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“We won’t,” Lauren?iu replies.
Before they leave for a new search, Paimon states, “Hey, I have something for you.”
“Yes?”
Paimon hands him parchment with writing on it.
“It’s the original. ‘Darkling, I listen,’ and all that.”
Lauren?iu reads it, and he feels bloody tears come to his eyes. “Oh. Oh.”
Setting the manuscript aside, they embrace, foreheads touching.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“It’s going to be okay. She’ll be so thrilled to see you.”
“And after?”
“After.” In a low rasp, Paimon murmurs, “I’m going to put a crown on your pretty head.”
It takes Lauren?iu a long while to knock. Paimon sets a hand on his shoulder.
He does.
The mustard-yellow apartment door opens, and a woman in a checkered blue dress answers them both, her blue-gray eyes as clear as always.
Her hair has gone completely steel-gray, her face lined with wrinkles, making her look sterner and more distinguished.
It takes her a couple of seconds to recognize Lauren?iu, given his change of hair color and his transition.
When she stares at her son, it reminds him of Anthony. Grief, but without horror. Then, relief.
Lauren?iu was never extremely adept at Romanian, despite growing up with two parents who knew it fluently; he knew the sounds of many words without knowing how to spell them. He was better at listening than speaking, all except, of course, for some of the more vulgar phrases he learned as a teenager.
God, God, God.
He can barely keep himself from weeping--now, that’d be alarming, the blood running down his face--as she coughs out a sob and wraps her arms around him.
After, Lauren?iu and Paimon sit on a colorful couch with cups of hot, steaming coffee on an unsanded pine table. Watercolor paintings of birds brighten the gray walls; the air smells of Marlboro cigars.
“My name is Lauren?iu now,” he’d told her, and she’d nodded.
Now, Mama paces before she stops to look at him. He offers a smile. “How do you look so young? You don’t look like you’ve changed since I last saw you.” Mama blinks. “And you’re a man now.”
“Yes,” Lauren?iu says.
A hand on her hip. Now he’s in for it. “Well, you have a lot of explaining to do. No calls. Nothing to let me know whether you were dead or alive. You were never inconsiderate or selfish, and I just—oh. Oh, we should have some soup.”
“It’s a complicated question, whether I’m dead or alive.”
Mama frowns sternly. “What do you mean? Be serious. I thought you’d died.”
“Well...”
“Don’t tell me that you’re reanimated. Or, by God, a vampire.”
