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beasts of the field, and those creatures don’t even give themselves up. Who is to say that what we do is wrong? And even if it were, is wrongness not defined by those who are opposed to our own creators?”
    “But we aren’t animals,” I protested.
    “And we aren’t human. It’s not my argument, Cora. And it’s not my belief, but that of those who oppose what I do.”
    He took a drink of his brandy, emptying it swiftly, and set the glass on the table next to his chair. “These others, the Kyrioi, believe that to defy our natures is misguided at best and self-destructive at worst. And they were right about the self-destruction, because many of us would not live long enough to find a cognate if we restrained our feedings to what our bodies demanded. Until now.”
    “Because of your research,” I said.
    “Because of you,” he corrected. “The result of my research. The first of many. The Adelphoi believe that we might have been created for evil, but we still have the chance of redemption, the same chance any man might have. We have to. We can’t be damned by our births.”
    “The rising angel,” I said, remembering the statue.
    “The rising angel or the falling demon,” Dorian agreed. “We must have the power to choose which to be.”
    “Then how can Etienne be one of you?” I demanded, standing in my restless irritation. “How can he think that brainwashing Isabella will...will redeem him?”
    Dorian tipped his head back, looking up at me. Even as he sat with the loose-limbed grace of a cat, he looked no less dangerous. No less compelling.
    “To have a consort saves lives. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, depending on how long he or she lives. Etienne believes that human lives matter, and he also believes that many lives matter more than one. And what he’s done has kept her safe and subjectively happy for twelve hundred years. She may be the oldest cognate in the world.”
    Twelve hundred years. For twelve centuries, she had been a husk of a woman, emptied out, a blood donor kept one step above a vegetable. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around that length of time, even as my brain kept going through the brutal arithmetic: sixty of my lifetimes, forty of my mother’s, twenty of my grandmother’s....
    Dorian continued mercilessly. “At a minimum, we must feed three times a year for sanity and life. Four a year for functional health. Her survival has spared at least that many. ”
    My mind shifted thoughts abruptly. And he had lived how long? Older than empires, he had said. Older than memory. Two thousand years? Three?
    How many had he killed?
    “And you?” I asked, the question dragged from me by my need to know. “How many lives a year do you—did you—take?”
    “Four.” The answer was flat.
    I rubbed the mark on my wrist. Thousands of lives, then. Many thousands. The man to whom my life was bound had killed more people than Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, or the Son of Sam—or all of them combined. He made Jack the Ripper look like a dilettante. Only a tyrant or a war criminal could match his monstrosity.
    And yet I could feel the pull of him from here, his dark beauty like a drug in my veins, calling to me in a way that no man ever had. I had let him do things to me that no one ever had done before, and I’d do it all over again.
    Even if I knew every name. Even if I saw every face of those who had come before me.
    What kind of monster was he? I scoffed at the question. He, at least, was what he was born to be. The real question was, what kind of monster was I?
    “And that’s what you want me for,” I said. “To give you blood. To give you children. So that your damned Adelphoi win.”
    “That’s part of what I wanted a cognate for. But also...to be whole. Alive.” He held out his hand in the firelight, studying it as if it belonged to someone else. “Like waking from a long dream.” His eyes snapped back up to my face. “But you—no, that’s not all I want you for. Though I would