My Daughter's Choice

Though I than He--may longer live

He longer must--than I--

For I have but the power to kill,

Without the power to die--

--Emily Dickinson, "My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun"

It was so easy to love him.

Janette has insisted that I go with her this night, to the place where his body is resting. I have not seen it, nor do I wish to, but I cannot deny my only living child. She has been well acquainted with sorrow these last few years, and she has borne it alone. We have been each other's strength in the days since his passing.

She had him laid to rest in a plain field, unstigmatized by any of the usual markers that so repel our kind. We could not have buried him ourselves; he had a priest, she tells me, to perform the last rites. When she tried to touch the body afterwards, she found that it burned her.

I am glad I was not there. Seeing him weary and broken was torture enough for one lifetime, no matter how long. No man should outlive his child, and I have done so more than once.

It seems unfathomable now that it can have been almost a millennium since I first suggested that Janette might, if she liked, have a companion. My motives were far from altruistic: a man may have many daughters, but he will always yearn for a son. Also, as the only child, Janette was becoming rather spoilt. After more than a century of basking in my favour, she did not hesitate to be petulant and demanding with me when it was necessary to get her way. When she came to me and announced that she had selected a tow-headed knight of the cross, I was skeptical. The moment I laid eyes on him, I doubted he would ever become a member of our family.

The crusader's name was Nicholas; in Greek, victory of the people. Ironic, considering his occupation. He was the unwitting object of much primping and puling and general female uselessness in the tavern where we had lodged to observe him. His hair and skin were gilded by long days in the sun, his body fit from hard battles in faraway places. I felt certain that this one had won out because of his handsome face--a trait which counted for a great deal in Janette's search for a playmate, but less so in my quest for a protegé.

I am not insensitive to aesthetics, but I wanted a man with intelligence, character, and spirit. Good looks are not a prerequisite to these qualities, and quite frequently they are an impediment. I wanted someone with whom I could match wits--and swords--if I so chose; someone to whom I could be a role model, but not someone so anxious to step into my shoes that he might eventually try to rob me of them. In short, I wanted a man I would be proud to call my son, not a knuckle-dragging sword-for-hire who could barely hold his drink.

"Very pretty, my dear," I told her, not bothering to conceal my disdain. "You should have him stuffed. Then you can place him on the table and gaze at him every day for the rest of time, without the burden of his useless talk."

Janette made a little moue with her mouth. "You said I might choose."

"Look at him." He was chewing in the most repellent manner, not even bothering to shut his mouth. His eyes had a vacant look. "Positively bovine."

"He is a fine man, father," she replied. The fact that she called me 'father' was a measure of how badly she must have wanted him; rarely did she deign to do so, and never in tones of such respect. "The perfect choice. You will see."

She was right; the boy was a champion, indeed. After observing him for a time, I began to appreciate Janette's decision. Young Nicholas had many admirable traits: he was brave, proud, ruthless, headstrong, and passionate. He drank, gambled, used women, swore on the name of his god, started fights--and finished them--and in general debauched himself thoroughly, night after night. He was rude, but he could be trained. He was stupid, but he could be educated. He had an ardour for life that impressed me, and an occasional brutality that delighted me. In him, I glimpsed a reflection of myself as a young soldier. And he was the one Janette wanted.

In taking his blood, however, I was surprised by his trusting nature, his easy, guileless affection. His ability to love, confident that he would be loved in return. His native innocence had not been tarnished, merely buried by circumstance. He followed me into darkness, asking few questions and trusting me implicitly. Unlike Janette, he did not wish to escape life; in spite of all its hardships, he still yearned to embrace it. He wanted only to serve a master who would protect and honour him. He needed guidance. He needed authority.

In short, he needed me.

Nicholas called me père, and treated me as if I were the first he had honoured with that name. This, as it happened, was very near to the truth. Nicholas' mortal father and brothers had died when he was quite young, leaving him to shoulder responsibilities far beyond his tender years. The lord he had followed, a man he had admired and wished to emulate, had betrayed him over so petty a matter as an infantile dalliance with a pretty pagan girl. (Had I known how many such dalliances Nicholas would indulge in over the years, and to what distraction it would eventually drive me, I might then have sided with Delabarre and killed the wretched creature myself!) The Crusades, besides destroying the last vestiges of his belief in the so-called Almighty, had forced him to grow up very quickly indeed. Yes, the boy had taken blood before I knew him, that much was certain. My gift to Nicholas was a second childhood--a chance to be free and wild, and to test himself against the kind of stern, yet indulgent father any boy needs.

Within a few years of his joining us, I began to notice changes in my Janette. She had been a woman of ice and snow, but the warm attentions of young Nicholas quickly fostered springtime. Janette became a flirt, a sultry tease. She began to enjoy the more subtle pleasures of the hunt, rather than imagining every man was the one who had enslaved her. She smiled more often, and even laughed, as she had never done for me. Not the demonic cackle of the predator seizing its prey, but the easy, musical laughter of a young girl in love.

Janette was particularly affected by the simple tokens of devotion Nicholas offered--a fistful of wildflowers, a pretty song in some indecipherable foreign tongue, a lopsided trinket he had carved. They had been lovers from the start, but every night he courted her as if the prize was not yet won. He understood that she had been hurt by men who professed to care for her, and he seemed to know exactly what to do and say to ease some of that hurt. Under the steady warmth of his care, she blossomed, from the trampled bloom she had been when I found her, into a flower of almost unbearable loveliness. Well, it was to be expected: she had been a whore, and he treated her like a queen.

What I did not expect was the degree to which I, too, would come to rely upon his companionship. I have always prided myself on my independence, ever since I was a child. My own father taught me the importance of needing no one but yourself, if you are to survive in this ever-changing world. I have tried to do the same with my offspring. But Nicholas and I were so ideally suited that I hated to part from him. He was everything I'd hoped for and more, and my liking for him grew gradually into a deep, abiding affection. It seemed perfectly natural to spend hours in the company of my young protegé. Nicholas seemed to return the regard I had for him, treating me with respect and deference. When I had to correct him, he bore it with fortitude, his anger quickly giving way to good humour. But that was a rare occurrence: in those days, he never made the same mistake twice.

At times, I sensed that even Janette was envious of the bond we shared. She had his body and his heart, but it was I who had engaged his mind.

I taught him games to sharpen that mind: Wei Qi, chaturanga, and the game of twelve lines. We played on into the day, after Janette had sought her rest. Afterwards, we took it in turns to tell stories. Despite what society may have gained in speed and precision of thought since the introduction of the written word, the oral tale remains the most companionable form of entertaining another person--particularly one with an imagination as fertile as young Nicholas. Our standing rule was that whoever forfeited the most games had to spin the tenth part of a tale. It was my way of teaching the boy patience: even at that leisurely rate, our supply of stories would be exhausted soon enough. He was a charming storyteller, although rather too romantic for my tastes--there was always a prince in disguise or a fair maiden lurking in the wings. I preferred stories of war, feats of strategy and battle--the kind of story guaranteed to make my son yawn, and sigh, and claim Janette would be put out if he did not turn in straight away. He had seen enough of battle for the time being.

All the extra time he now had allowed Nicholas to develop his artistic nature. He loved to paint, and studied under several masters; he was never serious about it, and in the end contented himself with being a mere dabbler. I often thought that if he'd only applied himself to the painting as arduously as he often did to the pretty models... but no matter. Music was his true gift. The boy soon mastered any instrument he came across; when no instrument could be found, he was quick to fashion one. Song after song flowed from his nimble fingertips. Before long, he was composing his own songs--strange and haunting refrains which, he claimed, had no title and no meaning, but which somehow seemed to reflect his own mercurial character perfectly.

He enjoyed reading, especially poetry, though his own hackneyed attempts at writing it were enough to try the patience of even so loving and understanding a parent as myself. Even Janette, his designated muse and the subject of his most florid writing, couldn't stand to read the things. He also loved the theatre, and would go night after night to see the same plays performed over and over again. When he announced his intention to leave me and travel with a group of players, I did not try to dissuade him. I knew he would return to my side, as he always did. This trifling matter of a conscience did not trouble me; I felt certain he would grow out of it in time.

As I had done once before, I underestimated the boy.

When Nicholas turned away from our little family, trying to follow his own path, it was impossible for me to accept. I will admit, I made mistakes then. I tried to draw him further into the darkness, because I thought it would bring him closer to me. But over time, every act I compelled him to commit drove him further away. I was driven to discipline him, far more harshly than I ever had. Perhaps his first father's never having raised a hand to him was precisely what was wrong with the boy, I reasoned. Even the so-called Holy Writ cautions parents that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. I did not spare the rod, but Nicholas, it seemed, was already ruined in any case.

It was so easy to love him... and yet so difficult.

Once he had fastened onto the ridiculous notion of becoming mortal again, he would not be parted from it for all the world. I tried to dissuade him, but in this he proved more resistant than ever before. The fires of my anger only tempered his iron will into resolute steel. He became obsessed--even his annoying tendency to infatuation became secondary to his search for a cure. Then, perhaps predictably, his two greatest fixations--mortality in general and mortal women in particular--came together, in the form of a young doctor who undertook to cure him.

He often mentioned her to Janette, and Janette, of course, relayed everything to me. In the beginning, she told me, he was merely impressed by her diligence in searching for a cure. Then he began quoting her, coming out with stray witticisms of hers that had particularly tickled him. Not long after that, he began to speak wistfully of her selflessness, her innocence, her beauty. Her humanity. To Janette, it was a familiar refrain. She didn't dislike the mortal doctor, but she remarked to me one evening that she hoped Nicholas would soon finish things, one way or the other, so that they could move on together. She was a little bit bored, she confessed, by the Toronto club scene, and wanted to return to Paris--or at the very least, someplace where French was spoken properly.

My first opportunity to observe Nicholas with his Natalie came unexpectedly. I paid a visit to his workplace, to discuss the matter of David Constantine. She was there, attending to paperwork or some other mundane affair--I believe it involved being reimbursed for a damaged car. I watched her, trying to discern that essential quality that Nicholas found so transcendent. To me, however, she was just another mortal. She, in return, gave more than a passing glance at me, the stranger seated at her friend's desk, but made no comment.

When Nicholas arrived, I watched them exchange a few harmless pleasantries. To any outside observer, they were little more than friendly colleagues. But the way her heart rate increased at his approach spoke louder than words, louder than actions. As for Nicholas, well, the boy was obviously smitten with her. One had only to look at Nicholas at the right moment to know what was passing through his mind.

I was not fooled by his performance on the eve of St. Valentine's, although I allowed him to think that I was. It accomplished the same purpose in the end: he was deprived of her in all the ways that mattered. Or so I assumed.

I wish, now, that he had consented to make her one of us. He would have been happy, at least for a time; she would have made an admirable addition to our family, once I had got used to no longer thinking of her as the vile usurper of my son's affections. She had strength of will, intelligence, and was, like all of Nicholas' dalliances, attractive, in her own fashion. The night he lost his memory, her efforts to keep him from me were admirable, if rather foolhardy. And she loved him, insofar as her limited mortal mind was capable of understanding what it was to love such a creature as Nicholas.

I hated her for years, after it all ended. She stole away my son's love of life--the eternal youth that was my first and finest gift--and nothing I could do would bring it back. In death, she held a power over him that I would never possess, drawing him ever closer to her and to the light.

The bitch.

Watching Nicholas hand me the instrument of his death, and turn from me to face her, was one of the most painful moments in all my years on this earth. I hated him for trusting me to do this thing, for almost convincing me to do it before I came to myself. The hatred surged forth, taking possession of me, and I struck. I did not run him through, as he expected, but instead reared back and delivered such a blow to the head that the stake broke in two. In spite of his recent feeding, Nicholas was so weakened by guilt and grief that he fell over, incapacitated and bleeding copiously. I struck him again. And again. And again, the force of the blows rippling through the splintered fragment of wood I still held. And then I discarded it and used my bare hands.

There had been times in the past when I felt as though reason had failed me, and the only way to reach Nicholas seemed to be through my fists. But it was different then; Nicholas had fought back with all the fire of his being. He had bested me more than once. Now, he simply waited, quietly hoping for a death I refused to give him. This both terrified and enraged me, and I continued to strike.

Savagely, brutally, I broke every bone in my son's body, as he lay there, unresisting. And I beat him so thoroughly because I did not want to kill him. If he had lived, a thousand years from now Nicholas might have found that amusing. Irony always delighted him. As surprising as it seems, I think I loved Nicholas more in that instant of terror and rage than I had in all the centuries we'd spent together. I did not want him to die, to pass from this world to another in which we would never be reunited. If this god of his does exist, there is no salvation for one such as I.

At last, my energy waning, I came to myself and stepped away. Nicholas was a wretched mess, the sweet scent of his blood hanging heavy in the air. The sun had risen by this time, so all I could do was to make him comfortable in his own bed, feed him as well as I could, and wait for the healing process to begin.

When he awoke, a few hours later, completely immobilized and barely able to speak, he reminded me that his coroner friend still needed to be buried. I would have called one of the young ones from the Raven, experts in matters of disposal, but Nicholas was adamant that she be given a proper burial. To speed her departure to points above, no doubt. I made the appropriate arrangements.

"I suppose you'll want me to dig your grave next to hers," I remarked bitterly.

"No." He tried to shift positions, found he couldn't, but made no mention of the pain I had inflicted. "I don't deserve..." He slid away into unconsciousness again before the thought could be completed.

He wanted to die. Perhaps I should have done as he asked. I am far from innocent, and cannot even claim that I have never done something as awful as murdering my own child. But Divia would undoubtedly have destroyed me in the end; Nicholas' foolishness inevitably hurt him most of all.

When night came, I carried him to a safe place, and fed him again from my own wrist. When he regained consciousness, he would take no more from me. I fed him by day, while he slept, to speed the healing process. I had resolved not to take him to Janette until the bruises and breaks were gone. The hollow shell of what he had been would upset her enough, and I was ashamed of what I had done.

What I felt through the blood link confirmed what I had already sensed: Nicholas had completely lost his will to live. Late one morning, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I sensed movement in the room. I found him struggling to reach the door, and step into the sunlight. I subdued him easily.

"I won't have it, Nicholas," I warned him.

He said nothing, only looked ruefully up at me. He was a pathetic sight, both his eyes still blackened from the broken nose I'd given him.

"I refuse to spend eternity beating you into submission," I added. "It's boring." In fact, I'd hardly touched him since that night, and I certainly hadn't hit him. I wasn't sure I ever could again. But the boy didn't need to know that.

There were no more attempts.

The disposal experts retrieved his belongings and torched the building. No evidence of his true nature could be allowed to remain in existence. I arranged for it to be assumed that Nicholas and his precious doctor had died in the fire. Faulty electrical wiring. A most unfortunate accident. I saved his obituary; Nicholas collected them whenever he moved on. I would have attended the funeral, but it was during the day. Pernicious irony.

Janette did not know what to make of either of us when we arrived. Nicholas, never speaking, barely moving, seemingly senseless to the world around him; and I, attentive and patient with his moods in a way I'd never been before. At first. I quickly lost my patience. No matter how angry I became, however, or how much I berated him, I could never bring myself to touch the boy, not even affectionately. Janette was the one who tended to his burns when he developed a taste for self-injury, and Janette was the one who finally brought him back to something resembling a normal state. I was gone when that happened, but she was able to reach me at the hotel where I'd taken up residence. She left me a message, informing me that Nicholas had "recovered" and that I was invited to come and stay whenever I wished. I replied that I was occupied at the present time, but that I would no doubt pay them a call the next time I was in Paris.

It was many years before I could bring myself to see him again, and when I did, I found him so changed that it shocked me.

He had grown a full beard since I'd last seen him; Nicholas always had a somewhat juvenile fondness for beards, but tended to restrain himself because the women in his life often disapproved. But even the abandonment of his razor was not enough to hide the changes that had taken place in my absence.

He made the first move, stepping forward and clasping my hand firmly. "It's good to see you, sir," he told me. He hadn't called me sir in centuries; it was one of those tokens of respect that he'd gradually withdrawn as we grew apart.

"Nicholas," I murmured. "Mon garçon. You look..."

Janette quickly eased her way into the conversation. "He looks well, doesn't he, LaCroix?"

He did not look well. He looked tired, saddened, weighted down. He looked old. I could still sense his presence, and there was no trace of warmth the hand that gripped mine. He was still one of us, but he was changing. It was not possible, and yet, it was true.

"Yes," I managed to choke out. "You look well, Nicholas."

"Enough empty flattery," he replied, smiling. To Janette, he added, "Only yesterday, you threatened to hold me down while Heloise and Marthe took a razor to my face."

Janette raised a hand to his chin, tilting it this way and that. "A razor would no longer suffice, mon gamin. Hedge trimmers, I think."

He grinned at me over her shoulder, and for a shining moment, I had my son back again. "All right, LaCroix. Let's have it. You don't approve either, I can tell."

"I do not." I allowed myself a small smile. "Nicholas, I have never understood your predilection to facial hair. It does little to render your profile more imposing, and in fact makes you look quite... seedy."

Nicholas gave a loud, dramatic sigh, then turned away from us both. "Your room is this way," he called over his shoulder.

I took Janette by the elbow, and we allowed him to precede us along the hall. "Why did you not inform me?" I demanded, in a whisper.

"He does not know," was her reply.

"Surely he..." The thought died before I could complete it. My son, ever the master of self-deception, had not yet realized the truth. His precious mortality had been granted to him, and he couldn't even see it for what it was. "Will you tell him?"

"No." She straightened, stiffened, as if anticipating a blow. "Nor will you."

There were times when I would have struck her down for daring to give me an order, even indirectly. But not now. I tucked her hand into the crook of my arm and continued to walk, saying nothing, but tacitly acknowledging the wisdom of her decision.

I stayed with them for a time, and then left, unable to look at his weary face anymore without being consumed by rage and disgust. But I returned, towards the end, to keep my son company during what would be his last years in the mortal world. Nicholas and I played many games of chess together, and more than once he managed to win. He had lost his youthful innocence, but he had gained something in exchange: a kind of insight. More than once, feeling his gaze upon me, I received the distinct impression that he knew me better than I knew myself--that he, not I, was the older and wiser of us both.

On realizing what was happening to him, he seemed quite content, even jovial. The last time I saw him--grey, wizened spectre that he was--he pressed my hand, and smiled, and told me he was bound for a better place. I doubted it, but could not bring myself to say so. And then, one day, he simply faded out of existence, his once brilliant flame snuffed out as simply as ordinary candles may be. I was not there when it happened, although in a way I wish I had been. Janette was, and wishes she hadn't.

As we stand over his grave, Janette tells me she has bought this wild place, and had it declared a nature preserve. No one may enter; Nicholas need never be disturbed. Perhaps, one day, we will return, she suggests, and turn it into a garden. Nicholas always liked gardens--their fragile beauty, their fragrant secrecy. So... romantic.

"Do you remember that poem he wrote..." she begins, then breaks off with a tiny smile. The first I've seen in so long. Nicholas' poetry was simply so abysmal that it never fails to inspire mirth, even on such a grim occasion.

"I would just as soon forget it," I reply.

"It was an ode, I think."

"Why couldn't he have simply kept on with painting?" I can see where the thread of the conversation is leading us: we have had this discussion many times before, but the familiarity of it is comforting. "He had a good eye for his subject, and his composition was excellent."

"He was impatient. He hated to be bad at anything," she muses.

"If he had only given it a little effort, he wouldn't have been bad at it. He would never, however, have been a poet."

Here she breaks down, crying quietly, and I enfold her in my arms. A myriad of emotions flood through her and into me: she is saddened by his passing; angered because he cheated her of death before embracing it himself; relieved because it is finally over; frightened, because she isn't certain how life will be without him. We who are very old face little uncertainty in our lives; nothing is new under the sun, as the saying goes, nor has been for a very long while. The face of the world may change, the clothes and the means of transport and the styles of clothing and hair may alter, but underneath it all, humanity is what it has always been.

Soon, we will quietly sell the house, and probably go our separate ways for another fifty or sixty years. But even eternity will not heal the gaping wound, the rift that his absence has created between us. We were a family, strange as it may sound. I was once the proud parent of two beautiful, perfect children; they were mine, truly mine, in a way the others I created over the centuries could never have been. Now, my son lies cold in his earthy cradle, and my daughter weeps because she cannot follow.

I find solace, lately, in reading his favourite books, listening to his music. I am reminded of the young man he once was, who believed that every story should have a just ending. One of Nicholas' favourite authors, a man he greatly regretted never having the opportunity to meet, was Victor Hugo. He spoke often of the man's books, but I never bothered with them. Nicholas' tastes in literature have always run more towards the insipid than I cared to venture. In his last years, however, the boy urged me to read Les Miserables. I began it, more to placate him than anything else, but I kept on because I felt strangely compelled by the story. What moved me, however, was not Valjean's salvation by the bishop, or his confession to the court (which was precisely the kind of melodramatic hogwash Nicholas always relished), but his rescue of the girl, Cosette, from her oppressors. Never before have I seen such an eloquent description of the love an adoptive parent may grow to have for a child:

"He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing.

Poor old man, with a perfectly new heart!"*

I have had two such new hearts in my lifetime. I am too old to risk a third.

"We will get another one!" Janette had said once, after one of Nicholas's headstrong attempts to run away. I'm not sure I recollect which attempt... there were so many, and there is a limit, even to the vampire's seemingly endless recall. Time blurs events, and emotion colours them; I am not certain that some of the things I remember quite clearly ever actually happened. But I remember, as if it were yesterday, my reply on that night: I don't want another one. I like that one. And it is as true today as it was then.

There are few left in the world as old as I, and the young ones are all style and no substance. In our day, we were gods and demons, feared and worshipped by all. They want to be television vampires: slick, plastic, pre-packaged evil. No; there will never be another Nicholas, no matter how long I wait.

I never dreamed that I would one day mourn the man who had been my daughter's choice.

Note to the text: "The game of twelve lines", or ludus duodecim scriptorum, is the Roman name for backgammon. Wei Qi is Go. Chaturanga is an early version of chess. According to my research, all of these games would have been around, in some form, long enough for LaCroix to have enjoyed and mastered them before Nick came along.

*Les Miserables, Vol. II, p. 158