The first time Etta encountered Raphael, she was a little quiet afterward.
“He was made a vampire only a few days ago,” she said eventually, when they were dancing. “That’s what you said. Before that he was just a boy.”
“If it helps, I have a suspicion that he was a menace.”
Etta did not laugh. “I always thought of vampires as so old,” she said. “I never thought about how people can become them. I guess it makes sense. I mean—Raphael, the poor kid, he’s too young. But I can see how people might want to stay young forever. The same way you do.”
Etta had been talking about age more and more in the last few months. She had not mentioned the men who came to hear her sing at clubs, who wanted to take her away and have children with her. She had not had to.
Magnus understood, could read the signs like a sailor knew which clouds in the sky would bring a storm. He had been left before, for many reasons, and this one was not unusual.
Immortality was something you paid for, and those you loved paid for, over and over again. There had been a precious few who had stayed with Magnus until death had parted them, but come death or a new stage of their lives where they felt he could not follow, they were all parted from him by something.
He could not blame Etta.
“Would you want it?” Magnus asked at last, after a long time swaying together. He did not make the offer, but he thought it, that he could have it arranged. There were ways. Ways one might pay a terrible price for. Ways his father knew of, and Magnus hated his father. But if she could stay with him always—
There was another silence. All Magnus heard was the click of his shoes, and the soft shuffle of her bare feet, on his wooden floors.
“No,” said Etta, her cheek pressed against his shoulder. “No. If I could have it all my own way, I’d want a little more time with you. But I wouldn’t stop the clock for it.”
Strange and painful reminders came to Magnus every now and then, when he had become accustomed to Raphael as the always irritated and irritating housemate who had been wished upon him. He would be surprised with a reminder of what he already knew: that Raphael’s clock had been stopped, that his human life had been viciously wrenched away from him.
Magnus was constructing a new hairstyle with the aid of Brylcreem and a dash of magic when Raphael came up behind him and surprised him. Raphael often did that, since he had the silent tread of his vampire kind. Magnus suspected that he did it on purpose, but since Raphael never cracked a smile, it was hard to tell.
“You’re very frivolous,” Raphael remarked disapprovingly, staring at Magnus’s hair.
“And you’re very fifteen,” Magnus shot back.
Raphael usually had a retort for whatever Magnus threw at him, but instead of a reply Magnus received a long silence. When Magnus looked up from his mirror, he saw that Raphael had moved over to the window and was looking out onto the night.
“I would be sixteen by now,” said Raphael, voice as distant and cold as the light of the moon. “If I had lived.”
Magnus remembered the day when he had realized that he was no longer aging, looking in a mirror that seemed colder than all other mirrors had before, as if he had been viewing his reflection in a shard of ice. As if the mirror had been responsible for holding his image so utterly frozen and so utterly distant.
He wondered how different it was to be a vampire, to know down to the precise day, the hour, the minute when you stopped belonging to the common warm and changing course of humanity. When you stood still, and the world whirled on and never missed you.
He did not ask.
“You people,” said Raphael, which was how he referred to warlocks, because he was quite the charmer. “You stop aging randomly, don’t you? You’re born like a human is born, and you’re always what you are, but you age like a human does, until you don’t anymore.”
Magnus wondered if Raphael had read those same thoughts on Magnus’s face.
“That’s right.”
“Do you think your people have souls?” Raphael asked. He was still staring out the window.
Magnus had known people who thought he did not. He believed he did, but that did not mean he had never doubted.
“Doesn’t matter,” Raphael continued before Magnus could answer. His voice was flat. “Either way I envy you.”
“Why so?”
The moonlight poured in on Raphael, bleaching his face so he looked like a marble statue of a saint who had died young.
“Either you still have your souls,” said Raphael, “or you never had them, and you do not know what it is to wander the world damned, exiled, and missing them forever.”
Magnus put his hairbrush down. “All Downworlders have souls,” he said. “It’s what makes us different from demons.”
Raphael sneered. “That is a Nephilim belief.”