Free Crawling Between Heaven And Earth by Sarah A. Hoyt

this in a high whine, but he interrupted me, "No, you're right. I cannot kill you. Even if you are dead already . . .even if it is the most merciful thing, I can't bring myself to do it." He put the candle down, picked up his cloak from the couch facing mine, threw it haphazardly over his shoulders and said, "I'll be back tomorrow morning. Be gone when I'm back. I'll give instructions for you to be left alone till then." He opened the door, and, framed in the muted light of the central courtyard, the faint light that made my eyes hurt and my skin smart, he turned around and said, "And Hylas, everyone in this house, to the least slave, better be alive and in good health when I return. Or I swear by Mars I'll search you out, drag you from your den and hold you in midday light till you shrivel and die."

    He walked out.

    I sat on my couch, in pain and anger as I heard voices on the other side of the door and smelled the living blood of the household. It did not occur to me to defy Hadrianus's prohibition. I knew him too well, his prompt and merciless justice.

    I found one of my tunics, dressed in it and waited. Now and then, I peeked through the draperies that encased the window. When evening fell, soothing and calm, I climbed out.

    In the city, I found plenty to satiate my thirst.

    Rich men in search of pleasure found quite something else and were too secure in my embrace by the time they thought of fighting. I learned blood was more than food, life was more than a means of slaking thirst. There was an exquisite pleasure to drinking from the springs of life . . .something, I suppose, like the contentment of a babe at his mother's breast. Food and sex and ecstasy were mine when my teeth tore open the vein and life left my victim and streamed into me. I spared no one, didn't leave any of my victims the tiny spark of life necessary to turn him into one such as I. I gave them nothing, and took all—their life, their gold, their jewels.

    When dawn threatened in the Eastern skies, I rented two rooms in a cheap hostelry, and closed the wooden shutters tightly against the day.

    I lived this way for uncounted years. Athens, then as now, was a seaport, where people came and went, enough of a feeding ground, enough of a hunting preserve.

    My only joy was to stalk the nightly streets, searching for drunken sailors, lost whores, bohemian citizens. That and to listen for any news of Hadrianus. Hatred, hatred flaming clear and pure, had replaced love. Hatred born of resentment for his coldness that pushed me to my death, for his weakness that allowed my dead body to escape for this life, this quasi life I led.

    And when I missed the warmth of the sun, the gentle breeze of daytime on fragrant spring flowers, it wasn't myself that I blamed. Not myself but my erstwhile master and his ways, and the coldness of his heart, the coldness of Rome. Take a boy out of the streets, would he, and show him love and power he'd always been denied, only to throw him out, when his body changed and he turned into the man he couldn't help becoming?

    I remembered the smell of his blood, the warmth of it on my tongue, and hungered, and waited.

    I heard the news when he became Emperor, after Trajanus's death, and ground my teeth, and bode my time. I would wait, I told myself. I would wait until he became old and decrepit and powerless. Until he was ready to beg for immortality. And then . . .and then I would deny it, I would laugh as he had laughed, I would give him death—slow unforgiving death.

    Then one night, in a tavern, a coin was thrown at me, change for the drink I pretended swallowing while I lingered and heard living men talk of living things, and joke and sing, and discuss women and boys and the happiness of daily life.

    The golden coin was small, bright, freshly minted. And from it Hadrianus's face smiled at me. Older than I had known him yet unmistakably Hadrianus. I turned the coin over. On the other side, an exquisitely beautiful