Part Four

Hannah was cold when she woke up. She reached out without thinking about it, expecting Thierry at first and then, when she couldn’t sense him near, Mira. But her hands landed on long, flat sheets and sunken, empty pillows.

She opened her eyes and blinked. It was dusk; she’d slept the entire day away in this beautiful attic bedroom. It took her a moment to realize she wasn’t alone in the room, that on a fainting sofa covered in gray velvet, Teth was sitting. He had his legs curled up underneath him like a child.

Hannah pushed the hair out of her eyes. His being here when she knew Thierry wasn’t around made her stomach clench.

She didn’t mean to say something so hostile, but "What are you doing here?" just slipped past her lips. Silly question, of course, it was his house and she was a guest, but the fact that he had been trying to wipe out her entire race a year ago had not slipped her mind.

He looked startled. "Where’s Thierry?" she demanded.

"He left," Teth told her.

Left? He had left her here? "Why?’

Teth glanced away from her, his mouth frowning while he formed an answer. He was wearing a velour shirt in dark tan. It would have looked relaxed if his face hadn’t betrayed his worry.

That damn face of his, Hannah thought. Could he never keep his feelings off it?

"He left so that we could be alone," he told her.

"Why?"

Now there was pure shame in is expression. "I thought this..." he began.

"Thought what?" Hannah asked with less anger.

"I have to explain something," he said.

A note in his voice, she realized it was vulnerability, and it took the edge off her fear. He was nervous.

"When I was seventeen," he said, "I met a woman. No, really my brother met her. He brought her to our house. I’ll spare you the historical details, except that it was the fifth century, and I lived in France. I was quiet, Dontien was the one always running around. He never got into trouble, he was an upstanding youth, but he wanted to explore everything. I loved him, not the way siblings today do, with their petty insults and reluctance toward sentiment, I loved him entirely. He loved me. Our father killed himself when I was fifteen, he hung a robe belt from the balcony railing and then jumped. It was the middle of a holiday, and the street was filled with a parade. Everyone saw. After that things changed. Dontien and I grew distant. My mother remarried a few months later, to a teacher who had loved her when she was a young girl and was now sinking into inevitable death. He was rich. He knew my mother married him for his money, but she was kind to him, so he didn’t mind. He was kind to Dontien and me, as well. I missed him when he was gone.

"It was strange to grow up among classmates who all saw my father commit suicide in the town square. They looked at me differently. Dontien let it rush off his shoulder like water, but I was always over-sensitive. I could read but philosophy bored me, and I had no friends, so I spent most of my time alone or with Mother. She was beautiful, like Dontien, and as she aged she remained beautiful. She didn’t mind the attention I gave her, I suppose she was vain. She loved to know I was watching while she read, or slept, or bathed and dressed.

"Dontien was a year older than I was. He put off joining the military for a year so that he could go to Paris, and a few months after he arrived there he wrote and demanded that I join him. Mother told me to go. She had always thought I was too quiet, and now she said that being in a city would draw me out."

Teth stopped, and Hannah met his eyes. "Go on," she said.

"I’m not sure why I’m telling you this."

She shrugged. His staggered, broken story wasn't threatening. "Tell me anyway."

He hesitated, then began speaking again. "When I wasn’t with Mother, I would go into my room, lay down on my bed, and close my eyes. I would stop thinking, but I wouldn’t sleep. I just shut down, stopped being. I was breathing, but not feeling.

"I arrived in Paris to find Dontien living with a woman named Marie. It was frowned upon, but not considered as scandalous as it would have been in, say, the seventeenth century. She was a seamstress, and she was madly in love with Dontien, but she knew he wouldn’t stay around long. It didn’t seem to trouble her. Marie had light brown hair, and she wore it long, to her hips. Sometimes I would watch her sew, watch the way she pushed her hair off the cloth.

"Dontien took me gambling, sight-seeing, hunting. I was ambivalent about most of it, but when he took me to the house with all the powdered, scented women, I refused to go inside. He grew angry and tried to mock my morality. I don’t think he understood that what happened between men and women had always seemed to me a complicated pointlessness which I wished to avoid.

"I went back to Marie and watched her sew. Dontien came home drunk, it was the only time I every saw him drunk, and he said horrible things to me. I didn’t care. I didn’t care when he said he hated me, that he was disgusted with me and ashamed of me. I just felt...annoyed that I had to listen to him, when I would rather have gone and laid down.

"In today’s language of psychology, I was severely depressed. It had started with my father’s suicide and grown progressively deeper until I no longer cared about anything. Dontien cared about me, he hated to see me withering away. He tried to entice me with food and game and woman, and I just wanted to sleep and watch Marie sew.

"To make a long story short, he met a vampire named Giovanna. She took us to Italy and changed us both. The change was a wild shock to me, depression was no longer a problem. I could feel. I was hungry. I had been reborn, and I fell in love with Giovanna and with Dontien all over again. We ran rampant in the streets, we made love for nights on end, we drank the blood of royalty. We were living art. We were Divine.

"I began hating the human I had been. The disgusting, weak boy who never moved and was never interested in anything. I recalled how impossible it had been to feel, how words Dontien had spoken which now would have torn my heart out had had no effect on me. I had been a cold, disgusting, emotionless creature.

"There’s no climax to the story that I can tell you which you don’t already know. With time I learned that all humans were as I had been, none of them ever feel anything, ever really care. Their attention spans are based on social custom, which they find easier to follow than to ignore. Those in the Night World feel. We have souls. Humans do not."

He finally stopped. His speech had been imperfect, its plot raggedly drawn, but Hannah understood what he was trying to tell her.

"You think I’m a puppet," she said.

"Not a puppet. A sheep."

She wanted to smack him, would have if he hadn’t looked so disgusted with himself. She knew why. "You found out you were wrong," she said.

He nodded. "Thierry told me. I didn’t believe him at first, I thought he was a deranged human-lover. But I came to respect him, and love him, and I realized that his wisdom is large enough that if he believes humans are our equals, I have no reason to doubt him."

"But you still don’t believe it’s true," Hannah finished.

He looked as if he might cry. "I’ve tried so hard. But it’s been sixteen hundred years, and I’ve watched humans live and die without meaning. I have found no proof except Thierry."

Hannah leaned slowly back against the headboard, her fingers wrapping around the edge of the blankets. "What do you want from me?"

His eyes were soft gray, fading to brown at the edges. Strange eyes, but not frightening. "I want to know that you’re real inside. I mean, honestly, there was something wrong with me when I was human, wasn’t there? You aren’t like I was. The six billion people Thierry wants me to help him save aren’t like I was."

"No," Hannah whispered, "they aren’t. But you don’t believe that, either, do you?"

He didn’t answer. She was starting to talk in circles. "What do you want from me?" she asked again.

His gaze traveled slowly over her form beneath the thin blankets. Hannah swallowed and closed her eyes. He wasn’t leering at her, nothing so unsubtle, but she could tell from that dream around his eyelashes what he wanted.

"I won’t demand anything," he said. "I’ve never been with a human, if you would show me-"

"Show you what?" she hissed, eyes blazing. "It would be the same between you and me as it was between you and Mira, or you and Austina, or you and any of the hundreds of humans you’ve raped in the last sixteen hundred years."

Quietly, he said, "I have never raped a human. Never, Hannah. I never had a lover before I was changed. Mira retains all of the physical and mental qualities she possessed before I injured her. I have never been with a human."

The silk edge of the blanket felt like rough wool under her fingers. "I’ve never been with anyone but Thierry," she heard herself tell him. "Does he know you're doing this to me?"

"He gave me permission to ask you. Nothing more, and I won’t take anything more without your consent."

"What did you offer him?"

"Nothing."

"What did you threaten him with?"

"Nothing."

Frustration fisted her hands. "Why are you doing this?"

His words were careful. "If I you can forgive me, if I can offer you something, and you can accept it, and I can find whatever it is in you that makes us equal-"

"You’re going to judge humankind on my ability in bed?" she asked. "I have no sort of experience! You know what it’s like with a soulmate, you get all caught up in the head and the mind, and you aren’t even sure afterward if you had sex or not."

"But it wouldn’t be like that between us-"

"I know, and that’s half the reason why you have no right to ask. You’re demanding to be the recipient of a right of passage that’s mine and mine alone."

He finally raised his voice enough that she couldn’t cut him off. "Not if I’m giving you the same thing in return."

Hannah huddled against her knees. "I want to talk to Thierry," she said.

"Pick up the phone on the bedside table."

It rang once against her ear, then was snatched up. "Hello?" Thierry said.

"You’re using me," she told him.

"No, Hannah-"

"You’re selling my body to the enemy so that you can get what you want. How dare you."

"That’s not it at all."

"He just told me it was."

"He wants to get to know you better. You two could be friends, you could make peace with each other."

"I don't seen Clinton hopping into bed with Hussein," she snapped.

"It's not about sex," Teth said distantly.

"It's not the same," Thierry said in her ear.

Hannah remembered the last Solstice. How the west wing on the sixth floor had proven full of horrific secrets. How Thierry had murdered people and stuffed their bodies into a little locker up there. How in all the times she had laid in his arms, in the folds of his mind, there were edges he kept tucked under and hidden away. When had he ever given her the full truth, confided entirely in her?

"Teth wants us to understand each other," she murmured absently.

Her eyes drifted up to him, and he nodded.

"If I ask him a question, he’ll give me an honest, complete answer."

Another nod, after a moment of hesitation.

"When was the last time you didn't turn away from me?" she asked, and before the sentence was finished she was putting the phone back in its cradle.

She looked at Teth, and he looked back. "When this is over," he said, "are you going to hate me?"

Drawing her legs back up to her chest, she said, "I hope not."

She honestly didn't think she was capable of hating him any more than she already did.