Rachel Caine & Kristin Cast & Claudia Gray & Nancy Holder & Tanith Lee & Richelle Mead & Cynthia Leitich Smith & P. C. Cast (13 page)

He was unmistakable!

I felt I should have known he'd be here, been
warned
. Maybe I took my ignorance too much to heart.

Yet my—almost
outrage
—made me linger after all. None of the rest of them, it seemed, could figure him out, and put their fascination down only to his looks. I had to assume too that now and then, if only after dark, he had been spotted in everyday garb where, frankly, even if his hair
was
tied back, and he wore jeans and a baseball cap to advertize the Chakhatti Arrows, he would stick out like an eagle in an aviary of pigeons.

I am not ashamed of what I next did. I felt it was my right and duty. If everyone else was blind, I wasn't. Oh, I'm nothing so gallant as a vampire-slayer, not me. Sorry if you hoped that was the next bit. No, I am just a nosy eighteen-year-old woman who sometimes—okay
often
(thank you, Dad)—takes herself a tad too seriously, and who
hates
to be beaten once she wakes up to a challenge. So, well . . . Reader, I
followed
him.

Back on the glacial dance floor a thousand feet pounced, pranced, and stumbled, and the band played and the chandeliers shone.

And I slid like a panther, all right a
white
one, through the mob, spying on wicked Mr. Anghel whose second name no one seemed to know. (I had asked again, here and there, about him.)

First off he danced a waltz with a dazzled girl, who almost swooned and then was non-swooning and dis-dazzled when he abandoned her for another. (Later in the evening I came across knots of unsettled young women fuming or sighing or even sobbing—or plotting how to lure him back.)

He went through about ten girls in ten dances. He was picky, wasn't he? Of course, his partners, did they but know, were better off
not
being the selected maiden for the night's feast.

I did note he could dance stunningly well. Wondered briefly if he'd be as good in a club, decided he would be, as the vampire kind are simply wired to move well, in whatever context. It comes with the territory.

He never actually spotted
me
. I took care he didn't. I've said I'm pretty brilliant at seeming to be there when I'm not. I'm pretty good at doing the reverse too. But now and then he glanced around, looking for a split second slightly uneasy. He was A Vampire. He realized that
someone
was on his track. But I could see too he didn't truly reckon anyone was or could be. His madly
apparent
vampiricness was the
camouflage. He was like an actor in the
rôle
of The Vampire. He
wants
to convince he is exactly that. The true vampire would cut his hair, dress in rags, and keep in the shadows.

All this anyhow, he center stage, me stalking unseen, went on for about two hours.

Then,
he found her
.

I was startled, and then less so. She was completely loud in clothes and make-up, with gold neon for hair. Quite pretty but mainly like a flag. The ideal choice. She thought she was the Star of the Night. She had convinced a lot of other people too that she was. Few therefore would doubt
he
thought so.

The target of some, by now, seventy-odd distracted jealousies, he drew her smoothly off the floor, and next they melted away onto another flight of watery stairs, and so down and out and in between the velvet curtains of the night.

It was rather more challenging hunting them now, in all my white shimmer, for the dark was
dark
even if a half moon was rising on the lake. Yet here too, I could hide. A slant of moonlight through the shrubs, a blond deer slipping from tree to tree—a trick of the eyes. That was me. (I'd better own up. Anthony taught me these skills, though I did have natural talent.)

He and she were fairly unoriginal in their choice of resting place, but then, I suppose, if you have a vast lake like a polished silver tray, and everywhere else the backdrop of
darkness, you simply
have
to perch the edges of both. Which means, presumably, Anghel The Vampire was a romantic? He must have bought into his own legend in a big way.

I watched them a while, as they sat on a bench at the brim of the water. They talked, he speaking low and she . . . well, she had a kind of high and penetrating voice. “Oh, wow!” she kept saying, and, “What did you do then?” I could catch his words too—my hearing is fine—but they sounded like sort of movie dialogue. Quite
good
movie dialogue, but. He was telling her about his harsh life, and the novel he wanted to write, and sometimes he quoted a little poetry (Byron, Keats), and though when most guys do that they come over as truly useless, when he did it, it was quite impressive. But it was all a show, a sham. It was him being The Vampire, in the movie
rôle
he had invented, and for which he'd coined this well-written script.

I wondered if he even made himself sleep, by day, in some sort of
tomb
. If so, probably a really comfortable one, with a crystal goblet of bottled water on the side. . . .

And then, quite abruptly, for somehow—even knowing it had to—I hadn't foreseen exactly when it would happen, he was bending toward her.

I thought,
Is she honestly so dumb she thinks this is just going to be a kiss?

Sure. The idea of vampires
is
romantic. But not when you actually think about what they do. They bite you. Which, if that wasn't what you wanted, or expected, is an
assault
in anyone's book. And then—they steal your blood. Because again, unless you genuinely desire to nourish them in this
way, it's
theft
. So what do those two procedures demonstrate a vampire to be? Shall I say: A mugger.

When he moved, so did I. I darted forward and burst out on them, white as vanilla ice cream. I made my voice even higher and more piercing than hers—which took some doing.

“Oh, hi! Am I
interrupting
?
Sorry!
But I'm just completely
lost
—and this is such a HUGE place, isn't it? Oh, do you mind if I sit down on your bench? I've been wandering around for over an hour. I mean, where
is
that castle? You wouldn't think, would you, you could lose a place that HUGE, but—” and down I flopped, with the sigh of a woman who just is not going to move for a while.

They were both gaping at me. She looked furious too. He, more as if he had just gotten the answer to a question that had been bothering him for hours. I had no doubt the answer was:
Yes! This plaster-of-Paris person is the one who was following me!

I let a few moments pass, but neither she nor he spoke. Anyone else but the character I pretended to be would have grasped, however miles-thick they were, that
monsieur et mademoiselle
wished to be
left alone
.

Not I.

“What
ever
do you think of the ball?” I sparkled at them. “Isn't it too divine?”

“Then why,” he said, in a low, dark,
awful
tone, “don't you go back to it?”

I'd tempted him from cover.

“I just said, you see,” I replied, “I'm lost.”

“I doubt that,” he said. “If you walk up that path there, the path you just came down, I guess, you can see the house. You can't
miss
the house.”

“Oh, really?” I gasped, and right then the neon girl clutched his arm, so for a second he scowled at her. She was in fact too thick herself to realize how terrible this scowl was. She said angrily, “Come on, Ang” (she pronounced that to rhyme with
hang
) “let's just get outta here.”

And this was when the stag came shouldering from the woods about twenty feet away along the shore, noiseless and then
extremely
noisy, as branches went rushing and snapping out of the way of its great-antlered head, lit silver by the moonlight. Its eyes flashed electric green—and it bellowed.

That sound, from far off, had been devastating. Being close to it could cause total panic. I'd hoped so anyhow, when I was mentally coaxing the stag—that is,
one
of the stags—to come find us by the lake. This first-class animal had obliged. Neon spurted to her feet. Her eyes—her hair—had gone insane. She shrieked—and
ran
. She left us, him too, and bolted away, around the water and then off into the woods.

He, of course, didn't move.

Nor did I.

The stag though snorted down its gorgeous Roman nose, pawed the grass once as if to say,
You owe me, Lel
, then turned and sauntered back among the shadows.

He
spoke once more.

“So you can do that too.”

“Excuse me?”

He sighed deeply, stood up, and turned his elegant black velvet back to me. His black hair swung. “This is set in concrete then,” he said. “You are to be my downfall.”

“Er,” I fluted, “my name's Lel.”

“Let's not play games. I know you judged me at once, in the house. So, Lel. When do the heavies arrive?”

He had set his baleful eyes on me again. To my annoyance I found I wasn't ready for them. I should have been, shouldn't I. I wasn't a complete dope, like Neon.

“Why don't you sit down,” I said.

“And let's talk it over? Very well.”

But he stood there. Right next to me. I found too I was uncomfortably over-aware of him, but I should have been able to cope with that, because I already
knew
the power he had, and in my case, prepared as I was, that power really could not and would not be having an effect.

For quite a while then, we stayed, in silence.

The moon silvered the lake, shining it up like an old dollar.

Finally I glanced sidelong at him. He looked magnificently and broodingly sad. Then, just sad. Like a child whose dog died, and he never forgot, even ten years later, the way you
don't
ever forget the ones you love. Things like that.

“Shall I tell you how I came to be—how I got like I am?”

This was what he eventually said. I'd already heard most of what I took to be his “line.” Obviously nothing to do with
vampires, but ancient feuds and some curse of his “ancestors” he hadn't believed. He had been born on the borders of France, in a mountain region. His family were aristocrats who had lost everything way back in the 1790s. He had escaped them, and now lived in one room, out here in Chakhatti (the sticks), an impoverished writer who worked nights waiting tables and pumping gas. But of course this mixture of Vampire Angst and modern day necessity was all baloney (as Dad might say).

I hazarded a guess. “Your family is well off, something in big business maybe. They live here and you were born here. You were also well-educated, went to a top grade college—but left on discovering your true . . . how shall I say, vocation? Your family meanwhile still support you financially, because you tell them you are teaching yourself to be a writer.”