Page 60 of We Were Eternal Once

But above all, I was still yours.

So I settled into Paris, strolled the banks of the Seine and tried not to vomit at the stench. I fed on the poor that lived everywhere but belong nowhere, clustering where food, work, cover, and indifference overlap. Pont Neuf and Les Halles became my hunting ground. They are thin and ill and their blood never satisfied me the way the blood of old did. I longed for bigger game, for a feast of our station.

You promised me decadence, as though a beautiful, empty home sufficed. As though the ground we buried ourselves in every night was more important than what we did when we were not asleep.

If this was your decadence, I didn’t want it.

You meant for Paris to tame me, thinking it was wanderlust I suffered from. But it was something much deeper than that, something I couldn’t ask for because I did not know its name.

And once I found it, I let it almost kill me.

The New Cult

It is at the Palais-Royal my unraveling begins.

Shops, salons, cafes, gambling houses line the rectangular garden under sweeping stone arcades. At night those arches become places to hide, to hunt, to watch without being noticed. It is a place of sin and destitution, and I adore it.

My first visit was purely accidental. I’d crossed the Seine and headed west, exploring the parts of the city thus far unknown to me. The noise drew me to it. Saint-Germain by night is a corpse, rotting away with its complacency. Everything is loud by comparison.

But Palais-Royal is a pulsating, beating heart.

A man leers at me from the doorway of a gambling hall where music pours into the street. Another tries to thrust a paper into my hand, speaking in rapid German, then French.

“Beautiful girl, this booklet will change your life!” It is a pamphlet filled with caricatures of people in fine dress with the words “Le pouvoir arbitraire corrompt tout”—arbitrary power corrupts everything—framed overhead.

It is said the seeds of revolution were sewn in Palais-Royal, but that was still years away. Here it was the brooding predecessor to rebellion, a constant thrum in the streets that mirrored the one in my blood.

I sat in cafes at night and listened to the humans talk of the corruption of the church, the lies of the monarchy, the woes of poverty, and I understood. I knew what it was like to worship and get nothing in return. I knew what it was like to be governed without representation. While I knew physical riches, I knew only emotional poverty.

I itched to join in on their conversations, to speak my truths to someone who would listen. Would they understand? Would they know we were kindred spirits?

No, a human would never understand my plight. They do not know what it means to love for centuries, for someone to hollow you out and bury themselves within that space. You’d sprouted roots that dug into my marrow, too deep to dislodge. What human could understand that, even as a metaphor for their church and monarch?

I wanted to tell them that this empire would fall, just as all the others have before them. Is the same true for me? Is it at last time for you to realize you are tired of me and cut me loose?

How much of me will your roots take with you?

The smell of blood jolts me from my reverie. It is not uncommon for blood to be shed beneath the stone arcades. Stabbings, fights, murders all go unsolved and barely noticed by the locals. The difference is this smell is coming from within the cafe.

My head jerks toward its origin, my eyes meeting an electric blue so bright they glow under the dim lamps. I freeze, because I recall another set of blue eyes watching me in the street. But these are not Essemteu’s, who had blue eyes so light they might have been white. The man with the blue eyes lifts his wine glass to me in salute, the blood swirling and coating the edges of the glass.

I move to sit across from him, the rest of the cafe a decrescendo against finding another of our kind.

It’s been so long.

After your failed cult, we saw little of our kind. I knew we were rare, made rarer by the death of so many in Alexandria. It’d taken over a century after being made before I wandered upon the vampires in Rome.

Sometimes I wonder if our trudge through the periphery of society was intentional, to keep us away from any knowing eyes. Did you fear recognition for your origin, or for what was done in Alexandria? Since we did not investigate, there was no one to blame, and thus blame rests on us. Is that the origin of your silence? A sense of burden, of guilt?

Whatever the cause, it has been far too long since I saw another of our kind. What a glorious coincidence one should be settled at a table in the very cafe I am in, sipping a glass of blood.

Coincidence, indeed.

“Bon soir,” he says, though his accent is not French.

“Is that the language you prefer to speak?” I reply.

“It is not,” he admits. “But alas, we are in Paris”—he pronounces it too heavy, ignoring the ’s’ entirely—“and this is how we shall speak. Tomasz,” he adds, an afterthought.