Ad Eternum (3 page)

It was not an easy task to rescue a conversation in a small group from such an inauspicious beginning, but Mrs. Blacksnake managed it. As challenging stares passed between the wampyr and the man he considered an impostor, the Seneca sorceress threw back her head and rasped a smoker’s complicated laugh.

“Fantastic!” she said, when she’d slowed down a little. “We haven’t had a good bitter rivalry in months!”

She nudged Dr. Wehrmeister, who glanced at her and forced a chuckle.

Dr. Wehrmeister sipped her tea and made a face. “If there’s going to be a duel,” she said in her delicate accent, “I for one want a brandy.”

When she leaned forward, the eyelet lace at the edges of her blouse gaped slightly, showing the symbols inked above her sternum. Alchemical marks, tattooed in crimson.

“No duel,” said the wampyr. Without touching, he gestured with a gloved hand to the notch of her collarbone, then down. “Sorbonne?” he guessed.

Smiling, she shook her head.

“I’ll fetch the brandy anyway,” Miss Emrys said. It was becoming rapidly evident that this was not her first salon, because she was back in a flash—with a decanter decorated with roses and mismatched tumblers for everyone, even the wampyr. This must be the new shabby-Bohemian chic he’d been hearing about. The patterns might be random, but the crystal was still leaded, and it caught the glow of the electric lights like prisms.

“Thank you,” he said. “But don’t waste good brandy on me.” Gently, he nudged the empty cut crystal away with his fingertips.

She blanched. “Oh, I am so terribly sorry—”

“Don’t be.” He smiled generously, because he could. “I don’t know what I’m missing.”

“A great deal,” said the man who called himself Ragoczy. “But never mind. I do not require that you believe me. Only that you entertain me. After all, is that not what we are here for?”

Miss Emrys poured brandy quickly, stiff measures with articulate hands. She passed the glasses and kept one for herself.

“So you gather here to discuss magic?” the wampyr said. “Miss Emrys, may I ask where you studied?”

“Sarah, please.”

He nodded. “I know your line of old—”

“I have no spark,” she said sadly. “But—as you intimated—I was raised in a family of sorcerers, and I find I prefer their company. One need not practice magic to theorize.” She kissed her fingers in self-mocking farewell.

She continued, “Of course Estelle was educated in her family. Damian—” he smiled in acknowledgement, cupping his hands around the glass so it vanished “—at Oxford. The Prince was educated in Kyiv. Ruthanna’s provenance, or
Provence
—” Groans around the room told the wampyr that what Sarah Emrys lacked in spark, she made up for in terrible puns “—you have already failed to determine.”

“I am one of America’s first native-educated doctors of Thaumaturgy,” Dr. Wehrmeister said. “Schooled at Yale. As a matter of fact, I studied under Doctor…with Damian. Who is that institution’s first Black professor of Thaumaturgy.”

The wampyr said, “I had no idea I was being invited to such a rarified gathering.”

“Ah,” said Emrys—Sarah. She looked at Ruthanna. “Well…”

“It was my idea,” Damian said. “I’ll explain.”

There was a time when the wampyr would have picked up the glass, just to fidget with it. Now, he folded his hands across his knees and let the stillness take him. He could all but vanish in a busy room, simply by sitting still. He had been dead so long that living people no longer registered him as a presence unless he forced the issue.

“New Amsterdam,” Damian said, rubbing the pad of his thumb along the rim of that untasted glass, “has no college of magic. And we have assembled here the beginnings of, if I may be so bold, a rather fine faculty.”

“Ah!” Something unknotted inside the wampyr. They wanted something of him—something it would be easy for him to provide. And in return…the beginnings of a court? Or at least the beginnings of those fleeting human friendships that could relieve his tedium. “You wish to secure an endowment?”

They glanced from one to another like guilty children. Damian cleared his throat, but stumbled.

Ruthanna stepped in. “Actually…we were hoping you might agree to teach. Um. Mr. Prior.”

Whatever he had thought they were about to suggest, that left him with his mouth hanging open and his hands limp. Undirected in midair. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

“There are
many
schools where a student can go to study about magic,” Damian said. “There aren’t many where he can study magic with someone who has watched a good bit of it develop.”

The wampyr let his hands drop to his knees. “You thought all this up on the airliner?”

Damian smiled. He didn’t bother making sure his lips stayed closed. He had a deep voice, a little rough with nervousness as he said, “Only the barest outlines. The details required us all.”

“I’ll have to think about it. But I will be honest. My initial impulse is to demur.” The wampyr raised an eyebrow at the man who pretended to be an immortal. “What do you think, Prince Ragoczy?”

“I think you’re trouble,” the Prince said. “But you were trouble in the court of Louis the fifteenth, and you were trouble when you outwitted Giacomo Casanova over the dignity of that one lady—what was her name…?”

“Was that me?” the wampyr said, wonderingly. “I thought that was some fanciful hero from an old romance. Something by Dumas, perhaps.”

“That was Amédée Gosselin
pére
,” said the round-faced man. “Or was it
grand-pére
? The man I knew was Amédée Gosselin
fils
. There’s a portrait of the father, you know. Admittedly, the features are lost under a good deal of stylization—but it’s not a bad likeness.”

The wampyr frowned at the Prince, imagining his slack cheeks and close-cropped hair as they might look beneath a powdered wig. His scent was not familiar, but wampyr had sought to avoid the so-called Comte de St. Germain—in any of his incarnations. Metaphysically-inclined confidence tricksters were the last associates a wampyr who wished to keep a low profile should seek.

He had reason to believe this was not the man. But he had been wrong in his time, and had no reason to believe it could not be so again.

As if aware of the scrutiny, the Prince smiled. “Think about it, Mr. Prior. What we’re offering you, after a fashion, is respectability.
Continuity
. No more need to pick up and move every few decades, no more need to reinvent yourself over and over again. You will have a home at our college for all eternity. Universities and churches—what else is that that lasts as long as wampyrs do? Not nations, certainly…”

The wampyr held his face still, feeling—nevertheless—as if this fakir, this fortuneteller, looked right through him and saw his deepest desires.

The Prince continued. “I’m fortunate: no one in a position of real power has ever been quite willing to believe me, so I have had the luxury of telling the truth. But I imagine it cannot be easy for your kind, to drift along so unmoored through the world.”

“I’ll need to think about it,” the wampyr said.

“Of course you will,” the Prince answered cheerfully. “Now, Estelle, I have been meaning to ask you about some of the incantations you use…”

“I’ll drive you home,” Damian offered in the hall much later, as the wampyr was buttoning his coat against the foredawn chill. “It’s a long way back to the Hotel Aphatos, and you won’t find a cab at this hour.”

The wampyr cocked an eyebrow at the taller man. “I am not staying at the hotel.”

“Oh,” said Damian. “But you implied—”

“I receive messages there,” the wampyr clarified, suddenly irritated with himself for withholding information. “They have been keeping my things. But I have a house. Near the park. I have had it for over sixty years.”

“I’ll still drive.”

With a spread gesture of his hands, the wampyr acquiesced. He wasn’t sure exactly when he had lost control of this encounter, but it was almost a novelty, and he found he was not in any hurry to reestablish it.

In the car, Damian said hesitantly, “Which way are you leaning?”

“I have made it a goal to avoid human politics,” the wampyr said, his face turned so he could watch the city flicker by outside the windows. Less than twenty-four hours elapsed since he had returned to New Amsterdam.

Damian laughed as if responding to a dry joke—but it trailed off, and he said, “You weren’t kidding. But what Ragoczy implied—”

“I try to avoid human politics. That does not mean I can avoid humans.”

“I see. And yet you tried to expose Ragoczy as, what, a confidence trickster? How is that not politics? We are not naïve, nor simpletons, Mr. Prior.”

“Jack,” said the wampyr.

Damian nodded, but did not echo him.

With a sigh, the wampyr said, “If he is lying, he is very good at it. He was right, you know, about what was in Dumas’s ridiculous book about Gosselin and what was not. Here, this is the house.”

“Ridiculous, was it?” Damian pulled the car over.

The wampyr studied his own fingernails. He reached for the door handle. He stopped. “You are probably in a hurry to get home.”

He heard the pause, the consideration. The decision to trust.
Yes, he is a wampyr. Does that mean he is not also an honorable man?

Damian said, “No one’s waiting for me.”

That hung between them for a moment, in soft silence and the dry warmth from the automobile’s heaters.

“Will you come in to my house, Damian Thomas?” the wampyr asked, with intentional solemnity. He did not care to be mistaken in such things. He was too old for screaming.

Damian paused, hands on the wheel. In a conversational tone, he asked, “How much does it hurt?”

“As I recollect,” the wampyr said, “it was most exquisitely pleasurable. But then, my memories of such ancient days are dim.”

“I see,” said Damian. “You need this?”

“I will not die without it,” the wampyr said. “But that I cannot die of starvation does not mean I cannot starve.”

The automobile sat idling by the curve for thirty seconds. Ninety.

Damian reached out and turned off the key. “A scientist should always be eager for new experiences,” he said.

The wampyr brought the sorcerer up the sweep of his front steps and into that ridiculous foyer. He moved surely in the darkness; the human was hesitant, and not yet accustomed to trusting the wampyr’s sure hand on his elbow.

“Where’s the light switch?” Damian asked, moving each foot forward as if probing for what he might trip over.

“Not yet installed,” the wampyr said. Swiftly, he crossed the room and opened the shades, that the light from the streetlamps might filter in. “I last inhabited this house in 1902. And the gas is turned off, currently.”

“I wasn’t born yet,” Damian said, as if he’d only just started to consider the implications. “When last you were in America.”

“When last I was in America,” the wampyr said, “The state of New Netherlands was the colony of New Holland, and a British protectorate. If you’re going to let that trouble you—”

“I’m just not used to it,” Damian said.

His pulse raced with apprehension, anticipation. Curiosity. Not desire—not
yet
, the wampyr judged, but perhaps…

“Trust me,” the wampyr said, and led Damian to a settee. It might have looked ridiculous, a man so much smaller pressing one larger to sit, to lean back. To let his head fall against the pillows.

The wampyr let his dry, light hands rest against Damian’s shoulders. “I do not usually drink from the throat,” he said. “It makes a scar that shows. May I remove your coat?”

Silently, shaking, Damian sat forward. The wampyr slid the jacket from his shoulders, untacked and unknotted his tie, unbuttoned the once-pressed shirt now rumpled with a long day’s wear. He laid each article of clothing across the arm of the settee. Damian watched his movements with a focus that told the wampyr his mortal friend saw nothing, now, but a moving patch of darkness in a lesser dark, leavened by reflections from the streetlights.

It might be worse for Damian, being blind. The wampyr could go and find a candle—

But soonest begun was first ended. Even in such dim light, the wampyr had no problem picking out the outlines of Damian’s sorcerer’s tattoos, though the red ink faded into the darkness of his skin. The wampyr laid his hand against Damian’s chest and felt the beat of his heart.