I said nothing. The first thing I would do when I recovered, I promised myself, was go track down one of the other nulls.

After a moment, Dashiell stood up from his seat. “You are tiring, Scarlett. I will let you rest.”

“Wait,” I said, and he turned to face me. “Ariadne, she said something when Jesse and I talked to her...”

He frowned. “Beatrice told me she sent the two of you down to see her. What did she say?”

“She said to tell you...” I began and paused for breath. I really was tiring. “She hoped your writing was going better. What did that mean?”

Dashiell just stared at me until I started to feel uncomfortable. Finally, he sat back down in his chair. “All right, Scarlett. You saved Beatrice. I suppose I owe you a story. Do I need to go into why this must remain between us?”

I tried to shake my head, but it hurt. “No,” I whispered. I could have stopped him then—I didn’t really need to know—but now I was curious.

“I’m not as old as I may seem, Scarlett. With most vampires, power comes from age, but I was turned only two hundred years ago. Do you know anything about English literature from that time?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “Nothing past the average public school education.”

He allowed me a faint smile. “Let’s just say that while many vampires will boast about a relationship with a celebrity in their long lives, mine came before I was turned. In eighteen sixteen, I was a personal physician to the famous poet Lord Byron. That summer, he and I rented a house in Lake Geneva with some friends—Percy Shelley; Mary Godwin, his bride; and Mary’s stepsister, Claire.”

“Frankenstein,” I whispered.

“That’s right. The weather was horrible, and we were stuck indoors. One night, Byron read aloud from a book of horror stories and suggested we each write one. Mary started writing The Modern Prometheus—Frankenstein—on that trip. Percy wrote a number of short ghost stories, and Byron started a story, which came to be called Fragment of a Novel, about a vampire. Something spooked him, however, and shortly after the trip, he abandoned it.”

“What did you write?”

He waved a hand. “Claire and I, we were just what you’d call hangers-on. Neither of us had much talent for writing, but we wanted to be around the three of them so badly, we were determined to...play in their league, I suppose would be the phrase. Claire decided to throw herself at Byron, which started a great deal of anguish. And I...Well, I was foolish.” He leaned back in the chair. “I picked up Byron’s discarded story and tried to make it my own. I added every detail I could think of, from every silly vampire story I could find. Back then, vampires did what they wanted—Stoker’s book wouldn’t come out for nearly a century, and vampires were just folklore. When I tried to get the book published, however, I was visited by three of them.”

My eyes widened, and he smiled. “Oh, yes, they threatened me. I suspect they pressed my mind as well, because I awoke the next morning with no desire to be a published author whatsoever. But in a stupid twist of fate, one of my servants passed a manuscript to someone, and the story was published without my permission. The Vampyre. They came for me that very night.”

“That’s how you were turned,” I said quietly.

“Yes. I believe they only did it so they could torment me further, but something strange happened. When I was ‘born,’ for the second time, I was more powerful than I should have been, with more control over myself. It happens that way every now and then. A few years later, after her affair with Byron had gone wrong and their young daughter had died, Claire came to me begging to be turned as well. Claire was always trying to find a cure for her restlessness, her endless search for self, and she had decided that being a vampire would solve all her problems. After two years of begging, I relented. She decided she was in love with me, which caused more anguish...” He lifted a shoulder in an elegant half shrug.

“Ariadne.”

“Yes.”

“Did it work? Did it make her happy?”

He frowned. “No. In fact, a few dozen years later, I met Beatrice and realized what love really felt like. And Claire was furious. So furious that she acted rashly, once again. She went to a young theater manager and failed novelist named Abraham Stoker, determined to give away secrets that would lead to the destruction of vampires. Luckily, Stoker was smart enough to do some...What would you call it? Fictionalizing.”

My jaw dropped open.

He saw it and smiled. “I won’t go any further into this particular drama. Suffice it to say that when you turned Ariadne—Claire—you did me a great favor. She was a thorn in my side for nearly two hundred years.”

He stood up again, straightening out his clothes. “Of course, if you tell anyone that story, I will shoot you in the chest.” He touched his forelock, as though tipping a hat, and just that quickly, he was gone again.

My jaw hung open.

I spent two more days in the hospital, sleeping and getting CT scans. I never asked who was in charge of supernatural cleanup while I was out, and Eli was in my hospital room every day. Maybe Kirsten, Dashiell, and Will were taking care of things themselves, or maybe they just ordered everyone to be cool for a week or so. I didn’t really care either way. I was more concerned with getting better. By the morning after Dashiell’s visit, I was starting to feel short, tingling bursts where the edges of my radius had been, like an electric fence struggling to turn itself on. I had also finally caught up on sleep, and was getting bored with the hospital.