“My body will continue to age and will, in fact, begin to decompose much as a dead body does if left unattended until I’ve been reduced to a moving skeleton. However, I’ve so far staved off most of the results of such decay with preventative magic, and should be able to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. I stand before you today in as good of shape as I was the day I died—er, stopped living, as it were. Better, actually, since my joints and muscles no longer feel the weight of years.” He gave a demonstration of his ease of movement by executing a passable, if not exactly graceful, full squat to the ground, then standing straight up with no sign of pain or discomfort.
“So you’re a monster.” Skate said the words as her mind raced; Belamy was standing between the door to the street and her. She could not hope to jettison herself out of the downstairs windows with Belamy’s locks on the latches, with the magical reinforcements he had placed on them besides, and jumping from the higher floor would be outright suicide. If this revelation was a prelude to an attack, she was not sure she could get away from him. Outwardly, she tried to show nothing but casual indifference, but she knew her body was betraying her; the hair on her arms was standing straight up, the tension in her legs aching, and part of her mind was screaming Run! over and over again. Her voice wavered as her throat constricted out of pure terror.
“Some would call me so, yes.” Belamy nodded, either not noticing her fear or not caring about it. “But I don’t think that’s quite fair. I’m not hurting anybody. I didn’t have to hurt anybody to get to this point. I wasn’t ready to die, and old age wasn’t waiting, so I made a change. It’s true,” he went on, sweeping an arm through the air vaguely, his loose-hanging sleeve billowing softly in the current that it caught as it moved, “that most people who go through this process must lose something of their humanity in doing so. You wouldn’t believe some of the horrible things I found in my research leading up to the execution of the deed.” He gave what appeared to be a genuinely involuntary shudder. “Anyone who found such paths and followed them would be truly monstrous.”
“You did.”
“No!” His eyes went wide as he spoke, the passive tone replaced by vehement denial. “I told you, I hurt no one. I did my own research; I found another way. Because of what they had to do in order to reach this state, most of my kind deserve death, real death. But I did not do what they have done. My way hurt no one. I am not a monster, Skate.”
She was standing still. She had begun to actually be calm as he talked, though she was not fully relaxed. Belamy’s confession did not seem to be a prelude to an attack, but now that she knew for a fact he was not a living thing, she did not know if she could ever be relaxed around the man again. “So you’re not a vampire.”
Belamy laughed once, throwing his head back with the effort. “No, of course not. What do you know about vampires?”
“Only what my friends have told me in stories. They drink blood, they’re really strong, and they don’t like garlic.”
“Wait, is that—?” He laughed again. “Is that why you brought me garlic?” He laughed again, a full-throated sound this time. “You’ve had suspicions for quite a while, haven’t you?” He laughed a bit more, then settled down again. “They also can’t go into sunlight, cross running water outside of their coffins, or be close to silver for extended periods. So, no, I promise you I am not a vampire. However, that raises a question: you brought me that garlic almost a week ago. If you’ve been worried that I was some sort of monster waiting to kill you, why have you been staying here the whole time?”
Skate considered a moment before giving her answer. She needed to disguise at least part of the truth—I’m trying to find something really good to steal—so she decided to cover up that deception with a truth. “I really want to learn to read. And also not be out on the streets in the cold.” These things were true, though they would not, by themselves, have been enough to convince her to stay with a monster. “That, and the fact that you’ve had plenty of chances to harm me if you wanted to.”
“I don’t.”
“I don’t think you do. You don’t act like a monster to me, despite whatever you are.” It was a bizarre thing to say to someone who’d just confessed to be a thing that was not alive but pretending to be, but she did mean it: Barrison Belamy had shown no interest in hurting others. Whatever else he was, he did not seem to be sadistic. “Why would you tell me any of this?” she asked. “Why not tell me to mind my own business, or just lie?”
He shrugged. “It’s bad form for a teacher to lie to his student, or to discourage curiosity for selfish reasons. The most dishonest I’ve been with you is in how I look.” He waved his hands at his body, indicating nothing in particular. “Despite my best efforts to preserve my body, I still find that people immediately recognize something off about me that deeply unsettles them. I’ve learned to take certain precautions about my appearance, a simple trick of magic to smooth over the parts of me that would keep me entirely incapable of going out in public.”
“What do you mean, ‘a trick’? What, you can change the way you look?”
“Yes, exactly. Here, I’ll show you.” He snapped his fingers, and she was no longer looking at an old man. Instead, he appeared to be a young soldier, wearing dark metal armor wrapped at points in leather and no more than seventeen or eighteen years of age. He looked nothing like the man she knew—this image was much rounder and softer than Belamy. He also looked a little taller. “See?”
“Something’s weird about you.”
“Well, yes, I did just transform right in front of your eyes. I imagine that must seem passing strange.”
“No, I mean, I think there’s something wrong with your trick.” She blinked hard and rubbed her eyes. It was difficult for her to explain. “You look…blurry.” That wasn’t exactly the issue. In fact, every facet of his new appearance was crystal clear when she looked at him. If she had time enough, she could probably count the hairs on his newly full head. It was only when she wasn’t looking at a part of him that she noticed the blurring, or the shaking. When she looked at his face, his arms below the shoulder started to blur at the edge of her vision. The effect was hurting her eyes and giving her a headache.
“Ah, right,” he said, snapping again and resuming his more familiar appearance. “Your eyes are detecting the trick because they saw it happen. Your mind knows to look for the difference, to look for what’s beneath, despite what your eyes are telling you when you focus with them. The young man disguise doesn’t work as well because it’s a drastic departure from my true appearance. This one’s almost identical to my actual appearance. I’ve simply modified the small details that, when added together, unnerve anyone looking at me undisguised. Because it’s closer to what’s real, even though I’ve told you it’s not real, it shouldn’t give you any problems.”
Skate did not notice the effect anymore after his reversion to normal. “How long did it take you to figure out how to do that?”
“Not long. It’s a fairly simple spell. It’s also one of the most useful of a wizard’s talents, to be able to disguise himself and slip into the crowd when he needs to.” Belamy chuckled, clasping his hands behind his back and staring wistfully at nothing in particular. “I remember a wizard I once knew who took to street performances to earn extra money for experimentation, eating, savings, and whatever other odds and ends he might need to spend some coin on. If one of his shows started to go poorly, he’d just bolt into his crowd, change his looks when he was two or three people deep, and blend in with his audience until the crowd began to disperse. He’d leave town shortly thereafter. He told me he sometimes had to heckle himself in order to speed the process along, when a poor crowd would mill around for an hour with no coin forthcoming.”