“I told you to come to me for help, if you needed it,” Byron said.
“Thank you—but I didn’t need any until last night.”
Byron stared at him, and Crawford knew he was considering his thin face and fever-bright eyes. “Really.” Byron sighed and leaned back, replacing the bottle in the sloshing ice bucket on the floor. “What happened last night?”
Crawford looked speculatively at Byron, noting for the first time Byron’s own symptoms—the pale skin, the intense eyes. “I lost my—” What, he couldn’t precisely say wife; protector? Lover?
But Byron was nodding knowingly. “Not for long, you haven’t,” he said, “unless you climbed one of these mountains between then and now. How long has it been since … ‘melancholy marked you for her own'?”
“Since …? Oh. A month or so.”
“Huh.” Byron refilled his own more mundane glass with a not-quite-steady hand. “You must have been bitten hard, to get here so quickly. I’ve been their prey since I was fifteen.”
Crawford raised his eyebrows, reflecting that these poets tended to have drawn the deadly attentions of their vampires very young—Keats had fallen into the power of his at birth, and Shelley had been consecrated to them before he had even emerged from his mother’s womb!
Byron was staring at him. “Yes, that is young. It took me a long time to get here.” He drank some more of his wine and squinted out his window at the lake.
“I do owe you help,” he said quietly, perhaps to himself; then he sighed and turned to Crawford. “My family estate was some kind of focus for the things—there are such places even in England, ask Shelley sometime—and one of them made his tenancy legal by actually renting the place. Hah! Lord Grey de Ruthyn, he called himself. He liked me, and wanted me to live there with him—my mother thought that was prestigious, and made me go, and he knocked on the door of my room the first night I spent there. Like a lunatic I invited him in … but it was my mother’s fault too.”
He frowned and lifted the bottle out of the bucket again, then stared at the dripping label. “Of course she paid for it later,” he remarked, “as the families of people like us generally do. Did you know that? And Lord Grey has been … attending to me ever since, in one form or other, one sex or the other.”
He shuddered and poured some of the wine into his glass. “But now my sister, half sister, actually, has begun to show the symptoms of his attentions, and I won’t have that. And Claire’s fetus is mine, and even my bastards won’t suffer it if I can prevent it.”
“Can you prevent it?” asked Crawford. “Without dying yourself?”
“I hope to. Switzerland is dangerous—they seem to have a stronger foothold in this country than anywhere else—but I believe that at the same time, ironically, it’s possible here to climb up out of their field of power, and throw off their yoke.” He pointed at Crawford’s cup. “Drinking wine from an amethyst cup is a good way to start.”
Crawford remembered something Keats had told him in the Galatea. “I thought neffers liked to do that—and they certainly don’t want to … throw off any yoke. They seem to be seeking that yoke.”
“Neffers?” Byron seemed amused by the word. “I know the sort of people you mean—God knows I’ve been hounded by them. One of them, Lady Caroline Lamb, cut her hand at a ball I was at four years ago, and waved her bloody fingers at me, to entice me. Christ. At any rate, they misunderstand the real nature of the quartzes. Some tantalizing dreams can be induced by the uses of them, but such dreams are just … echoes still ringing in the remoter halls of a castle after the inhabitants are long gone. Some crystals can give more vivid echoes than others, but none of them can recall the departed tenants; in fact, such crystals tend to repel a living member of the nephelim. Not that there are many such left anymore.”
Crawford took a deep sip of the wine, and he could feel alertness and energy trickling back into him. “Nephelim?”
“You’re not a biblical scholar,” Byron observed. “The nephelim were the ‘giants in the earth’ they had in those days, the descendants of Lilith, who sometimes laid with the sons and daughters of men—it’s one of the ways they can reproduce, through human wombs. Ask Shelley about that, sometime, too, but catch him when he’s tranquil. They’re the creatures God promised to protect us from when He hung the rainbow in the sky as a sign of his covenant.”
“I thought that was a promise of no more floods.”
“No—did you ever read the Greek version of the flood? Deucalion and Pyrrha?” The carriage shook as it crossed an unevenness in the road, and some of the wine splashed out of Byron’s glass onto his shirt front, but he didn’t appear to notice.
“Of course. They were the only survivors of the flood, and the oracle told them to repopulate the earth by throwing behind them the bones of their mother; and they figured out that the mother being referred to was the earth, so they threw stones behind them as they walked across the mud,” Crawford’s voice was becoming more thoughtful, “and the stones they threw became humans.”
The image of throwing stones had reminded him of St. Stephen, who had been stoned to death, and suddenly he was sure that the phrase loaves of St. Stephen referred to stones—dangerous stones.
“Almost right,” Byron said. “That’s actually a much older story, which those primeval historians confused with their own stories about a relatively recent flood. The things that the stones turned into looked like people—it’s mimicry—but they were this other species, the nephelim. The rainbow, I’m told, is a reference to the fact that the nature of sunlight changed sometime, God knows when, and now it’s bad for them—in heavy doses it can even crystallize them, freeze them where they stand. They turn into a sort of dirty quartz. Lot’s wife was one of these creatures, and that’s what happened to her—it wasn’t actually salt that she became a pillar of.”
“So quartz crystals repel them because they’re … bits of dead friends?”
“More than that.” Visibly drunk by now, Byron waved his hand in the air as he groped for an analogy. “If you were a glass of water in which three dozen spoonfuls of sugar had been dissolved, would you—I don’t know—collect rock candy?”
“Uh … oh! I get it! It might provoke the whole glassful into crystallizing.”
“Exactly. I don’t think it’s a rig bisque … uh, a big risk for them, and I’ve heard that unless they’re diminished they can change to crystal or stone and back again without any … with relative impunity, but it does repel them.” He nodded heavily and pointed at Crawford’s cup. “And wine drunk from an amethyst cup, amethyst being a quartz, is a tiny but real first step in freeing yourself. It will help clear you of the fevers those creatures induce—so drink up.” Byron blinked at him owlishly. “Assuming, that is, that you want to be rid of the creature that did this to you.”
Crawford raised the cup, then hesitated; he licked his lips nervously, and his forehead was suddenly chilly with sweat—but a moment later he tilted the cup up and drained it in three big swallows, and held it out for a refill.
“That’s a start. You have a family? Brothers, sisters?”
Crawford shook his head.
“No? There’s no twin-half, no mirror image, that you’re trying to save? Then you must be split yourself—one of the ones who is ‘like two spent swimmers that do cling together and choke their art.’