wind, standing in a snowy landscape with arms outstretched. A searing climax rocked us both, as if this person willed it. I tried to probe Ethan’s memory deeper and find out who this man was, but my lover abruptly pulled away and the vision vanished. We lay there panting and gasping for breath.
“Ethan, can we read minds?”
He pulled himself over me, eager for round two. “Really Mia.”
I opened my thighs to admit him. Every evening started this way, not that I objected. I was more than happy to oblige him.
“I sense things about you sometimes… ”
He didn’t miss a stroke. “You’re simply reading the language of the body, the timbre of the voice. Trust me, the less hocus pocus you believe the better. It clouds the mind.”
“How do you explain the visions when we share essence?”
He pulled out abruptly. “Visions?”
“I saw a man with long blond hair, standing in the snow. Who is he?”
He rolled off of me. “No one— you saw nothing! A hallucination brought on by ingesting blood, nothing more!”
“Seems to me, you know him well… ”
He ignored my questions and got up to dress. “Get dressed. You have reading to do.”
Ethan had peculiar ideas about our place in the world and thought it his duty to instruct me nightly in the drawing room. “Mortals are lesser beings,” he said calmly, as he laid out his nightly game of solitaire on the inlaid card table. “You’ve undergone a metamorphosis. Your flesh is no longer mortal, and now you must shed the vestiges of the puny human psyche. Open your consciousness to new possibilities… ”
I struggled through the dusty old tome he’d assigned me, scowling. This philosophy of his was, in my opinion, simply a case of some animals being more equal than others, but it was seductive when offered by the epitome of male beauty. To Ethan, after living thirty-three years at the apex of human development, it seemed only natural that his new form took on divine proportions. It really isn’t hard to imagine how he’d come to this conclusion. One look at Ethan would have made a believer out of the most hardened skeptic.
Ever the curious little cat, I put down the book he’d assigned me and thumbed through a very old leather bound photo album on the table, to a picture of a girl, fair, very slender, in her late teens. Her eyes stared out of the old daguerreotype like a plea for help. No one ever smiled much in those old pictures but she looked positively scared to death. “Ethan, this is your wife?”
An annoyed look came over him. “Yes— that’s Sally Anne.”
I couldn’t help feeling jealous. “Did you love her?”
“We were ill-suited. I married her out of duty. My father was afraid he’d die before seeing any grandchildren. She was the least objectionable choice.”
I felt another more severe stab. “You had children?”
A pained look briefly crossed his face. “Two sons, Robert and Joseph,” he said, quietly turning the leaf to show me.
I looked down on two toddlers dressed in the fashion of a century ago, the unmistakable stamp of Ethan on those sweet faces. Gut instinct told me he still grieved for them. “Ethan, can’t we have a baby?”
His face had that sudden odd look again. “No. We procreate through the blood.”
“What if you had taken me and I hadn’t— gotten rid of it?”
“An abomination that would have devoured you from inside. We’re sterile. We’ll never make a child together.”
I sank to the floor in a heap, sobbing. For some reason, in the glow of transformation, I’d never considered this. What had I deluded myself into thinking? I wasn’t really alive anymore was I? I was some kind of ghoul now no matter what fancy name we called ourselves. Ethan lifted me to my feet and held me close. “Hush now little bird, don’t cry. I understand.”
I tried to free myself. “You didn’t murder your own offspring! I’m eternally damned for what I did!”
“Who is to judge what you did? It was the best thing you could have done, under the circumstances. There’s no such place as hell, except for the one men make, but you are my angel, and I can’t bear your tears.”
I choked back the tears as he ordered, but I’d never absolve myself of the responsibility. Every time I went to his arms I’d remember what I’d done to get there. Yet, there I was and how I craved his embrace. If he was damnation— then I was damned.
Ethan’s