Agony wracked him now just thinking about it. He clenched his fists and whispered hoa.r.s.ely, "G.o.d d.a.m.n you!" Then he laughed bitterly. "Except you already are, and me, too."
She raised her brows. "Surely you don"t believe that nonsense. d.a.m.nation has nothing to do with us. We"re neither demonic nor Undead. We"re as alive as humans, only in a different, superior way. What mechanism do you think actually produces a vampire?" The question surprised him. He thought about it for a minute and had to shrug. "I never thought about it."
"Well I have, and I"ve studied. I"m convinced there"s a vampire virus."
He remembered the medical books on her shelves. "Like rabies."
She laughed. "Close enough. It"s carried in blood and saliva like rabies. A person bitten receives a small inoculation of the virus.
In a normal, healthy person the immune system destroys it. If there are repeated inoculations, though, some viruses survive to set up housekeeping in the host"s cells, and when the body becomes very weak-dies-they take over, modify the host to suit their needs, and reanimate it." Lane"s eyes gleamed as she warmed to her subject. "It would appear to take very little to just reanimate the body. The amount of virus from several bites or one long drinking session ending in death are sufficient for that, but apparently there has to be a large colony to affect the brain enough to restore higher intellectual functions."
He stared at her, suddenly understanding. "Blood would carry the most, and I received your blood by biting you."
She nodded. "I knew you would reanimate with higher functions intact, unlike Mossman or Adair." She stood and came over to reach toward the scars on his neck. "Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood."
The light spicy-musky scent of her perfume curled around him. He jerked away. "I don"t believe you, lady. I"m a cop and you"re a killer and you thought you"d make me your companion? How in h.e.l.l did you ever think I"d agree? Didn"t it occur to you that once I realized what had happened to me I might tell everyone what you were and destroy you?"
Her smile was knowing. "You didn"t, did you? You haven"t told anyone anything, just came after me on your own."
Something he had done once before, he remembered with a sudden chill, and had died for the error. He bounded up the steps into the bandstand. "But not to become your companion. I"m taking you back, even if I have to tell everyone everything."
She followed him up. "And destroy yourself, too?"
He turned his back to the rail and leaned against it for support. "Why not?" he said steadily. "I detest what you"ve made me.
You destroyed my life; you almost destroyed my partner"s. You"ve brought misery to the lives of Mossman and Adair"s families. All I care about is seeing you face judgment for that, then I want to die . . . finally and for always."
Lane"s breath wrapped white around her and melted away into the night air. "Do you? When there"s so much you"ve never seen or experienced?" The musical cadence of her whisper filled the bandstand. "You lived on the bay for years, but did you ever once climb aboard one of the ships that dock there every day and sail away with her? Do you really want to die before you"ve seen wonders like the Himalayas above Katmandu or climbed to the temples of Tibet? Or walked the Great Wall of China and explored the ancient ruins of Karnak and Zimbabwe? Poling through the Okavanga Delta in Africa at flood time there is such beauty and richness of life that it makes your throat ache, and there"s nothing more awesome than the migrations in the Serengeti, when the plains stretch like a sea of gra.s.s and there are wildebeest and zebra as far as the eye can see. There"s a city in northern China that holds a winter festival every year and fills the city with ice sculptures, not just snowmen but pure, clear ice chiseled into a wonderland of heroes and mythical animals and castles, and ice arbors with ice benches to sit on."
The whisper sang on, naming cities, describing mountains and rivers and caves, most he had never heard of but all sounding awesomely breathtaking . . . sang on and on until Garreth"s head swam and he ached in longing. He had looked at the ships along the bay, yes, and thought about the places they sailed, but he could never afford to board one. "Most people don"t ever see those places," he said. "There isn"t time for them all in a life."
Garreth did not recall seeing her move, but Lane suddenly stood beside him. The scent of her perfume filled his head. "Not a human life, no, but we have all the time in the world. We can explore every wonder completely before moving on to the next."
Yes, he thought with a slow wonder. "You can afford a trip like that?"
She slipped an arm through his and laughed-a low, rich sound. "My dear, a woman with hypnotic powers can learn a great many investment tips from the business giants she beds." She sighed happily. "It will be the grand tour of grand tours. Vienna and Rome and Copenhagen. They aren"t like they were before the war, but they"re still beautiful, and Peking, Mecca, and Sri Lanka.
Carrara, where the best marble in the world is quarried, and Venice, where all the greatest gla.s.s craftsmen work. And there are pleasures I"ll show you that are beyond your imagining, pleasures no human can appreciate. I"ll teach you survival techniques it"s taken me decades to learn. Garreth, my love, we will bestride the world like a colossus."
The bandstand felt like a carousel, with the night spinning dazzlingly past them. But uneasiness still stirred beneath his growing excitement and antic.i.p.ation. What? Something he had forgotten? No matter; he would remember it later.
He shook his head. "I"m surprised you"ve waited this long to go. Wasn"t the vampire who made you interested?"
Lane sighed. "We were going to. All the signs indicated Europe was about to fall apart, though, and we couldn"t leave until the Polish property was secured or sold off. Another week and we"d have been clear, but . . . Hitler pushed in so much faster and more brutally than anyone ever antic.i.p.ated." She shuddered. "Blitzkriegisn"t just a word when you"ve lived through it. Warsaw was in chaos. Irina and I got separated and I never saw her again, not even when I went back to look for her after the war."
Garreth blinked. "Irina? Her? Awoman made you?"
"Don"t sound so scandalized, love." Lane squeezed his arm. "Human blood is human blood; we don"t have to drink from the opposite s.e.x. That"s usually the choice and Irina normally fed only on men, but . . . I begged her to take from me and let me drink from her. She called herself Irina Rodek and she had a Polish pa.s.sport."He felt his brows hop. "Polish."
Lane giggled. "All vampires aren"t Transylvanian, you know. Not that she was really Polish. She once told me she was nearly five hundred years old. She"d been Russian for a while, an aristocrat, but had to flee during the Revolution. We met in Vienna." Her voice went dreamy. She leaned her head down on his shoulder. "July, 1934. Vienna really wasn"t the place to be that month with Hitler"sputsch and Dollfuss"s killing, but Matthew was stubborn. What were politics to us, he said, as long as the cafes and museums stayed open? That was when he had his reservations and that was when we would use them."
"Matthew? That"s the professor you ran away with?" Garreth said.
"Matthew Carlson, yes, but it"s more accurate to say I ranafter him. I"d had him for history that spring and knew he"d be going to Europe on his sabbatical, and I wanted so much to get the h.e.l.l away from Baumen and Kansas. I threw myself at him. He was middle-aged with a middle-aged wife so the idea of some coed, even an over-sized, clumsy one, finding him s.e.xy turned him to putty. He left his wife and took me with him instead. We were sitting in a cafe and I noticed his eyes going past me. I turned around to see what he was looking at. It was a who, a woman at the next table." Lane laughed. "I hated her on sight. She was so exquisite, like a Dresden figurine, small, perfect cream complexion, hair like sable, and violet, violet eyes. And she was looking at Matthew, flirting with him. Worse, he looked back, all goggle-eyed. Suddenly I was furious. I threw myself at her, fully intending to ruin her beauty for life."
Garreth remembered the photograph in theChronicle. "You have tended to react violently to other women interfering with your meal ticket, haven"t you."
She grinned. "Oh, yes. And this would have been another nasty scene except she looked straight at me and said very calmly, in the most charming accent, "Please don"t be angry. Sit down. It would delight me to have you join me for tea." And suddenly I wasn"t angry any longer, and Matthew and I did join her."
The scene played in Garreth"s head. He glanced sideways at Lane, fascinated. "How did you come to find out she was a vampire and ask her to make you one, too?"
"I found out by observation, watching her with men, always a different one, including Matthew once, and seeing the man afterward. She sort of took me under her wing after that afternoon. "I sense you are a very unhappy young woman," she told me several days later. "You think you are ugly." She taught me to dress and walk properly. "You cannot be small and cuddly so don"t waste your youth longing to be. Think of yourself as a G.o.ddess, a queen, and move like one." Irina was the one who showed me that I had a singing talent. She even paid for coaches to train my voice. But that was later. At first she was just kind and when I saw how much men fawned over her, I wanted to be just like her, so I watched her closely in order to imitate her." Lane frowned.
"WhyI realized she was a vampire, I don"t know. Even though I had always been fascinated by werewolves and vampires and ogres while growing up, dreaming of becoming one and wreaking revenge on all my tormentors, I didn"t believe in them. If I"d been back in Kansas, the idea would never have occurred to me; it would have seemed preposterous. But I was in Vienna, where it seemed all the fairytales in the world might be true. I"d found myself a kind of fairy G.o.dmother, hadn"t I? I figured it out and when it came time for Matthew and me to leave, I refused to go with him. I went running to Irina, weeping, claiming he"d been over come with remorse and guilt about the way he"d treated his wife and had abandoned me. I begged to stay with her, as her maid if nothing else."
"And she let you."
A complacent smile lifted the corners of Lane"s mouth. "Yes, but as a companion, not maid. I was useful to her, you see. She quickly realized I knew what she was and didn"t care. She also saw that as I gained self-confidence, I attracted men . . . meals for her. After a couple of years, I begged to join her in her life. She refused at first, saying how hard and lonely a life it is, but when I pointed out that she wouldn"t have to be lonely anymore, she agreed. I think she was sorry. She kept scolding me and threatening to leave me on my own if I killed another man. "It is excessive; it is dangerous. You must learn control," she would say."
The uneasiness, the feeling that he should be remembering something, stirred again in Garreth. "Irina was right," he said.
Lane snorted. She flung herself away from him, pacing across the bandstand. "Not if it"s done right, like a wild animal did it, or a fanatic cult. I knew what I was doing. Irina came from a superst.i.tious age, when people believed in vampires, and was careful out of habit. Even so, sometimes . . ." She turned back to face him. "Sometimes I wonder if she comprehended how much power we have. And how much safety in this age of logic and technology. We can do whatever we like with no fear of reprisal."
The chill inside him exploded outward, shattering the warm spell her plans had woven around him, reminding him why he was here and what he had to do. "No. We can"t. We still have to be accountable."
Her frown told him she saw she was losing him again. Lane hesitated, mind churning visibly, then shook her head with an indulgent smile. "Ah, we"re back to that again, are we?"
"I"m sorry, yes."
She shrugged. "I"m sorry, too, but I suppose it"s too much to forget what you were so soon. You have to grow out of it. Then let me start you on your way by dispensing with this foolish illusion you have of returning me to San Francisco. It can"t be done.
Rosary handcuffs and a garlic cell might hold me, but you"ll never get me from here to there. I"ll kill you first, even though I adore you and long to show the world to you. Now lay down these wisps of humanity you cling to and come with me. Enjoy the power that is ours."Cold and dread sunk into his spine, bones, and gut. Dread? Or maybe just uncertainty. What she said carried a ring of truth.
"Power? Something I"ve learned as a cop, and maybe as a vampire, too, is that power always carries responsibility, and the greater the power, the greater the responsibility for not abusing it."
Lane snorted. "A human notion. For us there is no responsibility because there is no one with more power who can punish us."
The dread grew. The latter was certainly true. Garreth felt leaden, as though daylight pressed down on him. Very soon, he feared, he would see what the dread was, and he did not want to. That she was right. That he must forget Lien and Harry, Maggie and Nat, everyone he cared about, and look on them as no more than walking bottles of blood?
"And we certainly have no responsibility to humans," Lane continued coldly. "They are only food. We prey on them. We must.
It"s our nature."
The words cut like a knife, but to his surprise, the knife did not stab him. Rather, it sliced through his uncertainty, suddenly releasing him. He straightened like a drowning man finding a bottom under his feet and his head out of the water. "Bulls.h.i.t! It"s the vampire nature to need blood and prefer darkness and sleep on the earth, and that isall ! The rest we choose: our source of blood, killing or not in obtaining it, the way we use our power. I may be new to this life, but I can recognize the difference between what Imust do and what Imay do. So don"t do any numbers on me about predestination and compulsive behavior!" His voice was rising.
With an effort, Garreth dragged it down again, to keep the whole town from hearing. "You abuse people because you hate them.
You kill because you enjoy it. I understand why you do it, but that doesn"t mean you have to do it, and it sure as h.e.l.l doesn"t justify it! You"re a killer and you have to answer for it."
Her eyes flared. "You"ve decided that, have you? Tell me, how do you justifythat ? What givesyou the right to judgeme ? That badge?"
The dread burst in him, like ice, like hunger cramps. He wanted to turn away and throw up. "No, not the badge." There was no responsibility, she said, because there was no one with greater power to punish her . . . the same principle punks like Wink lived by:get away with everything you can until you"re caught. And of course they never thought they would be caught. There was another principle, though, one that worked in human law and could apply equally to vampires. An awareness of it must have been working at him since the evening"s first mention of the difficulty of taking her back to San Francisco. He drew a deep breath and said steadily, "I"m your peer."
She froze. "A jury of one?"
Acting to recreate order must be done with proper authority.He leaned back against the rail, fingers biting into it. "I"m all there is."
Lane stared at him. He avoided her gaze. After a moment, she gave up trying to trap his eyes and shrugged. "Very well. How does the jury find me? Guilty?"
He felt as though he were suffocating. "Yes."
"Then what sentence do you pa.s.s?"
The question stunned him. Something else he had not thought through. Whatcould he do? Have her make some kind of anonymous cash gift to compensate the dead men"s families? But that did nothing to restrain her from killing again. "I . . . have to think about it."
"Poor baby." She strolled back and reached out as though to stroke his cheek.
But before she touched him, her hands dropped to grab his upper arms. A knee drove hard up into his groin.
Pain exploded through Garreth. The world disappeared beyond a raging blue haze and he dropped to the floor, writhing and gasping in anguish.
Dimly, he felt her hands going through his jacket pockets, and heard the jingle of keys. "Dumb mick," she hissed. "The world could have been yours. NowI"m imposing a sentence onyou . Actually I"m doing you a favor by granting your wish. You will die, finally and irrevocably."
The heels of her boots rapped down the steps and away toward the bridge.
Garreth struggled to stand, to pursue her, but could not even make it to his knees, only continue to huddle groaning and cursing.
Through the pain paralyzing him came the distant snarl of the ZX"s engine. With it rang a grim echo in his head.Setting one"s self to alter things according to one"s own judgment can end in mistake and failure . . . mistake and failure . . . failure.
3
A decade later he managed to drag himself up the railing of the bandstand, and a couple of years after that the pain finally subsided enough for Garreth to walk. Anger helped, even directed at himself.Dumb Mick, all right. The maiden is powerful.
When the h.e.l.l are you going to get that through your thick skull and quit underestimating her, man?
Reaching the bridge, he paused to breathe deeply and push self-recrimination aside. It did not solve the problem at hand, which was what to do now. With any other fugitive he could call for back-up and count on help from every other officer in the area. But not this one. It would only needlessly endanger their lives. He really was the only one to deal with her.
But maybe he could let them help find her.
He broke into a run, angling through the park so he came out on Seventh Street and raced down it toward City Hall. The wind had swung around to the north, he noticed, and it felt damp. A sign of snow coming?
A patrol car rolling up the street toward him braked to a stop. Maggie rolled down her window. "Garreth, I pa.s.sed some girl driving your car a couple of minutes ago. When I realized it was your car, I swung around the block to catch her again, but by that time she was gone."
"That was La-Mada Bieber, Anna Bieber"s daughter." He scrambled into the pa.s.senger side. "Will you call Sue and have her ask Nat to be on the lookout for the car and woman? I need to talk to her."
Magpie raised an eyebrow. "She looked a whole lot younger than Mada Bieber."
"The night is kind to aging faces." He gave her a quick smile.
Maggie continued to eye him. "How does she happen to have your car?"
Garreth grimaced. He would probably have to give some kind of explanation sooner or later. "She s.n.a.t.c.hed the keys while we were sitting on the steps of the bandstand."
The curious stare became a suspicious frown. "What were you doing on Pioneer Island with a woman old enough to be your grandmother?"
He groaned inwardly. The last thing he needed to deal with now was jealousy. "Finding out she is my grandmother . . . and not very happy about the past crashing in on her." He reached for the microphone. "206 Baumen. Ask 303 to watch for a red 1983 Datsun ZX, local-"
"Baumen 206," Sue Pfeifer interrupted. "Be advised that vehicle is 10-19."
He blinked at the radio. The car was at thestation ?
Before he could ask about it, though, Sue went on, "206, will you please check the high school? 10-96 reported around the gymnasium."
Magpie grimaced. "Even on Thanksgiving someone has to be out making trouble."
They both checked all around the high school, but neither saw any sign of the reported prowler. All the doors and windows were secure. After ten minutes, Magpie called off the search and they drove on to the station, where Sue handed over Garreth"s keys.
"This woman stuck her head in through the door and tossed the keys at me. She said to tell you she"s sorry for stranding you and that she"ll see you later."
Cold slid down Garreth"s spine. He heard Lane"s voice beneath Sue"s cheerful tone and the words rang with threat.
Maggie said, "Sounds like she"s cooling down."
He smiled grimly. "Yes." Cooling to sub-freezing. The lady of ice and steel was out there planning how to kill him. He tried to imagine possible methods. Throw garlic at him and break his neck while he struggled to breathe? Wait and attack while he slept?
No matter. She was not going to have the chance. Lane had victimized him for the last time. He intended to find her first, and while he hunted, would think of some way to deal with her.
Blood smells from the two women swirled around him. His stomach cramped, reminding him sharply that he still had not eaten today. That had better be taken care of before he started the hunt.
Calling goodnights over his shoulder, he headed for the door and his car.
His watch read midnight as he turned in the drive. Leaving the car running, he went to peer in through the windows on his side before opening the garage door. It was empty. The tool drawers caught his eye. Might there be something in them that would make an effective weapon? His gun was no good unless the bullets had suddenly trans.m.u.ted to wood.
Wood. His gaze slid to the stack of firewood against the back of the house, and to the smaller pieces left from tree tr.i.m.m.i.n.g during the summer and saved for kindling. Garreth"s gut twisted. No! He turned away. Not that. Itwould be setting himself up as judge. It would also be murder. There had to be another answer, even if it meant becoming her companion after all, in order to be her keeper.
He bent down for the garage door handle.
A flat thrum and hiss sounded from the direction of the shrubbery separating Helen"s property from that next door. Garreth reacted with all his cop"s training and instincts . . . spinning and dropping. Not quite fast enough, however. Pain exploded in his right shoulder. He fell backward against the garage door.
With shock, he saw the feathered shaft of an arrow pinning uniform jacket to his shoulder. But even then his training carried through. He rolled for the cover of the car.
There he pressed against the front fender and wheel and pulled at the arrow, gritting his teeth against the pain as the shaft grated on the underside of his collar bone. At the same time he listened, straining for any sounds that would give him Lane"s position. The a.s.sailant must be Lane. But the rumble of the car"s engine drowned out all other sound.