My Dearest Kit,

I am so glad to have finally received word from you. It's a relief to know that you are feeling well. Please thank Bilal for me. His descriptions were lovely: "Cool and bright, clean, like the way the air smells after a hard rain." That smell actually has a name. It's called petrichore. I don't know what that would be in Arabic, but I'm sure he could tell me.

Being out here is making me very wistful. All this open sky provides the perfect canvas for projections of memory, and I spend a great deal of time thinking about the places I have been before, alone and with companions. Today I am thinking of Paris. If you still have that picture of Adam, Ava, and I standing beneath the Eiffel tower, please send it to me. That was our first day in the city of romance. We all look so beautiful and so happy.

I miss Paris. I wish I could go back, but that isn't possible, at least not without a great deal of consideration for detail and a great deal of effort toward remaining unnoticed, and at that point it can hardly be called a vacation anymore. It occurs to me that I haven't told you the whole story of what happened in Paris. It was the nineteen thirties everywhere else in the world and people were hungry and full of anxiety for the future, but in Paris, the abandon that had characterized the twenties for most countries was only just beginning. The new musical style had taken its time crossing the ocean, and France was strolling into brass and tumbling pianos the way that its citizens strolled through its carefully manicured city gardens. While the rest of the world fretted and gnawed its fingernails, Paris bloomed, and Adam, Ava, and I found ourselves at its center, bathing in sweetness.

We were staying at a lovely, lavish hotel - I can't remember the name - with a ballroom and a grand staircase, all brass and mahogany. Autumn was making its slow leisurely way through the city, lighting the sidewalk trees ablaze in gold and crimson, filling the streets with the scent of bread and leaf decay and cold stone. Adam, if you can believe it, was wearing a suit, charcoal grey and slim, with a silk tie in wine bottle blue. I couldn't convince him to polish his shoes, unfortunately, but scuffs aside, he looked very handsome. I liked the fashion of the thirties. In the previous decade, women were liberated considerably from old ideas of modesty, but the style of flappers was impractical. Don't misunderstand me - I thoroughly enjoyed ten years of fringed skirts and endless strings of freshwater pearls - but after those ten years had passed, I was grateful to wear closed toe shoes again, and hats that did not require four pins to stay securely affixed to my head. My sister and I wore high waisted skirts and belts with circular buckles, felt cloche hats, and neatly embroidered white gloves. We all felt sharp and clever, as if coming into France from the United States made us time travellers, as if we were cheating by living through the Jazz Age a second time.

It was the music we has become enamored with, of course, so different from the riotous dance tunes taking over Britain and the United States. It was jazz alright, but not the party music we had become accustomed to. In Paris, the pianos had voices like thin spinsters. The accordions and violins were widows and lean men with cigarettes. There was joy, too, but it was more human, more lasting, the sort of joy that is felt for simple things: a place to sleep, the safety of one's family, the comfort of a lover. I found Adam a beautiful blue and white concertina, and he played it as the three of us strolled through the city at night, dancing ahead of us, Ava and I walking after him arm in arm beneath the lights of the Tour du Eiffel. He learned his way around the instrument quickly and with ease, as he always has when given the opportunity to create music in a new way. The melodies he invented spontaneously some evenings, leaning against lampposts with that wry grin stretched lazily across his face, were simple, but lovely. He played us a great number of waltzes in our hotel room. I tried to teach Ava the steps, but she only wanted to spin and spin and spin until she tumbled to the floor in a dizzy heap, where she ran her fingers through the thick pine-colored carpet.

What took us to Paris in the first place was a simple whim. For Adam, it was the music; for Ava, the evolving fashion; and for myself, the people. I adore the French, such a pragmatic culture, but still so passionate. They have the elegance of the English without quite so much pretension, and the romance of the Italians without quite so much shouting, though I like the English very well when I am in England, and the Italians when I am in Italy. We were in a club, a low-ceilinged place with grey stone walls and a band playing in one corner, no stage to speak of, and a young Parisian couple came to speak with us. One of them was very tall and very thin, with sharp features and sand-colored hair that grew in tight curls. Rather than sitting down, he leaned against the wall next to Ava, playing with the knot of his plum-colored tie and staring down the front of her dress. The other was broad shouldered and dark, his jaw shadowed, his suit jacket slightly too large for him. He sat down between Adam and I, leaning on the table with one elbow, staring into Adam's face very intently. He was quite drunk, reeking of cognac, but smiling.

"Why did you come here, really?" he asked in a strange but beautiful blend of English and colloquial French, his black eyes narrowing. He clearly was not originally from Paris, whereas his lover exuded the very scent of the city. Even in the smoky dark, the young blonde fellow's eyes shone with the tower lights, reflecting the glow of the monument like the Seine.

"To find myself," Adam offered, only half joking. For a moment it seemed that the phrase has suffered in translation. The dark man who was most certainly not from Paris, who may even have been German judging by the shape of his face, stared at him, uncomprehending.

"Are you drunk?" Adam was startled by this, to say the least. "How do you find yourself? You would first have to lose yourself somewhere, like your wallet or your house key. You are sitting right here next to me, yes? Not forgotten on a train."

There was nothing anyone could have said in response to that brilliant gem of Common Man's European philosophy, really.

We spent almost eight months in that strange, lovely city, and almost every night in that little club. There was a man, a violinist, who played there sometimes whom Adam took a liking to. This happened often then, and happens occasionally still, that he would encounter an artist or other great mind of some kind and, in a sense, fall in love with them. It's a delight to observe, to see him leaning into the sound of someone's voice, or their theories, or their poetry on a page, sighing against their genius, enthralled. Each time this happened, I liked to take a step back and watch him. Once it had been Shelley. He had fallen into her words, her clever eyes, gracelessly like a boy. She made him laugh and made him think. I am sure it would have been a joy to witness. In Paris, as a vibrant autumn faded into the muted lavender hues of winter and the Seine turned silver underneath a moon haloed by illuminated crystals of ice, it was Stephane Grappelli.

He was a beautiful man, tall, with a square jaw and coal black hair. He played jazz violin. The first night we saw him play, I thought Adam was going to fall out of his chair, he was leaning so far forward, trying to get as close as possible without getting up from the table and walking right over to the man. I watched Adam's long, slender fingers moving in the air, up and down the neck of a phantom fiddle. The music was enchantingly expressive, in turns sighing and laughing. He would play a heart-wrenching lament one moment, and in the next he would have us leaping up from our chairs to dance. Oh, how we danced, Kit. You would have loved it. I knew that first night that Adam was going to dive into this man's work the way he dove into Byron's and Tesla's, the way he dove into yours (though he thought, like most do, that it belonged to someone else). So I took Ava to fashion exhibits and to the opera, the latter of which she did not enjoy nearly as much, while Adam sat on the club's damp back steps until dangerous hours, talking shop and playing along on his concertina. Some nights we were invited to join them, to listen to some tune they had conjured together from thin air.

Stephane, who was quite young and a bit timid, looked at my Adam with a great depth of affection, much in the way that I sometimes catch Adam looking at me when he thinks my attention is focused elsewhere. For months, every time that brilliant boy picked up his violin, whether in front of the club's patrons, or on a street corner, or on the back steps at night, he played for Adam. It was beautiful. I felt it would have been wrong of me to interrupt them, to encroach on their company. Occasionally, we are very fortunate to find zombies who are a little more than zombies, and they capture us. We are caught in the warm light of their humanity, their aliveness. For a time, we love them, as Adam loved Shelly, as I loved Klimt. For a time, we become the shadow just behind them, the whisper of the muse over their shoulder, but we can't keep them. Either they die never knowing what we are, or they carry our secret to the grave. Because of this, I was satisfied to leave them be. I didn't mind spending my time with my sister, both of us wrapped in woolen capes. I didn't mind being apart from Adam for most of the night. I had him all to myself at dusk, before Ava woke up, when the sky was still grey over the river. I enjoyed our quiet moments together, and I enjoyed seeing him enthused over something, anything, again.

Stephane was a romantic man, a man of deep feeling, who one night decided to share his life story with us between songs. His mother, a Frenchwoman, passed away when he was four, and his father, an Italian journalist, was drafted. He was raised in Paris, if you'll believe this, by none other than Isadora Duncan. She taught him to dance, but during the war had to surrender him to an orphanage until the bloodshed ended. Adam was absolutely rapt as Stephane told us of the first time he ever held a violin, at the age of twelve.

"I learned to play on my own," he told us. "I listened to the men playing in the streets. I wanted to play like that."

Outside, rain fell, heavy and grey with the beginnings of a terrible ice, and somewhere, someone was playing the alto clarinet. Adam closed his eyes and listened, and I let my gaze rest on the shadow his long, dark eyelashes cast just above his cheekbones. Speaking softly over the drifting street song, the city's feral music, the violinist murmured lovingly about America, his romance with jazz when he was fifteen. He couldn't have been much older than that, really, maybe eighteen or nineteen, but he spoke as if it had happened lifetimes before. There was practically no one else in the club with us aside from a sparse handful of regulars, sitting on their own or in exclusive little clusters like secret societies. It was a quiet night, almost time for the club to close, for people to begin trickling out and sniffing through the streets for some place that stayed open until three and still served alcohol. Adam was sitting backwards in his chair, long legs splayed, his concertina on the floor at his feet. I sat next to him with my shoes kicked off under the table, and Ava was up walking about aimlessly, the same way that a lion might walk about aimlessly among a herd of zebra.

I love my sister, I truly do, but there are times when loving her is a considerable undertaking. There are things I have been through with her, or because of her, that I could have done very well having never experienced. There are things my sister has done that make me cringe, and probably always will, even though I adore her. The incident in Paris is one of these. I don't think of it often because, quite frankly, it disgusts and embarrasses me. But you have seen me almost at my worst, old friend, and there is nothing I would ever be ashamed to tell you. In fact, I am surprised I haven't told you this story before.

A restless Ava is a dangerous thing. A restless, hungry Ava is even more of a risk. When she glided up next to me and whined that she was "absolutely wasting away," I should have paid attention. I should have taken her back to our hotel so she could feed. I was selfish. I wanted to stay and hear more of Stephane's wonderful stories, see Adam's face light up at every noteworthy name uttered casually like the name of a childhood friend: Isadora Duncan, Paul Whiteman, Joe Venuti, Louis Armstrong, Michel Warlop. It was the perfect night, and we were inside where it was warm, while outside the cold was descending on the river, the cobbles, the wooden benches where the homeless slept underneath their paper and tarpaulin shelters.

When Ava wants something, she does whatever is in her power to get it. I didn't realize what she had done until I smelled the blood, and by then she had already started in on her second victim. The first lay slumped sideways in his booth, eyes blank, neck a mess of disconnected tendons like frayed wires. Stephane, poor man, saw her tear into the arm of the club pianist. He fell over backwards, taking with him the stool he was perched on.

The stool landed on his violin.

The sound it made as it splintered into pieces was the sound of a heart breaking.

The violence didn't last long. Adam and I worked quickly, and much more cleanly than Ava. We managed to take down three of the witnesses. The other four got away, but they were drunk as olives, and probably wouldn't remember the scene clearly enough to relate it to anyone, only recalling bits and pieces: blood, a tearing sound like someone pulling a wing from a roasted hen, running, rain and ice, a taxi. While they ran through the door like rats down a burning staircase, Stephane, dear Stephane, sat on the floor with the remnants of his violin on his lap. Adam stood a few feet away from him, hands helplessly outstretched.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I'm sorry."

There is no need for me to detail to you what the club looked like that night, what Ava looked like lying on the floor, reeling from all she had consumed. To describe at any length the amount of carnage, the awful silence that descended that night, would do a terrible disservice to the men who died there. I think you said it better than I ever could in Richard III when you wrote:

'Tis a vile thing to die, my gracious lord,

when men are unprepared and look not for it.

You are the uncrowned king of poetry, my dearest friend, and so I will leave the lyrical lamentations to you. I will not make a poem of the deaths of those people, because I am partly responsible. I should have gotten Ava out of there much sooner, but I was concerned chiefly with myself.

We gave Stephane a choice. He chose to be turned, to keep the secret, to have no grave after all and instead carry the secret forever. He was not afraid of Adam, and so Adam turned him, cradled him against his chest. He chose immortality. Still, it is my understanding that he died, truly died in permanence, only seventy one years later. I believe he chose that, as well, though while he lived, he did continue to make beautiful music, poignant, haunting.

We had to leave the country at once, of course, and very quietly. We went by train, and then by boat back to America. We found out from a good friend several months later that one of the four men who had run drunken from the club had gone to the police, and had a sketch done. They never found the people in those police sketches, of course, because we are very good at disappearing, but the new owner of the club hung the sketches up over the bar and told everyone who asked about the drawings the brutal story of how the previous owner was devoured by monsters. Naturally, we made the decision to give up on Paris.

It's interesting to me that whenever something like that happens, the story that is told in the aftermath never paints us like vampires. We sound much more like cannibals in all of the tall tales that evolve from the chaos we occasionally create in human lives. I wonder sometimes if this is not just another sign that we as a race are not meant to last on this planet, even as a legend, a fairy tale. We will be forgotten. We will become wolves, savages, man-eaters. Maybe we will become something even less defined, as all the stories melt together, losing their individual shapes with time and telling. Maybe we will just be Monsters. Or Fear.

I'm not sure that I intended to get so serious in this letter, but I suppose it was meant to be this way. This is a story whose shape only grows sharper around the edges with every rendition, which is why it has had the power to keep us out of any entire country for decades. I am glad to have shared it with you. I know you could tell me all about the living nature of words, how narrative is an organism, growing, breathing, changing, dying, and living again. Please tell me, Kit. I look forward to it. I look forward to seeing you again. Please do send that photograph. I would like to have it when I am with Adam again, to remind him what we looked like, what he looked like standing next to Ava during the time when he could still say that he loved her.

Thank you for enduring my prattling, my dear friend. I enjoy having someone to recount the past with, since there is so much of it. If you think you can stand it, I would like to do this more often, share these old tales with you. Call it catharsis. It's cleansing in a way. I miss you. Tell Bilal he writes beautifully.

Yours Still,

Eve