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Other than Jack Prior, and Amédée Gosselin…”
    The wampyr snorted. He traced a finger down a leather spine, feeling the texture of embossed hide and gilt. “Those are names. I am a dead man.”
    The edge of the glass clicked Damian’s teeth as he sipped brandy again. “If you do not tell me, I will only invent stories. Each more scandalous than the last.”
    The wampyr turned. He folded his arms and gazed challengingly up at the sorcerer. “Who are you ?”
    “Damian Thomas. Sorcerer. Both an American and an Englishman. Professor. Teacher. Author. Widower. Occasional—” he huffed in self-amusement. “—civil-rights activist. I have an elderly mother in Deptford. I am also a homosexual.”
    The hand with the glass in it lowered to his side, no longer raised as a barrier. It was offered vulnerability, like the calm, blatant statement that came before.
    “Am I meant to be shocked?” the wampyr said, showing his fangs, letting them catch the dim light from the street.
    “Some men would be. Especially since it should be obvious that I find you attractive.”
    “I am not a man.” The wampyr studied Damian’s expressions through the darkness, the suppressed muscular twitches he tried to conceal. “You said, widower.”
    “My wife,” Damian said, “was also an academic. And a Lesbian. And a friend. We…”
    “Shielded one another?” the wampyr suggested.
    “That’s a good way of putting it. She had a lover and so did I—” he shrugged. “He is with someone else now.”
    “I’m sorry,” the wampyr said. Eleven or twelve hundred years of experience didn’t give you any facile answers as to what the right reply was when someone had just shared a shattering confidence. But there might be something else he could say. Sometimes the right answer to a confidence was simply to reply in kind.
    He said, “My name was Lopo, when I was alive.”
    “Lopo. That’s not the sort of name one associates with wampyrs. Shouldn’t you have been Count von Something? A Bathory, perhaps? Or at least some ponderous old name with a sinister ring? Vladislav? Gideon? Batholomew?”
    “And not the sort of thing you’d call a pet monkey?”
    Damian winced theatrically. “I wouldn’t have put it just like that.”
    The wampyr said, “It was the name of an apprentice stonemason. One who was lucky to find the position. His mother had no husband. His father was a Moor who did not keep her. This was in Galicia.”
    He gestured to his face, aware that to Damian’s eyes, the olive tones were lost in the darkness.
    “I don’t remember it,” the wampyr said. It was somehow easier to talk about these things with a virtual stranger—as if he said them to the void, or the night. “I have forgotten so much. But I know…knew…someone older than myself. He told me.”
    Damian slipped a hand from beneath his sheets and brushed it across the wampyr’s face. “You’re pale, for a Moor.”
    The wampyr laughed. Even to his own ear, it had the whispery rasp of an unused door.
    “The Berber tribes were Africans, but not all were black Africans. I never knew the man who fathered me, and cannot tell you how he looked—but I can tell you that I was not considered fair as a youth. The blood—we fade, in a thousand years away from the sun. You should see how the old ones get, who were light-skinned in life. Like Grecian marbles, white as ice.” He studied his own pale-olive hand. “When I was maintaining the pretense of mortality, a certain swarthiness was an advantage.”
    The wampyr was not sure what expression lit upon his own face just then, but Damian finished the brandy and hid his face inside the glass for a moment as if enjoying the fumes.
    “I suppose I should go,” he said as he lowered it. “It will be daylight soon.”
    The wampyr stepped back, leaving his hand extended for the empty glass. Damian set it in his fingers, letting their skin brush as he did so. It might have been bravado, but that did not mean the