Amor Meus

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “Sebastian!” Nathanial yelled, sounding nothing like a man who had just taken a beating. He sounded outraged. Then he spoke again, and Sebastian understood none of it. It was a foreign-sounding tongue – not even the Italian Sebastian thought a man with a name like Aquila might know.

  As Sebastian staggered back away from the flailing blade, as heat seemed to bloom in his chest, Nathanial surged to his feet, glaring around at all three of them. He appeared none the worse for the blows he had taken. “You have made a serious mistake,” he told them, his voice very calm and his face very still. But there was something in his eyes…an emotion Sebastian could not recognize for the pain in his chest was distracting him. So were his knees which had become unaccountably weak. He staggered toward the wall of the theatre and rested against it. His knees buckled and he slid down the wall to sit upon the dirt.

  He pressed his hand against his chest and looked down upon it. There was a dark stain spreading over his snowy white new shirt, rising above the neck of his waistcoat as it spread.

  “Oh…” he said, his voice weak.

  Nathanial glanced at him. “I’ll be with you in a few moments,” he said. “Press your hand against it until I am there.”

  Sebastian tried to nod, but he felt light headed and couldn’t move his chin. He lifted his hand – it took enormous effort – and pressed it against his chest. Then he pressed his other hand over the top, to hold the first in place.

  Nathanial pulled his coat off and dropped it to the ground, as the three ruffians backed up deeper into the alley. They were afraid of him.

  “You can run if you like,” Nathanial offered. “It won’t save you.”

  The one with the knife dropped it with a clatter, then turned and ran toward the end of the alley.

  Sebastian couldn’t say for sure what happened next. His vision was impaired, perhaps from the injury, and time seemed to fold in on itself, for Nathanial began to move very fast indeed, almost too fast for Sebastian to follow.

  The two ruffians that had not run abruptly dropped to the ground, clutching at their throats, which were spurting blood. Then the man that had used the knife squealed, somewhere in the dark at the end of the alley. The squeal cut off abruptly.

  Sebastian swallowed. He was unaccountably thirsty.

  “Sebastian.” Nathanial was abruptly standing in front of him. He got to his knees, straddling one of Sebastian’s useless legs and pulled his coat open. He gave a breathy groan, looking up into the night sky. “Why did you not stay where it was safe?” he demanded.

  “Because...” He wanted to explain that staying where Nathanial had left him would have been unthinkable. That he hadn’t thought. He had simply acted.

  Nathanial was tugging at his shirt. The buttons scattered, one of them bouncing with a soft sound against the brick of the building at Sebastian’s back. “Let me see,” he said gently, moving Sebastian’s hands out of the way by resting them on his thighs. Sebastian wanted to protest that the blood would stain his breeches, but it remained only a thought.

  Nathanial pulled the shirt front open and hissed. “You have lost a lot of blood,” he murmured. “But it isn’t a fatal cut. I just need to stop the blood from flowing.” He tapped Sebastian’s cheek, making him open his eyes. Nathanial was studying him, but the moon was at his back, and Sebastian couldn’t see his eyes properly because of it. “Do you trust me?” he asked.

  What an odd question! And yet....

  Sebastian forced himself to speak the word. “Yes,” he whispered, for it was true.

  “Thank you.” Nathanial leaned forward and for a moment, Sebastian thought he was about to kiss him, but his lips pressed against his chest, which he had bared to the night.

  Then Sebastian felt him licking the wound, which began to tingle and grow warm again. Then even warmer, until it was the hottest part of his chest. “What are you doing?” Sebastian whispered and was surprised to find the words were easier to speak.

  Nathanial lifted his head a small fraction of an inch. “Healing you.” He studied his chest carefully, as if the dark was no barrier to his investigation. “It is done.”

  The heat was dissipating. Sebastian blinked. “Healing?”

  “Closing the wound, so that it no longer bleeds,” Nathanial told him. “To fully heal, you will need to recover from the blood you have lost. That will take rest, food and time.”

  Sebastian let his head roll back against the wall. “I am tired,” he agreed.

  “Then it is time to get you home,” Nathanial told him, and lifted him to his feet.

  Sebastian swayed and clutched at him to maintain his balance. “God above!”

  “And his son in heaven,” Nathanial agreed, sounding amused. “Come, my foolish one. You need to sleep. When you have recovered, we will talk.”

  * * * * *

  There was no disorientation, this time. The room and the big bed had become familiar in the space of a day. Sebastian lay blinking up at the decorative edging on the ceiling, listening to the quiet sounds on the street outside, muffled by the closed window. There was very little traffic passing over the cobbles, and the street itself shed no light through the windows, which meant it was late enough for the lamps along the street to have been extinguished for the night. That meant it was past two in the morning.

  There was a soft sound in the room beyond the door, which was closed. It sounded like Nathanial was still awake. Sebastian rolled onto his side, then remembered the wound. He looked down at his naked chest, then sat up properly and examined it as carefully as he could in the dark.

  His chest was completely unmarked.

  He remembered Nathanial carrying him home. His feet had been close to useless, but even carrying his full weight had not seemed to tax Nathanial. Once home, he had laid him on the bed, stripped him of his clothes, and washed away the blood, all in silence.

  Sebastian had been very tired by the time Nathanial pulled the covers over him, carried the candlestick out with him and closed the door. He hadn’t moved from the spot where Nathanial had left him.

  Now he reviewed the moments in the theatre lane once more.

  When you have recovered, we will talk, Nathanial had said. He had anticipated Sebastian’s many questions, then.

  Sebastian looked around for the dressing robe he had been borrowing, but there were a pair of breeches hanging over the end of the bed, and nothing else. He put them on and buttoned them. They were tight about the waist, and an inch too long, but they covered him.

  He stepped out into the main room.

  Nathanial was sitting in the armless chair closest to the fire, reading by the light of the flames. The big book was spread across his knees. He was wearing the robe that Sebastian had borrowed. He got to his feet as Sebastian halted at the edge of the big square carpet that lay in front of the fireplace.

  “You look better,” Nathanial judged, “although I imagine you are quite hungry now.”

  “And thirsty,” Sebastian agreed. He held up his hand as Nathanial made to move toward the table, which was behind Sebastian. “If I may ask a question, first?”

  Nathanial gave him an odd look. “Just one?”

  Sebastian touched his chest. “What did you do to me? How did you do it?”

  “Ah, not just one, then.” Nathanial turned and picked up the big book. The leather covering it was carved and painted, and the hinges were brass. “Have you heard of Guillaume de Palerme?”

  Sebastian glanced at the book. “William of Palerme? It is a romance, isn’t it?”

  “Set in the court of the Emperor of Rome, yes. It is a fanciful story and quite untrue, but the idea of werewolves is very entertaining.”

  Sebastian frowned. “I suppose. I have not read it. It sounds too melodramatic for my tastes.”

  “You do not like flights of fancy such as these?”

  “I do not understand what this has to do with….” Sebastian halted as he coupled up the idea of fantasy and his original question. “Magic?” he aske
d, his voice croaky with stress. “You are telling me you used magic on me?”

  Nathanial took a deep breath. “Of a kind,” he agreed. “A very, very old kind.”

  Sebastian wanted to tell him that he was addled, except that he could touch his chest and feel for himself that something had healed him. Nathanial had done that.

  “What did you do? How did you do it?” Another thought struck him. “It wasn’t my eyes failing me, was it? You really were moving faster than I could see.”

  “Yes, I was,” Nathanial agreed softly.

  “You were untouched by their blows…” Sebastian added.

  “Yes.”

  Sebastian’s heart began to thrum hard. It seemed he could feel his blood thundering through him. He felt as if he should be afraid, but there was too much he did not understand.

  “I can hear your heart galloping,” Nathanial told him. “I am scaring you. That was not my intention.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Sebastian told him, although the idea that Nathanial could hear his heart from across the room was also strange and fantastical. “I just do not understand.”

  Nathanial trod across the carpet, stopping just in front of him. “I am a vampire, Sebastian. I have been a vampire for a very long time.” He opened his mouth, and Sebastian watched two long and very sharply pointed teeth slowly descend, to stop with their points a fingernail width below his normal teeth.

  Sebastian leaned closer to study them. “May I…touch them?”

  Nathanial’s eyes widened. For the first time since Sebastian had met him, he looked uncertain. “I…yes, I suppose.”

  “Is that inappropriate?” Sebastian asked.

  Nathanial gave a small laugh. “It is a question that I have never been asked before. Most humans are afraid of my kind.”

  “You are not human?” Sebastian asked.

  “Not anymore. Not since I was made.”

  “Then you were human, once?”

  “A long time ago.”

  Sebastian cocked his head. “So, what is a vampire?”

  Nathanial’s extra teeth withdrew and disappeared. Sebastian decided he would learn more about them, later. He looked at Nathanial expectantly.

  “You had better sit down,” Nathanial told him. “Perhaps you should eat, while I talk. This will take some time.”

  “You will not eat with me?”

  “I do not eat,” Nathanial told him.

  “Then how do you thrive?”

  “We take in blood,” he said gravely. He was watching Sebastian carefully. “Human blood.”

  “There are more of you?”

  Nathanial looked surprised again. “You keep defying my expectations, Sebastian. Does the idea of my drinking your blood not disturb you?”

  Sebastian shrugged. “You might have done that at any time in the last day or so, but you have not. You have…well, you know what we have been doing together as well as I.”

  “Sex,” Nathanial said flatly.

  Sebastian could feel his cheeks heating. “Yes,” he agreed, “and I don’t think you’re such a hypocrite that you would…have sex…with the man you intend to feed from. I don’t know how things work with vampires, but what I know of you as a man tells me it isn’t possible.”

  “Thank you,” Nathanial said softly.

  “Why?”

  “For attributing me with human values even when you know I am not human. It has been quite some time since I have been thought of so highly.” He stepped out of the way, and waved toward the table. “Sit and eat while I tell you a tale.”

  Chapter Five

  Sebastian had eaten his fill and moved from the table to the sofa by the fire, yet he had more questions. Everything Nathanial told him budded another three or four questions, and every answer Nathanial provided added a few more.

  The vampire culture, like humans’, was old and complex. Nathanial was also old, although he had seemed coy about mentioning exactly how many years he had existed. His age, however, explained one other thing.

  “The language you spoke in the lane,” Sebastian said. “I didn’t recognize it. Was that your birth tongue?”

  “It was Latin.”

  “You are Roman?” It seemed a very strange question to ask someone of the eighteenth century, but most of Sebastian’s questions and Nathanial’s answers had been the stuff of fantasy.

  Nathanial shook his head. “I come from the land that eventually became Italy, but Rome was a crumbling ruin when I was born.”

  “I do not understand why you remain hidden,” Sebastian said finally, for this had been puzzling him all along. “Why not tell the world that you exist?”

  Nathanial’s expression was wise and sad, making him look as old as the centuries he had hinted he had lived. “Humans have proved over and over again that they cannot tolerate a competitive race – a dominant society will destroy another that it thinks might be as strong. It subjugates a weaker one. How do you think humans would react to a species that is more powerful, faster, and lives far longer than any human?”

  Sebastian sighed. Nathanial spoke truly. Human history bore him out. “It is sad that you must hide away, but I cannot dispute the wisdom of remaining secret. Perhaps, one day in the future, things might change.”

  “Perhaps,” Nathanial agreed. “Humans have grown steadily more civilized as time goes on. That is for the future, though.”

  Nathanial was standing by the fire once more. It was as if the flames comforted him, although Sebastian had learned that Nathanial didn’t feel heat or cold the way humans did. He was still wearing the robe and his feet were bare.

  “Come here,” Sebastian told him and pressed his hand against the sofa cushions next to him.

  Nathanial’s eyes narrowed, but he moved slowly forward. “What do you have in mind?” he asked, his voice low.

  “I would have thought that someone with your superior skills and centuries of wisdom would have deduced for yourself what I intend.”

  Nathanial settled on the sofa, but he wasn’t as close as Sebastian would have preferred. “Are you sure, Sebastian?”

  Sebastian curled his hand around the lapel of Nathanial’s robe and drew him closer. “Why would you ask that?”

  “I am a vampire. Many find that off-putting.”

  “You were a vampire when we...had sex. Before. Nothing has changed except that I know more about you now.”

  Nathanial smiled. “You really are an extraordinary man.” His smile grew. “And you simply must get used to words like ‘sex.’ I have a few more that I must teach you, too.”

  “Latin words?”

  Nathanial slid his hand around Sebastian’s hips, his fingers stroking the flesh above his breeches. “Anglo-Saxon words,” he replied and kissed him.

  * * * * *

  Nathanial was stroking his chest while Sebastian spoke. The light in the room was steadily growing as dawn drew closer. They were lying beneath the covers for the pre-dawn air was chilly.

  “Life had been very simple and so very privileged, until I was thirteen. Then my father found out – I still don’t know how – but he learned that I was not his son. I was a bastard my mother had passed off as his. My father—I should say the earl—tossed both of us off the estate with only the clothes we were wearing, and ordered the staff to ensure we did not return. We were run off.” He recalled the cold winter day, and standing upon the road that led to the gates of the estate, while John the Bailiff stood at the gate with his legs spread and his big hunting rifle cradled in his arms. The full depth of the betrayal had not made itself completely felt on that bewildering and frightening day. As he grew older and looked back on that day and his life before it, Sebastian had understood better the choices the earl had made.

  “We started walking and eventually found a village that could offer us shelter. It was a village that did not know who we were, and that was the beginning of our new life. My mother had no skills other than embroidery, but we had no money for the linens and threads she would nee
d to create anything. So I found work as a farm hand and learned as quickly as I could.” His hands had blistered and bled for a month and his mother had cried over them, but she had sent him out the door the next morning anyway because she had known just as he had that money brought them food and would let her work, too.

  “It was a brutal winter,” Sebastian said. “My mother died only a few weeks later. They told me it was an infection of the chest, but she had said nothing about being ill. Her death was a complete surprise to me.”

  “She didn’t want you to worry any more than you were,” Nathanial said quietly.

  “I think she gave up,” Sebastian said. “She was high born, and had never worked in her life. Scrabbling for farthings and wondering where the next meal was to come from...she couldn’t stand it. All I was left with was this.” He lifted the chain from around his neck and showed Nathanial the lady’s ring hanging from it.

  Nathanial raised a brow. “I wondered what the ring meant to you. I see, now.”

  Sebastian drew in a breath. “Then I met Einrí Fitzgerald.” He paused, wondering if he could speak of this.

  “Fitzgerald was a swindler?” Nathanial asked, his hand growing still.

  Sebastian nodded. “He...liked my looks.” He looked at Nathanial.

  “Ahh...” Nathanial rolled onto his back and looked up at the ceiling. “Your first introduction to the ways of buggers and thieves. No wonder you were so wary, with me. I assume he was not at all considerate when he took you.”

  “I did not know there was a gentle way to it, until I met you,” Sebastian replied.

  Nathanial drew a breath and let it out. “There are some humans whose hearts I would happily tear from their chests.” He closed his eyes. “I will spare you the rest of the telling, Sebastian. I can see it all from here. He took you in, taught you his swindling ways, and in exchange, he used you whenever the mood took him. Is that how it went?”

  “Close enough,” Sebastian said, trying to keep his voice even. “Einrí was a rough-as-guts Irishman, so his swindles were limited. But because of my accent and my manners, he could dream up swindles that targeted the upper class and their rich purses, using me as his entry pass. Because of me, he tripled his earnings every year, above what he had been able to gather before we met.”