Roger nodded.
“You'll recall the author's remark that ‘the vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons ... it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refine-ment of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship.’ I'm not sure where Le Fanu obtained his information, but except for the word ‘murderous,’ he is accurate.
“I mention this,” Volnar continued, “to impress upon you the perils of such an association. If you want to comprehend what Sylvia experienced when her young pet was killed, imagine the discomfort you were enduring earlier tonight. And imagine, further, that it can be relieved by one donor, and only one. If that donor suddenly becomes permanently inaccessible—”
No wonder Sylvia had behaved irrationally at times! “Discomfort” must be a ludicrously mild word for what she had suf-fered. Roger wished he'd shown her more sympathy.
Volnar said, “There is another duty I must perform in order to function as your advisor. We need to establish a telepathic rap-port. It will be for instructional purposes, not quite the same as the bond you share with Sylvia.”
“Sorry, I don't quite understand,” said Roger.
“You have exchanged blood with her, haven't you?” Volnar asked. “She implied so to me.”
Roger had an uncomfortable feeling that the answer he had to give wasn't the one his advisor wanted. “Well—she let me drink from her.”
“Youdid reciprocate?”
“She tried that, but I wouldn't allow it.”
“Wouldn't allow—” Volnar was speechless for half a block, this time with anger. “Dark Powers! Have you any idea what you've done? No wonder she overindulged with that boy and got driven out of Boston! If you'd behaved with ordinary courtesy, she might still be there.”
“And all those victims of hers Sandor killed, hounding her across country—” Just what he needed, a fresh load of guilt.
“The custom of our people,” said Volnar icily, “to establish a bond between mentor and pupil, or to express affection, is amutual exchange of blood.”
“Then why didn't Sylvia tell me?” Roger lengthened his strides, wishing he could run away from Volnar's unpleasant truths. “It's hardly something I could be expected to figure out for myself.”
“Couldn't you?” said Volnar in a thoroughly unforgiving tone. “You've treated her like a victim—an inferior. I'm surprised she let it go on as long as she did. She must be fond of you; the Creator alone knows why. But she has too much pride to spell out what your presumed affection should lead you to do spontaneously.”
“Damn!” After a short silence Roger said defensively, “She might at least have been clearer about what it meant to her.” Again he recalled the one time he had tried to fulfill her wish. “No, that's dishonest. She practically begged, and we did attempt it—once. I couldn't go through with it.”
“Why not?”
“Feeling her—inside my brain—” Roger felt as if the memory were suffocating him.
“But that's the point of it. In such an exchange you can read the thoughts, share the sensations of your bonded partner, whether vampire or human.”
“Oh—then Stoker was right.”
“Yes. A single encounter will suffice for you and me. There's no time to explain verbally all you need to know about your nature, so I'll have to transmit the information by osmosis, so to speak.”
“What? You expect me to—” Well aware that he would be dominated in that exchange, Roger shrank from the thought of getting that close to the older vampire, even once.
“Why did you suppose I brought up the subject?” By now they had reached the hotel. In the second-floor corridor Volnar again made a brief visual, auditory, and mental scan of the area before unlocking his door. Inside, stale smoke pervaded the air despite the open window.
They sat in the twin armchairs and stared at each other for a moment. “I see you're going to be difficult,” said Volnar. “You deserve punishment for exploiting Sylvia, but that's not why I am insisting on the union.”
“I know—for my own good.”
Volnar ignored the sarcastic tone. “Aside from the fact that it's standard policy, it really is for your own good to overcome this reluctance. Without the bond, it would be practically impossible for me to teach you the skills you need. And I certainly couldn't do it in a single night, much less in the half hour or so we actually have. Also, there will be future occasions when you'll have use for this kind of rapport, so you shouldn't be afraid to initiate it.”
“I'm not afraid.” Roger settled more comfortably in the uninviting chair. The contentment of satiation was catching up with him. He wished Volnar would be quiet and let him rest.
“What word would you choose? Your inability to open to anyone, even in the most limited and controlled way, hints at paranoia—to an extent dysfunctional even for us.” Volnar's tone softened a degree. “Understandable, of course, in view of the iso-lation you've endured all your life.” His voice seemed to fade into the distance.
“Wake up!” Volnar snapped.
“I'm listening.”
“There are hours left until dawn,” Volnar said. “I suppose you don't sleep properly, either. Well, the sooner we get this over with, the sooner you can rest.”
Roger tensed, his drowsiness vanishing. “Right now?”
“The less time you have to brood on the prospect, the less you'll resist, and the easier it will be on you.”
Roger sifted through what Volnar had said in the last few minutes. “You mentioned conveying skills. Sylvia is convinced I can learn to shapechange, as she does. Can you—?”
“Teach you that?” Roger felt Volnar fingering the upper-most layers of his mind. After a moment of silence, Volnar said, “No, I sense no vestige of that ability in you. You must realize, as a hybrid you inevitably have certain limitations. On the other hand, in some ways you are more flexible, less vulnerable, than the rest of us. Now, we'll proceed with your initiation.”
Chapter 12
ROGER DIDN'T CARE for being shoved around like a chess piece, yet he found a certain security in the way Volnar projected an illusion of absolute control. “Very well, I'm ready.”At least, I know I'll never be any readier.
“If you'd grown up among our people, we'd have forged this bond as soon as you reached adolescence,” Volnar pointed out. “You are magnifying the process into something far more unpleasant than it is. I intend to show you at once—shock treatment, if you will—that what you consider the worst is nothing to fear.”
He stood up, looming above Roger. “I suggest you unbutton your collar.” Having done so, Roger gripped the arms of the chair, exerting all his self-control to keep from lashing out as Volnar bent over him. Fighting would be undignified as well as useless. He made up his mind to submit to this invasion—once.
Volnar touched his neck, then drew back. “You are making this unnecessarily difficult. If you don't relax, you are likely to feel pain. You do know how to relax?”
Roger unclenched his hands, exhaled a long breath, and deliberately forced the tension out of his muscles. Volnar leaned over him again and nipped his throat without further preparation. For an instant Roger felt as if he were being sucked down into a bottomless whirlpool. When he clutched Volnar's arms, the old vampire's hands clamped on his shoulders, immobilizing him. Roger tried to scream, but no sound came out. He felt the pressure of Volnar's mind bearing down on him. He couldn't fight that crushing weight. He deliberately went limp, physically and mentally.
As soon as he relaxed, he realized nothing but his own terror had produced that sensation of being drawn into the abyss. Volnar's touch proved to be as cold and remote as his speech. He drank briefly, and Roger felt no loss of energy.
“You appear to have survived that,” Volnar said dryly. “Now we reverse the process.” He rolled up his left sleeve. “If you prefer to take from the neck, I'll allow it.”
>
“This will be fine,” said Roger. The less intimacy, the better. He sank his teeth into Volnar's arm, wishing he could inflict pain on the other man, if only for a few seconds. But Volnar didn't recoil. Roger did not expect any tangible benefit from this exchange. The interspecies polarity that enabled human blood to nourish him was not present; there wasn't even the sexual polarity that had made drinking from Sylvia pleasant, if not precisely satisfying. Yet he did get something from the cool, alien flavor of Volnar's blood—a tantalizing sense of ancient power, hovering just beyond his reach, there for the taking if only he could imbibe enough.
When the old vampire would have pulled away, Roger grasped more tightly. Volnar allowed it for another minute or two. Underlying the coolness of Volnar's flesh and the metallic taste of his blood, Roger also sensed the heat of his own lips and tongue on Volnar's skin, the tickle of his breathing on the hairs of the other man's arm.
Impossible—I'm feeling through his senses.
He felt the top layer of Volnar's mental barricade drop. Inside his skull he felt his advisor's exploratory probe, like the fingers of a surgeon preparing to make an incision. Roger struggled to cast out the invader. He might as well have tried to uproot an oak tree.
Volnar's voice spoke inside his head: “Why do you fight? The bond is complete. Neither of us can break it.”
Roger felt a surge of vertigo. “Are you saying you'll be inside my brain forever?”
The ghost of a dry laugh. “Not at all. That would be equally distasteful to me. We can initiate and end communication at will, and in any case the rapport works only over short distances. A deeper union would require repeated exposure.” The tone of the mental voice hardened. “Now, brace yourself. This part will be strenuous for both of us.”
A tornado roared through Roger's head. He groped for an anchor, anything to help him stand against the whirlwind. He had no defense. It shattered his consciousness into a million fragments. Images crashed over him with the force of a tidal wave. Moonless nights, far from any human habitation, illuminated only by the haloes of living creatures’ auras. Flying on currents of air above mountain peaks barren except for snow-swept rock. Sprinting through a chill desert night to spring on a coyote and rip out its throat. Stalking through the darkness shrouded in the illusory forms of wolf, panther, giant bat. Gazing into the eyes of an entranced woman who begged to open her veins and share her life-essence. Not one woman, but hundreds. Blood, rivers and oceans of it. He was drowning—
The overbearing presence became fainter. Roger woke to awareness of his own thoughts. Scraps of information whirled in his brain like autumn leaves lashed by a hurricane. He opened his eyes, realizing that his lips were still pressed to Volnar's wrist.
Volnar pulled away. “That's more than enough. This is only a token exchange, remember?”
Dizzy and nauseated, Roger bowed his head on his hands. “Whatwas that?”
“As I explained, that was the only way I could convey everything you need to know quickly enough. An information dump, so to speak.”
“I don't know anything,” Roger muttered. “It's all—chaotic.”
Volnar laid a hand on his shoulder. “The confusion will pass quickly. The knowledge is lodged in your unconscious. The facts will sort themselves out, and when you need a piece of information, it will rise to the surface.”
“Telepathy,” Roger said. “Verbal transmission of thoughts. I don't believe it.” He leaned back against the chair, waiting for his head to stop spinning.
“You do have a habit of skepticism, don't you? Actually, for extended conversation, telepathy is less efficient than speaking aloud. However, in some situations it can be very useful.”
“I'm impressed,” Roger said. “I wish Sylvia had explained this to me.”
“Worth the ordeal?” said Volnar with a hint of derision.
“For once, yes.”
“Some gaps may remain. You can, of course, call me when you need further advice or clarification.” Volnar took a business card from his pocket and jotted several numbers on it.
Accepting the card, Roger noticed that the seasick feeling had almost vanished. “I can imagine what the psychological community would make of that—exchange. Especially the researchers who are already interested in extrasensory powers.” He thought of Britt, with a fleeting image of “initiating” her into a telepathic bond.If I think that's a good idea, I really am out of my mind. "Listen, Volnar, the age of superstition is long gone. Why don't you people declare yourselves to the scientific com-munity? Your species and the human race could share infor-mation that would benefit all of us.”
“I'm astonished at your naivete.” Volnar paced to the window, turned, folded his arms, and glared down at Roger. “Do you seriously believe the human authorities—no matter what a few scientists might recommend—would react well to a group of nearly immortal predators in their midst? How many ordinary people would relish the idea of donating their blood to sustain ‘monsters'?”
“Surely it wouldn't have to be like that, not with proper preparation and—well, public relations work.”
“Public relations experts can accomplish only so much against primal fears. Do you want to spend your life on a reservation? The American Indians haven't fared very well in that arrangement, have they?” When Roger tried to speak up, Volnar overrode him. “More likely, we'd be locked in zoos, or worse, laboratories. Those who weren't exterminated on sight.”
“I find that hard to imagine, not with the current attitude toward endangered species. Many natural predators are admired nowadays—killer whales, Siberian tigers, timber wolves—”
“May enjoy the protection of what some people derisively call ‘tree-huggers.’ The whales, tigers, and wolves, if they could talk, would doubtless take a dim view of their situation nevertheless.”
“Is this why you objected to my reporting Sandor to the police?”
“Objected? Young man, no vampire in his senses would have considered doing what you did. If Sandor is caught and examined, or worse yet killed and dissected, the survival of our whole race would be jeopardized. That's far more important than the premature deaths of a few ephemerals.”
“Damn it, Volnar, I can't accept that!” Roger leaped to his feet. “I will not dismiss human beings as—as game animals. I willnot be like you.”
Volnar shut him up with a cold stare. “I mentioned that I was your mother's advisor. Therefore I was bonded with her and shared her death.”
“Then why the hell didn't you stop it?”
“Had I not been hundreds of miles away at the time, I would have.” Volnar's mind locked onto Roger's....
Roger found himself in the cellar of a nineteenth-century stone house on the outskirts of a small French village. That fact seeped into his consciousness as background information, while in the foreground his thoughts were submerged in those of a wo-man lying on a wide bed covered with sheets of white linen, in a paneled room of that cellar. He shared the panicked racing of the woman's heart as the fog of sleep cleared from her eyes.
A man holding a kerosene lamp stood over her. “Wake up, Claudette! For God's sake, you must—” He spoke in French, which Roger understood without being fully aware of the translation process.
Claudette sprang up and grabbed the man's arm. As her nails dug into the skin, the man winced but did not pull away. “What is it, Raoul?”
Raoul's aura radiated barely suppressed terror, punctuated by the smell of fear on his damp flesh. “They're breaking in—they'll kill you.”
Tossing her hair back from her face, Claudette released the man's arm and smoothed the rumpled robe she had slept in. “It's you I'm afraid for, my love. Our kind take a lot of killing.” A sullen mutter, swelling to a low roar, assaulted her ears from the floor above. “If you stay here while I confront them, they may not find you.”
“Don't be absurd!” Anger flared up in Raoul, blotting out his fear.
The vision blurred, then re-formed in a parlor overstuffed w
ith an eclectic mix of furniture and knickknacks from the Empire period on, which Claudette's eyes darted over unseeing, as familiar background details. Men brandishing a variety of weapons—some makeshift, such as hatchets, some on the level of the World War I cavalry sword an old man in a corner held in anen garde posture—clustered around Claudette and Raoul. A boy who looked barely twenty trained a shotgun on the woman. Claudette felt suffocated by the stink of terror and hate.
Her husband flung himself upon the boy with the gun. “Raoul, no!” Claudette shrieked. The blast ripped through Raoul's chest. The pain seared Claudette's flesh as well. An instant later it ceased, chopped off with the cutting of the link that bound her to her mate. She saw, rather than felt, the ax blade that severed Raoul's head.
She fell off a precipice into a black abyss, into an unnatural darkness her night vision could not pierce. Only the scent of her lover's blood, already cooling in death, wrenched her back to the crowded room. A dozen hands closed on her flailing limbs. She fought with all her inhuman strength, her teeth and claws gouging any flesh that came within reach. The taste of blood scorched her mouth. She howled like a rabid wolf, heedless of revealing her inhumanity.
But no matter how many she felled, they kept coming. At last she lay flat on her back, each arm and leg pinned by three or four assailants. The old man with the sword thrust a crucifix into her face. Baring her teeth, she snarled at him. A muscular fellow loomed over her. Almost before her eyes focused on it, the stake plunged between her breasts.
She felt every centimeter of the agony that tore through skin and cartilage to puncture her heart. And still she remained conscious, keening her anguish, to watch the sword sweep down. Its edge, dulled by time, lacerated her neck but did not bisect the spine. She felt the killers’ horror when her eyes continued to stare up at them, and tortured ululations gurgled in her throat. She smelled smoke just before a hatchet extinguished awareness with her life....
Roger struggled back to the present as if swimming against twenty-foot surf. Volnar's mind still lay wide open to him. A rush of agony, centuries, millennia of it, washed over him before Volnar slammed the gates shut.
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