A drop of sweat skittered down Elian's temple as he stared at the ceiling, letting his chest ease its heaving, and his muscles unclench. Beside him, Kakuji was little more than a mess of colour—red, black, and orange. Elian's circular golden frames sat abandoned on his nightstand, leaving his farsighted eyes to parse meaning from the blurry surroundings. They'd steamed up. They always did. Elian had learned that feeling his way around someone wasn't an issue. Not in this kind of context, at least. Although he would have liked to get a better look at Kakuji's face, he settled for the noises Kakuji had subdued in his pillow.

  Reaching over Kakuji, Elian grabbed his glasses. As his eyes focused and the sprawling tattoo on Kakuji's back sharpened, Elian disappeared into his vision of the same moment, then the memory of that vision in the Bookworm, realities flooding together like streams of time until he was caught in a web of places and moments, none of them his current life. Elian tried to blink them away, but they just flowed into one another, eddied, or split into something new. Maybe something old. Elian never really knew.

  Visions of the future, when he did have them, were rarely from his own life, but when they were, it was rarer still that they came to fruition in any way he might have guessed. Elian had given up by the time he was ten. The future wasn't for him to decipher, and that was okay.

  As Elian reached for the line of Kakuji's spine, little ridges protruding from the ink, the threat of another vision nibbled at the back of his mind like a rat chewing through electrical wire. So many moments—warm embraces, tender touches, and familial care—Elian had abandoned in fear of the rat, but starving it only made it writhe and pounce on every little thing. That was probably why Elian's gift worked so well on the customers who came looking for it. The rat was starving, and it would latch onto any skin, or in Kakuji's case, even a shadow, that touched him. Elian didn't really know how that worked. Purebloods, and stuff. It all felt a little too eugenics-y for his liking, but he supposed most vampires didn't have control over how they were turned. Although with all of the misinformation about vampires flooding every fissure of the internet, Elian couldn't be sure about anything other than the feeling of Kakuji's cold skin beneath his fingers.

  No vision came, so Elian traced the contours of Kakuji's ink in relative peace. Brilliant vermilion carp, the same colour as his eyes, thrashed down Kakuji's arms, chased by a frothing wave of cobalt blue. The maple leaves decorating his back also littered his chest, along with the black scalloped backdrop behind all of the inkwork. Elian recognised them from cheesy Yakuza flicks. Kakuji looked too young to be(or to have been) in the Yakuza, but he also looked too young to have near full-body tattoos. The ones on his thighs weren't finished. One was coloured down to the knee in spindly red flowers, but the other was just a black outline.

  No needle in the world could finish colouring his undead skin.

  As if he were the one who spontaneously got snippets of people's thoughts through touch, Kakuji sat up and slipped his shirt on, cutting off Elian's access to the lithe planes of his back. So, too, were his incomplete thighs soon gone beneath worn black jeans. He fished in a pocket of his leather jacket, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and saying, 'I need a smoke,' before walking the three paces across Elian's studio apartment to its adjoining balcony.

  Throwing on a robe, Elian followed. The balcony was hardly big enough for the table and chairs Elian had bought second-hand for it, and the only view it offered was of the grimy back alley that serviced the Bookworm and the other shops backing up to it. Though it was a bit unfair to call it grimy. It was no grimier than anything else in the city. Still, if Elian squinted, he could pretend to see the River Pysg in the distance. Or maybe it was the Channel. Elian wasn't sure. He didn't even know if the tide was in or out.

  Sitting opposite Kakuji, Elian set down a plate and said, 'For the ash.'

  Kakuji nodded, balancing a cigarette between his lips. The pack was half-empty, but despite the habitual ease with which Kakuji struck his vintage gold lighter—it wasn't engraved or intricately patterned, just made with the care of a bygone era—and held the lit cigarette to his lips before pulling it away, no smoke came from his open mouth. The undead didn't breathe.

  Pinched between his narrow fingers, Kakuji offered the cigarette to Elian with a raise of his brow. Elian shook his head. Nicotine was a mild enough drug that it probably wouldn't mess with his gift, but after blurting about things he'd seen a few too many times while drunk in combination with the fateful night he'd let a university friend goad him into trying weed(he'd tripped so hard he Zhuangzi-ed himself into thinking his whole life was one long vision), Elian had sworn off everything but caffeine. Even that was a rarity these days.

  Kakuji turned his gaze to the night sky. 'Reminds me of when I was young.' He tapped a clump of ash onto the plate. 'Vampires like to talk about being reminded of when they were alive, but they really just mean when they were young. Everyone likes to feel like that.'

  Elian liked to think he'd had a good childhood—a roof over his head, food on his plate, loving parents, etcetera. Still, he wouldn't go back. There was nothing left for him there but boxes he no longer fit in and expectations he'd never live up to, so he said, 'You smoked when you were young?'

  Kakuji smiled, but it didn't have its usual snarl. His fangs were tucked neatly behind his lips. 'I wasn't a very good kid.'

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  'How old were you?' The question slipped out before Elian could stop it. Even if he saw into the mind of the most emotionally well-adjusted person, they wouldn't just spew biographical information at him, and Kakuji wasn't the touchy-feely, let's all hold hands and share our feelings type. He was like a lead lockbox. Nothing went in, and nothing came out, at least, not with his permission. Elian had gotten a few glimpses—it was hard not to when, physically, at least, you were that close with someone—but they were just fragments. The weight of something in his hands as distorted guitars growled through a dark basement crammed with beating hearts. A microphone, perhaps. Flashing lights dusting the crowd in neon reds and blues, but never the stage, never on him. The bassline pounding through the ground like an external heartbeat. Had Kakuji been in a band? Maybe, but that wasn't the question Elian had asked, not that either were particularly normal things to ask someone. Not when you'd lived as them on stage for a few seconds without any concept of whether it was their past or their future.

  All in all, Elian could have seen far worse. He certainly had before. Memories or premonitions of other partners were so common they were hardly worthy of note, though that didn't stop them from hurting Elian's ego. Occasionally, he still woke from a dream of a vision he'd once had: a particularly unpleasant instance when he'd had a vision of someone else in his place. The guy had even tried to pull his hair as he had with the girl in the vision. She'd been a brunette like him. That night was the only time Elian had considered cutting his hair short again.

  'When I died?' said Kakuji, the smile gone from his face.

  Elian had the decency to feel shame. 'Yeah,' was all he said. They'd had sex, sure, but that didn't entitle him to intimate, probably traumatic knowledge about Kakuji's life. Just asking for a number undoubtedly dug up a bunch of memories, and based on the flat pull of Kakuji's lips around the cigarette, they weren't good ones.

  'Twenty-two.'

  Breath caught in Elian's chest. Not the exhilarating, heart-pounding kind, but the kind that dragged him down into a rivulet of time like a stone tied to his ankle, drowning him in the unchanging depths of a single, excruciating moment. Elian tried to look past the leather, eyeliner, and ink, through to the flesh beneath, so he could see if it was true even though he knew it was. At twenty-two, Elian hadn't had the mind to eat the vegetables rotting in his fridge, let alone commit to a body of tattoos. Shards of Kakuji came together like fragments of a broken mirror, forcing Elian to look at his chipped reflection: the heeled shoes he wore, the distorting depth of his black eyeliner, the volume teased into his hair. He was like a cat, hackles raised, all puffed up to scare off predators. Elian didn't want to think about how Kakuji might have looked if he'd lived even a couple more years.

  Elian's voice rang hollow through the night air. 'There's nothing good to say to that, is there?'

  'Nope.' Kakuji took another simulated drag from his cigarette.

  'Does it bother you when people like me ask you silly questions like that?' Elian really should have shut his big mouth, but he'd never been particularly good at that.

  The bare strip of skin down Kakuji's unmoving chest reflected silver in the moonlight. His shirt had only had one button buttoned when he'd waltzed into the shop. Now it had none. 'I'm not in the habit of answering.'

  'But you answered when I asked.' Elian was fishing for meaning in treacherous waters. They were interlopers in each other's lives. They'd both signed a social contract of mutual pleasure that would last only until Kakuji found whoever he was looking for. He didn't want to be there—hadn't wanted to leave wherever he called home. That much had been clear to Elian since Kakuji's first patronising sneer. Kakuji didn't fit in his world, not because of his foreign accent or distant origins in both time and place, but because he glowed far too bright for a city like New Harbour.

  'I did.'

  Elian waited for Kakuji to say more, but watching Kakuji's gaze sharpen as he stared off into the night, Elian realised he wouldn't. 'Don't you think it's a little inappropriate?'

  'What?'

  'This. Us. Here.' Elian couldn't find the words to articulate the precise nature of what they were to each other. Elian kept waiting for Kakuji to ask for his blood. It seemed like a natural part of the strings woven between them—pleasure for pleasure. But Kakuji hasn't asked, hadn't even indicated that he was interested or probed to see if Elian was willing to give it to him.

  Kakuji looked at Elian then. His vermilion gaze was tempting like red-hot metal, and meeting it was like getting caught in quicksand. 'Because I'm dead?'

  Too bad Elian didn't mind drowning in it. He couldn't think straight, not about the words coming out of his mouth or the visions now forgotten at the back of his mind. 'Because you died at twenty-two and I'm twenty-eight. That doesn't make you feel... I don't know... uncomfortable?'

  'I'm old enough to be your grandfather. Does that make you uncomfortable?'

  Elian wondered if that were true, or if Kakuji was speaking in hyperbole. 'Not as much as the other thing, no.'

  Kakuji chuckled, a wry smile stretching his lips. 'You're strange.'

  'You know, some humans think that vampires get stuck at the age they're turned.' Elian absentmindedly twisted a lock of hair around his finger. 'Their brain freezes, and they don't age a day more, physically or mentally.'

  'Do you?'

  'Do I what?'

  'Think that.'

  The sound of distant cars swishing past echoed through the black sky, filling the space between them as Kakuji waited on Elian's answer with furrowed brows.

  'No.'

  Kakuji leaned back into his chair. 'Then why did you say it?'

  The only answer that came to Elian was the honest one. 'I wanted to know if you believed it.' They'd already started something. It was precarious, but that wasn't because Kakuji was twenty-two physically, might be in his nineties literally, like Elian's remaining grandparents, or anywhere in between mentally.

  Kakuji smudged the glowing butt of his cigarette out on the makeshift ashtray. 'I should go.'

  Elian reached for him and said, 'You can stay,' but before he could make contact, Kakuji was walking back into the apartment to grab his jacket.

  'Despite what your feeble human mind might think, patience is not a virtue inherent to all immortal beings, and my sire isn't a forgiving man.'

  Elian's clumsy human feet followed like the lone player in an orchestra lagging behind tempo. By the time he was back inside the apartment, Kakuji was pushing past him. When Elian spun around, Kakuji was little more than a night breeze rattling the balcony door and the harsh sting of his words, like a bite from a wounded dog, in the cold air.