Gavriel stood in the doorway, frozen.
“I feel so strange,” said Lucien in a falsetto, a smile stretching his mouth, clearly much entertained by his own performance. “What’s happening to me? How could you make me have these terrible desires? Satan, avaunt!”
Gavriel came inside, closing the door behind him. “I apologize,” he said. “I am very drunk and not likely to be as clever in my interrogation as you imagine. I confess I am discomposed, but you may stay as long as you please. I have been searching through the streets of Paris for damnation, and now that damnation has come to sit by my grate. Who am I to turn it away?”
He was not as cool as his words made him appear, but Lucien’s mocking rendition of his thoughts had put him on his mettle: He refused to let the creature see how afraid he was.
Lucien inclined his head in thanks. “You never do quite what I expect. To me, surprise is a quality precious above rubies.” He held up his hand, and Gavriel could see that one of the silvery rings he wore covered the length of his finger like some kind of armor, with a wicked hooked talon at the end.
He drew that across his wrist, letting blood well. It was darker than the blood Gavriel remembered spattering his brother’s chest, darker and with an unusual blue tint. The smell of it seemed to fill the room, a hypnotizing scent, like ozone rising after a lightning strike, and he lurched forward without meaning to.
“Drink,” Lucien said. “This is what you thirst for. Come and drink.”
And as Gavriel bent his head, falling to his knees, fingers shaking as he closed them around Lucien’s wrist, some part of him knew that before this moment, he had only been playing at wickedness. He had never done anything in Paris so terrible that he could not have returned to the man he had once been.
Then the flavor of Lucien’s blood washed over him and he was lost. He sucked at the wound, tongue pushing into the slit skin of Lucien’s wrist, a low sound starting in the back of his throat. He forgot about Aleksander. He forgot about his mother and father and sister. He forgot about the sound of the gun firing and the smell of the powder and the way his brother’s body had sprawled in the snow. There was only this.
And when he woke in the late morning, with blood staining his lips and teeth, blood smeared on the pillow where he’d rubbed his mouth against it in the night, all he thought of was getting more.
Before, Gavriel had been full of self-loathing and conflicting desires, but now his days had a singular focus. He waited for night and for Lucien to drink from him and then feed him from his wrist. Nothing else mattered very much. He drifted through his days, no longer caring about salons or cabarets, no longer caring about drink or degradation.
At first, the feedings exhausted him, but then the blood seemed to have worked some strange alchemy. His hunger abated. He walked through the streets during the day, feeling stronger, swifter, and more alert than ever before. He could snap a poker in half and catch the reins of a frightened horse, jerking it to a halt, without even exerting himself. In his room, alone, he threw a knife at the wall again and again, perfectly able to control where it struck. His canines grew longer and sharper, making his gums bleed. He was delighted, running his fingers over their points absently when he was alone, to prove to himself they were really there.
And as Gavriel hunched over Lucien’s wrist, new teeth making neat little holes in his skin, Gavriel felt as far from himself as he could have ever wished to be.
On the seventh night, when Gavriel returned to his apartment just after dusk, Lucien was there, lounging in a chair, wearing a dinner jacket with a shawl collar. He had a girl with him, sitting on one of the arms, in a thin, stained shirt and heavy-looking brown skirt. Dirt rouged her cheeks, darkened her throat, and gloved her hands. A box rested on the table, apple green satin spilling out.
“I told her that she could take a bath here,” said Lucien. “Is that all right?”
Gavriel nodded numbly, his heart speeding as he took in the scene. “Of course, if she wishes.”
“She wishes,” said Lucien and gave the girl a little shove. She stood obediently. “I told her she had to be quite thoroughly clean before she could put on the dress you bought her.”
Gavriel glanced over at the box of green satin and then back at the girl. She was looking at the fabric with longing fierce enough to make her foolish. He remembered his sister’s closet full of such dresses, and he thought that it was such a small thing to want, but of course, for her, it wouldn’t be.