhere inside it.

The Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana was a short distance from the Zócalo. I walked briskly first, then started running, the memory of her voice triggering rising panic.

I found her easily by her scent.

Clémence was crouched in the darkness beside a girl who lay on her back with her arms flaccid. The girl was model-thin, dyed blonde hair fanned across the tiles. Her neck bore two barely sealed puncture marks and her pulse was thin.

Clémence looked up at me.

"I'm sorry," she said, her voice raw. "I'm sorry."

There was still dried blood on her mouth, a smear of it across the back of her left hand where she had tried to wipe it away. Her palms were pressed flat to her own thighs, her eyes wide and empty, her whole body braced, waiting for whatever came next. The punishment. The abandonment. The disgust.

I crouched beside the girl, then pulled my phone from my pocket, and made two calls. The first was to a private clinic in Coyoacán; a doctor who owed me a favor. The second was to Leyla's network in Mexico City.

I gave the address; they knew the rest.

I reached down and took Clémence by the wrist. She flinched but did not resist. I pulled her upright.

"Don't…" she began, her eyes trembling.

"Hush," I told her. I hugged her for a moment so that she would quieten.

I took the hem of my own shirt and wiped the blood from her mouth and chin, the way you might clean a child's face. She stood perfectly still while I did it, her eyes fixed on a point beyond my shoulder, fighting back tears.

Two men arrived through the service entrance as I steered Clémence toward the exit. I nodded to them.

The older of the two looked at the girl on the floor, then at me. "Tu hermana?"

I shook my head.

The younger of the two was already setting up a line, and the one who addressed me had turned his attention to a pack of Normal Saline and was preparing to check her blood type. I could see a pack of O Negative and a blood warmer in the large carry case at his side.

I did not look back.

***

Our hotel was a mid-range place on the Zócalo that looked out onto the cathedral's floodlit towers. I led Clémence inside and closed the door and locked it.

I ran a bath. The water steamed in the small bathroom, filling the air with heat and moisture. I removed Clémence's stained clothes and sat her inside the bath.

She had not spoken a single word since we arrived. She hadn't even dared to look at me.

I worked shampoo through her dark auburn hair with both hands, getting rid of all traces of the blood from her scalp and then her face; my fingers moving from crown to nape, working the lather through, the same way that Maman had once done for me decades ago in Marseille.

"Close your eyes," I told her.

I made sure the shower was at the right temperature, then used it on her hair, my palm shielding her eyes from the rinse; then on her face and trunk. The waters swirled pink in the bathwater for a moment before dissolving.

Clémence sat with her eyes closed. Her breathing, which had been shallow since the corridor, deepened. I rinsed her hair a final time then dried it, pressing the water out in light squeezes, then gently toweled her down.

I walked her to the bed in a hotel robe. She sat, then lay down on her side. I lay beside her on top of the covers, on my back, my hands folded on my stomach.

After a moment, Clémence turned and pressed her face against my shoulder. Her hand found the fabric of my shirt and gripped it loosely. Her breath was warm through the cotton.

Within minutes, she was asleep.

I lay still and listened to her breathing and the distant noise of the Zócalo below.

In the morning, the space beside me was empty.

The note was on the nightstand, written in Clémence's cramped hand:

I'm sorry. I need to prove I can manage on my own. I'll come back when I'm good enough for you.

I read it twice, folded it, and set it on the nightstand where I'd found it.

***

Three years was nothing. I had waited longer for much less.

Around me, the courtyard continued its business. A bell rang somewhere inside the building, and a fresh wave of students poured from a doorway and dispersed. Near a locked side door at the edge of the colonnade, a small placard marked the restricted Sor Juana exhibit.

Then I felt it; someone I had washed and held and let go.

I looked up.

Clémence was walking toward me through the crowd, carrying two cups of coffee. Her dark hair was longer than I remembered, falling well past her shoulders, and she wore a simple linen dress.

She looked well. She looked like someone who had kept a promise to herself.

She was smiling.

And I smiled back.

***

Chapter 19 - The Cistern, 2020

The Bosphorus was the color of tarnished silver through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and Clémence's skin was warm against mine.

The sheets were ruined. Twisted around our legs like white silk bandages, pulled free of the mattress at one corner where someone had grabbed them too hard.

The suite at the Çırağan was obscenely beautiful: parquet flooring appointed with Turkish rugs, Ottoman Revival moldings, a chandelier that cost more than most people's homes.

But the room was just a frame.

I pressed my lips to the curve of Clémence's neck. Her skin tasted of the faintest trace of the jasmine oil she had used in the bath. I moved lower, kissing the ridge of her shoulder blade, my hands finding her ribs tracing them before sliding forward to cup her breasts. I kneaded them gently enjoying how her flesh had just the right amount of pliancy and firmness. Her nipples hardened against my palms and she made a small sound.

"Ma chérie," I whispered against her shoulder. "Tu es si belle comme ça." I kissed the freckle beneath her ear. "J'aime le goût de ta peau."

Between our thighs, the slickness of what we had done together was cooling against the silk. I pressed myself against the small of her back.

But Clémence was not soft. The muscles along her spine were just slightly taut, not fully submitting to my touch

"It's pointless," she said.

I didn't stop touching her.

"You don't need her anymore. We don't need her." She was irritable even though she had enjoyed being seduced. "Istanbul is fine. Istanbul is beautiful. Let's stay here, fuck like queens, and not go chasing the woman who abandoned you."

"All these years," I whispered, "and you still haven't rid yourself of that potty mouth." I licked around her left ear. "She didn't really abandon me. I had lots of help over the years. It was pedagogical."

"Don't use that word in bed."

"There is no danger," I continued, my hands straying to her lower lips, enjoying their moist softness. She squirmed a bit, then parted her thighs slightly. "If she wanted to kill me or take me, she would have done so centuries ago."

"I'm not worried about her killing you." Clémence turned her head, just enough that I could see the edge of her pale green eyes. "I'm worried about what she'll do to your head."

"My head is perfectly fine." I kissed the corner of her mouth. "Don't be angry. Please?"

She was quiet for a moment. Then she turned fully, her body rolling to face mine. She studied me intensely. My dark eyes, my olive skin, the face I had settled into for this chapter of my existence. Azra Demir, on the passport. Turkish enough for Istanbul. Beautiful enough to satisfy my vanity, which, after nearly five hundred years, remained my most durable character flaw.

"You're going to go regardless," she said.

"Yes."

"And nothing I say will change that."

"Probably not."

She kissed me. It was not a gentle kiss. Her fingers knotted in my hair and her mouth was hungry against mine, her tongue sliding past my lips with the confidence of a woman staking a claim. I kissed her back, my hand finding the nape of her neck, pulling her closer until our breasts pressed together and our legs intertwined.

When we broke apart, her eyes were still fierce but the tension had eased.

"Fine," she said. "But if she tries anything, I'll eat her."

"Noted."

I rolled her onto her stomach and straddled her hips. She groaned in protest, but her body surrendered immediately, her arms folding beneath her head. I began at her shoulders, pressing my thumbs into the knotted muscles along her trapezius, working the tension out with slow, firm strokes. I could feel her muscles softening, her breath deepening. I moved down her spine, vertebra by vertebra, my palms warm against her skin.

"Là," she murmured. "Just there."

I worked the spot until she sighed and moaned almost as hard as when I finger fucked her earlier. Then her breathing changed, her lips parted slightly against the pillow, and the faint worry lines between her brows smoothed themselves out. I kept my hands on her for a few more seconds and leaned down so that my cheek was on her back. She was warm and alive and mine.

Then I rolled off her and reached for the nightstand.

The note had been waiting at the front desk when we checked in, addressed to Madame Demir. The script was in the practiced Ottoman calligraphy of a highly trained harem woman.

The Basilica Cistern. 8 p.m.

The date was the anniversary of the night in 1566 when Hasan ibn Selim's life had changed forever.

I folded the note and slipped it beneath the pillow. Then I looked at Clémence sleeping in the silver light from the Bosphorus.

"I'll be back," I whispered.

She did not stir.

***

The heels were impractical and I knew it, but I wore them anyway.

Silk dress the color of pomegranate seeds, light brown cashmere overcoat, a scarf loosely draped. I had shed names and genders and nationalities and lovers and children and I could not shed the desire to be looked at and found beautiful.

The last tourists were trickling out as I descended.

I started down and the noise of traffic and the evening street vendors thinned to nothing. Soon there was only the sound of my heels on the steel steps and then the cistern opened beneath me like a forest submerged. Three hundred and thirty-six columns rising from black water that held the ceiling like the ribs of some vast sleeping creature; the brick vaulting overhead consuming every breath, so that my footsteps produced only a soft wet echo that seemed to come from every direction.

I moved deeper.

The air was cool and thick…and I was on the road outside Târgoviște and the horse beneath me was lathered with sweat and the Janissary company ahead was singing something obscene; and the mud was red and the columns blurred and I steadied myself against one of them…

…the stone was cold beneath my palm and it was the cold of the marble floor in the Comte's chamber at Versailles; the boning of the corset crushing my ribs and the Comte had said something gallant and meaningless and I had smiled and the smile was a blade and the blade was in my hand and then it was in his chest.

I kept walking. The water was perhaps two feet below the raised walkway and perfectly still and black as a mirror and I caught my reflection in it.

A tourist coughed somewhere behind me in the dim forest; and it was Thomas's cough, the first one, the one that was nothing, and I was in the bedroom in Kent and the sheets smelled of laudanum and his hand found my wrist and his grip was weak but his eyes were clear and he said you're changing again and I said you're feverish and that was the last lie I told him or perhaps the second to last because the very last was I love you, and how could that have been true if I had killed you.

The Medusa heads.

I had reached the northwest corner where they waited; one tilted sideways like a woman listening for something; the other inverted, her serpent hair pressing into the stone floor, her blank eyes staring at the ceiling. I felt the weight of the Janissary's sword in my hand; the night Emine's eyes shifted from dark brown to near-black; and her mouth was red.

Hasan's body. Stefánia's body. Anne's body. Stephen's body. Claudette's body. Stella's body. Samantha's body. Azra's body. Which body was I standing in. Which hands were these. The heels clicked on metal and the sound came back to me from the vaulted ceiling and for a moment I was all of them and none of them, a crowd packed into a single silk dress, every face I had ever worn echoing against my skin.

I closed my eyes.

She had just made herself visible to me.

On a stone bench near the Weeping Column; she was waiting.

Emine did not stand. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, her dark hair falling in heavy waves past her shoulders. She wore a simple black dress and a grey wool coat, and she looked exactly as she had the night she had taken me nearly half a millennia ago.

"Good evening, daughter," she said. "You look well."

"Good evening… Mother," I replied. It seemed appropriate; the only correct way to address her.

"I have watched you," Emine said. "Across centuries. Sometimes from closer than you knew."

I said nothing.

"The distance was necessary, Azra. Not for my benefit. For yours. A creature shaped entirely by its maker becomes a reflection, nothing more. A mirror has no will of its own."

"How generous of you."

"There was something else," she continued, ignoring my tone. "I was afraid of something. Not death. Death is an abstraction for us. What I feared, what I have always feared, is eternal solitude. The horror of existing forever with no one who understands what that existence costs."

I folded my arms. The silk of my dress shifted against my skin, and I could feel the damp chill of the cistern pressing through the cashmere.

"I realize that I am not even half your age," I said, "but that doesn't make me a complete fool. There is nothing about you which suggests any fear of solitude. You orchestrate. You place people like furniture and then retreat to admire the composition. That is not the behavior of someone afraid to be alone."

Emine laughed. It wasn't a woman's laugh exactly; more like a schoolgirl's giggle.

"I'm sorry," she said, once she had settled. "I still like to test my children, an old habit. But in all seriousness, being a woman is preferable is it not?"

I grunted in response.

"I'll take that as a yes. What about this version?" she said, leaning forward slightly. "I abandoned you deliberately. Not from cruelty or carelessness, but from design. A creature who is fully trained, fully equipped is… predictable. Complete. And completeness, for our kind, is a form of death. Your suffering; the confusion, the loss, the centuries of not knowing; that suffering is precisely what kept you alive. It is why you sat with dying soldiers; why you loved Thomas, Hélène, and the children; why you can hold to Clémence without reservation. Quite simply, you are worth knowing because you were never finished."

"No," I said, firmly. "I don't buy that either. Try again."

Emine laughed, more softly this time, almost a titter.

"Third try," she said. "A short one." She straightened on the bench and met my eyes. "Would you believe me if I told you that I love you, my daughter?"

I frowned.

Not because the words were unwelcome. Not because I doubted them, exactly. But because it suddenly occurred to me that she had spoken the truth at the beginning of our conversation-that she had truly always been with me. In Buda as Leyla; in London as Jonathan Harrow; in Rome, Jerusalem, and China; at the Somme as Leon; even as Ilona in New York. I looked at Emine's face and I thought: Have you always been her? Have you been all of them?

Emine seemed to read my thoughts.

"Don't ask," she said. "Keep everything in your heart."

She patted the empty seat beside her, and I sat down beside her.

"I have nothing more to give you," she said. "From this point forward, I will not interfere with your life." She paused, and something almost human crossed her face. "Clémence is good for you. Keep her safe."

"She said she would eat you if you harmed me."

"Well, if she has an appreciation for aged meat…" She smiled and pursed her lips. "I would not be unhappy if you called upon me. Once in a long while. Once a century, perhaps."

I did not embrace her. I simply sat beside her with my arms folded; and allowed my head to rest gently on her shoulder and the moment to be exactly what it was.