smackenzie

In the nearly two hundred years he'd been a vampire, Aurelian had learned a couple of things. (One of those being that he really liked being called Aurelian. He hadn't hated Ruslan, but there was something about owning a name that you'd chosen for yourself, instead of being tied to something your parents had given you.) He'd learned that sunlight would, indeed, kill him. Garlic wouldn't. A cross held right in his face would repel him, but he'd been in the Sistine Chapel and Notre Dame and Chartres without any ill effects, other than a little nervousness. Holy water would burn. It hurt, but it wasn't fatal.

A hundred and fifty or so years ago he'd met the Castillons, Clare (who was Irish) and Alexandre (who was French), and had gotten some very smart financial advice. He'd learned how to cover his tracks from decade to decade, usually by packing up and moving on. He'd learned a number of languages, he'd learned that Italians tasted different from Austrians who tasted different from Greeks who tasted different from Spaniards, and humans of the twenty-first century tasted different from humans from the nineteenth. That made sense to him, though - it had to be the difference in diet. He imagined humans in the sixteenth century tasted even more different.

Aurelian had learned how to drive but not how to program his VCR. He'd learned how to hide in plain sight. He hadn't had to learn how to dress, but he'd learned to take fashion advice from strangers. He always felt a little behind the times technologically and culturally, but he had a theory that all vamps were in some way stuck in the time when they were turned. He figured he'd always be a bit of an old world guy.

(At least he was more up to date than poor Alex Castillon, who was turned in 1690 and still sometimes used an abacus to count. Alex had been a banker in his other life, and while he still followed the market and conducted business like he had when he was mortal, and seemed to have kept pace with advancements in the financial markets, he was always a little confused by the modern age. He and Clare had never gotten a computer, although Clare at least had gone online from other people's houses. Alex still did business by phone and letter, and very occasionally fax. That was as technological as he could get. Aurelian wasn't quite that bad.)

Aurelian had learned some practical survival skills and some very useless (but entertaining) sexual skills; he could defend himself and his friends and his lovers, he could easily attract admirers, and he could tell someone to leave him the hell alone in nine languages. He'd learned about art and music and opera and history and dance and literature. He'd learned he could pass for Italian with very little difficulty, so he did. It helped that shortly after he and Jan left Russia he'd gone to Venice and stayed for several decades.

He had learned a lot of things - some useful, some not - been a lot of places, done a lot of things, met (and had sex with) a lot of people. He'd bought a house and two cars in Eden, where he'd developed a reputation as an aloof kind of gentleman, a man who might take a vampire lover but would never have any kind of relationship with human, except for maybe a platonic one. He did have some human friends, but it had been a long time since he'd had a human lover. He hadn't ever, in fact, had a human lover.

The occasional one-night stand or orgy didn't count. He'd played with humans when he lived in Venice, bloodplay and bondage games, when his life lessons included dom/sub and sexual mental games taught by a master, but he didn't like to think about those years. He wasn't that person any more.

So Aurelian had learned all these skills, and he had learned that sometimes life threw something at you that you were completely unprepared for. He'd learned that in two centuries you could learn nothing at all, or that in one minute you could forget everything.

He'd ducked into the Bluebird when it started to rain. He hadn't worn his raincoat and had left his umbrella at home, and was on his way to the Fledermaus, which was not a German restaurant, as the name would suggest, but was instead a vampire bar owned by an old Prussian vamp named Otto. It was a quiet, laidback place, with a good selection of blood on tap and a light menu of bar snacks, for those vamps who still liked to chew their food. (Aurelian had also learned in two centuries that he could eat food like he used to, but it wouldn't fill him up and certainly wouldn't give him the same energy as a couple pints of warm blood. Sometimes he had a craving for Italian nougat, or schnitzel, and once in a great while he wanted tapas or tagine.) The Fledermaus was almost entirely a vampire bar, the name being German and obscure enough to throw off the Anne Rice worshipers and vamp wannabes who showed up in more well-known vampire hangouts.

Aurelian was going to meet Alex and Clare, who had been living in Eden for a very long time, and an old friend of theirs from Paris who Aurelian had never met. He had wondered, when Clare called to invite him, if she wanted to set him up with the guy. He'd gotten used to being alone, mostly because he really wasn't alone. He had friends, he certainly wasn't lonely, and if he wanted, he could easily find someone for more physical comfort. It was just the way Clare was - she liked setting people up, and since she was so happy in her marriage she wanted everyone else to have the same thing.

(For three hundred years people had been saying that Clare and Alex would never last. There were not a lot of long-lived vampire relationships in their circle. Aurelian thought that one reason the Castillons were still together, and still happy, was that Clare was hell-bent on proving everyone wrong. Sometimes she could be very stubborn.)

He called the Fledermaus and left a message for Clare and Alex (and their Parisian friend) that he'd been delayed by the rain. He thought he'd just have a drink and wait for the rain to stop, so he ordered a Dewar's on the rocks from the bartender, who was bald and goateed and competent and silent, and he sat at a little round table in the corner, where it was dark and no one would notice that he wasn't breathing, or that he seemed a little paler than was normal.

There was a small jazz combo on stage - a bass player, a saxophonist, a drummer. Aurelian sipped his scotch and watched them. He didn't know a lot about jazz but it was clear the three boys - and they were boys, all younger than he'd been when he was turned - loved playing and loved playing together. They were tight enough that he could understand how they'd gotten to play here, but not quite good enough to get to play on the weekends when the club was full.

After a very short period of time it became startlingly clear to Aurelian that the boy with the saxophone was heads and shoulders better than the other two. The vampire didn't know a lot about the sax, any more than he knew anything about jazz, but he could tell. He could see the passion on the boy's face, could feel the talent in his playing.

And he was a good-looking boy, too, with dark blond hair tinged blue by the lights over the stage. He looked good in his charcoal suit. He filled it out well. He wasn't tall, and he was very human, and Aurelian felt something tighten in his chest. He told himself it was just the music.

He stayed for the entire set, his scotch half-drunk and forgotten at his elbow. When the trio took a break he exchanged his watery Dewar's for a fresh one, which he also forgot about ten minutes into the second set. It was astonishing, the hold this blond saxophone player seemed to have over him, but his playing really was incredible. Aurelian looked around the nearly empty club in disbelief - why wasn't the place full? How could people not understand what was happening here? Couldn't they recognize genius when they heard it?

(Aurelian had always had a slightly over-dramatic bent. If he'd been a mopey American teenager he would have written a lot of silly and vaguely pretentious romantic poetry in high school.)

He leaned forward on the little table and watched and listened intently for the whole second set. He'd completely forgotten about the Fledermaus, where Alex and Clare and their French friend had in fact assumed he'd taken refuge from the rain and then bailed on them. (Of course they wouldn't have used that word - "bailed" - but that's what they assumed he'd done. They weren't too offended.) This was much more interesting. He got caught up in the music, which was mostly new to him, and in the joy the three musicians obviously got from playing it. He'd have to come back and see them again.

By the time they were finished the rain had stopped and Aurelian could make it home without getting soaking wet. He couldn't catch a cold from being rained on, but it made his clothes unpleasantly clingy and heavy, and even though he was immune to pneumonia he didn't like being cold and wet, and it made him look like a drowned rat. He hailed a cab outside the Bluebird and went home, where he spent the next several hours trying to play jazz on his piano. When the sun came up he finally went to bed.

Aurelian went back to the Bluebird every single night for the next three weeks, trying to catch the same two hours of bliss that he'd felt the first time. He figured out that the trio was called the Branch Trio, although none of the boys was named Branch, and he learned their names (Scott Moon on bass, Teddy Persson on drums, and Sam Mackenzie, who was the saxophone player), and he learned they played Wednesday nights and alternate Thursdays.

After the second Wednesday he managed to catch Sam at the bar during their break and talk to him. The boy was young - not a year out of college - and had been a jazz baby, since his dad was a jazz trumpeter, and he liked playing at the Bluebird and it was their first steady gig so he couldn't complain. He was glad Aurelian liked their music, and what did he think of the impromptu jam? Too weird and noodly?

Aurelian admitted he wasn't sure what "noodly" meant, but he'd enjoyed it anyway, and Sam had laughed. Sam had a great laugh, genuine and warm and completely without mocking. Aurelian was smitten.

After three weeks and four shows he'd started hearing their music in his head and in his dreams. He imagined longer conversations he and Sam might have, imagined the two of them playing together, him on his baby grand and Sam on his sax. He thought up things he could do to woo the boy, and was startled to realize he might actually be in love. With a mortal. For the first time in two hundred years. For the first time since he'd been mortal himself.

words: 1,956
total words: 12,507