Paradis was a slight man with a sparse black beard and mustache, his head square and balding. He looked fully mortal, which made sense for a tutelary that was interacting with mortals so frequently. He wore the garb of a janitor, and when he entered my room at the end of its lonely corridor he came in dragging a superfluous mop and bucket. The bucket didn’t even have any water in it.

Once he knew who it was I had in mind, he said, “The rules here on that kind of business are strictly Catholic.”

“No matter how the patient lingers?” I didn’t want to argue or fight him, and I was certainly in no position to do well at either. I still needed another long stretch of sleep to guarantee that I wouldn’t sink bonelessly to the floor when I first tried to stand with my regenerated nervous system.

He sighed, leaning on his prop mop. “Neglect amounting to euthanasia is … feasible. But no straightforward euthanasia.”

My voice almost broke when I shifted the subject, asking, “How can you stand listening to … all that?”

He seemed bewildered. “You’re not used to it? I got used to it a long time ago.”

Oh, so I was just a softie.

“Monsieur Gisant seems to have had peace and quiet for eighty-three years. I take it you haven’t had to fend off this place from bloodsuckers in a while.”

“Not your exact kind. The ready-to-launch might be persistent. Spiteful. A lot of the time I’m protecting in-laws or exes of the deceased. Deathbed wishes, especially the ill ones, can be powerful, even from a mere mortal. That’s most of what I clean up. If curses and evil eyes were left to go free the mortals would be accidentally hexing each other all the time. When you think something over and over again, wishing it to happen, and it does not happen, often that’s because of someone like me. Because it shouldn’t have happened.”

This grand conspiracy to keep humanity in the dark on all this mystic gobbledygook made sense – it explained my ignorance as a human and the general cluelessness of humanity, though I wasn’t about to say that it made moral sense. It seemed rather arbitrary, letting the humans learn nuclear power but not necromancy. But the more I thought of it, and thought about legends like the story of the Tower of Babel, maybe there was some moral justification behind keeping most humans so blind.

I returned to the subject at hand. “Even someone wishing to die for years in a coma in your long-term care ward?”

Paradis frowned. “Even so.”

“Could you, with great negligence, leave a door or window unlocked? A Christian ward in a hospital room unmounted?”

The tutelary janitor took a seat on my one visitor’s chair and lit a cigarette, in defiance of hospital rules. He completed the lighting and the first drag before saying, “You’re not going to live one year out there, among the vampires. Taking such risks like these proposals, I mean, is not going to do you any good. They are brutal, killing, torturing sons of bitches.”

“So far my bigger problem has been holy people. And a lot of their tricks can be blunted by the mystical power of ‘not being an asshole’. Just don’t be the kind of cunt who kills a dog for no reason, and I can walk off the ichthys that sent that creepy Nocome bitch back to sleep for a lifetime. If I commit myself fully to the religion of Bill and Ted I should one day be able to walk into the Vatican and smack his holiness across the face for being wrong on gay marriage. And the right to die. Thought maybe Bill and Ted wouldn’t approve.”

“I think,” Paradis said dryly, “you’ll be three words into a very clever speech like that when your first fellow vampire rips out your throat.” I noticed that his cigarette smoke was moving in a non-existent draft to slip out the seam of the window.

I found the power to wrench my head off the pillow and look at him directly. “How about you take an extra-long smoking break once I’m out of here?”

He scowled and sucked some more cancer into his system. I don’t think he had to worry about any long-term effects. Then he said:

“Her name is Helen Emelie Forgrave. Seventy-five years old. Locked-in and read-to-launch for about two years now. Amateur horticulturalist for more than forty years, which is enough to make some people not an amateur. Does that make you drool?”

“What?” I hurt my neck as I was startled and tried to turn it.

“All those nasty plants for you – rose, I think, that’s the big one. Worse than garlic. Rose on the vampire’s grave means you can’t return, and can’t get out if you’re already inside. But someone who knows her plants, giving her mental book to the likes of you … that’s a step in a bad direction for a lot of future hunters.”

“Really? Horti-mancy?” But I was faking my sarcasm, considering this new idea with dawning interest, and Paradis knew it and didn’t like the look in my eyes.

“The real problem is that taking people for your kind is an addiction, and I’m not going to be a pusher.”

“I’ve already taken and released one human victim,” I told him. “A man who dueled me, a young Catholic trying to finish his first hunt. After a few days I gave him to Raven, and others who want to leave can also go. I don’t want a bunch of trapped people screaming in my head. This hospital is already hell to sleep inside.”

“Mm.” Paradis dropped and crushed his cigarette, and when he lifted his foot there was literally nothing there. I stupidly realized only now that I hadn’t smelled anything.

“Tutelaries cannot kill those they guard,” he told me in a low whisper, seeming to have made up his mind. The fact that he whispered these words made my loosened muscles tighten all across my body again. Paradis continued:

“I can see that you’ve made some previous vows – small vows. I’m going to ask for something bigger. I want this: If you ever enter a place of caregiving, be it a hospital or nursing home or hospice, and should that place be at your mercy with its tutelaries cast down, you may strike only the elderly.”

I frowned. “What about the young people who are locked-in and ‘ready to launch’?”

“We can agree on a better definition of ‘elderly’,” Paradis said, eyes rolling to the closed window. Was that a sign of nervousness?

“Okay … people who are near death, whatever their age, with no hope of recovery, for purposes of euthanasia. Still lots of wiggle room-“

“You have to ask their permission.”

“Telepathy reaches deep enough for the comas? Severe brain damage? Alzheimer’s?”

“You might need to ask slowly, but it should work.” Paradis was suddenly standing up and leaning over my bed, sparse beard and mustache bearing down on me, his square head massive. His eyes had been normal-looking until now with brown irises, but now I saw a little more. White and blue sparks chasing each other around the pupils, two tiny halos that could easily be dismissed as reflections by a human glance.

“Great negligence on my part to let you do it, yes … but you don’t know what happens if you break a vow, do you?”

“I’m … not terribly curious.”

Paradis showed me his open palm. “Say your words, and then grab my hand, and Forgrave is yours if she gives her permission.”

I said the words. In any place of caregiving only those near death, only those with no hope, only those wanting to die. When I touched his palm I felt no heat, instead an electric jolt.

“I am writing your vow next to the others, on your ethereal template, or what the bird called your ‘true body’. And there is no laser tattoo removal for this kind of writing.”

So it seemed that mutilation or amputation of some kind would be the best possible outcome of a broken vow. Good to know.