A woman sitting alone at the hotel bar. She could be any woman, but she is not, and somehow that fact is known by the other patrons who keep a distance with their bodies, though not with their eyes. They watch her as if drugged or bewitched, unaware of themselves, their fascination and their terror with a woman who could be any woman, and I have been many women over the course of nine centuries. I was a nurse in both Great Wars, a courtesan of Mehmed I, and the first to be accused of witchcraft in Ireland. All of my names wash away in the flood of time, except for one, the one I've come back to after so long.

The name he calls me now, "Etain." I don't turn to the sound of his voice, a whisper across the room, but I hear him as though he spoke directly into my ear, the Devil on my shoulder. Let him come to me. I will not go any further to him than I've already come. All it takes to summon the bartender is a lift of my pinky and he delivers a glass of blood red liquid, only it's not blood, not even close despite the name it's been given. True Blood, so they call it, and I know better than most how misleading a name can be.

As the bartender slides the glass towards me, I consider looking him in the eyes. It would be easy to make him fall in love, for awhile, long enough to do with him whatever I pleased. Fuck him until he breaks, drink him dry, turn him into a monster, or simply tell him my story and then make him forget. One look and he could be mine, so I do not look, I do not speak, and he moves on to someone else. Lucky boy.

Bach drifts from the piano across the hotel bar. I heard the original performance. This 21st century rendition is a pale imitation. It hurts my ears, along with the mortal chatter, the shrill laughter, the drunken murmurs of flirtation, so far beneath me, lost to me, stolen. A life I never lived among the thousands that I have. I want to leave this place. I close my eyes and focus on the little cottage I left behind, perched on the edge of a cliff and slowly falling into the gray sea. I feel the salty slap of wind across my cheeks. I taste fish, and stone, and isolation. I am home and it is quiet in my mind, until a name brings me back.

"Etain."

He is behind me now. He sits and his cold arm brushes my shoulder. I flinch. How long since I was last touched by someone like me? I forgot how cold we are even to each other.

"You came," he says.

"Obviously," I say, and my voice is foreign to me. I don't speak much these days. I don't need to anymore to get what I want, what I need. All it takes is a single glance and men will die for my pleasure. Men will do anything. But not him.

I look at my brother for the first time in a hundred years and he hasn't changed. Of course not. He's as tall and blonde as the day we met. An old, forgotten god. His beauty would be breathtaking if I had a breath to take.

"It's been a long time," he says.

"You could have found me."

He smiles and I look away. "I knew you'd come back eventually," he said. "You never could resist a war."

"Is it war, then?" I say, fingering the rim of my glass. I won't drink from it. Can't stand the taste, but you can't sit at the bar without a drink, can you? It's what people do. He knows my pretenses.

"You're still trying to be one of them," he says. I laugh. The bartender looks my way. Careful, I remind myself. One look and I'll destroy him. One look and I won't be able to stop myself.

"You won't ask where I've been?" I say.

"Does it matter?"

"Does anything?"

"Godric has been kidnapped. Does that?"

The pianist breaks between melodies and for an infinitesimal moment there is silence. I feel Eric's eyes on me, trying to see something that isn't there anymore. "Godric can look after himself," I say. The name is rusty on my tongue. "He doesn't need you to go to war for him."

"Then why did you come?" says Eric.

I look at him again, my long lost brother. Or am I the lost one? So many questions an immortal life raises. There was a time when I would've done anything for him, anything he asked. I have followed him into wars, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, but not even we are immune to change.

Why did I come? For him? For Godric? "To see," I finally say.

"And what do you see?" says Eric.

A dim bar, humans in their fragile skins, the bartender's cornsilk hair that I would like to run my fingers through and tear out one golden strand at a time. Look at me, I think at him, look at me, and he does. Our eyes lock and he is mine now. He approaches, walking on air, in a trance, doomed. I am thirsty for more than lies. I want blood, hot and fresh, dripping down my chin, between my breasts. I want to drown in his life and forget all of mine.

"Nothing," I say. "I see nothing."

And the bartender is standing before me again. I hold out my hand and he takes it. We leave Eric at the bar. No doubt he'll soon find his own dinner and, briefly, I remember all the meals we shared together, the three of us with a thousand names, all of the blood, and the heat, and the screaming, the mess, the satisfaction. I eat alone now and I am much neater. My table manners have improved.

Still, tonight, I will forego napkins. I will paint the walls red. I have lived undercover long enough and whatever trail of bodies I leave here, in this foreign city, can never follow me back to my little cottage by the stormy sea. Not even Eric can find me when I don't want to be found. There is only one who could and he has never tried.

As I lead the bartender into my room, I think of him, the one, and I leave the door unlocked as if hoping he might walk in, catch me in the act like the unruly child I've always been. He'll bend me over his knee and thrash me bloody, as he once did, in an act of humiliation more than pain.

But he does not come. The door does not open. I am alone, naked, painted red from the bartender's blood, and what remains of the bartender drips from the ceiling, oozes down the walls, congeals on the window. I am alone and haunted by so many names. The world is hazed, as it always is after I've gorged myself, and my mind wanders to places it has run from for centuries. Names resurface that I thought lost. The names of brothers before Eric, and the names of sisters, a mother, a father. Of the family I had when I was Etain and nothing more, when my own name was simple and singular.

IRELAND, 1164

Etain was supposed to head straight home after the sheep shearing and help put supper on the table, but she dreaded going back. The cottage would be hot and crowded with all of her brothers stinking of sheep. She didn't smell much better herself, truth be told, so she stole off into the woods, to the river. Sunlight danced on the blue-green water. She stripped down to her skin, folded the shirt and trousers she'd borrowed from her brother and set them on a rock for safe keeping, and then walked into the river, right into the heart of it. Even at its deepest, the water only rose to her chest this time of year. She curled her toes into the muddy river bottom to keep from being swept away by the current.

Bits of wool swirled in eddies around her. She knew her hair was dusted with fluff, and wanted to dunk her head, but then Mamai would know she'd come to the river instead of going home. Mamai would probably know one way or the other. She usually did. Still, Etain settled for wetting her fingers to comb as much wool from her hair as she could. She drank in the river until her thirst was satisfied. Shearing sheep was hard work. She much preferred it to being cooped inside with the women. The only reason Mamai allowed her to go out with the men was because she had a way with the beasts and, with her along, the work went much faster. Her brothers teased her. They asked if she planned to catch a husband the same way she caught sheep.

The woods became dim and Etain dragged herself from the river. There was still time to make it home before her brothers and Dadai, only when she went to the rock where she'd left her clothes, she found they weren't there. She looked all around, thinking she'd left them somewhere else or an animal had scattered them, but there were no tracks and no clothes. Etain wrapped her arms around herself. A cool breeze pricked her damp skin into goose pimples from head to toe. She felt as if someone was watching her from behind, but there was only the river.

When she turned back around, her clothes were right where she'd left them, folded neatly on the rock. Etain blinked. She was certain they hadn't been there a moment ago. She still felt someone watching as she dressed. The sensation of eyes at her back did not leave her until she was free of the woods and crossing the yellow field, the stone cottage in view.

"Where've you been?" said Aurelia, greeting her at the door. "The boys will be home soon and supper is not laid."

Etain tried to slip past her sister, but Aurelia was too fast, even with one babe on her hip and another tangled in her skirt. She caught Etain's sleeve. It was damp from her skin.

"Better change before Mamai comes back," said Aurelia, stepping aside and scattering the children. "She'll know where you've been. I won't cover for you this time."

"Aye, you will," said Etain. She ducked behind the tatty curtain that divided her tiny corner from the rest of the cottage. Her good dress lay crumpled at the foot of her straw sleeping pallet. Quickly, she layered herself into a proper Irish lass, petticoat by petticoat.

"I won't," said Aurelia, her voice clear through the curtain. "You're not a child anymore- By the Saints, don't touch that!"

Etain poked her head around the corner in time to see Aurelia wrestle a carving knife from one of the children. She spun, pointing the knife at Etain. "You are a woman and it's time you acted like one."

Etain retreated behind the curtain once more. She squeezed her eyes shut. "You sound like Mamai," she muttered, her pain unmasked.

Aurelia was silent, but she heard, even over the squalling babies. "I spoiled you," she finally said. "I let you be…"

The loud voices of men drowned out whatever Aurelia had let her sister become. A moment later, Dadai strode through the door with his flock of sons. There were Etain's brothers, three of them, each taller than the last, even Fionn, the youngest, was over six feet at only fourteen, and then Aurelia's husband, Fergus Bligh, who was swallowed whole by his in-laws' shadows. Etain's brothers overshadowed everyone. Her twin, Oisin, was the tallest by two inches, though she barely brushed five feet.

She loved her brothers, by God and all the saints, but they could be too much even for her. She welcomed their noise tonight, so she did not have to think about Aurelia's unfinished thought. Always, Aurelia covered for her, since she was old enough to crawl. She took the blame when she was blameless. She'd taken twenty lashes with a leather strap for losing a horse in the woods, when it was Etain who committed the crime. Then Aurelia married, and had children of her own, and another on the way, and she was too tired to lie for her grown baby sister.

I will never marry, Etain promised herself, as she lay awake, smothered by her brothers' snores, and the whimpering of babes, and the thunder cracking open the night sky like an egg. I will never have children. I will never be what I am not.

I never married or had children. I kept those promises, but who's to say I could say the same if I'd never met him, the one who stole my clothes while I bathed in the river. He never told me why he did that. I asked many times. The last promise I made to myself he broke for me, and as for why, I thought I knew hundreds of years ago, when I was young and arrogant.

The sun will rise soon. I feel it, a pulsating ache in my blood, but I don't want to sleep in this hotel bed, under a blood-splattered silver comforter. I'll go home tonight. I'll never come back to America, certainly never to Texas, this hot and dry place. Why he settled here I don't understand. Did the council send him to govern this area for a reason? Why do I care?

Eric glides into the room without a knock, without a sound, and I'm not surprised. He takes in the bloody room with one sweeping, apathetic glance, and then looks to me, sitting on the floor, naked and painted red from the bartender.

"I take it you're not mainstreaming," he says.

"Go away."

"I know someone who can clean up your little mess. I will-"

"No," I snap. I clean up my own messes now. There isn't much of the bartender to be found and, besides, I'll be long gone before anyone starts looking for him. He's not married. His friends are alcoholics, addicts, and fang bangers, so they won't miss him for awhile. His family lives up North. I'm not a total fool, even if Eric still sees me as one. Big brothers can never accept when their little sisters are all grown up.

Eric touches the doorframe and licks the blood from his fingertip. "Salty," he says. "I could have found you something better."

"I don't want anything from you," I say. My head falls back against the mattress. Even the ceiling is spattered in blood. Maybe I'll leave it for housekeeping. Why waste my time on the cleaning up? I haven't been a maid since the 1700s. "Go away," I say again.

Eric walks to the window. He takes the remote from the ledge, presses a button, and steel descends over the windows. This is a five-star Vampire hotel. No sunlight will penetrate that steel. Not a single ray of UV. Eric keeps his back to me. I pretend he isn't here, but then he speaks in an old language that doesn't exist anymore outside of this room, a little bit of Old Scandinavian mixed with Gaelic, a code we came up with long ago to communicate in private, a little bit of his native speech and a little of mine.

"I don't know those words anymore," I lie. He knows I do, but switches to English anyway.

"You care for him still or you wouldn't be here," says Eric. His back is still turned to me. "He is your Maker. You can't-"

"Don't tell me what I can and can't," I say, tired of this conversation, this hotel room, this country. "No one could kidnap him unless he wanted them to. He's too old. You'd do well to leave him to his games."

"He's changed," says Eric. I don't believe him. He knows I don't. "You've been gone a hundred years. You wouldn't know."

"I hear things," I say. "They say he supports the V.R.A.. He's grown fond of the humans."

"You don't believe it?"

"I don't care."

Eric finally turns. His eyes are old North ice. For a moment, my heart is tender, looking at my Viking brother. He's always made me feel weak, always the younger child, and for so long he hated me for being the favorite. Now it's hard to tell what he feels. We're as strangers to one another. The same and not the same.

"I saw him a week before he disappeared. He mentioned you. He hasn't since you left. I should have known then that something was wrong when he told me where you were."

My heart melts. All these years, he knew where to find me, and he chose not to. All these years he left me on my own, and it hurts, though I'm the one who chose to leave. I solidify my heart. I fortify it, drawing the black out curtains around myself. It is too unbearable to feel for so very long.

"He misses you," says Eric. "Let the past be. Help me find him and we can all be together again. We can be a-"

"Family?" I say. "We were never that. He took my family from me, remember?"

"You asked him to."

"I didn't know."

That an eternity of half living would be so painful, that I would ever miss my own heartbeat, I didn't know. I was a child, a fool, afraid and alone. I'm being unfair to say it was all Godric's fault. In truth, I don't blame him for what I am, because Eric is right, I asked for this. I blame him for everything that came after he saved me.

IRELAND, 1164

"Mortal babe the fays have brought me," sang Etain, bouncing her baby sister on her knee, "at your woe, freshly flow, all the bitter griefs they wrought me." Her voice is clear and tinkling as the river. Little Niamh smiles and claps. She doesn't understand the words, but she loves the sound. Even Aurelia's brood are silent when Auntie Etain sings for them. The three of them sit at her feet, sticky mouths hanging open, entranced.

"Long ago, sho-hoo-lo! When a blooming bride they snatched me-" Etain reached out to catch Aurelia's oldest girl by the collar. Ealga giggled and wriggled free. "-from my husband's arms and matched me with a fay, with a fay."

Mamai scowled as she and Aurelia peeled the bushel of potatoes at their feet. She didn't approve of the old fae songs. They were sacrilege, tunes against God, but she allowed them to keep the children entertained and out from underfoot.

"Loveless here below I languish, sho-hoo-loo," sang Etain, "From above hath thou come to soothe my anguish, cooing dove with thy love." Niamh's little fist curled in her hair. The babe looked at her with green eyes wider than the sea.

"Another one!" said Cian, Aurelia's youngest boy, precocious even for a four year old. Etain smiled at him.

"Yes, go on, another," said Aurelia. She was being especially kind this morning. Last night's words still hung between the sisters. Etain would not look at her and had not looked at her all morning. She was stubborn as the sheep she charmed with her voice.

"Sing the one about the lark," said Ealga.

"No, I want to hear Jack the Jolly," said Cian.

"And what about you?" said Etain, looking to the middle girl, the quiet one, Fiona, who'd spoken less than a dozen words her whole life. She didn't speak now, either. Etain smiled at her. She looked more like Aurelia than the others with her fiery gold hair and heart-shaped face.

"How happy for the woodbirds on the branches above," came a familiar voice from the door. Etain looked to her twin. None of them had noticed his return. The children left Etain's knee to swarm him. He scooped up Cian and spun the boy around as he sang, his voice higher and sweeter than most women's. "To flutter together and warble their love. How I wish we were like them beneath the blue sky."

Even Mamai smiled softly when Oisin sang. He was her favorite. She often said aloud how she wished his twin were more like him, softer and more patient, but she didn't understand how similar the pair were. Though they looked nothing like twins, and though they were as different in temperament as land and sea, they shared silences as one. They could speak to each other without words. Both named after old gods, both with the voices of angels, and both of them discontent with the life they'd been born into.

Etain joined her brother on the second verse. The children danced, kicking their little heels in the air, and baby Niamh laughed until her face turned red as a carnation. " Fortune let the birdies alone on the tree, and fetch wings and feathers for Mary and me."

Oisin took the girls by the hand and together they spun. He was light on his feet. All the girls in the village wanted to dance with him. All the girls dreamed of becoming his wife, but Etain knew his heart belonged elsewhere, to the fields and the soil, the creaking trees of the woods, the burbling river. They shared that love as well. They could go whole days together in the woods without speaking aloud, yet understanding each other better for the silence.

"That we may soon go darting across the salt tide." Even Aurelia sang now in her thin, reedy voice, and Mamai hummed under her breath as she peeled. It was a rare moment, all of them happy, united by the music, all differences set aside and grudges forgotten. Etain looked to her sister and smiled. "And fly winging together-"

The song ended abruptly at the shouting. Etain recognized her youngest brother's voice. Mamai rose from her stool. Potatoes spilled from her lap. She'd gone pale as cream. Before she could take two steps, Fionn tumbled into the cottage. He stood in the doorway, panting for breath, and Etain's heart turned to stone at the dark terror in his carefree eyes.

"What is it?" said Oisin. "What's happened?"

Fionn stared at them all. Etain clutched little Niamh so hard to her breast that the babe began to howl.

"Normans," said Fionn. There was no need to say more. In the blink of an eye, Mamai and Aurelia gathered the children, all of them confused and afraid.

"Dadai and the others?" said Oisin, one foot already out the door.

"You can't go," said Etain. She almost dropped the babe as she reached for him. She locked eyes with her twin and saw that she could not stop him.

"Go to the boulder," he said. "You'll be safe there. Stay until I come for you."

Etain couldn't let him go. Deep in her bones, she knew if he went now, he would never come back. The song had ended. We will never sing together again, she thought.

"I will come for you," said Oisin. "I promise, a chuisle mo chroi."

"Hurry, child," snapped Mamai. She caught Etain by the wrist and parted the twins. Oisin broke into a run. Etain watched him disappear across the yellow field as she tripped after Mamai and Aurelia, to the woods.

"Hush hush," she whispered to Niamh, struggling in her arms, "hush, my sweet."

She dove into the shadows of the trees and took the lead. Go to the boulder. It was a place only she and Oisin knew about. Running through the dappled light, his words echoed in the song of the woodbirds. A chuisle mo chroi, vein of my heart. He had not called her that in years and she was afraid, so very afraid, but there was nothing to do but keep going.

"You should sleep," says Eric.

"So should you."

By the weight of my body, the weak thrum of blood in my veins, I know it must be nearing midday, but I can't rest with him here. I couldn't sleep even if he was gone. He's sprawled across the bloody bed, his long body taking up every inch, his feet dangling beside my face. We're like a portrait from another time. This would have been normal centuries ago and it could almost be normal now if I let it.

"Will you leave?" he says.

"Will you let me?"

"Yes," says Eric. Only because he thinks I won't. He's older than me, stronger than me. He could stop me from going away again. "Stay," he says. "I need your help."

In nine hundred years, he's never said those words to me. I have never heard him afraid, or uncertain, until now, and for the first time I wonder if there's more to Godric's disappearance than I know. Eric moves sluggishly. We are weak in the daytime. He kneels before me. I let him take both my hands in his.

"I need you, a chuisle mo chroi," he says, staring deep into my eyes. A chuisle mo chroi, vein of my heart. I could slap him. I could cry. He knows too well what those words mean. I can't fight them even now. They are my weakness.

"Fine," I say. "I'll stay."

So many times I've run, and lost everything because it was easier than staying, because I was afraid, and here I am, too tired to run anymore.