reentered the earthly plane. It took me some time to find you. You had come back to the place where we first met- the stormy west coast of Ireland-and I took it as an omen from you that you were going to be receptive to me and to all that I have been offering you. Once I found you, I saw that you had been incarnated with powerful gifts and that they frightened you and those around you. That is when I decided to watch over you and protect you. I did not want to wait another lifetime for you to come back to me. I would merely wait for you to grow up. Though you were not, by any means, defenseless, you believed that you were. It amounts to the same thing.”
“But how did you find me? How did you even know that it was me you were looking for? I must have been just a baby.” Some part of me understood that he was telling the truth, but none of it made sense.
“We are physically and psychically attuned, you and I. Everything that exists in this material world also exists on the other side of the veil. On the etheric plane, you and I are eternally united. You have read the philosopher Plato?”
“No,” I said. “I have not read philosophy.”
“You must do so sometime. What he said of the twin souls is not far from accurate. We are twin souls, so to speak. You know this, but it frightens you.”
He poured me another glass of wine. “Drink it,” he said.
I was not accustomed to having more than one small glass, but I liked the soft and careless way it made me feel. I took a long sip and swallowed it. He leaned over toward me, putting his fingers under my chin. He grazed my lips with his nose and then with his own lips, first gently, and then taking them into his mouth and biting them one at a time. He put his big hand around my neck, covering my throat, terrifying me with the power he had to wrap those fingers tight and suffocate me, but exciting me because I knew that he would not do it. There was too much that he wanted from me, and I did not know yet exactly what it was. He kissed me with an open mouth, my lips subsumed by his. His tongue found mine, and he pulled it into his mouth.
As soon as he felt my enthrallment, he pulled away from me so that I was looking into his eyes, and I understood in that moment why he called himself my master. His eyes were intense and fathomless, an eternity of deep blue, like the sea at twilight, and they left me without a will of my own.
“I want you to suck my tongue,” he said. “Taste me.” He put the length of it into my mouth, and I obeyed him, latching on to it. I was surprised at how much it thrilled me, and for a long time, I nursed at his tongue as if I expected it to feed me. His lips and his tongue-and his entire being-hummed with a subtle but indelible current. I felt that I could stay there forever, feeding on his tongue, but he broke it off, pulling back, his hand still on my throat.
“Does that feel familiar?” he asked.
“No, I have never felt anything like that before,” I said, disappointed that he had stopped and wanting more.
I was still catching my breath, yet wanting him back inside my mouth where I could taste him again. What had he tasted like? Salt, iron, spice-like nature itself. But his mood had changed, and I could tell that he was not going to invite me to do it again, at least not now. I could not imagine how to collect myself, which he apparently knew. “Tea will help,” he said, at which point one of the waiters appeared pushing a tea cart.
“I did not hear or see you call for the tea,” I said.
“My staff have been long with me. Their training is rigorous.”
I wanted him to kiss and touch me again, and at the same time I wanted to ask him more questions, when I realized that I had no idea what to call him.
“You may call me whatever you like,” he said, addressing my unspoken words. “In time, I hope that you will call me by the term of endearment that you have always used.”
“And what is that?” I asked.
“You have said it in many languages, but it is always the same.” He put his hand around the back of my head, bringing my ear to his lips. “My love,” he whispered.
“Are you human?” I asked. We were in the ship’s small library, where we retreated after dinner. He gestured for me to take a seat in a big stuffed chair covered in a Turkish carpet.
He shrugged, turning his back to me. He lit a pile of herbs whose smoke filled the air with a heady mixture of flowers, spices, and vanilla. “I know how keen your senses are, Mina. We must feed them a variety of delights,” he said. He poured topaz-tinted brandy into a heavy crystal glass and handed it to me. He sat on the divan opposite me.
“Why do you not want me to sit beside you?” I asked. I thought I was beginning to have inklings of what passed through his mind, as he could read mine, and I knew that he had a purpose in relegating me to the chair.
“I must tell you about myself, but if I am sitting next to you, your scent will overcome me, and then I will overwhelm you, and you will still be ignorant of me and afraid.” He sighed a heavy sigh, stretching his long legs out in front of him.
“I began life as a human. But I have transcended the human condition and am an immortal. At least that is what I believe, as I no longer age, and no one has been able to destroy me. But who or what is truly immortal? I cannot be certain.”
“I want to know everything about you, and about us,” I said. “Have we always known each other?”
“No, not always. Shall I tell you about my life before we met?” he asked.
“Your life before you came to me when I was a child? Or before you took me away from the asylum?”
“My life before we met seven hundred years ago.” He got up and poured a brandy for himself. He put his nose deep into the glass, but he did not taste it. He sat down again.
“I was born in the Pyrenees in the southwest of France in the time of the king known as the Lionheart and into a distant branch of his family. Those were the days of the Crusades to the Holy Land. As a young man, I trained as a warrior, and when I came of age, I entered the service of a French nobleman, the Viscount of Poitou, a relation, who was raising an army to help King Richard reclaim the city of Jerusalem after it fell to the Saracen commander Saladin. The Viscount of Poitou was known for his bravery in battle, and eager young knights and vassals flocked to his cause when he came to recruit us. While King Richard set off for the Holy Land through Sicily, the Viscount of Poitou marched through France and eastward through the Rhineland, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Slavic countries, and on through Greece, recruiting a huge army before we crossed the Hellespont and entered Byzantium.
“In the evenings, by campfire, a time when men love to tell tales of conquest, our leader enthralled us with the story of how he courted and captured a fairy queen and made her his lover and wife. At first, some of us scoffed at him. We had heard old nurses and midwives tell these kinds of tales to charm and frighten us. Yet he convinced us that his story was true. ‘I was hunting in the forest one day,’ he said, ‘when I shot an arrow at a fleeting form. It was a careless, quickly delivered shot, for the deer seemed to come out of nowhere. I shot blindly, and my arrow hit a tree. When I went to retrieve it, the animal was standing beside the arrow, staring at me with insolent eyes. I could not believe the boldness of the creature. It seemed to defy me.’
“The Viscount of Poitou was as intrigued by a challenge as any man alive, and so he nocked another arrow and aimed straight at the deer, which then took off with great alacrity into a thicket.”
The Count smiled at the memory. “Hunting stories captured our young imaginations. I can still see the rapt faces sitting round that fire. I remember it exactly as he told it, for he told it more than once, and always in the same manner. He said, ‘The little beast ran into a part of the forest through which no path had ever been cleared, and I chased it, scrambling through bush and brush, which ripped at my new cloak and angered me, for I have always been proud of the elegance of my costume. Soon I was in a small clearing, which had an eerie, chilly atmosphere, as if the surrounding forest had thus far protected it from both sunlight and human entry. I knew instantly that I had entered an enchanted place. In its midst was an enormous tree with a massive trunk that had bowed over-either by its own weight or by the winds that howled through that part of the country-and now slithered along the ground like a long-snouted dragon. It bore no leaves, and its bark was thick and gnarly like the scales of that reptile. I was out of breath, but I could hear movement, and so I drew my bow and aimed in the direction of the rustling leaves. Suddenly, from out of the thicket came, not the deer but a beautiful naked woman with golden hair so long that it protected her modesty. Her eyes were like none I had ever seen-dark, wild, and green, as if they too were a product of this magical forest.’”
The Count paused. “You can imagine how he had us young men in his thrall.”
“An old woman in the asylum told me the story of magical women who enchanted men,” I said. “I thought she
