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so,” Damian answered. He touched the wampyr’s face. His fingertips were warm, and the pulse of blood thudded through them. “What’s it like?”
    “The blood?”
    “Living forever.”
    “Nobody else does,” the wampyr said, and touched Damian’s right hand, with its lonely ring. “You can still leave—”
    “I’m stalling,” Damian admitted. “Aren’t I?”
    “I am patient.”
    “Don’t be.”
    Slowly, still shaking, Damian raised his left arm and laid it along the back of the couch. He turned the palm up and curled his fingers into a fist. He softly curved his right palm around the back of the wampyr’s head, twining fingers through his hair.
    “Soft,” he said, so the wampyr heard his surprise.
    The wampyr didn’t answer. The rich scent of blood be-neath elastic, living skin called to him, sang along his nerves.
    The sorcerer sighed. “Do it.” His cupped hand followed the wampyr’s head down.
    He drew a breath as the wampyr’s fangs pricked the soft flesh inside his elbow, and as they sank through the skin, his right hand made a fist in the wampyr’s hair. “Christ,” he muttered, head arching back, as the sweet, thick life filled the wampyr’s mouth. “Ow. Ow. Oh, sweet buggered Christ. I never —”
    His voice broke. He drew a heaving, ragged breath, his heart accelerating under the warm, slightly oily skin where the wampyr rested his own left hand.
    “Oh,” he said, and fell silent, breathing deeply though pleasure and pain.

4.
     
    The wampyr was careful, and took as little as he could bear, as slowly as he could bear. It was hard to stop, with the rush of warmth and life into his body after so long dry and chill and hungry. With the curl of Damian’s fingers tight into his hair. But he felt the gooseflesh raise its Braille patterns across Damian’s chest, and remembered—the house was cold, for a mortal, and the wampyr had no way to make it warm.
    He drew away long before either of them wished him to.
    In the normal course of events, the wampyr would have fed Damian afterward—but of course, after sixty years standing empty, there was no food in the house. So he stanched the wound—his fangs were sharp, and the punctures sealed quickly—and wrapped Damian in the sheets that had veiled the settee. The wampyr kissed Damian’s moss-springy curls with lips that suddenly tingled with life, and went into the still-dark parlor to fix the sorcerer a drink. To give him a few moments alone, and take a few for himself.
    Sometimes they were shamed, shocked. In a hurry to leave. Sometimes so dizzied by unaccustomed pleasures that they would beg to be taken again. When the wampyr was young and inexperienced or had little control, that was when tragedies occurred.
    But as the wampyr found glasses—clean, and neatly tidied away in the liquor cabinet—and began sniffing stoppered decanters, Damian slipped up behind him, trailing the sheets like a ghost’s funeral shroud.
    The wampyr held a brandy bottle over his shoulder, the stopper in his other hand. “Does this smell good to you?”
    “It smells fine. I thought wampyrs were supposed to have extraordinary senses.”
    “I sniffed it through the stopper. It smelled like liquor—which is to say, chemical burns, with an overtone of putrescence. It’s hard for me to tell if it has turned.” The wampyr poured a third of a glass, then considered Damian’s size and tipped in a little more.
    “Quel dommage,” Damian said, accepting the glass. He sipped and sighed. His gaze followed the wampyr as he extricated himself from between Damian and the liquor cabinet and wandered away across the thick-padded carpet.
    Damian said, “Who are you?”
    The wampyr permitted himself a flicker of a smile. His flesh tingled as the blood returned to it, bearing sensation and warmth. Keeping his voice light, he answered, “Etiquette would dictate that that is not the sort of thing one asks the blood.”
    “Forgive me. I am new at this. Who are you?