There"d been the Ellen Wunderling affair, when Sarah had panicked and eaten a reporter who had gotten too close to Miriam. But that had blown over.
The truth was, it was not hard to get away with killing humans if you were just a little careful, and the other Keepers should not have become so fearful. Caution was appropriate, of course. But this business of hiding in holes the way they were doing - they were nothing now but parasites. She was the last of her kind, the last true Keeper, the last vampire.
Well, she had to rehabilitate them, starting with Martin. She would feed him and nurse him back to his grandeur, teach him to live in the modern world. She"d teach them all. Then she"d have a beautiful baby, and he would be a prince among them and lead them back into the sunlight.
The creature began to move away, but Miriam was quicker. She embraced it from behind.
It let out a terrific bellow and began to fling its head back and forth, attempting to slam its skull into her forehead. It connected, too. The blow mattered not, wouldn"t even leave a bruise.
She tightened her grip. The creature struggled to draw her hands away. She could feel the ribs start to compress. The carefully orchestrated attempt to break her grip degenerated into hammering. Finally, the breath whooshed out.
Martin"s jaw opened, and he fell against the prey. It wriggled, flounced, shook its head wildly. Martin fell away, then regained his balance. Miriam crushed out the last of the breath. Martin locked his jaw against the neck once again. The creature"s legs, which had been kicking wildly, now began to slow down. Miriam squeezed tighter. She smelled hot urine, heard it sluicing out.
Martin"s suction finally took, and the creature"s body weight began to decline, slowly at first, then more noticeably. Martin, by contrast, began to flush red through his curtain of dirt. She felt the life go out of the human. The body became limp. A moment later, Martin let go.
"There"s more," she said.
He slumped. "I cannot." He found a chair, fell into it. At least he wasn"t crawling anymore. That was an improvement.
The blood and fluids that were left had to be taken. The remnant could not be left to rot. She carried it across the room and sat also, on the foot of the stairs. She laid the body out on her lap, bent down and sucked it until there was nothing left to take, just the dry, cream-colored skin tight across the bones.
"Is there acid in any of the vats?"
He shook his head. "That"s all finished. No more tannery."
Too bad. It had been a great convenience in the old days, because the remnants could simply be dissolved. It had been Mom"s charming idea to let the tanners come in.
"What do you do?"
He looked at her. "Miriam - it is you, isn"t it?"
"Yes, Martin."
"I haven"t eaten in a year."
Her mouth opened, but she did not speak, could not. She"d heard of Keepers going hungry for six months, even more - but how could he ever have survived this? How could he still live?
"Martin -"
"I begged for death, many times. But it did not come. Would not come." He smiled a little. "I was turning into one of those . . . those things that you you make." make."
He was referring to her humans, to what happened to them when her blood in their veins stopped keeping them young. Keepers might not communicate with each other much, but it seemed that everybody knew of Miriam and her humans.
"It"s nothing like that. You would have died in the end."
He nodded."No doubt." He raised his eyes to hers. She looked deep into the burning, black pools. Martin was thousands of years older than she.
"We are coming to our end, Miriam," he said.
"We aren"t!"
He nodded slowly, not as if he was agreeing with her, but more as if he was humoring her. "You need to find a way to destroy that," he said. "They"ll miss that man soon, and they"re bound to come here searching."
"Why here? We"ve always been safe here. This is my mother"s house."
"The City of Paris owns this structure. There are plans to make it part of the Musee des Gobelins, starting next year." He made a dismissive gesture with his hands, a gesture that expressed vast defeat, vast sorrow. "They"ll clear all this rubbish out."
"Martin, you were thriving just - well, just a few years ago."
His face, which had filled out and now bore a smeared, filthy resemblance to the narrow-lipped elegance she remembered from the past, opened into a smile. The smile quickly turned bitter and ugly. "During the war, the Resistance built a secret headquarters in the Denfert-Rochereau ossuary. They heard us, deeper down, in the old labyrinth."
This had been the traditional shelter of the Paris vampires, a honeycomb of tunnels that wound beneath the city, from which its stone had been quarried since the time of the Romans.
"They noticed us. They thought that we were spies working for the Germans, and they pursued us."
"But . . . how?"
"With sound! They have those little tins full of carbon black -"
"Microphones."
"Yes, those things. They put them about, and our voices were conducted to their ears through them."
"But they can"t hear our speech."
"Ah, Prime is such a trial, isn"t it? So complex, so many words needed for the simplest expression." He shook his head. "We spoke French, which requires the central register of tones."
"You"re speaking Prime now."
"Am I? Yes, I am. How lovely. I"ll try to keep it up. Anyway, they did not really do anything at first. They were perplexed. But you know the French, they are a careful and patient lot. They did not give up on the strange stories collected by the Resistance, of a band of hommes sauvages hommes sauvages living in the catacombs. When you were last here, we knew nothing of this. But they were working, you see. Always watching, always working. There began to be deputations from the Service Sociale going through the catacombs calling, "come out, come out, we are here to help you." Then a stupid fool, that idiot Emeus -" living in the catacombs. When you were last here, we knew nothing of this. But they were working, you see. Always watching, always working. There began to be deputations from the Service Sociale going through the catacombs calling, "come out, come out, we are here to help you." Then a stupid fool, that idiot Emeus -"
"He and I grew up together. He was with the Thebes gang, me and Sothis out of Amma, Tayna of Tothen, that crowd."
"Tothen now calls himself Monsieur Gamon. He is here. The others, the wind has taken."
"Tayna was in Shanghai, living as a Mr. Lee." Destroyed, now, Miriam supposed. She did not say it.
"Emeus ate one of the d.a.m.ned Service Sociale people. The h.e.l.l that resulted has not stopped."
So humans knew, also, here in France. "How much do they understand?"
"I don"t know what they know. How they find us. Only that I could not safely feed these years past." He gave her a look that she had never seen from a Keeper before, almost of despair. It made her most uneasy to see such a weak and human expression in the eyes of one of her own kind.
"Why did you have to stop? What exactly did they do?"
"They came! I had just fed - in the Twelfth, coming up out of the labyrinth. The usual method."
"When you say "They came," what do you mean?"
"I had chosen a very nice one, smelled great, skin tone said it was first cla.s.s all the way. I took it into a - oh, some little covered place, a toilet, as I recall. I ate it and put the remnant in my little case that I carry, and suddenly - there they were, the police! Running after me. Coming in autos. Jumping out of doorways. It was phenomenal. I only escaped by leaping a wall, then to the sewers." She pulled out her cigarettes, lit one. How tired she suddenly felt. She sensed that more had happened to him than he had as yet said, and she wanted to hear it all.
"Go on, Martin."
"You look so beautiful."
She thought, I don"t want to bear the child of a weak creature like this. I need the strongest blood now I don"t want to bear the child of a weak creature like this. I need the strongest blood now. She said, "But you haven"t finished your story."
"Miriam, I have been captured."
The words vibrated into Miriam"s shocked silence.
"They examined me, Miriam. They opened my jaw, they weighed me, they extracted fluids!"
"But you escaped?"
"They tried to make me think I had. It was a silly business, though - unlocked doors and such. I knew they had let me go."
She could feel her heat beginning to rise. Her blood was flowing faster. If he had been let go, then there was danger here.
"What happened next?"
"I waited months - a full season of moons. Then I took something - a rat of a thing, half-starved, living under a bridge in the trackless neighborhoods beyond the Peripherique. I had not even opened a vein before they were there, falling on me from the roadway above, rushing up in automobiles - it was horrifying. I ran. All I could do."
"But you must have been terribly hungry."
"I tried again a few days later. This time I took the RER to the outskirts, to an area where live the brown ones that they call ratons ratons. Again, I singled one out, cut it out of a little herd in a cinema, then started to have my dinner."
"They appeared again."
"Dozens of them! All around! This time I barely escaped. I came back here. I have remained within these walls ever since."
"But, Martin, how could you have not eaten for - what - at least a year? It"s impossible."
" "Nothing is impossible when you must," that is the motto of my family. Miriam, I have drunk the feral cats, the mice, the rats. I have eaten the very flies that are spit by the air!"
No wonder he stank so. A Keeper could not live on such blood, or could barely live. She did not want to pity one of her own kind, especially not one she remembered with such respect. He had been a charming lover in his day. She remembered him in the flashing brocades of the last age, a powdered wig upon his head and a gold-k.n.o.bbed stick in his hand. He knew the fashions of the age; he dallied with d.u.c.h.esses and played cards at the table of the king. Among the Keepers, he was known as an expert on the ways of man.
"You and I have always been kindred souls, Martin."
"I have thought of you often, child. You still live among them?"
"I have a club in New York that is quite faconnable faconnable. And a human lover called Sarah."
"That business of yours."
"A human to serve you is most useful." Or could be, if only she would answer the d.a.m.ned phone.
"I don"t even know the names of those who pursue me."
They had left him alone for these years, interrupting him only when he was - according to their idea - about to "murder" one of their own. There could only be one reason why he had been left like this: He was bait, and the house was a trap.
They must even now be rushing to this place. For they had undoubtedly bugged the entire building. G.o.d only knew, maybe there were even cameras. They could make cameras the size of a fingertip, microphones no bigger than specs of dust. Sarah used such things in the club"s security system.
"We have to leave here," she said.
"But I - where?"
She stood up. "Is there any fuel?"
"What sort of fuel?"
"To make a fire! Chemicals! Petrol!"
He gestured toward some steel drums.
She went to them, ripped off the soft metal cover. It was some sort of chemical, but it didn"t smell flammable. Another was the same stuff.
But a third stank gloriously of the esters of earth-oil. It had been sent through their great retorts until it was a volatile. "This makes the auto go," she said.
"I know what petrol is."
She threw the barrel into the middle of the room. "Is the hidden route the same?" Every Keep had one, usually more than one. There were escapes for fire, escapes for attack, escapes for everything.
"The same."
The petrol had finished gushing out, and now stood in a puddle on the floor. Miriam took the empty drum and rolled it back and forth over the remnant until it was nothing but a sack of powdered bone. Then she tossed it into the petrol, making sure that it was thoroughly soaked.
At that moment, she heard a sound, the creak of pressure being applied against the door. She took Martin"s shoulders, leaned against his ear. "They"re just outside," she said. "About to burst in the door and all the windows at once."
His lips twisted back in an ugly rictus. He really, really despised them, this hunted creature. Taking his still ice-cold hand, she led him to the far wall, where once the waste from the tannery had poured into the little river Bievre, long since covered over. She counted one, two, three stones up from the floor. Now she pressed the one that was under her hand.
A brutal shaft of sunlight shattered the darkness. The doorway was a white blaze filled with darting shadows. Martin screamed, the shuddering ululation of a Keeper in absolute fury. So rarely had she heard it that Miriam screamed, too, throwing back her head and howling to the rafters.
"Essence!"
The human cry stopped her. They came out across the great room. They had nets, nets and guns. She felt tears of anger streaming down her cheeks. She was almost immobilized, such was her rage at being threatened by them. She did not let herself succ.u.mb to these feelings, though. No, she must not. Instead, she drew a book of matches from her pocket.
"Madame, si"l vous plait!"
Lady, please, indeed! She struck one and lit the others and threw the whole flaming book. Instantly, fire roared up everywhere. The men began to shriek. They leaped and jerked in the flames, as her mother had leaped and twisted in her pyre.
Miriam pressed the stone that would open their route into the sewers of Paris.
Nothing happened.