The night that Gavriel was bitten for the first time, he woke to freshly starched sheets and an unfamiliar high-ceilinged room. He stank of liquor; even his sweat smelled faintly of Chartreuse, and he thought he might still be drunk. When he sat up, his head spun such that he had to lie back down. Outside the windows, the gas lamps of Paris burned beneath a moonless sky.
“Drink this,” a man’s voice said, bringing a glass to his mouth.
He gulped what turned out to be water. He felt odd, hot and cold at the same time, as though a fever was coming on. He was used to waking in filthy rooms, used to shame on the face of the person or persons who’d brought him there, used to walking back to his tiny apartment with a sour stomach and rumpled clothes in the late afternoon, scandalizing his landlord.
What he wasn’t used to was finding himself in an opulent hotel with a blond man standing over him wearing a wicked grin. Vaguely, he remembered a piano playing and a sting at his throat, as though a cobra had struck him, and some great pressure against his neck. But he’d spent most of the evening in one of the more raffish haut bohème salons, and while he’d heard it said that places like that were frequented by snakes, no one meant it literally.
“I ought to go,” Gavriel said muzzily, trying to sit up again. “I’m not well.”
“Some sicknesses are worse than their cure,” said the man, pinning Gavriel in place with the press of a single hand. In the dim light, the iris of his eyes appeared to be spilled-blood red. Gavriel stared up at him, too amazed to be afraid. After courting the devil’s attention for so long, it seemed that at last the devil had come for him.
“When it’s done, we’ll be like brothers,” said the devil.
“I already have a brother,” Gavriel slurred. “He’s dead.”
The devil loomed over him, his grin widening to show off sharp teeth. “As am I.”
Gavriel opened his mouth to shout, but drunk as he was, he began to laugh instead.
When Gavriel woke again, light was streaming through the window, making his memories of the night before seem ridiculous. A particularly silly and indulgent nightmare, brought on by too many drinks and too much misery. No man loomed over him, ready to strike. No blood stained the bright white sheets. The hotel room was empty, his shirt and shoes resting on a nearby settee. On a low table, a fresh bottle of Chartreuse was set out, beside a cut-crystal glass and a plate of baked oysters.
He blinked at the bed, at the rumpled sheets. He brushed fingers over his neck. They touched tender skin, as though he’d been bruised. That gave him pause, making him nervous enough to gather up his things and leave the room quickly, heading for home.
He felt light-headed as he made his way past the gambling dens and pawnshops that studded the Ninth Arrondissement around the Folies Bergère Music Hall. He walked inside a boucherie without even really deciding on it. There, he spent what meager coins he had on calf liver and ate it raw, straight off the brown paper in which it was wrapped, on the steps of his building.
Gavriel slept through most of the day, waking at night with a creeping chill in his bones. Outside his apartment, he heard all the sounds of night in Paris—people hawking wares, whether food or flesh. Someone was playing dice in the back alley below his window; the sound of them on the cobblestones made him think of a skeleton rattling in its coffin.
He found that he did not want to be alone. Fortunately in Paris, he could find low company at any time. In a cabaret where a dark-haired girl performed the shocking danse du ventre, he met up with a few of his acquaintances. He knew little about any of them, really, except for their appetites, which were prodigious. Still, their laughter chased away the dreams of the night before—at least until Gavriel found himself studying the throat of Raoul de Cleves, a comte’s son prone to gambling and deep in debt. As the night wore on, Gavriel became more and more aware of the movements of blood under de Cleves’ skin, of the way his heart sped it along, fresh and hot. It would be so easy to slice open flesh and release that red stream, bright as claret. It would be so easy to get him alone, to promise him the loan of some money and then press him against the wall of the alley and—Gavriel pushed away the thought of what came next. He tried to watch the girl onstage, but when she rotated her hips, making the bells on her skirt tinkle, all he could think of was the artery that ran down the inside of her sweat-slicked inner thigh.
He staggered home, drunk as he could make himself. When he opened the door to his room, a fire was burning in the grate and the devil sat in a threadbare chair, as elegantly dressed in a dove gray coat with covered buttons as though he’d come straight from Versailles.
“I’m Lucien Moreau,” the devil said, eyes bright with hellfire. “I imagine you have questions.”