Page 65 of We Were Eternal Once

“And now that your maker has gifted you a house, clothing, anything you want—you are deserving?” Yusuf digs his fingers into the meat of her argument, his magenta eyes sparkling at her discomfort.

“Yes,” she says, with such venom I think she might believe it.

“I suppose you’ve always been of the high ranked,” Caterina says to me, her gaze intent. She makes me wish for the five rules, for the law against writing anything down. Caterina owns many of the printing presses in town under a male pseudonym. There isn’t a bit of news she is unaware of, and that does not stop at human frivolity. It includes what is said in here. She scribbles away, claiming to be taking notes for academic reasons.

Blackmail, more like it.

“No,” I say simply. When they stare, I feel I must speak, else I explode under the tension of their gaze. I understand your silence with the acolytes now, though I don’t understand your silence with me. Had Tomasz been the only friend I made, had we simply met in the cafe and spoke, I’d not feel so…examined.

At least the cult treated you with reverence. I am strapped to a table, looked over and dissected.

“I was a lowly servant of the temple in Delphi. Through the centuries, I have slept in caves or under overturned wagons. Sometimes we knew decadence.” I pause, the word one you would use, not me. “Sometimes we did not.”

“And your maker,” Caterina says, licking her lips. “Were they of high birth?”

I give my fleeting half-smile, sympathetic to her question. I have not told you of this new group, and I do not know if I will. I come infrequently, when the call for something else overrides my need for solitude. My absences far exceed my attendance these days. I am tired of the questions, the looks, the conversation.

I don’t care about the humans and their comings and goings. This is what they don’t understand, that these conversations are useless. In a century, this swelling resentment will be called inevitable, and whatever comes of it the natural way of things.

Repeat repeat repeat.

Margarethe knows this. I see it in the way she picks things apart. Her ambitions are more understandable. She wishes to see a day in which God does not reign over the lives of all. She once prayed to him, and he let her become a vampyr. The fact that she could not return to her human ways was proof he did not exist, as she did nothing to tempt his ire.

“I do not follow cruelty,” she said once, and I admired her strength.

“High birth for whom? The Christians were once slaves, now their church reigns over all. To be born high somewhere is to be born low somewhere else.” I hope they understand this, the futility of it all. They can pick apart the pieces of this civilization until it is nothing but strands of yarn. Then that yarn will coalesce into something else, and something else, and something else.

Reincarnation. Whatever you wish to call it.

“Yet you live in the Saint-Germaine,” Caterina says. “That is old money.”

So she’s followed me to see where I live. Tricky little cat, thinking I am still a temple rat. Did she watch me enter one building, then exit another? Climb across rooftops and scamper into a second-story window?

I doubt it.

“And you live underground,” I say with a wave of my hand. I’m rewarded with her flash of teeth, though she calms a moment later.

I will not be caught unawares like I was in Alexandria. I will know where each of them lives, where they hunt, if there are any other vampyrs lurking in the shadows of Paris. I do not want another confrontation in the street, where a man with blazing eyes offers friendship.

“I only mean to say,” Caterina says, trying to recover. But I have unsettled her, so her speech is rushed. “That if your maker had connections⁠—”

“She is older than me, and I am older than Paris. What connections might her birth have afforded her?” I snap. Caterina glances to Eloise and I realize my error too late. She. I’ve let them know your gender. I had hoped to make you an enigma, one so obscure they could not worship you. As such, you could not have any identifying information.

Now they know this, and I hate myself for the slip.

“She? Fascinating,” Tomasz says. “I was unaware your maker was of the same sex.”

“Is that so unusual?” I ask. I do not recall any information about the makers of other vampyrs, just that they’d long since separated from them.

Yet here you and I were, almost two thousand years together.

“I suppose not,” Tomasz agrees. “My maker was a man, and he made Margarethe before me. Are all your siblings female as well?”

“There is only me,” I say. This I am sure of. You told me yourself—that you and I are the only two with red eyes. I am your only creation, and your only love. You’ve made yourself my entire world, such that I would know if there was another in the interim.

“And you are still…together?” Eloise asks.

“Yes,” I allow. I should stop this line of questioning, it is another way to flesh you out. I should turn attention back to me, remind them of how extraordinary I am. So much older and wiser.