on the precipice. I cried out, losing my balance and falling forward, when his arm caught me from behind and pulled me to safety. I fell back against him, looking over the bay. On one side, the gilded moon, brilliant though days past its fullness, hung over the water, while on the west side, the sun’s orb had almost sunken into the sea, and the last violet mist of daylight was fading into darkness.
He wrapped his arms tight around my waist and put his lips to my ear. “Have you forgotten this place?”
I closed my eyes, and in my mind’s eye, I saw us lying on a blanket of fur in the little cave, a cube of peat burning in the corner, lighting up the craggy dome. “Of course I remember it. This was our secret place, our eagle’s perch. This is where we came to be alone and to stay dry when the rains poured outside.”
“Yes. Do you remember what we used to do?” He put his hands on my temples.
I let myself rest against him, willing my mind to go blank. Then I saw myself on top of him, looking down at his face while I rode him, his blue eyes watery with pleasure and made translucent by the light of the fire burning in the deep end of the alcove. My hair was long enough to cover the length of my torso, and he moved it aside so that he could see my body. In my memory, I saw his younger face-eager and innocent-as he tossed his neck aside, baring it to me.
I ran my finger along his tender nape, making an incision in the skin, which burst with crimson color, drawing my lips to it.
He interrupted my memory now with his lips on my neck, kissing it gently, taking my flesh between his teeth, not breaking the skin but igniting every nerve in my body. I turned around to face him, knowing that he had read my mind and revisited the memory too. Wordlessly, he opened the collar of his shirt and exposed his neck and throat to me. His tendons and muscles were prominent, like sculpted ivory, and inviting. Together, with our thoughts, we opened the skin, and the cut filled with a peculiar pool of red-brighter than ordinary human blood, and glimmering. He was perfectly still, and I knew that he could not encourage, nor could he force. I had to do this entirely of my own volition.
I covered the wound with my lips, taking in his essence, and it assaulted my senses. The blood flowed into my mouth, and, like the rest of his being, it hummed with a life of its own that was palpable to my lips and tongue as I took in more of it. At first it was a challenge to get enough of it, but I sucked harder, letting the stream fill my mouth and slowly slither down my throat. I kept my lips tight on his skin; and he pressed my head into his neck, encouraging me. At one moment, I began to feel weak from the hard work of getting the blood from his vein, but I continued, sucking like a baby at its mother’s breast. Something inside me drove me on-desperation to have him in me, to make him part of me, to have his blood mingling with mine, and this time, forever. I imagined it coming into my body and integrating with all that I was. I drank furiously, oblivious to him and to all things outside of what my lips were doing. I was in the thrall of taking him this way, feeling unleashed, as if I could go on forever, when he pulled my hair, detaching me and snapping my head back so that he could look at my face.
I tried to free myself so that I could go back for more, but he held my hair firmly in his grip. His shirt was torn and the skin on his neck broken. A trickle of blood leaked out of the corner of the wound. He passed the two fingers he always used to take my pulse over the wound, closing it and sealing my source.
From the moment that I took his blood, until days later when we left Ireland, he did not let me out of his sight. He treated me like a baby, bathing and dressing me himself, bringing me my food, feeling my pulses, listening to my heartbeat, and giving me potions to drink. I did not welcome this pampering. My energy was so high that my ears buzzed. Something had ignited inside me, something that I did not know how to quell, and I tried to get him to let me drink from him again.
“Too much could poison you. We must be careful.”
“I have been careful all my life,” I said, hearing a new strength in my voice. His blood was animating my body, heating me up from the inside and infusing me with an unfamiliar vigor.
At those times, he held me close, not to demonstrate his love but to contain me. “We must proceed slowly, Mina. Let us see how your body responds.”
“How is it supposed to respond?” I asked.
“Responses vary. Some humans become very ill; some die. You were born with the Gift, so we know that you will survive, though you may experience some very unpleasant symptoms. On the other hand, you may not. We will observe you to gauge whether your powers are intensifying. If you take sick, then it means that we have moved too quickly.”
“How long before I become immortal?” I asked.
“You are getting ahead of yourself. It will take a long time to tell whether or not you are aging. You must be patient.”
“I do not want to be patient. Now that we are together, I want to gobble up life with you. I want to go everywhere and experience everything, all that life holds for us.”
He laughed at my enthusiasm. “My love, I am confident that we will have forever. Believe me, there is no rush anymore. One needn’t ‘gobble’ life if one has an eternity to explore its mysteries and to experience its pleasures.”
We set sail for Southampton on a glum Saturday afternoon, standing in the steamer’s glass promenade silently bidding good-bye to the land where we had first met. Black smoke sat like a wide-brimmed hat atop the great mountain that presided over the green-blanketed county. We glided out of the harbor and into the sea, where from our vantage point, barren stone slabs stood like sentinels guarding the coastline from the wind-whipped breakers. As the Irish coast receded, we looked ahead to the silver-gray ocean that had begun to shimmer with rain.
We intended to close the mansion in London and travel the world. The Count wanted to show me the lands where we had spent lifetimes together. He said that we had lived and loved in many countries-England, Ireland, Italy, France, but he would only tantalize me with snippets of information. “You said that the past was dead to you and that you only cared for the present and the future,” he reminded me.
“But now I want to remember,” I had replied. “I want to recapture the time we have lost.”
“There is no such thing as recapturing lost time. But much of it will come back to you when we return to these places, as you saw happen in Ireland. I hope that it will be a joyous discovery for you, Mina.” He added with a rueful smile, “I will try to avoid the locations of our past discontent.”
“At some point, I will remember all of it,” I said. “But past hardships are inconsequential now that we are together again.”
As Ireland receded into the mist, the rain, and the waves, he wrapped me in a blanket, and we lay on lounge chairs inside the promenade. “I have been thinking, Mina. There is so much of the world that I want to show you, so many places that I traveled in the years that I was alone-India, China, Arabia, Egypt, Russia. It would take lifetimes for me to tell you about my adventures. Let us go there, and let it all unfold before you. Only then will you truly know me as I am today.”
“I want to know everything,” I said. “Though now that I have you inside me, I feel that I know you like I know myself.”
“I have been a merchant, a soldier, a diplomat, a physician, a scholar, and many other things. I have served princes, kings, warlords, and usurpers; and I have also, at times, served no one but myself,” he said. “I have known thousands of people, and have had numerous alliances and intimacies, but my heart was a place of desolation until now.”
“But we have been together before,” I said. “We have spent decades together.”
“Yes, but it was never for forever, and I was always painfully aware of that fact. I always knew that sooner or later, I would lose you to one of the causes of mortal extinction. At least now, you have made the choice to try to be with me forever.”
“You will never have to be alone again, my love,” I said, wondering what would have made me choose life without him. But we had agreed not to discuss it, at least not yet. “I am strong and determined. We must never be apart again.”
In the first few days of the voyage, I noticed that my senses were gradually heightening. My night vision became sharper and my hearing more acute. The sensation was strange and not always pleasant. The pots and utensils used by the kitchen staff clanged loudly in my ears even when I was on the other side of the vessel. One of the servants stirred sugar into a cup of tea, and the sound of the spoon against the fine bone china irritated me and
