“That answer rattled me. And I sat quietly for a long moment. I even picked up the cup of coffee and then set it down. The café was half empty. The street outside was noisy with passersby. There was a nightclub opposite. The music was throbbing beyond the neon sign. I wondered if I had been in this street when I was alive. I didn’t remember it. But Nash and I had gone a-wandering in Naples. It was possible. And now, how would I see Nash again? How would I even go home?

“ ‘Now let me take up the point again,’ said Arion. ‘Don’t be destroyed in the first years. It happens with too many. There’s so much danger all around you. It’s easy to despair. It’s easy to succumb to bitter hatred of yourself. It’s easy to feel that the world no longer belongs to you, when nothing is further from the truth. It’s all yours and the passage of the years is yours. And now you must simply and plainly live up to it.’

“ ‘How long do we have?’ I asked.

“He was surprised by the question. ‘Forever,’ he said with another shrug. ‘There is no lifetime for us. When I gave you my blood I tried to hide my life from you, but you saw the place of my mortal happiness. You knew it was Athens. You knew the Acropolis. You recognized it immediately. You saw the Temple of Athena in all its grandeur. I couldn’t keep from you the secret of the sheer brilliance of that time, and the Athenian sunshine, so harsh, so hot, so merciless and wonderful. You breathed this knowledge from me. And you must certainly know how long I have been alive, how long I’ve walked the Earth as we say, how many centuries I’ve wandered.’

“ ‘What sustains you? What supports you? Surely not Petronia and the Old Man.’

“ ‘Don’t be so quick to judge,’ he said gently. ‘Some night far distant from now—if you survive—you’ll laugh when you remember asking me such a question. Besides, I love Petronia, and I can control her. You wonder perhaps why I didn’t stop her from making you, as we call it, why I didn’t call upon my authority to stop her from defiling you? Because you must understand I saw her as giving you immortality.’

“He paused, smiling at me faintly and touching my hand again with his hand, which was warm.