Dark Changeling

by Margaret Carter

  “I haven't,” she said. “If I come across any, you'll be the first to know. Must we talk about this all the time? What do you think about getting tickets to the Colonial Players’ performance ofPygmalion next weekend?”

  Roger's pleasure at the thought of Liza Doolittle and Henry Higgins quickly yielded to anxiety. “I don't know whether going out at night would be wise. We can be sure he's watching you—”

  Britt leaped to her feet and flung her napkin down on the table. “There you go again! I will not put up with this! I have no intention of living the rest of my life under house arrest!”

  Roger hurried around the table to grab her by the arms. She stiffened and shoved at him. He let go, appalled at his own roughness. “Confound it, Britt, I don't want that! I'm simply asking you to exercise ordinary caution.”

  Unmollified, she glared at him, her chest heaving. “It's more than that—and I want it nipped in the bud right now. You do not own me.”

  Did his concern come across that way? “I could never think that. If I've given that impression, forgive me.” He noted a slight relaxation of the tight line of her lips. “If you want to go to the play, we'll go.” Relenting, Britt nestled into his embrace. Lavishing kisses on her, he thought,This can't go on. How much of this can our relationship stand?

  * * * *

  THE NEXT MURDER victim discovered was a thirty-six-year-old real estate agent in Glen Burnie, up Route Two near Baltimore. Her husband had called hospitals and police, worried when she hadn't come home after showing a house one evening. The woman's body turned up the next morning in a dumpster behind a Seven-Eleven. Her car had vanished. According to Lieutenant Hayes, so had her automatic teller card, which had been used to withdraw the maximum allowable cash within a few hours of her death.Devious bastard , Roger thought.Must have hypnotized her PIN out of her before he drained her.

  The same day, Roger received a letter in a plain white envelope, no return address, postmarked Washington. With no salutation, date, or signature, it read, “How do you like the waiting? How does it feel to wake up every day wondering if I've taken somebody close to you again? Don't worry, I'll get back to that—when I'm good and ready. Don't know about you, Doc, but I'm having a great time. After I've had my fun, we'll get together.”

  True to his vow of honesty, Roger showed the note to Britt before destroying it. They discussed it in the car Friday night on the way home to Roger's place after thePygmalion performance. “What do you think he means by ‘get together'?” she mused. “A final confrontation, winner take all? Or does he still think he can persuade you to join him?”

  “Does it matter?” Roger said. “If I meet him again, I'll do my best to destroy him.” That resolve still held a dreamlike quality. Roger couldn't visualize himself committing premeditated homicide, even in a just cause.

  When he parked the car and opened the door for Britt, his eyes involuntarily flickered toward the woods behind the house. No hint of movement, no prickling sensation of being watched. Checking for those signs had become automatic.

  Inside, he scarcely gave Britt time to hang up her coat before drawing her into his arms. “Standing up in the foyer?” she murmured, molding her body to his.

  “Certainly not.” He rubbed his cheek against her hair, savoring its fragrance. “I just need to hold you for a minute.” He released his pent-up anxiety in a long sigh. Her blood-heat and the glow of her aura soothed and refreshed him. “Oh, God, you feel sogood. I wait all week for this.”

  “It feels great to me, too.” She rubbed her hands up and down his back. “This weekend-only restriction was your idea. I'd love to—”

  “Absolutely not.” Reluctantly he pulled out of her embrace. “If I didn't put some restrictions on myself, I'd never be able to keep my hands—et cetera—off you. Come sit down for a while.”

  He poured sherry for both of them and left Britt in the living room while he detoured into the study for a velvet-covered box he'd picked up at a jeweler's that afternoon. Her eyebrows arched in surprise when he placed the box in her hand. “What's the occasion?”

  “Must there be one? Open it.”

  She flipped up the lid. Her eyes widened at the sight of the gold chain from which hung a cross set with emeralds. She lifted the necklace out of its box and let it dangle from her fingers, glittering in the muted glow of the lamp at the end of the couch. “Colleague, you make me feel like a kept woman.” She wasn't entirely joking.

  “No one could mistake a successful psychiatrist for a kept woman.” He took the delicate chain from her. “Allow me.”

  She gazed down at the necklace as he fastened it around her neck. “Seriously, Roger, expensive gifts make me uncomfortable.”

  “It's part of a long-term strategy,” he said, hoping to lighten her mood. “Next I intend to take you shopping to replace that rattletrap you drive.”

  She flashed a smile. “It's a deal. But this is a whole different order of—” She fingered the cross. “Real emeralds.”

  “Certainly. To match your eyes, nothing less.” He cut her off before she could protest the compliment. “Dear colleague, I enjoy giving you things. Why deny me the pleasure? Besides, this has a practical purpose.”

  “A jeweled cross? I can't wait to hear it.”

  “I'm hoping this is one form of protection you'll accept.”

  “Oh—I think I see.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You saw how Sandor feared my crucifix—feared it so much that it burned his skin. If you'll promise to wear this at all times, I'll worry about you a little less.”

  “Fine. Anything to mitigate your worrywart tendencies.” She kissed him lightly, drawing back before he could deepen the embrace. “Now, how about some more biofeedback practice?”

  Britt had proved an apt pupil in controlling her autonomic functions, and she never passed up an opportunity for drill in the technique. “Are you sure you aren't too tired?” Roger said.

  “Nice try. Do you expect me to believe that if we went to bed, you'd let me sleep?”

  He blushed at her teasing. He knew she sensed his eagerness to drink from her, after abstaining all week. “All right, let's practice.”

  Britt slipped off the couch to lie face up on the carpet, her arms limp at her sides. She closed her eyes and took long, deep breaths. Sitting beside her on the floor, Roger lightly touched the center of her forehead. He slowly counted backward from ten. By the time he reached “one,” she had sunk into trance.

  He dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “Britt, I want you to decrease your heart rate by ten beats per minute. Begin now.” He silently counted seconds until she'd carried out the command. In less than fifteen seconds she had reached the goal. “Excellent. Now, concentrate on your left hand. Drop the surface temperature of the skin. Very good.” He saw her left hand turning paler by the second. Touching her fingers, he felt their coolness, compared to the rest of her body. “That's right. Now I want you to dilate the capillaries and make your hand warm up again.”

  Watching the immediate result of his suggestion, he marveled at how quickly she'd picked up these techniques. He wondered whether she could learn to suppress pain and bleeding, as he did. He hadn't thought of a way to instruct her in that skill, since he certainly couldn't inflict pain on her for didactic purposes. After they'd run through several more exercises, he counted up to ten to bring her out of the alpha state to normal consciousness.

  She sat up and stretched her arms, wiggling her fingers. “I can't get over how great I feel after these sessions.” She remembered every detail of the training; Roger kept his word never to blur her memory. “I just wish I could do half so well when I'm fully awake.”

  “That will come with practice,” Roger said. He sat back against the couch, putting an arm around her, and she laid her head on his shoulder.

  “What I really want to learn is your empathic perception. Think how much more efficiently I could treat my patients if I could read emotions the way you do.”

  “We'd
have to work on that in public, around other people,” said Roger. “I'm not sure how we'd manage it.”

  “You'll think of something.”

  “One thing we do have to practice in crowds, no matter what the difficulties,” he said. “You must develop enough clairvoyance to know when you're being watched—for your own protection. Fortunately, that's something most people have a touch of anyway.”

  “But not like you,” she said wistfully. “You know, I could really start envying those powers of yours. Invisibility must be a terrific asset sometimes.”

  She'd been awestruck when he'd demonstrated his ability to cast a psychic veil over himself. “I wouldn't know,” he said, nuzzling the tender spot behind her ear. “I've hardly ever used it in any practical context.”

  “Stop that,” she said. “I've just thought of something.” She cupped the emerald cross in the palm of her right hand and touched his lips with the index finger of her left hand. “Draw some blood for me.”

  His tongue flicked her finger. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Unless you want me to go get a sterilized needle. Look, this psychic link between us is a real entity in some sense, isn't it? I want to—well, objectify it.”

  Still puzzled, Roger nipped her fingertip. She allowed him to lick a single drop before she touched the center of the cross and dabbed it with her blood. Then she clasped his hand. “Now you.”

  Realizing what she had in mind, he bit his own finger and anointed the cross with a token drop of his blood. “You see,” Britt said, “now it's not just a piece of jewelry you bought. It contains a part of both of us. If psychic emanations stick to material objects, it's carrying a charge.”

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” he said, lifting her hand to his lips to taste the blood welling from the tiny cut. “I don't know whether that's objectively true or sentimental drivel, but it can't hurt.” Seized by a sudden rush of desire, he enfolded her in his arms and kissed her with ravenous intensity. When they came up for air, he said unsteadily, “I'm almost glad you're going out of town Thanksgiving week. The break will be good for us. I want you—so terribly—God, sometimes I'm afraid I'll devour you!”

  “Didn't I tell you to trust yourself?” She tilted her head, gazing into his eyes. “I've made you hungry, haven't I?”

  “How did you guess, colleague?”

  Laughing softly, she said, “Then I'd better do something about it.”

  * * * *

  TWENTY YEARS ago I'd have been trying to “cure” him,Roger thought, watching his last patient preparing to leave at noon on the day before Thanksgiving. Now psychotherapists no longer classified homosexuality as an illness, and Roger's job was to help the young man live with his situation. Lately the patient had been wrestling with the problem of whether to reveal the truth to his parents. Recalling how difficult it had been to conceal his true nature from Britt, Roger sympathized.

  “See you next Wednesday, Doctor,” said the patient on the way out. “Too chilly for golf today?”

  Roger summoned up a dutiful smile for the feeble joke. He didn't use his Wednesday afternoons for anything except catching up on sleep. Not that he expected to rest very well, as tense as he was with Britt visiting her sister in southern California. Sunday evening Britt would come home, thank Heaven. Only four more empty nights. He exchanged an automatic “Happy Thanksgiving” with the patient and prepared to lock up.Happy? Not without Britt.

  Adrift in his reverie, Roger turned with a start when Marcia stepped up behind him to say goodbye. “Good afternoon,” he said curtly, hoping his jumpiness didn't show too much. The frustration of Britt's absence made him short-tempered.

  And I thought the separation would be good for us!Good for her, at any rate. Driving through the glaringly bright November afternoon, he smiled at the memory of how Britt had fought his suggestion that she was becoming borderline anemic. She hadn't trusted Roger's perception of the altered taste of her blood and the shade of her aura. Finally they'd borrowed a friend's lab equipment to test her hematocrit, and she'd had to concede.

  Aside from considerations of her physical health, the perspective of distance could only benefit their relationship. He hadn't mentioned one more factor, that he felt relieved to have her out of Sandor's range, if only temporarily.

  However, he had taken too lightly the problem of lengthy abstinence. Of course he had gone without human blood for two weeks on many past occasions—but those had been before he'd become conditioned to feeding every weekend.

  And before he'd learned what real satisfaction could be! Knowing what he was missing made hunger doubly acute. Despite his fatigue and the eyestrain caused by the sun's glare on the Severn, he felt an erotic frisson at the memory of his last night with Britt, the Friday before

  Something else he'd overlooked, he reflected as he turned right on the Severna Park side of the bridge, was how strongly he'd come to depend on Brittbetween weekends. Daily contact with her fed his psychic hunger, equally as important as the physical need. During her vacation they had talked on the telephone several times. Hearing her voice without feeling the touch of her mind frustrated him almost beyond bearing—but not enough to make him give up that tenuous contact.

  Four more nights. I can stand anything that long.

  At home he took a quarter pound of ground sirloin out of the refrigerator and blended it with undiluted canned beef broth. He'd run out of frozen blood and would have to stock up at a butcher shop in Baltimore or Washington soon. He sat in the dim living room to drink his concoction, grimacing at the flat taste.

  I'll have to hunt again tonight.He'd fed on live animals every night from Sunday on, and the craving had rebounded sooner and harder each time.

  No doubt about it, I'm thoroughly spoiled. He chugged the rest of the drink. Maybe he could manage a decent few hours of sleep before sunset. More likely, he'd suffer through famished dreams of Britt all afternoon.

  Just as he was turning the bed covers down, the phone rang. Stifling a curse, he made himself answer in a politely neutral tone.

  “Dr. Darvell, this is Anna Kovak. Alice—I don't know what's gotten into her—she locked herself in, and she says—” Roger heard the woman swallowing sobs between phrases.

  Oh, Lord, not Alice again!Over the past month, Roger had convinced himself he'd noted signs of improvement in her depression. “Slow down, please, Mrs. Kovak, and try to speak calmly. What is Alice doing right now?”

  A voice in the background rumbled, “Let me talk to him, why dontcha?”

  Mrs. Kovak said, “No, no, I can explain it to him. Doctor, Alice is locked in her bedroom with my bottle of Valium. She took one pill, and she said—she says she'll take them all if we try to get in. She won't talk to anybody but you.”

  The background voice, who Roger suspected was Alice's father, put in, “Knew that shrink would be a waste of money.”

  Mrs. Kovak, her voice shrill but controlled, said, “Can you come over right away, Doctor?”

  Roger suppressed a sigh.There goes the afternoon. "Very well.” While he doubted Alice sincerely meant to kill herself—she'd chosen too inefficient a method—ignoring her cry for attention might lead to a more serious attempt.

  Shielded by his broad-brimmed hat and lightweight gray coat, Roger drove back across the Severn and through Annapolis, then across the South River to Edgewater. The area was still largely rural, and the Kovaks’ home sat on a wooded waterfront lot almost a mile from the nearest neighbor. They lived in a rambling, elderly house they had converted into two separate units.

  Seeing it for the first time, freshly painted, with wrought iron grills covering all doors and windows, Roger reflected that Mr. Kovak's auto body shop must be thriving. He knew from listening to Alice that she lived in one half of the house with her parents, who rented the other side to their grown son, Peter. Farther back on the lot stood a detached garage, and three partially dismantled cars crowded the side yard. Through the trees Roger glimpsed the river, a couple of hundred yards away.<
br />
  When he got out of the Citroen, a young man wearing a blue work shirt with the body shop's logo trotted up to him. “You the doc? I'm Pete Kovak. About time you showed up.”

  Peter was a lanky twenty-six-year-old whose black hair curled greasily down his neck. Roger didn't need ESP to guess that the boy shared the elder Mr. Kovak's opinion of “shrinks.” With Peter trailing him into the house, Roger greeted Mr. and Mrs. Kovak, whom he'd met once before.

  “Any change since you called me?”

  Mrs. Kovak, whose faded blonde hair suggested that as a girl she might have looked like Alice, began a reply, to be cut off by her husband. “No, she's still in there. I still think none of this woulda happened if—”

  Having no patience for a wrangle about Alice's treatment, Roger interrupted, “Then I'll go right in and talk to her. Where's the bedroom?” He could have found the girl by the noise of her breathing but could hardly advertise that power.

  Mrs. Kovak waved vaguely toward the hall. “It's at the very end.”

  Roger strode to the bedroom door and knocked. “Alice, it's Dr. Darvell. May I come in?”

  “Just you. Nobody else.” He heard her walk over to unlock the door, then cross the room again.

  When he entered, she said in a voice hoarse with suppressed tears, “Lock it.” He did. Alice sat on the bed with her legs curled under her, holding the open bottle of capsules.

  Roger gave the room a quick once-over. Tidy, even to the stack of books on the floor beside the hutch whose shelves they overflowed. Alice's twin bed was covered with a patchwork quilt that, along with the Rackham fairy tale prints on the walls, contributed to the childlike ambience of her refuge. He didn't risk alarming her by stepping closer right away. “Alice, can you tell me what brought this on?”

  “Nothing—everything. I don't know—I went to the mall this morning, because Mamma keeps bugging me about getting out more. I was watching the kids hanging out, shopping with their friends, and it all seemed so hopeless. Doctor, I'm so lonely!” The word ended on a sob.

  The popular prescription of busy-ness and sociability for a depressive sometimes backfired, Roger mused. “Let me tell you a secret.” Her eyes actually widened with interest at that. No, she wasn't ready to die just yet. “Everyone is lonely sometimes. Controlling your depression will not guarantee perfect happiness. No therapist can guarantee that. Loneliness is a permanent part of the human condition.”