Chapter 2 #2
He could hear his father’s baritone voice in his head, playing on repeat.
You spend too much time with mortals. I know they’re fun to toy with, but Alexander, you mustn’t confuse that with your purpose in life.
Whatever do you think you’re doing with this insistence on sticking around mortals?
I indulged you for the last five hundred years because young men need outlets, but you’re old enough to stop with follies and take your position seriously.
His first job as a professor had been a lark.
There had been little to do in his childhood but study, and he’d pleased his father by choosing politics – a natural vocation for the son of the man who had been guiding British politics with an unseen, immortal hand since he’d decided to stop killing peasants for sadistic fun and start killing his way to power.
When he’d gone off to university, his father had called it a chance to befriend this generation of young men who would one day be subject to Alexander’s own powers of coercion, course correcting the empire’s path to divert as much wealth as possible into the Damianos accounts.
There had always been an uncomfortable lurch in Alexander’s stomach when he’d used that power on his classmates, the boys he’d pretended were his peers despite the fact that he’d been alive when their great-grandfathers had been born.
Vladimir had been late to children, but that only meant that Alexander had been born as the seventeenth century had turned to the next.
There had been nothing to do after obtaining his degree, so he’d gotten another one, and then several more, and ended up as a professor at Cambridge because it was far enough from Rothburn that he didn’t have to see his father every day, and close enough that his monthly carriage rides back home weren’t completely excruciating.
He’d been an itinerant presence at most of the universities in and around England until the advent of cars, which is when he’d finally escaped to Scotland and the University of St Andrews.
It was just a matter of conveniently leaving before people noticed that he didn’t age, and then reappearing somewhere else with a different name after long enough that he’d been able to get a new degree and establish new connections, writing enough papers to seem credible.
And, of course, being able to put a bit of magical suggestion upon a hiring committee that yes, he would be the perfect choice hadn’t hurt his chances either – just his pride.
He pocketed his phone and pinched the bridge of his nose, cursing that immortality and stress-induced headaches weren’t mutually exclusive.
The right thing to do, now that he had taught for the day, would be to visit his office in Balliol College – one he’d been assigned back in 1900, with a lovely view of a back alley because while he was a professor, he was hardly a famous one – and track down one of the doctoral students he would be supervising this term and get them to lug his latest set of books from his car and put them on the shelves.
But if there was one thing Alexander was good at doing, according to his family, it was fucking up and doing the not-right thing.
The air was bitter with an autumn chill as he strolled out of the Clarendon Building and made his way to the Bodleian Old Library.
He could, of course, be making the excuse for himself that he was going to scout prospects for lunch.
But Alexander knew perfectly well it was pure avoidance, because nothing could enrapture him for a few hours and soothe his anxiety like going to touch old books.
Besides, there was a young man waiting for him at home – Aubrey, whom he’d been drinking from for months now – who was willing and eager to provide dinner.
In Alexander’s opinion, blood was always best straight from the vein, and drunk while being distracted from the fact that he needed to harm others to survive.
Even if his father looked down on him for not draining dry the mortals he used, Alexander was always insistent on drinking only enough to take the edge off his hunger.
He hated the idea that a person would have to die for him to feel full.
He guessed he hadn’t quite inherited the Damianos disregard for mortal life.
The Old Library greeted him like the familiar haunt it was, the imposing stone face of the building offset by intricate lead-lined windows and ornate spires, the courtyard giving the impression of being held gently between the building’s wings.
He was glad he’d ended up back at Oxford after a century away – the libraries elsewhere were never as good – and bounded up the steps, tapping his identification card for entry.
His feet took him to one of the smaller archive rooms, and, when he turned the door handle and entered, he stopped dead in his tracks.
There was a new librarian standing in the entryway, and he was angelic. Alexander felt pulled to him like there was a magnetic field drawing them together, a sense of possessive ownership washing over him at the way that the boy’s slightly-too-large cardigan fell off one narrow shoulder.