Rachel Caine & Kristin Cast & Claudia Gray & Nancy Holder & Tanith Lee & Richelle Mead & Cynthia Leitich Smith & P. C. Cast (14 page)

He threw me a swift glare. “Not bad. Actually I received a legacy—enough money to survive. That was from an aunt of mine. They always thought she was crazy, but she was—what
I
am. She was—”

“A vampire,” I said.

“I have to assume,” he said, flexing his hands (perhaps practicing how he would strangle me), “you don't believe vampires exist. That is, in the mythic sense. You just imagine I'm dangerous.”

“Wrong again. I know true vampires are quite real. And I know, Mr. Anghel, you belong firmly among them.”

“Usually people dismiss my
interests
as . . . a fantasy.”

I gazed hard at the lake. He was much too distracting.

“The only thing that's a fantasy here,” I answered, pleased at my own crisp tone, “is your total misunderstanding of what
being
a vampire entails.”

“Some secret society—a code known only to the few—” he solemnly said.

“No. Frankly, the opposite,” He had turned and I felt him stare at me. It was compelling but I didn't allow myself to react. To the lake alone I added, “You need to talk to someone. If you're as messed up as I think you are, you need some
help
.”

He gave a bitter, quite violent laugh.

“Sure. You mean a shrink.”

“You need,” I continued, “to speak to my father.”

“Your—your
what
?”

“Father.” I opened the tiny white glitzy evening purse I'd been given, and pulled out one of Anthony's cards, and handed it to him.

He stared at that, now.

“This is some joke, right?”

“No joke, Mr. Anghel—”

“Will you quit that
Mister
stuff—how fucking old do you think I am?”

“You could be a thousand. But no joke. This is for real. If you prefer, I can start you off on the road to redemption by just asking you nine straight questions. All
you
need do is reply, and be honest.”

Finally our eyes met.

I thought—well. I thought in one big golden blank. To my relief my voice came out again, not in a husky squeak,
but crisp now as very dry toast. I was at my most business-like, and that was how I asked those nine questions.

“First question: Do you reflect in mirrors or reflective surfaces?”

“I don't look anymore. Obviously I don't. I'm undead. My soul—or whatever—that's gone. So, no reflection. The night I realized I threw any mirrors away. And yes, I've learned to shave by touch. I'm good at that, dexterous. It seems to be part of what I am, what I can do, now. The same as I can seem to vanish, even on an empty sidewalk . . . that kind of thing.”

“Okay. Second question. Do you go out by day?”

“
You are kidding me
. What do
you
think? Do I look like a case from a burns unit? Yeah, I did once make a mistake. Last winter. I was walking around in broad daylight for one half hour. I was blistered so bad, even inside my clothes, I had to hide for three nights. My
skin
, bits of it, fell off in patches. No. I
don't
go out in sunlight. Sunset is dawn for my kind.”

“Question three: How old
are
you?”

“Twenty-two this fall. Next week in fact. I suppose I'll live forever, but I only got started on this
thing
about sixteen months ago.”

“Question four—”

“Wait a minute—”

“Question four—” I paused, but he didn't interrupt again. Just looked. With his sorrowful dark eyes. “Do you take and drink human blood? Is that your food?”

“Yes. You know that already. That was what you broke up back there. Me, trying to take and drink and feed on
blood
.”

“Question five.” (He sighed. Nothing else.) “Do you otherwise eat and drink?”

“No. Oh, water's okay—a glass of wine. Even a beer or a coke. Fluids seem to digest. I don't risk anything else.”

“So your last meal was—”

“Sixteen months ago. I threw it right up.”

“So blood is your only sustenance. Which leads us to question six: How often do you do this?”

“Once a week. Roughly. I can go a month without, if I have to. But if I don't it's—all I can think of.”

“Rather like partying with a so-called recreational drug, yes?”

“I wouldn't know,” he said icily. “I never tried those.”

“Fine. Question seven: Do you shape-shift? I mean, can you seem to become another thing, an animal say, or even an inanimate object?”

“Yes.” (He sounded almost embarrassed, as if he boasted and hadn't wanted to.) “A wolf. Mostly. But once I—I kind of made myself kind of like a phone booth.”

I couldn't help it. I burst out laughing. “Did anyone try to—get inside and
make a call
?”

He grinned.

Oh. The grin was beautiful too.

“Yeah. But the door stayed shut.”

I pulled us back to grim reality.

“Question eight: Ever killed anyone, Anghel?”

“My God—no.
No
. I don't—I'm careful. It's bad enough being—what I am. I don't want to be a murderer as well.”

We were both standing up now. I wasn't sure when I did.

I said, “Question nine, then. And this is the last one. How did you find out you'd become a vampire?”

“How did I—? Look, I'd had suspicions before that we—my family—had the gene for it. I suppose it
is
a gene. Like some families having the gene for red hair, or a particular allergy. . . . I know how it is in books, movies. Someone does it to you, takes your blood and makes you a vampire, just like they are. It didn't happen that way. I said my aunt—I came to realize she was—she was a vampire. She'd just seemed to think she was mad. Everybody put everything weird about her down to that—avoiding sunlight, not eating, that stuff. By the time I connected it all up, she'd been dead two years. And she had left me the legacy. Like she knew I would be the same. So I put it together. I still didn't believe it at first. I said, I want—
wanted
to be a writer. So I started to
write
about it, about my life if I had been, if I
was
, a vampire. I was trying to sort it out.

“Then I met a girl at some party in Manhattan. And she'd read a story of mine, a pretty lurid one, in some magazine and she—she wanted to act it out with me. Scared me. But when I'm scared—then sometimes I have to do it. Prove to myself I can. So, we did. I didn't hurt her. It's important to me you understand that. She loved every minute, and I had a real difficult time putting her off after. But for me—something changed. Something changed when I took the blood. It
was—” he hesitated, looking out at the lake and the moon—“it was like finding something in your own self,
meeting
who you really are—and I wasn't who I'd ever thought. And I was—not better—but I
fit
. And when I went out of the apartment, everything—the street, the city . . . it was
alive
, and I was
alive
, in a way it and I had never been, not until then. Do you begin to see? I can't explain it. I can write with words, use them, make them work. But with this, I can't
find
the words. It was like I'd walked out—not of a room, but of a dark
cave
. My whole world had only
been
a cave—but now the lights were on and the true world was there all around me, and inside me, forever.

“So I've answered all your questions, and now I guess your wonderful father and his men arrive and finish me off. Right, Lel? That name on the card though, that's a lie, isn't it? Only one thing puzzles me. Shouldn't it read ‘Anthony
Van Helsing
'?”

I shook my head. “
Oh
no, it surely should not. That name on the card is a family name. It's mine too.”

He looked quizzical. Sad and quizzical and courageous, all ready to meet some horrible bloodthirsty anti-vampire end of sharpened stakes and villagers with flaming torches ready to burn him alive.

It must have been that that made me feel protective, and want to put my arms around him.

But anyhow that was when he laughed again, a very different silky, inky laugh—and then he was gone. There instead stood a great black wolf, the height of a mastiff dog, with eyes like rubies. The wolf too seemed to be laughing.
But the next second it sprang away, and dove along the lake shore and into the trees.

And
my
next move? I stood there cursing myself.

I knew he wasn't headed for the house, or the town. He had vanished not only from his human shape but out of the life of anyone who'd recently known him. Though everything he said, I was certain, was honest and true, with my artful, smug little plans I'd cornered him, and blown the whole thing. I'd lost him. And worse than that, I had lost him also his own chance of living free and safe in this mad world he had only properly come to see sixteen months before. Oh, Lel. Clever, cunning, know-it-all, stupid, dumb damn Lel.

My father is a physician. He deals with sickness of the psyche and the mind. He has endlessly various patients. He is
good
.

He went into this line of work, as he would be the first to say, because he had already cured both himself, and another member of his family, of a pretty dire life-destructive mental illness. His name, which is real enough, is quite a talking point, but he's found, as I have on the whole, it causes startled amusement rather than giving anything away. It's like that thing about camouflage I mentioned earlier.

Vampirism isn't a disease. It isn't a possession or an evil spell or the devil's work.
It's a way of evolving
. Because the human race did and does evolve. Superman, Batman—they're already around out there. If they keep a low profile, do you
blame
them? A vampire, or what's come to be called
a vampire (the word seems to come from ancient Turkey, and means something like
magician
), is just one more variety of this evolving super-race, the one we watch on screen and read about in books, but which most of us seldom think may just have sat there next to us on the subway.

Vampires are this: They grow up but stay young for a very long while (centuries sometimes). They don't need food or drink, though they
can
eat and drink a little, if they want. Taking another person's blood can bring out awareness of themselves and what they are. But that is only because they have already bought into the idea. That is, they
think
it will, so it does. And in fact where they can come to awareness of the truth
without
assault and robbery, they come to it better and more fully, and with far less damage to themselves. Put it this way: They only go after that blood because they have the notion they are, on some level, vampires. So taking the blood isn't needed. What
is
needed is just facing up to the facts.

Feeding on or drinking blood is—
redundant
. People are
not
the allotted prey, and blood is
not
the essential food.
No vampire on Earth has to have blood
. Just as they don't have to have ordinary food or fluid either. So the Blood Feast made so popular in stories only has value (if that is the right word) in sometimes shocking them into focus for themselves. And believe me, it also hurts them on some deep level too. If you aren't a vampire, though, grabbing blood won't do a darn thing for you. I mean you won't be able to shape-shift or apparently disappear, let alone live to three hundred and forty-nine. Oh, and no vampire can turn anyone else into
one by taking their blood. Unless, of course, they already
were
one to start with.

So, the meaning of blood for vampires is basically a misunderstanding. It has nothing to do with drink or food, with goblets and dishes and the dining table of the world. It is blood
lines
—it's
genes
—as Anghel said. And if you've gotten that gene, you have it. You are a vampire, a Being of the Blood. And one day you'll wake up, and
know
, even if it takes till you're fifty and you look in a mirror (yes, I did say mirror) and think—
I only look twenty-two still. How can this be?