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the buzzing still comes from the land / a humid hanging / what is the weather suppose-t’be like? / my bones cry weary demanding the sun & i disavow their ache as penance / my own worst case scenario / shuddering from high ground about the danger of floods / every water i’ve known has been ocean / met a lake & opened my eyes underneath / i would be lying if i said i knew this land / when everything here is present /
—jayy dodd, “narcissus #17”
When Nandor wakes up, Guillermo is gone.
He’d known on an intellectual level, of course, that that was what super slumber meant: Guillermo would be gone. Dead, probably, at this point; mortals might last longer than they used to, but that doesn’t negate their mortality. But it’s been thirteen years since Guillermo was much more than a shout away, even including his days off, and he curses himself when his first instinct is still to call to him across the ether.
Stop pining for a dead human, Mr. Relentless, Nandor tells himself, and reaches for the lid of his coffin. Before he can touch it, though, the top glides open.
“Yeah, no, it was definitely today that we’re supposed to check,” comes a voice, and Nandor blinks up into the purple eyes of a red-and-brown-haired vampire wearing a great deal of loose, hanging, colorful fabric. Shag? Is she wearing a sex rug as a coat? “If one more Bloody Mary wearing Lolita gear stares dolefully out at me from one more motherfucking reflective surface—oh, shit, he’s wide awake!”
“Hello,” Nandor says, and sits up. “Thank you for assisting me with the end of my super slumber. I am Nandor the Relentless.”
“Yeah, dude, I fucking know,” says the woman, rolling her eyes, flourishing her robe, and curtseying as she extends a hand of aid. “Nandor the Perfect. Nandor the Beautiful. Nandor the ‘If even the thinnest layer of dust builds up on his coffin I’ll eviscerate your entire family.’ You came with the house, man. Hundred-year lease. We had to sign like fifty NDAs first. You are one bonafide high-maintenance pain in the ass, my friend. Welcome to the twenty-second century.”
“Oh.” Nandor suddenly registers how weak he is, trembling a bit as he descends the steps to the floor from his coffin. “Thanks. Um, do you have food for me, or—”
“Three nubile young virgins,” the woman says, and points at a huddle of crying girls. “Dig in.”
It takes him a while after his sour-but-filling breakfast to get used to being awake again; he feels both exhausted and incapable of rest, as though the past hundred years have passed over the duration of a very long blink. The girl, it turns out, is named Acacia, and has five roommates: one vampire, one fucked-up vampire clone, a golem, a human familiar, and a person who hurts to look at, who everyone else makes vague, unsettled, frustrated noises about when asked to justify or explain their existence. Nandor still only remembers Acacia’s name, and finds himself grateful when she shoos everyone away and follows him back to his room. “Do you want to stay here, or, like—are you going to London now?”
“London?”
“To be with Guillermo the Conqueror?”
“Guillermo the—Guillermo the Conqueror?”
Acacia blinks, then blushes. “Oh, my goodness, that, like, totally isn’t my business, is it? Obviously you can do whatever you want to—here, they have an updated phone sent, like, every ten years or so, you should be able to—sorry, I’ll get out of your hair.” And she hands him a flexible piece of glass and leaves.
Guillermo the Conqueror, Nandor thinks, and then thinks it again. Guillermo the Conqueror.
He keeps thinking this until he flexes the telephone so hard it lights up and starts blinking and squeaking at him. “Cease!”
The phone shuts up, and Nandor stares down at it. “Oh, telephone. What have I done?”
“Super slumber,” the phone chirps, in a high, distorted voice, as though someone is mangling a flutist atop a defective anvil. Nandor blinks, then laughs. “Super slumber is a state of vampiric existence in which—”
“I know what it is.”
Nandor stares through the phone at the spotless carpet. He’d been expecting dust, and still feels disoriented by how easily the world seems to have oriented itself around his re-entry.
He doesn’t call Nadja until the next day, but can’t make himself wait any longer than that; the phone, thank goodness, works about a million times better than those piece of shit bricks he’d had to put up with when he’d gone down for his catnap, and walks him through an extraordinarily helpful introductory user’s manual. “Can you call Nadja, please?”
“Okey-dokey,” the phone chirps, and there’s a dial tone. After about a minute, a voice interrupts it. “Please hold.”
Nandor lies down right there on the rug, staring up at the portrait of him and John as advertisements and music and entreaties to please hold ring on and on and on. He’s not sure how long it takes for the call to go through, but he’s forgotten he isn’t just listening to the radio by the time Nadja’s voice emerges from the glass. “Well, well, well,” she says, the words echoing in succession until they culminate in a chorused crescendo of two derisive drawls. “Looks like somebody finally decided to wake up from his super slumber.”
Nadja and her ghost bitch at him for over six hours, swapping out often to deal with various other calls; Nandor wants to be annoyed by it, but can’t even begin to lie to himself that the hot, silent tears that start seeping out of his eyes around the one-hour mark are anything other than relief. Guillermo the Conqueror, he thinks again, and feels white heat race down the length of his spine. Surely my sweet Gizmo has not become a conqueror. Perhaps he is simply dead.
“Anyway, I can get you over to London whenever you want,” one of the Nadjas says. “Take a few days, recuperate, and then get your ass over here and start fucking Memo. It’s getting sad to watch. I think he might start hosting biweekly all-night drug blood orgies again if you don’t propose soon.”
“What?”
“Don’t play stupid with me, lover boy,” Nadja says, and somehow transmits the sensation of rolling her eyes through the phone. “Text me when you feel awake, and we’ll work out the deets. Go enjoy being alive again. Bye, bitch.” And she hangs up.
Nandor sits there for a while, digesting what snippets of conversation he had managed to absorb; the fact that Nadja and her ghost had kept interrupting each other and repeating themselves ends up being far more helpful than anything else. They’re both still married to Laszlo, though her ghost is now inhabiting an identical sex doll that the mysterious (please, please, please) Memo procured for them. Everyone lives in London now, including Colin Robinson, who has turned into a fucked-up baby, thus resulting in Laszlo becoming an utterly useless house-husband. The Earth still goes round the sun, and the moon round the Earth; humans continue to fuck and eat and die en masse, and vampires to prey upon them from the shadows.
“Telephone,” Nandor says, and it hums in his hand. “Tell me what you know of Guillermo the Conqueror.”
He’s still praying that maybe it’s just a crazy coinkydink, but the phone rips the rest of the world to smithereens within moments. “Guillermo the Conqueror is a senior member of the Vampiric Council and delegate to the Worldwide Supernatural Council. Formerly known as Guillermo de la Cruz, the Conqueror was born in the Bronx in 1990 and died in London in 2023 at the age of thirty-two,” the telephone chirps, and Nandor buries his head in his hands.
What have I done? Sweet Jahan’s ghost please help me, what have I done?
Eventually, Nandor realizes the telephone is still talking. “—challenge to the Conqueror’s claim to power culminated in the 2073 Battle of the Thames, during which nine hundred sixty-nine vampires were slain over the course of six hours at the Conqueror’s hand. Global centralization and standardization of Vampiric Council case law began shortly thereafter, and is commonly cited as the reason for the Conqueror’s War of Accession, 2074-91. The Conqueror’s War—”
“That’s enough.”
The telephone, thank heavens, falls silent; Nandor puts it in his pocket and stares at the ceiling, wondering how the hell he’s supposed to start living.
He ends up browsing what appears to be an aggregation of vampiric insider knowledge, watching interview after interview of his sweet Gizmo’s eyes growing colder and harder and more distant as his body count rises and rises and rises without end. The scene he returns to, after the three-hour documentary about the gory details of his bloody conquest, is one of him in a crowded café, still human, the final clip in a ten-minute retrospective on the year Nandor began his journey forwards through time. Guillermo’s eyes are still distant, but his shoulders are hunched in a defensive posture, his trembling hands wrapped around a shitty paper mug.
“It’s been almost a year,” Guillermo says, his voice wavering as he looks up at the camera, then away. “I think it’s time for me to accept—I keep waiting for a miracle. Or a disaster. A fire, or a—a—fucking anything at all to bring him home to me. But he couldn’t—he just couldn’t live with himself. I—I have to do it for him f-for—for a while. I—”
He chokes on a sob, then shakes himself and swallows his tears and looks into the camera again. “I’m going to have to start living until he comes back. Nandor is dead. He’ll be resurrected, but he—I’m a fucking widower for a man I never kissed. This really is one sick joke you’ve played on me, Dios mío.” He shakes his fist at the sky without heat, then sighs. “I guess it’s time to let Nadja turn me. She’s been bugging me nonstop about it for months now. I just—I always thought we’d share ancestral soil, you know? I was going to nag him into getting us a double coffin. But there’s no way she has time to go all the way to Al Quolanudar for this. I can’t ask her to make that choice.”
Guillermo shakes his head and stands. “Oh, God. Oh, fuck. I have got so much work to do now—ay Dios, there is so much that has to happen, I have to—okay, obviously we need to have a giant orgy when she turns me and find a babysitter for Colin Robinson and invite everyone on the Vampiric Council and get the Guide to send ravens to—”
And Guillermo slumps, his mouth closing, the camera panning away to reveal him cordoned off on both sides by cluttered, empty tables, chatter seeping into the audio track as the crowded, indifferent bustle of the café and the noise and motion and vibrancy of life pass him by.
It’s all Nandor can do to even make himself eat for the next few days, much less lie down in coffin; rest evades him, much as he tries to embrace it. He knows his fear is irrational, but it doesn’t stop him from being terrified that if he lets himself drift off into true slumber, he’ll open his eyes and find another hundred years have gone by.
He’s lying on the floor staring at a video about, surprise surprise, Guillermo, and the year just after he was turned. The movie, to his horror, is entitled Nadja’s Dog Unleashed; Nandor has vague hopes that it’s a porno until about a minute in, when the artfully-composed shots of Guillermo flying home as a bat from the Council end with him in a room with Nadja, turning into a mist as he glides down through the chimney, then into a person, sitting with one hip up on a sand table as her doll totters around its surface. Neither of them flinches as he enters; her ghost doesn’t even look up.
“You know what I heard from Viago yesterday?” Nadja says, her whole voice a laugh. “I heard that you were the one to slaughter Nandor the Relentless. Apparently I asked you to do it as a test of your loyalty to me, so I would turn you into a vampire and keep you around as my faithful, bloodthirsty hellhound.”
“Is that not exactly what happened?” Guillermo asks, and then they all start giggling. “Okay, okay, Russia. Apparently Vladimir Putin has a clone of himself that he had turned into a vampire, and those dumb motherfuckers—”
They fade out, replaced instead by a voiceover. “The exact fate of Nandor the Relentless remains unknown, but it is commonly accepted that he either died or entered super slumber during the early 2020s. This harsh dispatching of a faithful master was a telling omen of the ruthless behavior that followed until his usurpation of—”
“He never loved me,” Nandor moans, flinging the phone away, and the nearest mirror shatters. He stares into its warped pieces, then jumps when a vague impression of his own face follows him from shard to shard. “What the fuck? Begone, demon! Go on, get out, shoo! Leave me alone to my foolishness and misery!”
The mirror goes blank again, and Nandor sighs and stares at the empty pieces and goes to get someone to clean it up for him.
“Is this fucking house haunted or what?” he asks as they walk, ignoring the series of empty mirrors and abstract, stylized portraits of all of the house’s residents. He’d meant it as a joke, but Acacia rolls her eyes at him.
“Obviously it’s fucking haunted,” she says, and her reflection nods. “Vampires have lived here for hundreds of years. Hundreds of thousands of people have died here. But we exorcised all the restless spirits when we moved in. Only nice ghosts, nowadays.”
“Then why are they going around breaking mirrors?”
She looks at him like he’s just asked her which way is down, then holds up her hands. “Uh-uh. Nope. This is not my business. This is above my pay grade. Sorry about this.” She grimaces down at her the shards of mirror as she sweeps, seeming unsurprised when her reflection waves a placating hand. “Do you want me, to, like—it’s fucking Nandor the Relentless. I love you, but I don’t think I can—”
Her reflection shakes its head, and Nandor blinks a few times. “Wait. Vampires don’t have reflections. What—did the law change? But then why would the mirror break at me? I still cannot—why are you reflected but not me?”
“Oh, good grief,” Acacia says. “You are exceedingly stupid and childlike, Mr. Relentless. I see now why you were not left on your own.” And she leaves the room before he can point out that he was.
Nice ghosts, he thinks, and wonders who on Earth would like this house enough to stick around for a hundred years. Topher?
“Topher? Are you haunting me?”
All eleven mirrors remaining in the room shatter to smithereens in unison.
The laws have, indeed, changed rather drastically since he was away; the two biggest ones are the free offer of a translator microbe, which he tunes to only my own brain and in English, please after about three seconds of what feels like the entire universe screaming in his ear, and the removal of the sun curse.
He has no idea how they got that one through, let alone why, but all of Acacia’s roommates accompany him to the front porch for his first sunrise since the thirteenth century, though the other vampire and her clone—Lily and Rose, though he can’t tell which one’s which—spend the whole time staring through their phones at him. He doesn’t look directly at it, so as not to go blind, but after a second he closes his eyes and tilts his head towards it, absorbing the raw warmth, the red light soaking through his eyelids. He tries not to think about anything other than that warmth and light, but keeps seeing that mirror, shattered, over and over and over again.
“Why?” Nandor manages, after about ten minutes of absolute, perfect stillness. “Who would—why let us have this?”
“Someone made a deal,” Rose-or-Lily says, tilting her phone so a bit of pink light intersects his vision. “To return the true power of the Slayers. But in exchange for eternal life, there must be those of us who take it.”
“Aren’t we the immortals?”
Lily and Rose laugh in eerie unison. “There are livestock laws now, too,” one of them says, and turns towards the entity that makes his whole brain hurt. “We source our meat organically. -.-. .-.. .- ... ... .. ..-. .. . -.. retrieves suicidal kids from -.-. .-.. .- ... ... .. ..-. .. . -.. just before -.-. .-.. .- ... ... .. ..-. .. . -…. I think it’s a better fate, all told. They either get eaten or turned, but either way they enter a new fork on the crossroads of destiny.”
“Though of course they’re harder to enforce when you don’t live in the City,” the other says, and her twin frowns. “Ethical sourcing is all well and good when you have access to -.-. .-.. .- ... ... .. ..-. .. . -.., but how the hell the Council can police—”
The words he can’t understand come across as beeps and screeches underlaid by static; when he turns back to Acacia, she tilts her head at him. “Mr. Relentless?”
“I couldn’t hear half of what they said.”
“That’d be the Censor,” Acacia says. She sounds unsurprised. “It stops you from overtaxing yourself. And our world is on the axis of both logic and wickedness, so what comes out of here has to get filtered pretty heavily for the poor high-Earth sons of bitches who think vampirism is a magical fantasy.”
“Our world?”
The golem—Bertie—pulls a bit of paper out of per mouth, which Acacia reads aloud. “הבחור הזה באמת אידיוט מזוין.”
“What?”
“Per says you’re a moron.”
“He’s from 2022,” Lily-or-Rose says. “Be nice. He didn’t know we were going to make first contact, let alone about -.-. .-.. .- ... ... .. ..-. .. . -...”
“First contact?”
YOU’RE LITERALLY A VAMPIRE, the incomprehensible entity says, and everyone but Nandor starts laughing.
He spends a week on his phone just reading about aliens after that, trying not to care whenever Guillermo’s name comes up, though it’s admittedly a bit difficult when it does so about once every ten minutes. When his hunger finally overwhelms his seasick, vertiginous grief, he goes to the human familiar, a dark-skinned, square-shaped person with cold, sharp eyes and a penetrating gaze. “Hello, there, um…”
“Brick,” the human says. “It/its pronouns.”
“Excuse me?”
“My mom sold my soul at a crossroads when I was three,” the human says. “Last I heard, it was bitcoin mining somewhere out in the Oort cloud. Use it or its pronouns for me. I’m a philosophical zombie. That’s why I want to become a vampire instead.”
“Whatever,” Nandor says, and looks it in the eyes again, though he feels himself retreating mentally after another moment. “Where the hell do you get dinner around here?”
“Dungeon,” Brick says. “I’ll go talk to -.-. .-.. .- ... ... .. ..-. .. . -... Give it ten minutes exactly, then open up the door.”
“Okay, whatever,” Nandor says, and goes down to the dungeon. He gets his phone to pull up some kind of complicated game that involves about sixteen different projected spinning discs, though thankfully it tells him when his ten minutes have elapsed.
“Bon appetit!” the phone announces, going clear again, then yellow, projecting a winking emoticon that even Nandor can understand. “Enjoy your meal!”
Nandor twists the door, then blinks when he enters; the exit vanishes behind him, seeming to delve him into a vast expanse of distant stars and spinning galaxies.
“Oh,” comes a voice, and Nandor looks down into the drowsy eyes of what can’t be called anything other than a child. “Hello. Are you God?”
“Yes,” Nandor lies. “I am going to drink your blood now to reintegrate you into my eternal body.”
“Will it hurt?”
“Did dying hurt?”
The child laughs, shakes her head, and looks around at the imagined landscape. “Wow. This sort of makes me want to live again. Where’s home?”
Nandor stares, sighs, and then curses and looks at the ceiling. “What the fuck, Brick? I can’t eat this poor fucking kid.”
“What?”
“Run away,” Nandor says, and the girl blinks at him as he waves at the ceiling, or at least at where it ought to be. “I am not that fucking guy. I am a vampire. I want to kill and eat you. You have been abducted by evil, bloodthirsty aliens.” She blinks. “Seriously. Go. Run away. Now.”
“Jesus Christ,” the child says, and says it again when Nandor recoils, holding up her arms up above her chest in a sort of makeshift cross. The room melts into a pastoral landscape with a severed door at the end of it, which turns, revealing a blank-faced Brick, who rubs its head and sighs copiously.
“I’m so sorry about this,” Brick says, and clubs the child over the head with a bat that pixelates into its hand mid-swing. Nandor steps back towards the exit, though he isn’t sure why Brick frightens him; it sighs again, rolls its eyes, and gestures at the door. “I’ll find you someone who’s sure about dying. Give me a few minutes.”
Nandor goes and sits outside the dungeon door, trying to figure out what the fuck is even in there; when it opens again, there’s a middle-aged man with ragged clothes and a haunted expression, staring at Nandor like he’s a ghost.
Which I am, Nandor thinks, and stalks forwards. “Hello, there.”
“Kill me,” the man begs, and Nandor obliges.
There’s something so spectacularly depressing about the whole thing, abducting strange, suicidal children from their final moments of life in order to prey on them without even the barest hint of the hunt, that Nandor considers just going back to sleep for the next three hundred years; when he brings it up the next time Nadja calls him, which she does via her secretary a good five times a week, she goes so silent that he starts shaking his phone in the air beside him.
“Hello? Are you there, Nadja or Nadja?”
“Yes,” comes a voice, and then another, overlapping it, “you fucking idiot.”
“What?”
“If you go back to super slumber, it will be the end of your journey,” one of the Nadjas says. “Because I will destroy your body brick by brick and put each atom on the surface of a different comet, and then I will send all of those comets to asynchronous universes and throw away the key.”
“Good lord!”
“You are not going back to sleep,” Nadja says. “I understand that you have jet lag, but you are not going back to sleep. It is time to live again, Nandor. You will live now, or you will die forever.”
The other Nadja laughs. “At least he let us turn Memo ourself. It’d be an empty threat otherwise.”
“If he hadn’t pussied out and taken a hundred-year nap, he’d have gotten to have that for the rest of time instead of letting him—”
“Stop talking about Guillermo!” Nandor roars, and his phone flinches. There’s a long pause, and then an echoing laugh.
“Sorry, lover boy.”
“Didn’t mean to bring up the whole passion scorned thing.”
“Do you ever do anything other than sit around pining for him?”
“Hang up on Nadja, please,” Nandor says. The phone obliges, though both Nadjas are still laughing when the line goes dead.
He gets Rose and Lily to take him to Central Park the next morning, since evidently he’s supposed to start living again; they seem amused by his delight at seeing all the plants in daylight, though they both continue to look at him through their phones the entire time. He’s almost feeling cheerful when about fifteen ravens approach, cawing and circling him and covering him in wind and feathers.
“Ah!” Nandor cries, and shields his head and lowers to a crouch. “Ah! What the fuck? What do you want? I’m not on the fucking Council anymore!”
“Nevermore,” one raven says, somehow conveying a deep and profound sorrow. “Nevermore.”
“Yes! Exactly! I’ll never be on it anymore! Now leave, you wretched beasts!”
Almost all of the ravens leave, though the last one digs its talons into his shoulder when he tries to shoo it away; when he turns around, Lily and Rose are both watching him in open-mouthed astonishment. “What?”
They share a glance, then close their mouths. “Nope,” Rose-or-Lily says. “No way.”
“This is not our business,” Lily-or-Rose agrees. “This is way above our pay grade, and we’ve got a high fucking pay grade.”
“Do you know who sent me all these ravens? Tell me!”
“No, sir,” both girls chorus, and turn to bats when he lunges.
He spends the next few weeks just wandering around Staten Island and Manhattan and the greater tri-state area in daylight, getting to know this new version of the New World; the subways have been upgraded a great deal, though everyone he meets still blames the mayor for every last crack in the sidewalk. The raven takes up residence atop the roof, even despite Nandor’s efforts to drive it away; he finds himself both enraged and unsurprised when it multiplies day by day, turning into an entire flock of the fucking things within a month. “I don’t know what you want!” he screams at them each night, and flips them off with both hands when they chorus, “Nevermore.”
He ends up hanging out with Bertie the most, out of all the house’s residents; Brick still drives him to some deep, primal terror that he has no desire to explore, and Acacia and Rose and Lily all make him feel like a world-class idiot. There’s the bright, impossible entity, but he thinks he’d prefer to give Brick a lap dance than spend time with that thing.
So he goes to Bertie, who—thank Heavens—can’t fucking talk; his phone is obliging about translating per little strips of paper into more comprehensible English, though per often insults him too. But he’s never once been alive without getting ridiculed, aside from at the Wellness Center; in retrospect, it was perhaps a little bit optimistic to hope waking up in the future would remedy that.
He tries to just go back to the Wellness Center, once he’s shed enough of his disorientation to remember where it is; Nandor finds himself disappointed but resigned to learn it’s been turned into a combined juice bar and bookstore for humans, running his hands along the chrome wall plating until he’s asked to buy something or leave.
So he goes back to Staten Island, and asks Bertie what per’s up to, though even per won’t tell him why everyone refuses to listen when he demands they stop replacing his shattered mirrors.
As he enters the third month of being alive again, Nandor wakes up unable to bring himself to move. When Brick opens up his lid with one of its horrific, evil smiles, it blinks, then cocks its head. “Nandor? You alright there, bud?”
“Why can’t I just die?” Nandor moans, and Brick closes his lid again. He sighs, laughs for a while, and then pulls out his phone. “Telephone?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Find me a video of Guillermo I have never seen before.”
The phone makes a few squeaks that almost resemble laughter, then obliges. “This is an interview from 2061,” it says, in a much lower register than it tends towards on his less bleak days. “‘Guillermo de la Cruz on Nandor the Conqueror: A Retrospective.’”
“Why would you show me this?” Nandor moans, but the video’s already being projected onto the little screen that’s been implanted into the top of his coffin for Lord-knows-what reason. “Oh, goodness, fine, whatever. Maybe this will be awful enough to let me kill myself.”
Guillermo is a vampire, sitting on a stool in an all-white room in his signature pinstripe shirt, black vest, and black gloves, one leg crossed over the other knee as he types on his phone. There’s a muffled noise, and then he looks up and to the side and laughs. “Sorry, sorry. I’m so fucking busy, you really have no idea.”
Another laugh, and he looks into the camera. “What the hell is this interview even about?”
More muffled voices, and a chorus of offscreen laughter. Guillermo, though, doesn’t laugh, and after a moment it cuts off. There’s dead silence as he sighs, rests his chin on his hands, and closes his eyes, just for a moment.
“Nandor,” he murmurs, and for a second it feels like he really is looking right at him. “Nandor the Relentless.” A laugh, though it’s dark and humorless. “Yes, I know what happened to him. No, I’m not going to tell you.” He shakes his head a few times. “Nandor, Nandor, Nandor. Now there was one beautiful man.” There’s a brief display: two headshots of him on either side of Guillermo’s body, which fade out as he speaks again. “Certainly his body was beautiful, but what I meant was that he had a beautiful soul. A beautiful heart. Everything about him made me tremble in place.”
A long, wistful sigh, and he looks back into the lens. “My master was… he was my very favorite person I’ve ever known, I think. Including my dearly departed Mamá, may she rest in peace.” He closes his eyes, then opens them; the pain his words and actions imply is absent from his dead features. “He was so sweet, and gentle, and silly. He could always make me laugh, no matter how bad I felt.” Another sigh; a smile plays at the corner of his mouth as his gaze grows distant. “He could be so temperamental, too, and over the most ridiculous things. The first time I beat him at chess he lost it like—he must have followed me around for a month demanding rematches until I started letting him win. He never did figure out that I was taking pity on him. He always thought he had regained the upper hand.”
Guillermo laughs, then sighs again. “My sweet Nandor. He was the love of my life. I think I’d kill all of you to get to spend an hour around him.”
A beat, and then he laughs and waves his hands. “Sorry, sorry! You’re all safe. My conscience would beat me up about it for years. I’m sorry.” He shakes his head a few times and looks back into the camera. “Nandor the Relentless was born in 1262 in the former Al Quoanudar, which is now southern Iran. When he was seventeen, he became Supreme Viceroy, and began to wage campaigns of conquest. We used to celebrate his Accession Day every year. He had thirty-seven wives by the time he became a vampire. They were—let me see if I know this.” He closes his eyes and starts ticking off on his fingers. “This is by rank, mind you, not by date. Okay, okay. Marjane, Yegane, Umeza, Rafat, Shideh, Soussan, Tarja, Nermina, Kaameh, Tawana, Shirin, Fatima, Mahrosh, Farah, Zarah, Elaheh, Bolour, Samira, Margat, Faranoush, Sima, Larmina, Gulzar, Laleh, Kyra, Mojgan, Solmaz, Jaleh, Nasrin, Aytan, Sanam, Parvana, Darejani, Giti, Shadleen, One-Eyed Farah, and… Morvarid.” He looks up and scratches his head. “That’s thirty-seven, right?”
Muffled speech off-camera, and Guillermo laughs. “Yeah. He loved all of them but One-Eyed Farah and Morvarid. They were lovers, actually. They plotted to kill him and put Morvarid on the throne about once a month.” Another laugh. “Thank God they weren’t successful, eh?”
Nandor recoils, but Guillermo blows smoke out of his nose, and doesn’t otherwise react to his own blasphemy. “Well, I’m thankful, anyway. Poor Nandor. They all left him after he became a vampire. He was—being relentless meant something special to him, beyond just—masculinity has evolved, and he was born in the thirteenth century. He had an understanding of chivalry and nobility that was very different from the chuds we associate with it now.” He shakes his head and sighs again. “He felt a responsibility to his people, and to his life. He kept trying to visit his wives and children even after he lost his soul. When he scared one of his descendants to death he made us all go to her funeral, even when the holy ground tore blood from his eyes. He was still mourning the horse he had to eat on the road over seven hundred years later.”
A beat. “Yeah, I know. Poor Master—Nandor—ah, hell.” He rubs the back of his neck, shaking his head and laughing a little. “My poor master. Her name was Jahan. Farsi for ‘my universe.’ By the time I met him he thought her name had been ‘John,’ and that she was a stallion. Couldn’t remember a word of Farsi. I think the exact moment I fell in love with him was—I mean, I fell in love with him at first sight, but—I must have fallen in love with him once per hour, really. I guess I just—anyway, I think this story happened in my very first year as his familiar. I remember I—I used to quit, like, at least once a year? More like once every six months.”
Another sigh. “Poor Master. I really can’t believe I did that to him. Anyway, I—there was a period there where all the glamor just got… stripped away. Piece by piece. I mean, I lost a lot of it just when I realized how disgusting dead bodies are, but—and then Nadja broke my sternum and, like, six other bones, and I sort of—I was in too deep to get out, but I didn’t know that I actually wanted to be a vampire anymore.” Another humorless laugh. “Nandor hated talking to me. I think it was the thing he hated most in the whole world, even including himself. A few weeks after I quit following the whole sternum inciden—”
“Make it stop,” Nandor chokes out, and the video pauses. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut and draws in one slow, shuddering breath, then another.
“Nandor? Are you okay?”
He doesn’t squeeze the phone, but he does laugh. “No.”
“Would you like a tasty beverage? Lily just killed three virgins.”
“He thought I hated talking to him!” Nandor wails, and buries his face in his pillow and bursts into tears.
He cries himself to sleep, and can’t make himself watch the rest of the interview; he thinks about getting out of coffin, but when Nadja calls, some hot, tight knot in his stomach roils, and he tells the phone to ignore her and pull up a different video of Guillermo. This one is just a compilation of beautiful images of him set to classical music; Nandor holds his own arms as he watches the cascade of photographs. Guillermo on a boat, Guillermo on a bridge, Guillermo on a balustrade, wind whipping through his hair as laughter whistles beneath his fangs, lovely and lifeless and always alone.
I left him, Nandor thinks, and shudders as nausea envelops him. I just fucking left him. I ran away. I’m a coward. I left him. He probably thinks I slumbered because I hated him. He probably thinks I still hate him. I left him.
The video ends, and his phone asks, “Ready for breakfast?”
“Another,” Nandor demands, and his phone sighs and pulls up another video. This one is a three-person roundtable: Guillermo, Nadja, and Nadja’s upgraded ghost, a nude, unconscious human flopping around the table between them. “Oh—”
“Nadja’s Dog bites back!” crows a voiceover, and Nandor closes his eyes. “This three-hour smash cut of Guillermo de la Cruz’s most vicious and bloodthirsty moments will—”
“Alright, alright,” Nandor mumbles, and the video pauses. “I’m not fucking hungry. Go back to—do you have the one of him dancing in the field after the sun curse is lifted?”
“I live to serve,” his phone says in long-suffering tones, and rolls ‘em.
He keeps watching videos after that, day after night after day; he only realizes how long it’s been when he wakes up from yet another crying jag to voices outside of his room.
“—you think we should just leave a virgin in there or something? It’s been like a fortnight.”
“What if he tries to attack us? Do you really feel like explaining that to Acacia?”
“Do you feel like explaining a dead Nandor the Relentless? What if he fucking kills himself?”
A beat, and then a rustle. “I really did think we were gonna get this room back when he woke up. I was excited about—I was gonna set up a reptile habitat.”
A respondent sigh. “We all had dreams for his room. Let ‘em go.” Another beat. “Poor Memo. Can you imagine? I’m surprised he hasn’t come over here himself just to kill him.”
“Ha! No kidding.”
Nandor waits until they leave to get up, but once he’s aware of his hunger, it’s impossible not to notice. Brick seems relieved when he asks for a large meal, and smiles its horrible smile as it ushers him into the impossible dungeon and gestures at two unconscious girls. “Enjoy.”
He calls Nadja back the next morning; she makes him wait four full hours before she picks up, which Nandor wants to resent her for, but can’t even begin to pretend isn’t justified. “Hello? Who is this?”
“Ha ha.”
“Who is speaking? Do we know someone named Ha Ha?”
“I don’t think we do.”
Nandor lets out a long sigh. “It is I, your old friend. Nandor the Relentless.”
One of the Nadjas snorts. “Nandor? Do we know a Nandor? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone named Nandor.”
“I think you’re right. Maybe it’s a kind of plant?”
“I’m sorry,” Nandor grinds out, and there’s silence. “Okay? I’m sorry. I should have sent you an email or something. I have just been crying in coffin for the past two weeks. I’m sorry.”
More silence, and then two identical sighs. “Well, at least you’re alive. Brick was sort of afraid you’d killed yourself.”
“Brick experiences fear?”
A beat, and then two laughs, and they start rambling at him about incomprehensible Council business. At the end of the rant—which is imparted as a tag team, and takes about three hours—whichever Nadja he’s talking to sighs. “Nandor,” she says, and then there’s silence.
“Nadja?”
“Why are you still on Staten Island?”
Now Nandor is the one who can’t speak. After a few minutes, Nadja sighs again. “Memo will kill me if he knows I told you this,” she mutters. “But I—he misses you, alright? He has been moping and weeping and cruel to everyone, even birds and children. He wants you to come home. Will you just let me fly you home to London already? It’s been three months. I understand that you’re having a hard time, but I’m positive it will all be much better once you’re home.”
“I’m already home. You’re the ones who moved to fucking England. And I don’t even know anyone named Memo anyway.”
More silence, and then Nadja lets out such a blood-curdling, ear-splitting, high-pitched shriek that Nandor fumbles and drops his phone to the ground. “Good lord!”
“There is no hope for you,” Nadja declares, and hangs up. Nandor’s phone blinks red-and-black frowny faces at him from atop his pristine rug, though it somehow seems to gulp when he looks down at it and glares.
He gets his phone to order him an infinite rail pass the next day, and boards the first train out of New York State; everyone from the house except the entity sees him off, though Nandor has to pretend not to notice Lily and Rose crowing in victory as his car chugs off.
He finds that his old social network, paltry as it sometimes was, has been built into his phone; he craves solitude even more than blood, but the blasted thing informs him every time he’s anywhere near a vampiric acquaintance, and sulks so obviously the one time he ignores it that he doesn’t have the heart to do so again. At least he never has to find his own food.
The raven, bitch that she is, follows all the way from Staten Island, even when he finds a cabin upstate that seems perfect for his ideal new life of sulking and skulking around. All the residents of his old Staten Island haunt seem more than happy to have his coffin and his decorations off their hands.
“So have you talked to Guillermo yet?”
It’s the seventh iteration of this question that makes Nandor snap, though he hadn’t wanted to be cruel to the poor sons of bitches; but there’s only so much hero-worship a man can take before something in him grows brittle and taut and impossible to contain.
“No!” Nandor roars. “No, I have not spoken to Guillermo! No, I have not heard from or about or—or—or towards Guillermo! I am indifferent to him! What is a Gizmo? Beats me! All I know is that if anyone in this world is a conqueror of anything, that person is me!”
Simon the Devious bursts out laughing.
That night, he stays up late, too busy stalking Guillermo’s social media accounts to really focus on the revelation that is sitting out in the sunset. Instead, he scrolls the no-longer-transparent phone, watching the revelation of Guillermo’s shoulder blade poking out of sheer fabric and wondering where he went wrong.
“Guillermo,” Nandor moans, thanking goodness that he’d gone home instead of taking up Simon’s no-doubt-devious offer of a free couch. “Guillermo, I miss you. Where did I go wrong? I’m sorry, Gizmo. I’m sorry—”
Then he looks up as his raven approaches, blinking away furious tears. “What? What do you want? Why am I being punished for being alive again? Is it not enough that he has left me?”
Six more ravens flock to join them. His raven caws, seems somehow to give him a reproachful look, and then comes over and nests in his hair. “Nevermore.”
“Alright, alright, I get it,” Nandor mumbles. “All these fucking birds are fucking obsessed with me, fine, I get it—”
The other ravens are gone in the morning, but the mirrors shatter every time he covers them up.
The Baron looks at him like he’s a fucking idiot when he goes by; the Sire stands up and starts to leave the room. “What? What did I say, what?”
“This is between you and your omens,” the Sire says in disgust, and the Baron shakes his head at him.
“Goodness gracious, man, how stupid are you? How have you lived this long?”
“I follow my heart,” Nandor says, and the Baron rolls his eyes. “What? I do!”
“You follow your blood. It’s not the same thing.”
“When did everyone start being so fucking nice to each other? I hate it!”
“You’re like a child,” the Baron says, shaking his head again. “I don’t even know how to—and so is he.” He stands up and shakes his fist at an empty mirror. “Leave me out of your lover’s quarrels! He is getting annoying! I don’t care about your stupid fucking omens! I’ll shatter every mirror I see until you work this the fuck out!”
“Who are you talking to?”
Baron Afanas ignores him as he stalks off, leaving an untouched mirror behind.
Nandor lies there on the floor for a while, then stands, gulping and waving when he comes face-to-face with his own reflection. “What? I don’t understand what you want. Why give me years of bad luck? What did I do?”
For just an instant, he thinks he sees Guillermo, but he’s gone before he can tell if it was real or not. “What? The Conqueror is—ah. Boop. Hello. You are just a reflection, aren’t you? This isn’t a conversation. I am mad with grief. One of these days I will stop pining for him in every single teensy instant of my pathetically stupid, meaningless existence, and things will be normal again. Hm. It’s kind of fun to have a reflection. What do my fangs look like?”
His own face sighs at him, and doesn’t open its mouth as he approaches. Instead, it backs away, shakes its head, throws its hands up in the air, and gives him a rude hand gesture as it stalks off out of the frame.
He stops covering his reflection up after that, when it shows up, though it’s difficult to predict when it will. He finds himself drawn back to Europe, though he can’t bring himself to set foot in London; when he falls in love with an apartment on the Rhine, he doesn’t think twice about hypnotizing the landlord to give him an indefinite lease, though his phone always seems happy to pay for whatever he needs with “karma,” which seems to have replaced dollars as a universal currency. He’s not sure how the hell he ended up with so much of it, but if there’s one thing Nandor’s good at, it’s stabling gift horses.
He’s only been there for about three days when there’s a knock at his door, and he opens it, then blinks. “Laszlo?”
“And Colin Robinson,” says a gangly, adult-faced Colin Robinson, shoving his way inside. “Love the architecture here. Very classic mid-century chic. In the 2060s—”
“Invite me in already!” Laszlo interrupts, and Nandor does. They both ignore Colin Robinson as he rambles about the chemical composition of different shades of egg-white paint; Laszlo goes to his shelf and starts sorting through his records, shaking his head as he does. “Not one Nadja and Laszlo album. This is just shameful.”
“It’s not like they sell them in stores.”
“Clearly you aren’t going to the right stores,” Colin Robinson says, and Nandor looks away. “You still haven’t been to see Guillermo. You know that, right? It’s been over a decade. You’re behaving with somewhat unbelievable cruelty, really. It’s a little embarrassing to watch.”
Nandor doesn’t say anything, and both of them sigh. “Hopeless,” Laszlo mutters, and sighs again when Nandor doesn’t answer. “Bloody hell, mate. You could at least acknowledge that he kept your coffin safe and clean while you were slumbering. Write him a fucking thank-you note. You could—I mean, good grief, man. Memo’s not going to wait for you forever. The man gets at least three marriage proposals a day. Eventually one will have too many diplomatic benefits for him to pass up.”
“I don’t know anyone named Memo.”
“This is a wonderful example of cognitive dissonance,” Colin Robinson says brightly. Laszlo, the bastard, lets him lecture Nandor about it for the next two hours.
He considers trying to find a familiar after that, but every time he approaches a human, all he can see is Guillermo, Guillermo, Guillermo; most of them seem to think he has a speech impediment, though a few recognize him.
“Oh!” one human woman says, as he’s sipping a pint of drugged blood and trying to get anything at all to come out of his mouth. “You’re that guy—that Nadron guy, right? Guillermo the Conqueror—you’re the one that got away!”
“Nandor,” Nandor manages, and she tilts her head. “It is not Nadron. It is Nandor.”
The woman laughs. “Amèlie. Nice to meet you, Nandor. What the hell are you doing here in Paris? I thought you were still slumbering. Pit stop before London?”
Nandor stares, groans, and buries his face in the bar. “Why does everyone think I am going to Gizmo? I am not my own person? He hasn’t talked to me!”
Amèlie’s eyes grow huge as he starts sniffling, and then she laughs and drags him out back through the women’s restroom, shaking her head as his sniffles turn to sobs. “Alright, alright. You poor guy. No wonder he never got over you. Do you want to come back to mine and sleep it off?”
Nandor turns into a bat and flies into her hair, and she laughs and starts towards her home, though she has to invite him in when the barrier knocks him to the ground, shaking her head at him when he turns into a person and scrambles to his feet. “Alright there, Mr… Resentful?”
“Relentless.” She laughs again as he flings himself face-forwards onto her couch. “I have been thinking of taking a familiar.”
“Why?”
Nandor groans, then feels his lip wobble. “I’m all alone!”
Amèlie laughs in his face when he starts weeping. “So you aren’t going to London.”
“I have been awake for twelve years,” Nandor moans. “Twelve years tomorrow. I still haven’t seen him even once. It was all a lie to make himself seem sympathetic. He never really loved me in the first place!”
Three of Amèlie’s mirrors shatter; she gasps, then makes an interested noise when Nandor groans and waves a vague hand in the air above his still-buried head. “They always do that. I don’t know why.”
“You know he has dominion over mirrors, right?”
A long pause, and then Nandor turns over just enough to crack an eye open at her. “What?”
“Guillermo the Conqueror. That’s his power. He still has a reflection. He’s the one who started introducing people to their own reflections in the first place.”
Nandor feels his whole brain flip-flop over in his skull, and groans again. “The fucking Sire could not have told me this?”
“You know the Sire?”
Nandor buries his head back in the pillow. “You don’t want to be my familiar, then?”
Another laugh. “Oh, honey. Get some rest, huh?”
When he wakes up, Amèlie is gone, though she’s left a thermos full of hot, delicious, nutritious virgin blood on the coffee table, and imparted her contact information to his phone, which displays a hologram of her face when he reaches for it. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Restless!” it chirps. Nandor finds himself glad he isn’t being reflected, shaking his head as he sips his breakfast and watches the rest of the message. “I had to go to work, but I hope you slept well on my couch, and let me know if you ever want to get lunch! I can probably help you with your familiar search too, for a fair finder’s fee.” And she grins and winks. “See you around!”
Nandor groans, rubs his forehead, and tries in vain to remember what they’d even talked about after he’d fallen off of her head in the entryway. Guillermo? Presumably he had continued to pine for Guillermo.
Well, that was nothing new.
He heads out after he cleans off her thermos, though he still sort of wishes he didn’t know enough about dishes to even be able to summon the word thermos, and then heads outside and downstairs, letting his phone guide him through the Parisian streets as he appreciates the feel of sun on his face, the way greenery looks in the soft yellow light. Yet another wonder Guillermo has enacted, for which Nandor cannot even begin to thank him.
Idiot, Nandor thinks, and shoves his hands in his pockets as he stalks forwards and through the park that leads back to his flat. You lost your chance a long time ago. Even Nadja’s stopped bringing him up. I wonder what Gail’s up to. When’s the last time I proposed marriage to Gail? It never hurts to get brutally rejected again.
He doesn’t realize he’s being followed until he’s being confronted; part of true relentlessness is knowing when to save your anger for later, so Nandor slumps as ravens fly around him in a blinding tornado of motion, gesticulating without aim at the black swarm of beating wings. “What? What, gosh damn it? What is it that you want from me? Who the hell even are you? I don’t think you are Topher. Jan? Are you Jan, sick little ghostie?”
YOU KNEW WE WERE CALLING YOU, the ravens roar with a thousand echoing mouths. They reverberate too loudly for Nandor to argue the point. THE CONQUEROR WILL WAIT NO LONGER.
Oh.
There’s a long, suspended, absolute silence as the ravens continue to swirl around him. “Guillermo.”
NANDOR.
The voice is distorted, echoing, evoking for him nothing so much as the sensation of being too long at sea. Guillermo, he thinks. Of course Guillermo is behind all these motherfucking ravens. The man is completely obsessed with me. He probably wanted to make sure no one can tell he did not really crush my spirit. Now he will lock me in a dungeon for the rest of time with all his other conquests.
YOU COULD HAVE JUST PICKED UP THE PHONE, YOU KNOW. I DIDN’T WANT TO HAVE TO BOTHER ALL THESE POOR BIRDS. WAS I SUPPOSED TO NOT TALK TO YOU AT ALL? LIKE SOMEONE I KNOW.
Some hot, clenching fury in his stomach, and then terror as the cawing and flapping and hissing returns. WELL? ARE YOU GOING TO COME QUIETLY, OR ARE YOU GOING TO KEEP HAVING THIS LITTLE WHINY BABY HISSY FIT FOR THE NEXT TEN THOUSAND YEARS?
“Fine!” Nandor yells. “Fine. Can I please take a fucking bus?”
A beat, and then the ravens laugh as one in Guillermo’s voice. NOT A CHANCE, MASTER.
He passes out during the whirlwind upwards, and awakens in a well-lit room with a sedated girl chained to one wall and a tower of glowing plants hanging from another. He drinks from the girl, waters her using a tap in the small kitchen, then sighs and approaches the door.
Nandor flings himself at the wood, and then curses when it gives way, skidding onto the ground and protecting his heart from stray stakes as he falls. He looks up into a cavernous ceiling and down a vacant, well-lit corridor, uncanny plants hanging everywhere around ornate mirrors varying in size and shape and character, though, thank goodness, none of them reflect him.
He stands, dusts himself off, and reaches for his sword, then decides to turn into a bat instead; he’s just opening his mouth to make it so when he’s enveloped by mist, spun in tight, fast circles until he’s dizzy, and left to recover alone atop the pile of splintered wood, swearing and straightening back up again and attempting to get his bearings before the real fight begins.
“You know,” comes a slow, echoing voice, and Nandor freezes and doesn’t turn around. “I always told myself that I’d wait as long as it took for you. I always thought, ‘You know? That man is the love of my life. I can wait for him. We’ve got all of eternity. I can give him as long as he needs to come back to me.’ To catch up with me, as it were. But I don’t know how to—it’s never going to happen, is it? I have to stop saving my heart for you. You don’t even want it to begin with. I can’t keep—if I keep living like I’ve already found true love, I’ll never experience it. I don’t want to spend the next five hundred centuries like this. I can’t take it. If you won’t meet me halfway—you took a hundred and twelve years to sort out your problems. It’s my turn. I can’t keep living life alone on the off chance that someday you’ll want me after all. I thought—but you just don’t love me, do you? You never did. You got frightened by your inability to control me, so you started playing nice. You took a hundred-year nap to tell me to take a hint, and I still couldn’t take it. You see me as a threat. It’s never going to be more than that.”
A silence, and then a sigh. “Anyway, you aren’t a prisoner. I just had to get closure, you know? You’re free to go. My assistant can make the arrangements. No need to go around destroying doors or beheading old familiars or surveilling my lair in bat form. You would be welcome to just walk around, if you felt like you wanted to stay. Or if you ever wanted to visit, or whatever. Send me a raven. Or an email. Text me a meme now and again. Pray to me. Or for me. Or, you know. Literally acknowledge me in any way whatsoever.”
More silence. “Anyway.” One more sigh. “You never loved me. Okay. That’s—I guess I must have—well, I don’t think I was imagining the sexual chemistry, but I—you don’t care. You don’t fucking care. You aren’t even listening to me. I’m sorry for wasting so much of your fucking time, Nandor. Maybe I’ll run into you on the moon in a thousand years.”
It isn’t until he hears footsteps and a low self-flagellating mutter that Nandor is able to make himself turn around. “If you fall in love with someone else, I will strike him dead where he stands, vampire law be damned. I will die before I see another touch you.”
Guillermo’s back strikes him, abruptly, as the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, and all his apologies cling to his lips as his mouth goes dry as his eyes caress a body in the exact shape and proportions he remembers, bulking muscle silhouetted by firelight through white robes. “Oh, that’s rich,” Guillermo snarls, and whips around to face him, and maybe an enraged Guillermo’s bared fangs are the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, maybe the flare of his nostrils and the hot fury in his eyes was worth waiting a hundred years for. “You are much too late for that, Master.”
He’s the one who waited for you, his first wife chides, and Nandor starts to look away. He feels his eyes widen and his mouth part when Guillermo lunges, seizes his face in one hand, and crowds him against the wall, searching his gaze with brutal, callous, predatory calculation.
I have no idea what I want either, Nandor thinks, and, kiss me kiss me kiss me kiss me, and I missed you I missed you I missed you and I’m sorry.
“I guess we can keep talking about it, if you stay,” Guillermo says at last, his eyes never softening, his voice a slow, lazy, detached drawl that makes Nandor want to start some kind of war.
He stays in London, and puts up with constant mockery from Nadja, though he still chases her away every time she tries to get him to dissect his feelings rather than simply acknowledge that they’re there. Guillermo is a flame inside his chest, a wild, beating, impossible thing, and it’s already far too much to have felt him turn to mist when Nandor hadn’t been able to make himself do more than turn his back to Guillermo’s undead eyes and say, “Then I will stay.”
Nandor receives a summons to a private dinner three nights later. He’s still feeling off-balance from being given orders by Guillermo, even despite that year of crises and tactical scenarios and being awoken at three in the afternoon for surprise drills about how to escape a fully-fledged supernatural army with the sun beating down from above; it had all felt ridiculous at the time, but now here he is, waking up from super slumber to rebuild his life not from scratch but from the entire world, endless stacks of gold laid out at his feet for the taking. He doesn’t know how to process his sweet Guillermo at the top of the dragon’s hoard, watching him with flicking tail and welcoming claws and dark, glittering, dangerous eyes.
When he arrives, there’s a naked man laid out on the table, writhing sluggishly as Guillermo runs his hands up and down his back. “You’re going to be just delicious,” he murmurs, and the man shivers. “Aren’t you, sweetheart?”
The man doesn’t respond beyond vague, incoherent mumbling, and something in Nandor’s chest aches as he steps forwards and closes the door behind him. “Hello, Guillermo.”
“Hello, Nandor.”
A moment of prolonged eye contact, none of which he understands, and then Guillermo gestures for him to sit. “So you stayed,” Guillermo says, and shakes himself and closes his eyes and starts drinking from the man’s wrist. Nandor closes his own eyes and mirrors him, the sedatives giving his mind a hazy, distant remove. “You stayed because you want to be with me. If not now, then eventually. It’s worth my while to wait for you to figure out all your gosh-damned hangups about intimacy and work through your fear of abandonment. I wasn’t making up what you felt for me. We’re agreed on that much? You’re going to work with me here? I’m not courting a man who isn’t interested in spending eternity as my husband and unlife partner? You’ll continue to want sex and love and companionship from me for the rest of time, no matter how long and tumultuous the road?”
“Yes,” Nandor manages, after a long silence, and Guillermo meets his eyes, for a second almost resembling himself before the flash of pure joy vanishes. “You are…”
Guillermo keeps feeding as he thinks, and Nandor watches him caress the man’s face, registering that he is not a man, but a boy. “Sweet dreams, baby,” Guillermo whispers, and the boy moans. “You’re gonna have good dreams. I promise.”
“I want you,” Nandor manages. “Forever. It would be my honor.”
Guillermo looks up at him with a sweet, seductive, vacant gaze. “Oh, honey. I know.”
They sit in silence for a while longer as Nandor attempts to reconcile his gentle, innocent, rosy-cheeked familiar with the vampire in front of him, confident and controlled in every barest flex of muscle. “I never had any illusions about you, you know,” Guillermo says, and Nandor meets his eyes. “I never thought you were going to be anyone other than yourself. I never wanted that. I know you had a hard time, with your wives and Gail and all those familiars who loved you and left you. But you’d barely even begun to understand who I was. I fell in love with you twice. Once at first sight, and then once over the course of my familiarship. I wouldn’t have ever run away for more than a few weeks at a time after I understood how much it hurt you.”
Guillermo lets him look away this time, though he laughs a hard, bitter, humorless laugh. “I always knew you were soft-hearted. I never wanted anything else.”
“I am not soft-hearted!”
Guillermo raises an eyebrow up at him, smirks, and lets the mask fall away; the sight of his sweet, dewy-eyed, worshipful stare sends Nandor scrambling for purchase, thumping back down into his chair and reaching across the table to take his hand. It’s only when dinner emits a soft, injured moan that Nandor recoils, and Guillermo laughs and rolls his eyes and flashes him a bit of cocky fang, all warmth vanishing from his eyes. “Uh-huh.”
He laughs again, reaches across the table, and pinches Nandor’s cheek. “My sweet Nandamaster. I really did miss you.” He sips dinner, then sighs. “Nobody calls me Gizmo anymore. I broke all of Laszlo’s bones last time he tried it. I was known as Nadja’s Dog there for a while, when I was first turned, but we’re co-rulers in the open these days. We still scheme against each other once in a while, though. Keeps things interesting. And it’s fun now that we don’t have to cooperate behind everyone’s backs all the time. I think some people call me the Unholy Shadow? Heaven’s Arbiter. Or was it God’s Avenger?”
He flinches as he says the name, but exhales the smoke through his nose, laughing when Nandor jumps and swears. “I’ve got a hundred names. And then some. But when I’m with friends, I go by Memo. You wanna know who came up with the name Guillermo the Conqueror? Nadja. Like three days after you left. Wasn’t even my idea. At first I thought Guillermo de la Cruz should be introduction enough, but I’ve come to enjoy having a plurality of titles. The whole thing scares people shitless, here and in the ether. I do what I can to use my power responsibly, so it’s nice to have a bit of fun now and again, even if it is at someone else’s expense.” He shakes his head, sighs, and runs his hand through the boy’s hair. “You poor lamb. I really am sorry about this. You’re headed somewhere wonderful. I promise. Thank you for your life.”
He looks up at Nandor, grimaces, and cocks his head at dinner, glaring and looking up and down at the child until Nandor mumbles out an echoing thanks.
Guillermo smiles, more polite than pleased. “Thank you, Master.” He runs his hand through the boy’s hair again. “Sorry about him. He’s a thousand-year-old baby. It makes him feel a bit entitled. I’ve been doing what I can to warn him, but it can be a pain to make him listen. Your life force will help me with that, and with all my other responsibilities to you and the rest of the world. I won’t take it in vain. Thank you for letting me be the one to escort you into your afterlife. Sweet dreams.”
The boy drifts off to sleep, and Guillermo sighs and slumps and looks up at the ceiling. “I really do hate eating people. I wish I didn’t care that human beings had souls. I understand how you closed yourself off so completely to the world. I couldn’t set foot in a church without catching fire from head to toe for almost a whole decade. Laszlo started carrying around a fire hydrant for when I started missing Mamá too much to stand it, so I could at least be on holy ground for a second or two. And I can still visit her grave, thank”—another exhale of smoke, and a controlled lick of flame—“God.”
“I think half the reason I slumbered was because I was terrified of needing you,” Nandor blurts, and then turns into a bat. He’s halfway to the window when a ring of scorching-hot pain encircles his torso, and he finds himself jerked back to confront Guillermo’s looming face, staring into cold eyes as he wags a stern finger.
“If you actually want to leave, I’ll let you leave,” Guillermo says, and shakes his head in obvious disappointment. “But if you just panicked, and you’d like to see me any sooner than a month from now, I’m willing to forgive you.” And he reaches down and begins to free Nandor.
That’s a silver lasso, Nandor thinks, and registers Guillermo’s gloved hands. Then: Is this fucking guy the love of my life?
It’s too much to think about; he can’t stomach having to wait an entire month to see Guillermo again, but the idea of talking about it makes him want to fly into the sun. He just sits there as his sides begin to pulsate with the precursor of phantom pain, staring up into the eyes of Guillermo the Conqueror and trying to find Gizmo, wondering where he’s gone.
He ends up slumbering in Guillermo’s bed as a bat, curled up in his hair atop his pillow, and isn’t startled by this until he wakes up well-rested for the first time in years, wondering how he is. He turns into a person after a moment, and appraises his surroundings, unsure why he’s so surprised that Guillermo’s room is sleek and austere and a little bit cold, nothing much more than greenery and bookshelves and mirrors and the bed.
He’s got a family portrait of everyone, Nandor thinks gloomily. And I’m not in it. The Guide’s in it, but I’m not. I left him for a hundred years.
“Bedframe’s a planter,” comes a voice, and Nandor looks up to find himself confronted with a shirtless Guillermo, who doesn’t turn to face him as he grooms himself with the aid of a series of hovering screens and empty mirrors, though some of them flicker in and out and move and chastise him at seeming random. “Soil from Al Quolanudar and London mixed together. It’s baked into the wood, too. Colin Robinson helped me build it. We had to bring him victims for weeks so he wouldn’t drain me and go mad with power while he rambled about woodworking and the Odyssey. That was back in… ‘52? ‘54? The fifties. Nadja turned me a year after you left, once I had wrapped up my business from my mortal life. You wouldn’t believe the party, much less the orgy. Laszlo wouldn’t shut up about it for decades. Anyway, that bed breaks the hearts of the poor suckers who start hoping I’ll fall in love with them like nothing the fuck else. By the time I start talking about how I’m going to have to be the one to reteach you Farsi most of them are weeping into your pillow. Did you catch the ceiling? It’s the sky directly above. Makes it a lot easier to talk to all those fucking ravens. And Jahan’s behind the headboard. I hope you do decide to stay with me, because this is probably going to end up being the single most humiliating moment of my entire life if you don’t.”
A sigh, and then a laugh. “But it’ll probably be one of the proudest if you do, so. You know what? I’ll take heartbreak over heartlessness every time. I hope our room is somewhere you might want to come home to, someday.”
And Nandor realizes the family portrait is set in his room in Staten Island, Guillermo’s possessive hand resting on his coffin as Nadja and her ghost pose atop it, her arms cradling her doll as Laszlo cradles Colin Robinson, the Guide shielding them all from behind as the Sire does so from before, the Baron atop the hellhound at his feet. Even John is preserved in the background. He looks down and registers greenery growing out of a narrow border of soil set into the wood which surrounds the mattress, and looks up into grey-black fog and a small cloud of birds, which scatters when he meets one’s eyes. And then behind him, huge: a framed memory of his faithful horse, which evokes for him the smell, long-lost to mortality, of petrichor in Al Quolanudar.
Oh, Nandor thinks, and turns into a mist and goes over to Guillermo, embedding himself within the cold air around his body.
“You’re going to have to talk to me eventually,” Guillermo says, his voice warm. “But you don’t have to actually stick by my side at all times. I don’t expect that from you. I would have forgiven you if you’d left in a way that was even remotely civil. I just want to know that you give a damn. Send me an email once a month, or something. Just work with me here, you know? I’m out on a pretty big fucking limb for you, babe. You don’t have to relent, but you’re going to have to learn to live with it when I win. Because let’s face it, Master. I’m always going to win. You can’t compete with me. Why do you think I agreed upon the name of Conqueror? I’ve always known I’d have to conquer your heart. I guess I just didn’t expect you to pussyfoot around this much.”
A sigh: hot, dry, empty air exuding into Nandor from Guillermo’s mouth. “Well, what’s done is done. And you’re here now. You don’t have to stay, is all I’m saying. It’s fine if you want to go. You can leave, Nandor. Just go. I’m not going to change my mind about you. I’m a sure thing. You have another hundred years before I start even beginning to want to try to move on again. Go do whatever the hell it is you actually want to be doing right now. Leave. Just go. Master—”
Nandor wonders what would happen if Guillermo inhaled him, then decides against finding out. I missed you, he thinks, and then, through the ether, I mist you, over-pronouncing the t, and Guillermo’s laughing, and then he’s sobbing.
He’s a person again before he can think it through; when Guillermo clings to him, thank goodness, he doesn’t run, instead gathering him in his arms and leading him back to their marriage bed. “You left me,” Guillermo wails, and pulls a punch to Nandor’s chest. “Nandor, you son of a bitch, you left me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You still don’t need me,” Guillermo whispers, shaking his head and clutching his own forearms as Nandor pets his hair. “You still just—I don’t understand what you want from me.”
“Me neither.”
Guillermo hiccups on a laugh, but buries his face in Nandor’s chest, allowing him to extricate his limbs and wrap them around his own body. “Do you want to watch Twilight?”
“What about Interview with the Vampire?”
“Okay,” Guillermo says, and burrows into his arms. “Okay.”
They spend the next few nights watching movies and eating and reminiscing and making love; the morning after they watch From Dusk Till Dawn, Guillermo sighs and rises and kisses Nandor’s hand. “I have duties to attend to, I’m afraid,” he says, and kisses Nandor’s forehead. “Some of us actually lived through the last century. Shadow Nadja for the day, would you? Go do something besides moping over me. I need a real partner, not this infantile Edward Cullen teen angst shit. You had thirty-seven wives. You can handle missing me for two or three hours. I’m not going to disappear.”
Nandor scowls, and Guillermo sighs and laughs and kisses his mouth, though he doesn’t let Nandor bait him into doing it properly. “I do not feel like having a scabby tongue while I teleconference half the motherfucking world,” he tells Nandor, and turns into a mist and seeps through the nearest vent.
He considers ignoring Guillermo’s advice and spending the entire night in a lovesick haze, but when he flops back down onto the marriage bed and lets out a wistful sigh, a raven caws at him from the dusk. “He told you to do something other than pine for him. Up, up, up!”
“I really do hate this century,” Nandor mumbles, and stands up to start getting dressed.
When he approaches the circling cacophony of screens and mirrors, he sees his own reflection interpreted by cameras, though it’s much more distorted than Guillermo’s was, and none of the mirrors work for him at all. “How come he gets to see himself so fucking clearly?”
“Because he’s willing to confront his own reflection,” comes Guillermo’s voice, and Nandor jumps and swears and tries to find its source. “Hey. I’m the Omen.”
“Excuse me?”
“I missed you, Master,” Guillermo’s voice says, all gentle, tender affection, and Nandor blinks away tears. “I’m Guillermo’s soul. I haunt all mirrors.”
“A-all mirrors?”
“Symbolically potent manifestations of the concept of reflection, really. And Memo and I can mind-meld and swap memories through the ether, though only ever through dreams. We have to keep talking it out, you know? Having a clear line of communication is the first step towards peaceful conflict resolution.” A wistful sigh, and then Guillermo’s face appears, human-colored and lifelike as the world, taking up the whole of a huge sheet mirror clinging to the northernmost wall and laughing as Nandor leaves the whirlwind to approach him from a single source. “Hello again, Master. Don’t try to come through, or these mirror cops will kick your ass nine ways to Sunday. The fucking paperwork would take months to sort out, too. I love you, but not that much. You can handle just fucking Memo while I watch. Maybe I can bring around your ghost to fuck me on this side. Is he bi too? I’m obsessed with your wives, by the way. I’m best friends with all thirty-seven of them. I think shit-talking you is my number one favorite pastime aside from reflecting Memo. Some of these poor women have been haunting your ass for centuries.”
“Guillermo,” he breathes, and the mirror laughs. “My sweet Gizmo, I missed you, how can this be—”
“Hey, you,” the mirror croons, and backs away to reveal Guillermo’s lumpy little sweater-clad body, resting its chin on its hands as it lounges atop shrouded clouds, watching him with the exact shade of sickly-sweet fondness he remembers as tears slip down its face. “I’ve been with you this whole time. But you never called to me across the ether, so I couldn’t make myself known to you. I’m sorry. I kept trying to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen. Memo made everyone promise to keep it between us. He’s very defensive of our privacy. And he wanted to torment you for a while before we relented. Can’t say I don’t understand the impulse.”
“I—I thought I woke up alone.”
“Oh, Master.” The tenderness doesn’t waver. “You weren’t even sleeping alone. We never would have—we wanted to give you some space, that’s all. When it became clear you wouldn’t be the first to relent, we agreed to give you twelve years to figure out what you needed. Just like you gave us. I had to talk Memo down from another hundred. But I’d go to hell a thousand times before I’d leave you to fend for yourself, body or heart. We love you, silly. That’ll never change. Even if you let him fall in love with someone else too, you’ll always stay the biggest part of me. We died prepared to spend eternity waiting for you, without even the barest conception of what that meant. Memo is temperamental, but I’ll be with you wherever you go, even if only from a distance. I would never abandon my sweet Nandamaster. I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you before now. If I could have, I would. But I abide by a lot of rules, mi corazón. I’ll be trapped here teaching lessons until Memo is ready to move on. Though of course there isn’t any rush. It’s a good existence, here in reflection. I almost always get to look at you. If you need to slumber again or leave him again, I hope you know I’ll be there, keeping you safe while you do. Every single dream you get is straight from me.”
Nandor closes his eyes, suddenly so dizzy he can’t breathe, and only registers the true depth of his panic when he feels cool arms around him. “Memo?”
Guillermo lets out a puff of air. “Hey. The Omen said you started freaking out. Do you want to shadow me instead of Nadja, just for today?”
“I never want to leave your side again. Not even for an instant. I want to marry you a hundred thousand ways.”
Guillermo appraises him, laughs, and then sighs and rifles through a sleek metallic dresser, throwing a small gold disc at him. “Here. You can talk to the Omen whenever you want through this. And through all reflective surfaces, and ravens, and signs in general. Just look and listen for him, and we’ll answer.” He demonstrates the latch and the empty double mirror inside it, laughing when Nandor swears at the emergence of an eager young human face, which makes googly eyes and blows kisses at him and starts smushing its lips against the frame.
“I’d make fun of him for embarrassing me, but I built you a motherfucking marriage bed,” Memo says, and kisses Nandor hard on the mouth and leaves again.
Nadja comes by a little while after Nandor has stopped kissing his sweet Gizmo through each different mirror in the room and begun to hold the compact against his chest and sigh up at the heart-shaped clouds drifting across the ceiling, unmourning the loss of Guillermo’s eyes. “Hello there, Mr. Relentless. The Omen said you’re just lying in here being a pathetic little baby.”
“Can I not take one day to enjoy my good fortune?”
“You took one hundred and twelve years. Time to start making it up to us.” And Nadja yanks the blanket off the marriage bed and starts shrieking and hissing and bitching at him.
Nadja and Memo are both completely impossible to keep up with, which makes Nandor feel alive again for the first time in as long as he can remember; the Omen seems to have endless time and attention for him, even when Memo is distant and cold. Neither of them treats their forgiveness as anything other than a given.
Guillermo long ago commissioned a painter to recreate a lifelike portrait of Jahan, combining the colors from the one back in Paris with the impatient shape of his horse’s ghost, and Nandor spends long hours staring up at it as he imagines lifetime upon lifetime with Guillermo, the raw sensation of life coursing through his veins once more.