The Taste Of You

We sat at the park when he got hungry, and he kept dropping his bottle because he would look up at me and laugh.

"I"m glad you think I"m funny, kid," I said. "Though it doesn"t say much for your survival instincts."

He giggled again.

We went back to the apartment that afternoon. I stopped the stroller right inside the door and unbuckled a sleeping Humphrey, lifted him out, then turned around.

"Will," I breathed. I set Humphrey down on his blanket so my shaking arms didn"t drop him, and I rushed to kneel beside the couch where Will lay, sprawled as if dead.

Again, I heard the snap of his neck as Keats"s paw tore across his face. I shook my head to clear it.

I poked Will hard, repeating his name. No response. So I rammed my fist into his stomach.

He grumbled something and changed position, and I would have cried if I could"ve. I threw my arms around his sleeping body and pressed my face into his chest. He was home. He was safe, perfectly fine except for a small stomachache.

For a fleeting, foolish moment, I hoped to lose my bet with Dr. Parrish.

I smiled into Will"s shirt, and then the foolish moment pa.s.sed.

I heard Humphrey giggle behind me. My attempt to wake Will must have woken him up, too.

I turned to him and thought I would be sick.

A woman held Humphrey, smiling at his giggles.

I was on my feet and taking him from her before the thought could form in my mind: she, whoever she was, had brought Will home.

Then I thought, maybe she had taken him away, too, and without taking my eyes away from her face, I moved Humphrey a few steps away from her.

Her hair was a white-blonde, her face sweet and gentle, though far from beautiful. She stood very still, as though she knew how nervous she made me. When she spoke, there was the slightest hint of Irish in her accent.

"You have to give him up, Annie," she said, with a sad smile. Maybe it was something she had worked to achieve, but something about her made me think she"d experienced this before, that she understood what an awful, impossible thing she was asking me to do.

"I know," I said, a.s.suming she was talking about Humphrey, not Will. "I knew that from the beginning. I was just getting him well enough to…to be…."

She was watching me, and she didn"t care that I was lying to her now, that I was telling her the same lie I"d been telling myself.

"Okay," I said. "Okay."

"Will was making phone calls for you when I came for him," she continued. "He called the foster parent friends first, but they can"t take anyone else."

I gripped Humphrey tighter.

"But there"s another couple, a little younger, who are wanting to adopt a baby. Will has it all set up now for you. He called while we were waiting for you here. They"ll be expecting you to bring them Humphrey tomorrow evening."

"Tomorrow," I repeated, horrified.

"Yes," she said, and she fixed her gentle eyes on me for several long moments.

After a while, I nodded. I wanted to protest, but I felt I"d done all the protesting I could. She had been so kind, so understanding. I didn"t want to argue with her, when she obviously knew what was best for us.

"I"m sorry, Annie," she said. She stepped forward and brushed Humphrey"s cheek. He smiled at her, and I relaxed a little. "I"m sorry, Humphrey," she said.

"Thank you," I said, though I wasn"t sure what I was thanking her for. "Is Will going to be okay?"

She turned to look at him, sprawled across that hideous couch, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. "He"ll be fine. He came wanting answers, you know. I hope I gave him some. He may sleep for a long time, and he may be disoriented when he wakes up. I thought it would be better for him to wake up here, with you."

She looked from Will to me, staring into my eyes again, and I suddenly believed things I"d never believed before, first about the existence of the judges" "magic," and then about myself and my life—that I wasn"t as screwed up as I thought I was. That I really would be okay, that I was nearly there already. That handing over Humphrey wouldn"t tear me apart. And maybe the strangest one—that Will loved me and would love me however I needed him to, as long as I would let him.

Then, I realized that her eyes weren"t there, just empty s.p.a.ce. And the place where she had been standing had been empty s.p.a.ce for a long time now.

I looked at Will on the couch, and I wondered if that was what was happening to him, on a larger scale. Processing. But processing so much that he wouldn"t be conscious again until his brain had caught up.

I sat on the floor with Humphrey and played with him, reaching out every few seconds to fix a sock or smooth his hair or wipe away drool.

What had my life been like before him? Had I ever done anything, accomplished anything at all? Was this near-immortality wasted on me? The answer to that question, at least, seemed clear. But there were so many others.

How could I pa.s.s Humphrey along, continue the ridiculous and horrifying game of hot potato that he"d endured all his life?

What would I do when he was gone? It wasn"t like I had plans, dreams, ambitions that the kid was hindering me from fulfilling. I wasn"t a scientist like Will or an artist like Hyuck-Joo. I had no calling. And very soon, I would have nothing at all.

I looked at Will, who had started to snore at some point. Humphrey looked at him too.

Maybe the judge had given Will answers, too. Maybe some of his answers could help me figure out what was next, save me from feeling like a lab rat who has managed to hit the right b.u.t.ton to release the cheese only twice in its life, and who was now desperate to figure it out again, sure that if it doesn"t, it will starve.

Humphrey was asleep in my arms again when Will finally woke up. I was pretty sure the kid was suffering from narcolepsy.

As much as I wanted to keep holding him as long as I could, I knew he needed to rest, and Will had no volume control when he was excited, and if he wasn"t excited yet, he would be as soon as he got talking.

I laid Humphrey in his crib. He did the little whining thing he always did when anyone bothered his sleep.

"Sorry, formulface," I whispered, then tucked his penguins-in-scarves blanket around him and went back to the living room.

"So did you find whatever you wanted to know?" I asked Will. He was sitting up now, one hand rubbing his eyes, and he looked up at me when I came back in. I sat beside him on the ugly couch, sitting cross-legged and leaning against the arm of the couch so I could face him.

Will nodded, then shook his head. "Maybe. G.o.d, I have a headache. How long have I been asleep?"

"Eight hours here. But you were dead asleep when she brought you in, so probably a lot longer. So what did you find out?"

Will turned sideways on the couch, like me, so he was facing me. He reached out like he wanted to touch me, then seemed to remember that there was a Do Not Disturb sign hanging from my nose, and dropped his hand.

"I know some things now," he said. "I know...I know that a war ended two hundred years ago, and that when the judges were all that remained of the vampire world, they made peace." He looked behind me, as though checking to make sure we were alone. "Not too long after that," he went on, his voice quieter, "they made their laws: the process of making a vampire was a secret; the judges would interfere to prevent war or to give their "children" guidance or keep them out of trouble, and," a proud smile emerged from his frown, "they would make themselves impossible to find."

"So how did you find them?"

"I took a census." His grin kept getting wider.

"A census?" I asked.

"Every time I met a new vampire, I would meet all his or her friends, then all of their friends. I kept records of key data: age, ethnicity, occupation, s.e.x, marital status, hometown, and when and where they were changed into vampires." He looked so smug I wanted to flick him between the eyes.

"Twenty years of parties?" I said. It was a question, but it wasn"t really a question. Why else would a geek throw a party?

"Thirty-five years of parties," Will said. "You were only around for the last twenty."

"So how many vampires took part in your sneaky census?"

"Ten thousand."

My mouth fell right open, like a cartoon character who had only just realized that those tricky sheep were dressed up as wolves. "Ten thousand? How is that even possible?"

"Two parties a week, on average. Thirty-five years. Between one and five new vampires at every event. And remember, that when you and…when you were traveling all over the world for five years, I was too. Actually, I left about a month after you did, and I didn"t get back for almost a year after you came home. So I"ve met vampires in New York City, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Mumbai, Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, Istanbul, Jakarta, Shanghai, Paris, Berlin…and twenty more, every city I could hit in six years."

I didn"t ask why his trip had coincided with mine and Keats"s. I told myself it would be easier to make up my own reasons—coincidence, he didn"t want to miss his friends, life in San Antonio was too boring without us.

"And then so many parties here, too," I said.

"Lots of vampires come through San Antonio. Cultural hotspot and all that."

I went to check on Humphrey, then came back and sat beside Will on the couch again, a little closer than before. "So what did you find out from all your census-taking?"

"Well, part of it I"ve already told you," he said. "Everyone is between fifteen and twenty-seven when they become vampires. No one has been a vampire for more than two hundred years, except the judges, of course—"

"Did you find out how old any of the judges are?" I asked.

Will"s face went serious. He was still excited, still bouncing with things to tell me, but serious now, too. "I only met one. She didn"t tell me, exactly, but she gave me this image. Or maybe she didn"t mean for me to see it."

He looked at me, and I nodded to tell him that I understand what he meant.

"She was running. I could see through her eyes—decapitated heads hanging from horses" necks, the heads bouncing as the horses ran. And all around her, men on horseback, men running, all of them with shining blonde hair, running naked into battle. They all carried spears topped with bronze heads. Pre-iron age. She was a Celt."

"A Celt," I echoed, amazed. "Well, she can"t tell you about Atlantis, but I"d bet she has some stories worth hearing."

"I don"t think I"ll ever see her again," he said, and there was sadness in his voice, like he was talking about a lover, and I remembered the kindness in her eyes when she had looked at him.

I nodded, squeezed his hand. "So what else did you learn from the census?"

After a pause, he continued, "Vampires match the proportions of the world population: gender, ethnicities, a mixture of jobs and talents and lifestyles and marital and parental statuses. But the most important point, what helped me find the judges, was geography."

I glanced toward the bedroom, listening. A gurgling sound met me.

"I"ll go check on him," said Will. He jumped up and went to the bedroom and brought Humphrey out a minute later, wide-eyed but groggy, clutching Señor Elephant.

I held out my hands for him, but Will ignored me and sat down with Humphrey, who looked perfectly content, in his lap. Something twinged in my body that hadn"t felt anything but thirst in so long. But it had to be psychosomatic or something. My ovaries hadn"t worked in two decades. Their chemical control over my brain should be at an end. Except, I realized, this wasn"t a reproductive twinge. It was about the picture we made, the family we made. The temporary family.

Will started talking again, and I had to rip my mind out of its fantasy and focus again.

"…chart the locations. It was only in the last year that the pattern really came clear. My sampling, after all, has been skewed in just about every way it"s possible to skew data, not the least due to my limited linguistic ability. I was unsure for two months whether this one guy said Mandalay was his wife or where he had become a vampire, or both."

"Okay, so you"re saying that finding out where people were made into vampires told you where you could find the judges?"

He made Señor Elephant dance, which was a popular technique with this audience. "It would be more accurate to say it told me where I could start looking." He waited for Humphrey to stop giggling, then said, "Mexico City."

"That would not have been my first guess," I said.

"That"s probably part of the reason they picked it. You"d think the rulers of the vampire world would be in, I don"t know, Transylvania."

I snorted. "Actually, I was thinking their own little island somewhere. So there were a lot of people changed into vampires in Mexico City?"

"No," Will said. "There were none."

"None?"

"And none who are from there originally. And none who live there now."

"None living there?�� I asked.

"Well, twenty. But those twenty never came to any of my parties. Or if they did, they lied about where they lived."

"But," I said, watching Humphrey jam Señor Elephant"s head into his mouth, "surely there are lots of cities without vampires."

"None the size of Mexico City. Twenty million people and zero vampires? Not likely. And the longer I thought about it, the clearer the answer became: this isn"t a statistical anomaly. It"s a clue."

I shook my head, but not because I didn"t believe him. I was still marveling at all he had done, all the work and all the years, and he had found them. "So you"re saying that the judges keep all vampires away from Mexico City? They, what, set up immigration checkpoints and do a blood test?"

"All I"m saying is that the judges don"t make vampires close to home. It"s like why serial killers don"t usually kill their next door neighbors," Will said.

"And then the neighbors always say what a nice young man he was, always kept his gra.s.s cut, brought a pie to the community bake sale."

"Right," Will said. "Avoiding suspicion. Making themselves invisible. But most of all, I think they realized that we"re still social creatures. So they could stay hidden if they only made vampires from other places, in other places, because it was unlikely that a vampire community would spring up where no vampires had any connections."

"That makes sense. You and Lydia—" I didn"t say, and Keats, but I paused long enough that I knew he would hear it in the air anyway. "—all lived here and were changed here. I ended up here because of you." That alone was enough to skew the numbers, I realized. San Antonio had a disproportionate number of vampires because it had permanent vampire residents to begin with. And we, apparently, flock together.

"But what does my census record say?" I asked. "I was living in Palm Beach, but I woke up, changed, in Denver."

Will nodded. "I listed both places, thinking there might be a clue there."

"And was there?" I asked. Humphrey was licking his lips and squirming. I would have to move the conversation to the kitchen soon to fix him a bottle.

"Sort of. I noticed that you weren"t alone in that. Most started their vampire life thousands of miles from where they were living. None were left in the same city."

"None?" I asked. I stood up and paced. There was too much information here to take sitting still. "None?"

"Want to hear my theory about why?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

Will made a face at Humphrey, who stared at his face as though trying to decode it. "Sympathy. What did you do when you first woke up as a vampire?"

"I tried to figure out what the h.e.l.l happened."

"And when you realized that you were really, really thirsty and Slurpees made you vomit?"

I stopped pacing. "I hunted."

"And if you had been near your family and friends when that thirst hit you for the first time, when you just couldn"t help but hunt because the part of your mind that would have told you how sick and evil it was couldn"t be heard over the part of your mind that was determined to survive—"

"I would"ve hunted them. I would"ve killed my family." Instead of sending them a nice note every Christmas full of lies about my successful career in advertising.

Will picked up the sock Humphrey had kicked off and pulled it back onto his foot. "I think that"s what happened to the judges," he said. "Maybe not all of them, but probably most, before the process was a secret. Someone, maybe just for fun, turned them and left them, and before they understood what had happened, their family was a pile of corpses around their feet."

For the first time, I thought I might love the judges. What kind of lives must they have led, what kind of horrors survived, before they brought order to their kind? How difficult was it to decide the rules—how much harder to implement them?

"Do you know why they chose us?" I asked.

Will understood. Were we special? Were we chosen? "No," he said. "As far as I can tell, they avoid changing people who are naturally violent or have any kind of mental instability." He didn"t look away from me when he said it. He knew that I"d been perfectly stable at the end of my human life. "The age range—I think it"s probably optimum for physical transformation, and I think people around those ages are more likely to be able to accept what"s happened."

"They"re breeding a healthy, stable, peaceful society for themselves," I said.

"I think so. I think they couldn"t stand being the only ones left. Or maybe, they were afraid that they weren"t the only ones left, that there were still those left in hiding who were eager to restart the wars and to make vampires everywhere they went."

"But there aren"t any of those left, are there?" I asked.

"I don"t think so. But who knows? When you"ve been alive for thousands of years, maybe you don"t mind waiting a few hundred for the time to be right to rise to power again."

Humphrey whimpered, and I went to fix a bottle. Will stayed in the living room with Humphrey, and as I poured the formula, I realized that even though we were a supposedly stable and peaceful (at least toward each other) culture, I wouldn"t leave any vampire but Will alone with Humphrey, not even for a minute.

Which is why when I heard a shriek from the living room, I was so shocked that I knocked everything over and ran to see what had happened.

Señor Elephant had been dropped to the ground. Will had set Humphrey on the couch to retrieve his elephant friend, and Humphrey was ticked about not being held anymore and was protesting loudly.

I didn"t walk any farther into the living room than that, just watched from the doorway as Will picked Humphrey back up, saying, "Sorry, dude. I had to save the elephant. There are dangerous predators in these parts."

Humphrey almost cooed in happiness, and I went back to the kitchen.