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Guillermo is standing above Nandor’s coffin, arguing with its occupant. The lid is shut.
“Vampires can get sick?” says Guillermo. “Like, not just you ate some human food, but you can get sick-sick? You get like, colds?”
“Yes,” comes a wheedling voice from inside the coffin. “And it is very contagious.”
“Not to me, probably,” says Guillermo, “or—no. Really?”
Guillermo looks back up at the camera crew, and shrugs.
“None of my reading told me about this,” says Guillermo, suspiciously. “Not even the van Helsing stuff I read. And if vampires did have any weak points, I’d figure it was in there.”
“Well, I would not lie about it.”
“Of course not, Master,” calls Guillermo. Then he rolls his eyes at the camera, and adds under his breath, “He would. I don’t know why, but he would lie.”
“I can hear you! I have super-hearing, in case you have forgotten!”
“And if you are sick,” announces Guillermo, “then it is my duty to take care of you, as your fa—bodyguard. Your bodyguard.”
With a brusqueness that would startle even a nurse, he lifts up the lid of the coffin, heaving a sigh as he does so. He looks down at Nandor, but tilts his head. The camera operator starts to step forward, until just Nandor’s top knot is visible, but Guillermo waves a hand at them, an obvious stay back.
“Is that… blood?” says Guillermo. “It’s like you threw up all over yourself in there.”
“I have been telling you,” says Nandor, and his voice sounds hoarse. “I am not well. I would like to stay in bed today. Not that it is your choice at all nor do you have any say in the matter, as you are not the boss of me.”
“Okay,” says Guillermo. “Um, sorry. Is there anything I can get you? I can help you clean up, maybe? Get you some new pajamas? Do you need anything?”
“Peace and quiet!” snaps Nandor, and Guillermo leaps back as the lid of the coffin shuts again. From inside, there is a muffled, “Fucking guy.”
“Well,” says Guillermo. “You know how to call me, I guess.”
There is a muffled snarl from inside of the coffin, and Guillermo shrugs at the camera.
“Can you call me if he does need anything?” says Guillermo, gesturing at the coffin. Assured of their watch over his master, he exits the room, and the camera swings back around to look at the coffin.
There is a muffled cough from inside.
[Laszlo and Nadja, in talking head footage.]
“Vampires do not get sick,” says Laszlo. “Well, except for the occasional venereal disease. But our immune systems usually kick them quite quickly and ferociously.”
“Colin Robinson gets sick,” says Nadja.
“No, darling,” explains Laszlo, “he does the sniffling and the sneezing on purpose as a change of pace from his usual office-day annoyance fare. What that Van Gogh chap was doing with sunflowers is nothing to what Colin Robinson can do with a lump of phlegm and an over-the-cubicle conversation. The man is a master mimic of all human vocal ejaculations relating to snot.”
“Then why does he do it at home?” says Nadja, suspiciously.
“Purely because it disgusts us all, I expect.”
“So then, my love, what do you suppose is wrong with Nandor?” says Nadja.
“Haven’t the foggiest,” says Laszlo. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
[Colin Robinson, in talking head footage.]
“Energy vampires are creatures of metaphor,” he explains. “It’s easier to understand than the bloodsuckers, actually, although I’m kind of biased I guess. You might never have heard of an energy vampire before, but as soon as someone explains the idea to you, you know what it is. You get the metaphor right away. You know what it means to be drained by someone like me. It’s not literal. But there’s probably someone in your life that, as soon as the concept of ‘energy vampires’ was explained to you, you went, ah, that’s what was going on there.”
When he smiles, his eyes flash blue.
“Whether or not you were right about it. You probably were, though, that’s the funny thing. You’re smarter than you think, about this kind of thing.”
He shrugs.
“So everyone thinks they know what a regular vampire is, though, and it seems pretty straightforward. Pretty concrete actually. You drink blood, even though blood isn’t food, and you live forever. Blood, that thing that keeps humans alive, pumping through their veins. Blood is the metaphor for life—yep, hey, you in the back, I saw that look on your face, you’re getting it now, regular vampires are creatures of metaphor too.”
He shrugs.
“So when a vampire starts spitting blood back out…”
Colin Robinson grimaces. For once, it looks genuine.
“I dunno, man. Can’t be good, that’s all I can say about it.”
Nandor, in the dark of his coffin, weighed his options.
He could hear the camera crew shuffling around outside, which meant that if he sat up now he would be on a recording, which would no doubt be clipped and edited into an episode. This would be deeply unpleasant, as he was covered in blood, and not in the way that he often was when he had just fed. No, this was his own blood—a vampire’s blood, which to him smelled coppery but diseased. It would not do to appear on the television so ill and weak.
He opened the coffin lid an inch.
“Hello,” he said, to the crew. “I am giving you fair warning. I am going to shut this lid, and count to ten. If any of you are still in this room when I am done counting, I will open the lid and eat you. Is this understood?”
There was the sound of half a dozen people scrambling to move microphones, camera equipment, and each other out of the room. Nandor sank back down, and breathed a wholly unnecessary sigh of relief.
His chest still hurt. He had woken up this morning, coughing, which was all the more strange because he did not need to breathe, and therefore, any tickle in his throat should not have bothered him. But he had not been able to control it—as if something had burned inside of him, something which had to be expelled. The coughing had been wet, and nasty, which left him rather unhappy, and then there were the petals.
He hoped that Guillermo had not seen them. By now, if he had been counting to ten, he almost certainly would have been done, and he heard pure and perfect silence outside of the coffin, so he raised up the coffin lid and heaved himself up.
He was not alone.
“Hi, Master,” said Guillermo, leaning against the doorway. “They came to get me when you told them that you were going to eat them. I think that was a breach of contract, actually, so you probably shouldn’t have done that. One of them quit.”
The piddling problems of whiny little film majors doing an internship for the local college did not concern Nandor. There were other, bigger problems, such as the coughing, and the fact that Guillermo was leaning against the doorway looking damnably smug. Guillermo always looked smug, but this time he look more smug than ever. He started forward.
“Well, they deserved it,” said Nandor. “Fucking vultures, trying to capture me in such a weakened state. No—stay back.”
Guillermo froze, which meant that Nandor had to heave himself out of bed, and as he did so, he discovered that he felt weaker, as if he hadn’t eaten in days.
“Is it really contagious?” said Guillermo. “Even to me?”
“Especially to you,” lied Nandor, hoping against hope that Guillermo would not see the petals in the coffin.
“I have to clean out your coffin, though,” said Guillermo, almost absently. “You don’t want to keep sleeping in that, do you? I mean, I know vampires don’t really go in for germ theory, but that can’t be comfortable.”
He was watching Nandor get out of bed with something like concern. Nandor felt foolish, and clumsy, trying to do this own his own. It wasn’t that he needed Guillermo’s help, it was just that—well, it made it easier, to lean on someone.
Nandor tripped over the hem of his pajamas, and lurched in the air. His reflexes were fast, but, he was dismayed to find, Guillermo was faster. Damn slayers. Guillermo was underneath him in a moment, and while Nandor had caught himself and managed to hover just an inch above Guillermo, sparing himself the indignity of being caught by his own familiar—bodyguard—falling out of his bed, they were still face-to-face for just that moment, Guillermo’s rosy cheeks a hair’s breadth away, his dark eyes wide with concern.
“Master?” said Guillermo, confused, as Nandor found himself overcome with yet another coughing fit. “Do you need to eat? Even just a—a snack?”
He drew a knife from his back pocket, as Nandor bit down on a mouthful of petals. Roses, he thought, disgusted. Floral and sweet and earthy and damnably, outrageously, vital. Like Guillermo himself, Nandor thought, and the choking feeling clawed his way up his throat again.
Oh, Nandor had an idea what was wrong, and what little he knew was discomforting, and the gaps in his knowledge even more so. He had heard about it five hundred years ago, in a language that he did not speak any more, the wasting disease of vampires.
[In the Vampiric Council headquarters, Nadja paces the room, looking distraught. The camera swings back and forth between her pacing, and the Guide, who makes an “I don’t know?” face at the camera out of Nadja’s range of vision.]
“Nandor is sick?” she yells, throwing her hands up in the air.
“Guillermo called me,” says the Guide, looking as confused as Nadja, though rather less angry. “He said that Nandor wouldn’t be coming in today, or at the very least, he wouldn’t be doing any work, because he didn’t feel well.”
“Well, then how am I supposed to bloody do one of Nandor’s bloody charity meetings?”
“Maybe I can cancel,” says the Guide.
“No, I can do it,” says Nadja. “Of course I can do it. All I have to do is stand there and look like I am in charge of Staten Island while they tell me what Nandor agreed to give them and then I wave my hand and you sign the little—what was it? The little balance book with the ripping papers.”
“The checkbook,” explains the Guide.
“Yes, you sign the bloody checkbook. It will be just like when Nandor and I were taking turns except instead of undoing his things I will do them the next day until he is better again.”
“Great idea,” says the Guide, rolling her eyes at the camera.
[The Guide, in talking head footage.]
“No, yeah, I haven’t seen a vampire take sick time since Ilych the Unreliable ate a possum. Hoo boy, that was a day. Anyway, I think Nandor is faking it.”
She shrugs, turning her hands upwards.
“What? Maybe he wanted a day off, I don’t know. I want a day off. I’m kinda thinking about it, actually. Don’t tell Nadja.”
It had started with a tickle in the throat. Nandor was sure of that much. He hadn’t known what was happening, because he had been at the Council quarters and in the middle of a meeting. Guillermo had crawled past in one of the little ventilator tunnels, and Nandor had caught the faint whiff of him, and at first Nandor had thought he was just surprised but then the coughing had—grown worse. It had kept him up all day, and nagged at something in the back of his mind, and, somewhere after a long sleepless morning, after the first petals had climbed their way up his throat, in the early afternoon the answer had come to him.
The wasting disease.
Vampires, as a rule, didn’t do autopsies, Nandor knew, generally because most of the time when a vampire died they were reduced to ash. However, in the case of the wasting disease, vampires found it useful to on occasion cut open other vampires without murdering them. They had found flowers inside, which had sounded terribly painful to Nandor, and now he could confirm. But certainly, the library would have some information. Nandor only had to get there, unaccompanied.
“I have to go to the library,” said Nandor, straightening up, and pushing Guillermo back. Gently, so as not to knock him off his feet.
“For what?”
“For work,” said Nandor. “What is it to you?”
“I already told Nadja you wouldn’t be in today,” said Guillermo. “What if you gave it to the rest of them? You said it was contagious.”
“I will stay very far away from them,” said Nandor.
“Nope,” said Guillermo. “Look, I brought you new pajamas. Get out of bed, for a minute, and let me clean it up in there.”
Whatever it was in Nandor’s throat clawed up again, reducing him to a hacking, coughing mess, and when he came back to himself Guillermo was dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief and rubbing circles on his back.
“I mean, I probably don’t have to worry too much about the blood,” said Guillermo. “If a human were doing that, it’d be pretty freaky, but that’s probably just like… well, no, in your case it’s vomit so it’s gross. Hey, what is that?”
He unfolded the handkerchief.
“What the hell?” said Guillermo, under his breath. He sniffed at it.
“Give me that,” snapped Nandor, trying to take the handkerchief back. The petals fell wetly to the floor, where they stuck on the carpet.
“Rose petals? I can look this up, Master. I think the witches might be able to help me. This seems pretty witchy, off the bat, but I know none of them want you to get hurt—”
“No!” yelped Nandor, “no, that is, you are not my familiar any more, so you are not obligated to do anything for me.”
The back of Guillermo’s hand was warm, chapped where his knuckles were exposed to the cold winter air of Staten Island. He had to reach up high to touch Nandor’s forehead.
“Don’t know why I did that,” said Guillermo, almost more to himself, “it’s not as if you’d have a fever. Anyway, you’re going to get changed, you’re going to let me fix the lining of your coffin, and then you’re going back into bed while I go figure this out. Up you get.”
Nandor strategically allowed Guillermo to hand him new sleepwear, and he put it on while he allowed Guillermo to strip the lining of his coffin (a feature of vampire coffins, being that not even vampires always want to sleep in old rotting bloodstains from messy meals) and replace it. While all of this happened, he formulated a plan.
First, he would let Guillermo do as he pleased, because it seemed to please Guillermo to fuss over Nandor, and Nandor was not going to think about this. Unrelated: Nandor could not remember the last time anyone fussed over him who was not Guillermo.
Second, he was going to distract Guillermo. Yes. He would distract Guillermo from going to figure this out himself, by… he cast a glance around the room. By making a mess in the house which Guillermo would need to clean up. This sort of thing did usually hold up Guillermo.
Third, he would sneak out himself, turn into a bat, and go to the library on his own. It was a foolproof plan, of which he was certain he would need only a moment of time to search in the library for volumes on the wasting disease.
“There,” said Guillermo, “all set. You can get back into bed.”
“I think I would like to take a turn about the house,” said Nandor. There was a vase on the second floor that he felt quite sure would cause a disaster if it were to fall over. Last he had seen, there were rats building a nest in it. “I feel quite better now that I am up and walking around.”
“That’s bullshit, but okay,” said Guillermo. “Here, at least put on your cape.”
He swung it around Nandor’s shoulders, a practiced motion, and adjusted the clasp at the throat. There was something so easy and sure in the flick of his wrist, as if he could have done it blindfolded. Nandor realized he was staring at Guillermo’s hands, and looked away.
“I am not cold,” said Nandor.
“I can’t tell,” said Guillermo, looking away. The rush of blood to his cheeks was audible to Nandor, in Guillermo’s heartbeat.
A wave of vertigo washed over Nandor, and he swayed on his feet.
“Okay, we’re not talking about this any more,” said Guillermo. “You have to get back into bed.”
Nandor was a practiced strategist, a conqueror, a winner of wars and battles and the cause of many lamentations of women over the centuries. He could not walk out of his room, he realized, and knock over a vase to create a mess. However, a vampire was an endurance hunter. And of the vampires, Nandor himself was unusually, well, relentless. All he had to do, he realized, was outlast Guillermo’s consciousness.
Foolproof.
He allowed Guillermo to help him back up into bed, and to tuck him into his coffin.
The lid shut over him, and he heard Guillermo step back, taking a seat in the corner of his room. Nandor breathed as deeply as he could, and shut his eyes.
[Guillermo, in talking head footage.]
“So, Nandor slept for like, three days,” says Guillermo, “and it was awful when he woke up again. I’ve never seen anyone looking like that. I know vampires are supposed to look dead but he kind of looked like… actually dead. Like not just pale, but actively rotting. And the whole room smelled like blood. I’m telling you, it was nasty. But it gave me some time to try some research.”
[The footage cuts to Guillermo, delivering a case of mason jars, only half of which are full with a recognizably opaque white substance. Guillermo’s voice plays over the footage. He greets the receptionist at the coven, who gestures to the back door, and he makes his way through.]
“So I went to the witches first,” says Guillermo, “because it was delivery day, so I kind of had to. They, uh…”
[Guillermo talks to the witches, who are frowning over the jars. Several of them shake their heads.]
“I mean, they vowed to curse the person who would do it, but also I mean, it’s really affecting their supply chain so I don’t think it was actually that generous all things considered. I guess Nandor could be caught up in some kind of witchy corporate sabotage, but they said that if they successfully cursed the person who was cursing Nandor, there would be entrails raining down on our house, and…”
[Guillermo, in the sitting room, gestures outdoors. The lawn looks normal.]
“Nothing there. So that was a bust. Next I went to Wallace,” explains Guillermo, “and he wasn’t really that interested.”
[Guillermo, in Wallace’s workshop, holding out a handkerchief full of rose petals. Wallace shakes his head.]
“That’s some nasty shit,” says Wallace. “I don’t know. You say the witches didn’t ask for this?”
He nods at the handkerchief in Guillermo’s hand.
“This?” Guillermo holds it up, and scrunches his nose in confusion.
“M-hm,” says Wallace, his voice light and casual.
“No,” says Guillermo. “They really only just want the semen.”
Wallace nods knowingly. His eyes do not leave Guillermo’s handkerchief.
“Yeah, typical witches,” says Wallace. “Just saying, you gotta dispose of that really carefully. Vampire blood’s powerful stuff. You said these rose petals came out of it? And you’re just walking around with it? Hey. I could take it for you, if you want.”
Guillermo frowns.
[Back to the talking head footage.]
“I saw Topher though!” says Guillermo, excitedly. “Um, that was weird, but not as weird as seeing people from high school, because he didn’t really recognize me, but he seemed to be having a good time so that was nice.”
Nandor did not mean to do so, but he slept. Mostly.
Sometimes he woke fitfully, lungs aching, sometimes he woke gasping for air that he did not need, sometimes he woke and Guillermo was standing over his coffin, brows knit together with concern. In these moments, Guillermo dabbed at his mouth with freshly laundered handkerchiefs each time, or he coaxed Nandor to drink from blood that Guillermo had, somehow, acquired. Guillermo was, as always, gentle when Nandor was weak. Nandor lost track of how many times over the days he thought of how curious it was, that the hands that so carefully tipped his chin up to drink were the hands that had killed dozens of vampires, that behind the touch that brushed faintly against his back was the strength of a practiced warrior, and yet to Nandor, only to Nandor, was this touch so soft. Nandor often fell back asleep with only the impression of warmth at his side.
Lucidity returned slowly, in starts and stops. The illness would be worse, and then it would be better, and he would wonder how long he had been out. Guillermo told him it was three days. This time frame mostly felt impossibly long, but alternately, depending on how much Nandor’s chest ached, it felt impossibly short.
“Guillermo,” said Nandor. “I do not imagine that you are going to stay here forever.”
“I can’t leave you like this,” said Guillermo. “You just cough all day. It’s really scary.”
“Well, I can’t die,” said Nandor.
“Do you know that?” said Guillermo. “Because I’ve killed an awful lot of vampires, Nandor. It can’t be that the only thing you’re vulnerable to is a slayer. I think I have to go to the library next.”
Panic clawed at the inside of Nandor’s chest.
“No!” said Nandor.
Guillermo tilted his head.
“Why not?” said Guillermo.
“Because…” said Nandor, who knew only that his foolproof plan had not worked, and that he could not let Guillermo go alone, “because I want to go with!”
“Well, you’re not going anywhere,” said Guillermo, a determined set in his jaw. “You’re going to rest. I’ll go and get the information, and then I’ll come back here with whatever I find. Don’t you trust me?”
Nandor realized, with a start, that he now could recognize what Guillermo looked like when he had not slept. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his hair looked greasy and unkempt, as opposed to its normal shine and curl.
“And you have not slept in days.”
“You smell like a rotting corpse,” said Guillermo.
“So do you,” said Nandor. Yes, Nandor was quite sure of it—Guillermo had not showered in several days, and though he often had trouble telling human daily wear apart, he was fairly certain that these were the clothes that Guillermo had been wearing when Nandor had first woken up, lungs aching.
“You don’t…,” said Guillermo, eyes widening. “You don’t trust me.”
“Of course not!”
The words hung in the air between them, horrible and loud, ringing against the walls of the room, and suddenly Nandor dissolved into another dreadful coughing fit. Guillermo did nothing, only watched him double over in pain, lip curling.
“Why not?” said Guillermo, when Nandor’s coughing stopped, when he righted himself. “Haven’t I done everything for you, over the past few years? What do you think I would do with this information? Do you think I’d hurt you with it?”
Nandor swallowed.
Did he think that? No, but, there was more to it than that. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Guillermo, but that he couldn’t trust Guillermo, because Guillermo already had everything of him. This weakness, this disease, added to the myriad ways in which Guillermo knew Nandor inside and out? Absolutely unbearable.
Nandor had been alone for eight hundred years. No other familiar would have offered to do this for him, any others he’d had would have left by now. This, somehow, was more frightening than anything else. What would Guillermo do if he thought Nandor was dying? Nandor did not want to find out. He did not want to find out that Guillermo would leave him, or worse, beg him to turn him, as if that was all Nandor had ever been to him.
He managed to look at Guillermo again, whose face was pinched with anger and grief. Guillermo already thought Nandor was dying, he realized.
And maybe—maybe he was right.
“We must both rest,” said Nandor.
He would find the answer, he would figure it out before Guillermo. Guillermo was already very nearly dropping of exhaustion. It would not do for both of them to be sorrowful, he decided, and he allowed Guillermo to help him back into the coffin.
“But you will stay?” said Nandor.
Guillermo, with the lid of the coffin in hand, looked down at him. Guillermo was always inscrutable, Nandor thought, but now Nandor felt he could make a fairly reasonable guess. Guillermo was furious. But when he spoke, his voice was measured.
“Yes, Nandor,” he said. Nandor shut his eyes, and the coffin lid closed.
[Nadja, in the Vampiric Council room.]
“I have been doing bloody paperwork for hours,” she tells the cameraman, scowling over a thick stack of paper on her desk. “It is all, pay the unionized maid thralls this, these are the bills from the candle supplier, calculate the income from the Vampiric Council dues by looking at this spreadsheet, solve the problems of the petty little vampire fights when they get into a scuffle with the werewolves, make sure that none of the meetings on your schedule with the different witches or werewolves or the mermaid council or the Badabook conflict with each other, blah blah blah.”
She slams the pen against the desk.
“And then we do not even know how long Nandor will be ‘sick,’” she adds, making very big air quotes with her fingers.
“Well,” says the Guide, “you could hire a secretary in the meantime. That would at least help with the scheduling stuff. And Nandor would probably appreciate it whenever he gets back.”
“Aren’t you the one who manages the schedule?” says Nadja, raising one black-painted fingernail to point at her. “You do this.”
“Er, well,” says the Guide, “sort of, but I’m really more of a certified project manager than an executive assistant. I’m more here to make sure that you get stuff done on a deadline and that you’re accountable to the Council, not really to manage your schedule specifically.”
“Laszlo!” bellows Nadja. “Laszlo, I need your help!”
There is the distant creaking of a doorway, and then another.
“Darling,” says Laszlo, poking his head in, “you called? I am indisposed, at the moment, but I would be delighted to be of assistance in approximately an hour.”
“How are you indisposed?” says Nadja, squinting at him.
“I’ve just discovered that the library’s collection of the erotic poet Wymond the Cuckold has been thoroughly disgraced by some prior reader, and I am in the process of some delicate restoration work to remove the residue of their passion for the text.”
The Guide grimaces. Nadja, already grimacing, affects an enormous sigh.
“So you would prefer to be with your semen-covered books,” says Nadja.
“Every leaf of the book was absolutely stiff with jizz, my darling. Starched as a lord’s ruff. Couldn’t turn the page for fear of the thing shattering like glass. I’ve just begun a time-sensitive operation with some tricky alchemical substances, and I am afraid the whole thing will blow up in our faces—”
“Never mind. Goodbye,” says Nadja, waving him off. Laszlo disappears back through the doorway.
“How do I hire a secretary?” says Nadja, as soon as Laszlo’s footsteps are no longer audible. “Back in my day, you simply pulled in the nearest child and told them to get very very good with one specific task.”
“Oh, no,” says the Guide. “I can take care of that part for you. We have a process for that nowadays.”
[Laszlo, back in the library. He has a stack of books in front of him, most of which have titles with some variant on Hedge Mazes: Confuse Your Friends and Entrap Your Foes! However, he picks up one of the older volumes. The pages open easily, no stickiness to be seen. The cover describes it as Illneßes of the Vampyricke Perſuaſion.]
There is a wet, ugly cough from behind him.
“Well, I’ve lied to my wife as requested, though I haven’t the faintest clue why you were so wildly opposed to anyone knowing you were here, and I’ve looked up everything I could find on vampiric horticultural practices and vampiric knowledge, and it’s all here on the table, dear fellow,” says Laszlo. “You’ve not got the lung, I expect, unless you’ve been daylighting as a wretched little orphan in a factory somewhere, but I’ll be fucked if I can think of anything else it could be. You do look dreadful, though, and it is bad enough that I have to admit that I say that with concern. You look ghastly, even, in the strictest literal sense. Rose petals, you say?”
“The wasting disease,” hisses Nandor, as though he is trying to be quiet, although Nandor is not very successful at being quiet. “I am sure it is called that.”
“Hardly wasting if you’ve got flowers sprouting up out of your chest,” says Laszlo. “Wouldn’t that be more of the blooming disease, eh?”
“That sounds like a sex disease,” says Nandor. There is blood on his fist, where he has been coughing into it.
“I suppose so,” says Laszlo. “We’ll have to come up with a new one so I can call it that. I’ve always been told I have a talent in that direction.”
He flips idly through the book as he speaks.
“Wasting disease, you say? I’m not even sure they had w’s when this book was written. Ah, there, no, a little Chaucerian but I think I’ve got it. When Vampyrs with their heartts aflame finde their wourds insufficing to showe Emotion, when sanguine fare hath litel appeal, flowers root deep in their bosom. Some find Forget-Me-Nots, some find chrysanthemums, or the rose herself with hire thorns buried in the undead flesh of the lung. This last ys the worst of cases, for it means that the Vampyr’s words are unequal to the task of True Love.”
“Yes, that is it! That is what is happening to me!” says Nandor, excitedly. As he speaks, he has to cover his mouth, before petals spill out.
“True love?” says Laszlo.
Nandor looks at the camera. The camera pans up, and to the ventilator of the room, where Guillermo is staring, open-mouthed, out of sight of both of the vampires. The video shakes, distortion and noise marring the scene of Laszlo and Nandor sitting at the table, and then it cuts out.
[Guillermo, in talking head footage.]
“So,” says Guillermo, “As long as I’m making, like, a snoring noise he thinks I’m out cold.”
[We cut, briefly, to a scene of Guillermo sleeping in the wooden chair in Nandor’s bedroom, in his sweater vest as if he had merely dozed off while keeping watch, making a series of snorting and wheezing noises, no two of which are alike, as Nandor pushes up the lid of the coffin and mimes Shh at the camera. Nandor exits the room.]
“Once he was gone I knew he was probably going to come here,” says Guillermo. “He turned into a bat, so I couldn’t keep up, but it wasn’t that hard to figure out. And anyway, this was where I was going to come next. So I snuck in—”
[As Guillermo speaks, we cut to a scene of him entering directly through the front door of the Council headquarters. He waves at Nadja. Nadja waves back.]
“—and I went into the vents. I know the vents really well by now, of course, so it wasn’t hard to find the library. But uh…”
Something crosses Guillermo’s face, something flickering and soft as candlelight, delicate as a flame. He almost sounds sad.
“True love?” he says. He is asking the camera for answers, and it has none. “Nandor? Really?”
“What does that mean?” said Nandor darkly. The camera men, who had enough sense to be afraid for their lives, left the room. “What do you mean, true love?”
“Well, that’s just what it says,” said Laszlo, gesturing at the book. “I mean, it could mean nothing, you know. They barely even knew about miasma back then, thought half this stuff was demons. Perhaps what they thought of as true love was just indigestion. They wouldn’t be the last to make that mistake.”
“It is not indigestion!”
“Careful, my good man, you’re spewing viscera onto the books,” said Laszlo, folding them back up and moving them out of range. “And anyway, if it’s not indigestion, and it’s not true love, I’m not sure what else that leaves. Lust, perhaps? Is there anything else?”
Nandor sat down next to him.
“And anyway, who would you be in true love with?” said Laszlo.
“Open your book again,” said Nandor. “Find the little page for me and tell me what it says about what will happen to me next.”
“Well, if you’re sure,” said Laszlo. “All sounds rather unscientific to me, but what do I know? Here we are. Whan the flowers growe to such an extent that the afflicted fynds themselves unable to breathe, ther it ys that they must confess their heart, or suffer eternal torment. Ah, sorry, that’s abominably clear, isn’t it?”
“Eternal torment?” wailed Nandor. He put his face in his hands. “This will go on forever, just like my unending unnatural life? But I do not even know what it is I am to confess! I do not feel true love. I am a creature of the darkness, I have been a warrior and a leader of men and I crushed thousands under the heel of my boot, even before I ascended to vampirism and drank the blood of humans to survive. I have lived centuries, seen the fall of civilizations. I was married 37 times and that was before I even died. I have thought I have been in love, and yet it fades, more swiftly than the mortals that I claim to love do.”
He felt a handful of soft pats on his shoulder.
“There, there,” said Laszlo, “now, surely you can’t think that vampires don’t love. What do you think Nadja and I have? You don’t think you can feel the same?”
“You are young, and full of vigor,” said Nandor. “I am centuries older than the both of you, too jaded by my past.”
“Well, all right then,” said Laszlo. “Up to you, I suppose. But you should, perhaps, think a little bit on this, and see if you can, er, get this figured out before the eternal torment gets a move on?”
Nandor managed to conjure up the willpower to turn himself into a bat, and fly home. When he got there, Guillermo, looking unnaturally sweaty and pinkish in his trench coat and sweater vest, was still snoring in the single simple wooden chair of Nandor’s room by the window, half-hanging off the side in a way that threatened to let gravity take him.
He stood there, for a moment, unsure why, but only knowing that he was reluctant to wake Guillermo up. There was a single sweaty curl clinging to Guillermo’s forehead, and Nandor realized that what he was doing, hesitating like this, was fighting the urge to brush it out of Guillermo’s face. It was not often that he saw Guillermo sleeping.
First of all, Guillermo’s room was all the way across the house. And second, Guillermo was awake before him, always there to guide him into the night. Guillermo went to sleep after him, the last face that Nandor saw, the last voice that Nandor heard, before the morning. Guillermo bound the edges of his nights like that, at the beginning and at the end, tying the gaps in his consciousness together.
It was a rare treat, he realized, to see Guillermo as unguarded as this. He could have cherished this.
“Guillermo,” murmured Nandor, “wakey-wakey!”
“Oh!” said Guillermo, sitting up, startled. “Master, are you feeling better?”
“Yes,” said Nandor, who had decided that Guillermo needed to know nothing of eternal torment.
“Good,” said Guillermo, smiling up at him, as if they had not just fought mere hours ago. Guillermo pushed his own curl out of his eyes, where it was threatening to fall behind his glasses, and sat up. He was curiously out of breath, and Nandor could hear the pounding of his heart. “Glad to hear it. Nothing serious?”
Only true love, thought Nandor, though of course, it was impossible.
“Nothing serious at all,” said Nandor, and then the thorns in his chest closed like a vise around his heart, and though he was dead and had no need to breathe, his vision went black around the edges, and there was a curious sensation, as though he were flying, though he knew his feet had not left the floor, and he was suddenly weightless, overwhelmed by Guillermo’s nearness, as Guillermo cried out his name.
[Nadja, in the Vampiric Council throne room, as a man in a hooded cloak approaches the throne at the center. He lifts his hood.]
“Your first interviewer arrives,” intones the Guide in deep tones, and then her voice changes back to normal. “He responded really, really fast. Kinda desperate, if you ask me!”
“Derek?” says Nadja, turning towards the camera and making a face. Laszlo, leaning against the back of her throne, shuffles through a stack of papers.
Derek nods.
“Okay,” says Derek, “so that’s not the greatest start, but did you at least look at my resume?”
“Am I holding this fellow’s curriculum vitae, darling?” says Laszlo. “Or his curriculum mori, so to speak, ha-ha.”
“I do not know any of the words that either of you are saying and that is not a good start to this meeting,” says Nadja. “What is a rezyoomay?”
Laszlo tosses the papers in the air, and Derek sighs as they settle down around his feet.
“Look, you posted the opening on ZipRecruiter although it also broke my computer when I tried to filter for vampire-specific jobs and when my computer stopped smoking this was the only one on the screen, and the Guide said that even though I only had one year of experience being a vampire I might as well try. So are you going to ask me about like, my weaknesses?”
“Yes,” says Nadja. “And tell us of your strengths. Tell us of the battles that you have won or of the foes you have outwitted. Tell us of what you will bring to the Vampiric Council. Tell us of the ruination we will bring to the humans of the Tri-State Area under your rule.”
“Okay, so that sounds like we’re going with strengths first,” says Derek, “which is good because I prepared an answer to that one. I’m detail-oriented, and I have a really positive attitude. That actually helped me out a lot in the last year as I was learning how to be a vampire, because no one showed me how to do it, I had to figure it out on my own, and look at me now. I definitely think it was my positive attitude that allowed me to succeed.”
“Yes…” says Nadja, looking over him. “I see.”
“And I can control a hellhound,” says Derek. “I mean, you kind of took him from me, but if I had him back, I could bring that um, energy, to the Vampiric Council?”
Laszlo and Nadja look at each other.
[Laszlo and Nadja in talking head footage, back at the Staten Island house.]
“Guillermo googled job interview questions for me,” says Nadja, proudly. “He printed me off a paper to reference. I forgot it at home.”
“You did marvelously, winging it as you did,” says Laszlo. “Insightful, penetrating questions, my love. The fellow was shaking in his boots! I read somewhere you were supposed to try to intimidate the interviewee, to see how they did under pressure. He folded like a house of cards.”
[In the Vampiric Council throne room.]
“You are hired,” announced Nadja gravely.
“Oh, no,” says the Guide, “you’re supposed to tell him I’ll get back to him in a few days… so that you can interview some other candidates…”
“Cool,” says Derek. “That is legally binding now. How much do I get paid?”
“I will get back to you in a few days,” says the Guide, firmly.
“One thousand dollars a week!” says Nadja proudly. “A competitive offer, I think you will find.”
“Mm,” says Derek, “make it fifteen hundred?”
“Done.”
“Well stated,” says Laszlo, kissing her on the cheek. “Very forceful negotiation, my dear.”
“And benefits?”
Nadja looks helplessly at the Guide.
“Benefits,” she says, “like… he does not get eaten?”
“That would do for a start,” says the Guide. “Yes. Start there.”
“I don’t have to pay dues,” says Derek. “And five sick days a year.”
Nadja is quite clearly at a loss. She looks back up at Laszlo.
“Why not,” says Laszlo, “it’s not as if he’ll need to take them. Give him ten, even!”
“Yes!” says Nadja, seizing onto this rationale as a lifeline. “Yes, ten sick days a year.”
Derek reaches forward.
“Oh, no,” says Nadja. “I have my husband for shaking hands.”
Derek and Laszlo shake hands.
“Uh, so, do I start tomorrow…?” says Derek. “I just come back here?”
“Yes,” says the Guide, wearily. “Come find me. I handle first-day orientation.”
“Ah,” said Nandor, when his vision came back to him. “Guillermo, you are crying.”
“I am not!”
Nandor reached up, thumbing at Guillermo’s cheek. Guillermo furiously wiped his face, knocking his spectacles askew. Nandor poked them back into place. Guillermo was warm, and cozy, and somehow in these arms which he had seen, personally, kill dozens of vampires in a battle that would have been worthy of any of the best warriors Nandor had ever known, he felt quite safe. It felt… right.
“Stop that,” said Guillermo, batting away his hand. “Nothing serious? What the fuck. You just collapsed. You’ve been sick for days, and you won’t even tell me anything about what’s wrong. You won’t even trust me to find out about it for you. I even went to the witches about it. I went to Wallace. Fuck that guy, he didn’t even tell me anything!”
Nandor managed to sit back up again.
“You went to Wallace?” he said.
“Yes!”
Nandor removed a rose petal from where it had stuck under his tongue, and dropped it onto the floor.
“And you keep losing rose petals everywhere,” wailed Guillermo, “and I keep having to clean them up, and I used to like roses, but now all I can think about is how they mean that you’re sick!”
“It is not so bad,” said Nandor. “It won’t kill me.”
“Well, now we know that,” said Guillermo. “But I thought you were dying for days!”
He froze, and sat back on his heels, letting his hands drop to his lap. There was a miserable curve to his mouth, which at the best of times had a rather sensuous pout, and Nandor could not stop looking at it. Guillermo swallowed. Nandor drew in a breath to speak, carefully, around the pain in his chest that he had come to expect over the past few days, and found that it was not there.
“Guillermo,” said Nandor, “why do you know that? I snuck out past you to go to the library, and Laszlo helped me look up the books.”
“Of course I followed you,” said Guillermo, rolling his eyes.
“So you know.”
“Well, I know as much as you do,” said Guillermo. “I know you have to find your true love, or whatever. And, Master, I want you to be happy, I do. I know you don’t think you can be, and I’m—I’m sorry that we’re not enough for you. Nadja, Laszlo, Colin Robinson… me. I’m sorry that whoever your true love is, isn’t fixing this, wherever the hell they are, and I have to tell you, the more I sit here and think about it, the more I’m angry that they aren’t here seeing you like this. It really makes me furious, actually. That’s stupid, I guess, and kind of selfish, but it’s not that I want to be the one who fixes this for you, necessarily, it’s just that I’m the one who’s here—I’m the one seeing you suffering, and I just want it to stop—”
Nandor leaned forward.
In his eight hundred years, he had followed many impulses. This, on the heels of the sudden and swift and vast relief that swept over him, was one of the easiest he had ever chased. He kissed Guillermo, and as he did he felt the tension in his chest ease, the bitter copper tang of what ran through his own veins faded from his mouth. He remembered—how had he forgotten?—that there was something that wasn’t life, that thrummed in him, beyond breath and blood, there was magic.
And Nandor, having remembered what it was like to be one of the powerful undead, could now be distracted by the hunger of the living.
Perhaps it was just the way that Guillermo clutched at his shirt as though he had latched onto a comet, or the way that Guillermo’s kiss was messy and fumbling, not the kiss of someone who’d had a century to perfect the practice but the heart-poundingly frantic touch of someone who had a mortal clock ticking away in the back of their head. The way that it was gentle, too, the soft noises that Guillermo made under his breath, as though Guillermo knew somehow Nandor the Relentless wanted someone—anyone—to remember that he had once been only a man, and he desired the kind touch of other men. As though Guillermo knew Nandor wanted someone to hold him as though he was precious.
Guillermo was precious, too, thought Nandor, hazily through the kiss. He was ferocious, yes, murderous and willing to take advantage of his lineage to exercise his power over the vampires of Staten Island, disgustingly stubborn and prideful when it came to his own work, and he was Nandor’s perhaps favorite person left on the entire earth.
Nandor moved down without thinking, kissing at Guillermo’s jaw, and then at his neck, and the soft noises that Guillermo had been making turned into something a little more desperate. Nandor reveled in it. There had been others over his centuries of undeath, only the steps of a dance, practiced and worn in grooves. This, with Guillermo, was shaky and unsteady, something new for the both of them.
“You were sick,” said Guillermo, “just now, you collapsed.”
“I am better now,” said Nandor, who felt as though he could have lifted a bus if he needed to. Guillermo pulled back to look at him, and in the reflection of his glasses, Nandor could see that his own irises were glowing gold.
“Wow,” said Guillermo, and Nandor remembered what it was like to strike awe into someone else, and in turn he could not take his eyes off of Guillermo’s pulse in his throat, the faint sheen of sweat on his brow, the way that Guillermo’s breath rose and fell in his chest—not, as Nandor’s, a habit or a necessity of speaking, but as telltale a sign as all the rest that Guillermo was alive and as swept up in this as Nandor.
Nandor could not help it. He went for Guillermo’s shirt, unbuttoning it carefully. It was one of Guillermo’s nicer shirts, which he wore often these days. Perhaps he thought that bodyguarding required a wardrobe upgrade from familiar-ing. Nandor could not complain. Guillermo cut a fine figure in his suits and waistcoats.
Guillermo wore an undershirt, and Nandor was surprised to find this. How had he not known every inch of Guillermo’s clothing? He would now. He would buy him finer clothing, matching Nandor’s own as Nadja and Laszlo did. No. Wait, perhaps Guillermo would not like that. Guillermo seemed to have distinct ideas about what his clothes should be. They would have to talk about this later.
“You know, I’m really going to regret this in the morning,” said Guillermo absently, and Nandor jerked back.
“Regret?” said Nandor.
“My bad,” said Guillermo, trying to shift so that he was no longer kneeling, and pulling Nandor closer, so that Nandor could sit in between his legs. “I meant, I’m past thirty. This is going to hurt my back. Worth it though.”
“I will make it worth your while. A thousand times over,” vowed Nandor, and he pushed Guillermo back until he was splayed out beneath him, curls spilling out onto the floor behind his head, and Nandor could run his hand down Guillermo’s sides, undo his trousers, and—
—well, most of his handjob technique was stolen from Laszlo, but it worked all the same. Guillermo was quick, and he eagerly reached back up to Nandor to return the favor. When Nandor, after thoroughly ruining Guillermo’s nice shirt and waistcoat and trousers, finally settled on the floor next to Guillermo, he realized how much it actually did hurt.
Against his own volition—because he had never seen Guillermo’s face in relaxed repose like this before, in profile, he shut his eyes, burying his nose in Guillermo’s neck, where he could smell Guillermo’s sweat and his varieties of human soaps and shampoos and shaving lathers and the sweat and terror of the past few days, a dizzying concoction in truth but one which was faint, now, and which Nandor could have recognized anywhere as Guillermo, specifically.
“Thank you,” murmured Nandor.
“I—what?”
“I did not know,” said Nandor.
“What?” said Guillermo. There was a new flush to his cheeks, and even in this dim light Nandor could see the thin dark ring of Guillermo’s irises around his pupils. “Did that help?”
“You are a very good kisser,” said Nandor.
“Thanks, I was worried it was a little desperate,” said Guillermo.
“That was the good part.”
Guillermo laughed nervously—how had Nandor not realized how much he loved the sound? His words in the library felt years away, and now, there was only himself and Guillermo, and the candlelight around them.
“So, um, true love,” said Guillermo.
“You,” said Nandor.
“Well, I don’t have a debilitating illness to show for it,” said Guillermo. “So you just have to trust me.”
“I do,” said Nandor, kissing his cheek again. What a delight it was, to feel Guillermo smile. “I am sorry, for lying earlier when I said I did not. I do trust you.”
Guillermo’s soft hands were back around Nandor’s waist, his breath warm against Nandor’s cheek.
“I know,” said Guillermo, and the final ache in Nandor’s chest faded. Guillermo understood. It was more terrible, to be sure—more vulnerable, and more wonderful, than Nandor could have imagined. “I know.”
[Colin Robinson, in talking head footage. He is in the Staten Island house.]
“So weird, how it just cleared up right like that!” he says, snapping his fingers. “I dunno, I guess Nandor got it figured out. He’s not telling us though. I asked multiple times. He didn’t want to tell me, so it was kind of a win-win either way. I either get to find out more about the bloodsuckers, or I get to annoy them into giving me dinner.”
He smirks.
“I’m not gonna be hungry for weeks.”
[Derek, in the vampiric council room.]
“So, unless anyone else has any questions?”
He hesitates a moment. Several vampires in front of Nadja, kneeling and shaking on the ground, whimper a little bit, but there are, indeed, no questions. One of them is missing a head, and a blood trail leads offscreen. Laszlo yawns.
“Okay!” says Derek. “I think we can probably give you all…”
He fishes an ornate brass pocket watch out from his vest, and fumbles with it, clicking it open.
“…20 minutes back? Thanks so much, everyone!”
A dog barks.
[Wallace, in his workshop, tips the contents of a blood-stained handkerchief into a cauldron, and smirks at the camera. He mimes putting a finger to his mouth in a shushing motion.]
[Guillermo and Nandor on a couch, in the Staten Island house. Guillermo rests his head on Nandor’s shoulder. Though Nandor is in a distinctly antiquated high-collared shirt with frog clasps and a cloak draped over his shoulders, and Guillermo is in a distinctly modern striped button-up and waistcoat, the two of them match with dark fabric and shining gold embroidery. There is a smudge of dirt on Guillermo’s face.]
“I am taking Pee-Tee-Oh to spend time with Guillermo,” says Nandor, leaning in towards the camera to emphasize the words.
“We’re planting a rose garden!” explains Guillermo, excitedly. “Um, we like roses now that they aren’t growing in Nandor’s lungs, and Laszlo said we could have the corner opposite the topiaries with the little water pool.”
“I am learning many things about horticulture,” says Nandor.
“Yeah, actually, the vampire council library has a lot of resources on maintaining gardens? But we have to keep sifting through all the hedge maze stuff,” says Guillermo. “I keep telling Nandor we don’t have room for a hedge maze.”
Nandor gives Guillermo a suspicious glance, evidently still unconvinced, but when he leans down to kiss Guillermo, the smile on his face is genuine, and so is Guillermo’s delighted laugh.