Karen Essex

  As outrageous as his claim was, he spoke with the sort of certainty that made me believe him. “I feel as if I have entered some sort of magical kingdom,” I said. “Forgive me if I do not know how to respond.”

  “Respond any way you like, Mina. I must admit that I have been surprised at the way that you have allowed politeness and formality to suppress your higher nature. But that will change,” he said. “You have entered a magical kingdom, but it is the realm in which you have existed before, the realm in which you belong.”

  “Are you speaking of the hallucinations I had as a child?” I asked. “I remember that in one of them, you came to me.”

  “Oh yes, and not just once, though that is all that you seem to recall. I have been aware of you since you 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 an
y 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 was mad. Yet I have seen you as both wolf and man, and so I must believe you, as you believed the French nobleman.”

  He smiled. “Shall I continue?”

  “I would like that,” I said.

  “The viscount told us in great detail how he and the mysterious woman coupled, first on the forest floor and then in every curve of that serpentine tree, leaving him so fatigued and spent that he fell into a deep sleep. When he awakened, he found himself in his lover’s kingdom, and that is where he learned the history of her tribe.”

  The Count stopped speaking. “Are you tired, Mina? Do you want to go to sleep?”

  “No, I am not tired,” I said. The room had grown chilly, but I was as eager as a child to hear the rest of the story.

  “I do not want to strain your credulity,” he said. I thought he was teasing me, but I could not be sure. He opened a cabinet, producing a thick wool throw, which he put over me. Then he sat down and continued.

  “The viscount learned that his fairy lover and her tribe were descendants of the angels who left heaven, but not because they were expelled by God. That, he said, was a lie told by priests. These angels were powerful creators in their own right and enchanted by human life. After observing humans for millennia, they craved all that physical life offered—touch, sound, scent, the heat and desire that comes with the flow of blood through the veins, and the taste of food and of wine. Sensuality is an abstract quality in the spirit realm, so they came to earth to experience all the senses. The angels thought humans to be magnificent creatures, and they longed for their companionship and their adulation. With their power to shift their shapes, the angels made themselves into physical beings and selected humans who were the most likely to give them children. With their superior intelligence and supernatural gifts, they were irresistible to the mortals.

  “Now, all this happened thousands of years before man began to record his history. The fairy queen who seduced the viscount was a descendant of those first couplings between angels and humans. She claimed that some of the offspring of the angels were mortals but some were immortal. As with any two creatures mating, the outcome is not guaranteed, no matter how careful one is in the selection of a partner. But the viscount’s wife was an immortal, and from his union with her came three daughters—beautiful, magical creatures—who went to live with their mother’s tribe in Ireland.

  “After hearing his story, all the young knights wanted to go on a quest to find immortal lovers, but the viscount explained to us that even if we did find them, some of us would be driven mad and some of us would die. ‘Their bodies emit a strange power,’ he warned. ‘No one can predict its effect on a mortal.’

  “Naturally, each of us wanted to prove that we were as strong and virile as the Viscount of Poitou. So full of bravado were we that the more he tried to warn us, the more we desired to journey to these mystical lands and test our manhood.”

  “Did you turn around and go looking for the fairy creatures?” I asked. I was anxious to hear more about them, and this time, not from a madwoman.

  “As curious as we were, our honor would never permit desertion. The enchanted women would be our reward for our service.

  “The viscount assured us that in battle, we had the protection of both the Church and the fairy queen, and so when we faced the enemy, we fought fearlessly—viciously, in fact. We were as close a band of brothers as has ever existed, and it tore us apart when one of us succumbed, either in battle or to one of the epidemics that infiltrated our camps. We began to inquire about special herbs and tonics and spells that we had heard of that would make us invincible; and with these inquiries, we attracted the attention of a sect of warrior monks, who began to reveal to us their mysteries.

  “These monks believed that through the daily transubstantiation of wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ, magical powers were conferred upon them—powers that could be used over our enemies, who were instruments of Satan. ‘We use the very power of Satan to defeat his disciples,’ they claimed. They invited us to take part in a forbidden ceremony, a Requiem Mass, said not for the dead but for our living enemies. We gathered in secret at midnight before the day of battle, and we prayed with great fervor for the souls of our enemies, who we strongly envisioned as already vanquished and dead. At first, it was eerie to imagine the living as dead, and moreover to pray to God to take their souls. But we left these ceremonies elated, and the next day, we fought with uncommon ferocity, slaying greater numbers of our enemies than we thought possible. Whether or not the Black Masses were the reason for our victories, they gave us the faith to go into battle with the certainty that we would win. And win we did. We became a renowned fighting force, and our loyalty to one another grew with every victory.

  “As our success grew, so did our ambitions. The monks believed that they had discovered what we were looking for—not just invincibility but immortality. They said that the Christ himself had given us the key when he said, ‘Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.’ These words, as you may know, are from the Gospel of John, and the monks believed in their literal interpretation, that drinking blood was the secret to life everlasting.

  “Some of us were appalled at the idea, but at the time, monks were the keepers of all the world’s knowledge and knew things that no one else knew. They said that in ancient times, it was known that the blood housed the soul. Supplicants of warriors and heroes like Theseus and Achilles poured blood into the soil of their graves to give them strength. With this blood, the heroes rose from the dead to fight alongside them in battle. The monks told us other stories to support these ideas: the goddess Athena gave Asclepius the power to heal by giving him the blood of the Gorgon. The Roman gladiators drank the blood of their kill, both animal and human, to absorb the strength of the enemy. The berserkers, the savage warriors of Odin who tore their opponents apart, ripping through their jugulars with bare teeth and eviscerating them without the aid of weaponry, got their power by drinking animal blood. The maenads, the original followers of Dionysus, drank both wine and blood in their rituals, sacrificing animals and sometimes a human in their frenzies. The monks said that blood consumption and blood sacrifice were as old as time, and that was why Jesus made himself a human sacrifice, giving us His blood to drink. They also warned us that drinking the blood of another can cause illness, even death, for blood carries humors both goo
d and bad. But we were men who faced death every day. For us, drinking blood would be just another test of our strength.

  “We young men desperately wanted to join the ranks of the eternal heroes. We formed a secret brotherhood and vowed that we would not rest until we discovered the key to immortality. Despite the risks, we began to drink blood as part of our ritual to prepare for battle—the blood of animals, the blood of our enemies—and eventually, we shared our own blood with one another.”

  He paused. “You must sleep. Your body is still recovering from the treatment at the asylum, and some of the medication is still in your blood.” He reached his hand out to me. “Please come and sit beside me.”

  I did as he requested. He took my hand and put his fingers to the inside of my wrist. “As I thought. Your pulse is not what it should be right now. Your energy centers were weakened by what they did to you.”

  “How do you know these things?” I asked, remembering what he had done to my pulse points in my dream, and I felt a hot, crimson flush across my face.

  “I was not always a warrior. I have also been a doctor,” he said, placing my hand back in my lap. “And by the way, it was not a dream, Mina.”

  I was astonished that he had read my thought so quickly. It was both thrilling and terrifying to be so vulnerable to another. There was nowhere to hide. It was like being perennially naked. “It had to be a dream. It happened in my sleep,” I said.

  “It happened in another realm, one in which I have visited you many times. And do not worry. As you grow stronger, you will be able to efficaciously hide your thoughts from me. I do not look forward to that day, but it will come. Now to bed.”