Page 102 of We Were Eternal Once

“It is tacky,” he agreed, smiling at me.

“Why should I attend?”

“Why should you stay away?” he asked, tilting his head. There was a genuine perplexity there, and I saw my younger self in it. Was that how I looked when you walked us away from Gaius in Rome? The way I looked when you refused to meet any other of our kind?

I could fill his ear with my tale, let him know exactly why one might stay away. Being another vampyr was not enough for my attention anymore.

I stayed away for a year or two. When they waved at me, I did not wave back. I found an apartment over a block that played music all night long. During the winter a parade passed under my balcony, and I stood and watched the humans dance beneath me. They called it Mardi Gras.

I should have hated the city for its attempt to duplicate France. There was a French Quarter, there were signs and streets named in French. When I landed here, I almost got back in my car and headed west still.

But I stayed, because for all the ways it was France, it was not Paris.

The French here mingled with something else, drawing the syllables out in a way that tickled my ear. The piano bars were sometimes like that bar in Mississippi, but mostly entirely something else. A man or a woman pounded the keys and sang raucously while drunk tourists joined in. There was an uncouth joy here that Paris wanted to have, but could never attain.

This was a product of time, of conquest diluted and remade. That was what America was, a place to start anew.

I could not start anew and fall into the same patterns, like finding a shadowed salon filled with vampyrs waxing poetic about human affairs.

I stopped outside of the salon once, straining my ear to what was inside. A melancholy violin played a solo, which ended in a burst of applause. The chatter overlapped, excited and congratulatory. Someone recited a poem to the same effect.

I did this for two more nights before I entered.

A vampyr lazed in the door, his feet propped up on another chair. In his hand is one of the small gaming devices children played. He taps the keys hard, cursing, unaware of me. He sighs and throws the device on the ground, his orange eyes turning up to me at last.

“Sorry, almost beat the level. It’s timed, you understand.”

I do not.

“You new?” he asks.

“To here, yes.”

“Let me show ya around.” He stands and nods for me to follow him.

The salon is a large rectangle over a center courtyard that opens to the evening sky. It is hard to see the stars for all the light, but the moon peers between clouds and illuminates the courtyard below. Two vampyrs embrace in the center, swaying as if listening to music.

At the edge of the balcony, two vampyrs drink from a human woman. They each take a wrist, their teeth deep into her flesh. The human moans, her head tilted back in ecstasy.

“Hey! Save it for a private room!” my guide scolds. One of the vampyrs raises his middle fingers, the other hissing around the woman’s wrist.

“They are exhibitionists,” he says, leading me through the open space. “They are supposed to use a private room, but they have no sense of decency.”

“Are there rules?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Mostly it’s ‘don’t be an asshole,’ but otherwise not really. Some pairings or groups have their own set of them, but this isn’t a place to impose that on others. We’re not the church,” he adds with a laugh.

I do not laugh in return, and he clears his throat. “Listen, I know the vampires overseas are a little…different. More uptight. Tense. Here, that comes off as rude. I’m not saying you have to slap a smile on and befriend everyone, I’m just saying that acting like Count Dracula”—he says this with an affected accent I think is supposed to be Russian—“will not gain you any friends.”

“And if I don’t want friends?” I ask.

“Why would you come to a meetinghouse if you didn’t?”

“It has been a long time since I’ve been around others like us,” I say.

“Hmm. Well, if it helps, there is an unofficial rule. It plays in with the ‘don’t be an asshole’ one. Your past is your past, and asking about it is considered rude. So if you’re running from something, hiding from someone, that’s none of our business.”

“I am not hiding,” I counter.