“I was being quiet.”
“He’s got your hearing, Paul, you know that.”
Paul went into the john, turned on the hot water until it steamed up from the sink, then covered his cheeks with the luxurious Italian shaving cream that he favored. Shaving mechanically, he tried to push back his concerns about Ian. The boy was just a teenager. Leo Patterson was all over the television, in all the magazines. She was the girl that every redblooded seventeen-year-old in America—or the world, for that matter—dreamed about.
He dressed and headed down to make his eggs. Before descending the stairs, he paused and listened at Ian’s door. He heard breathing—very soft, very close.
“Ian?”
No response.
Paul turned the handle. Locked. “Ian, come on.”
Still nothing. He turned it harder, rattled the door. No response, but he was still right there, literally leaning against the other side of the door. Paul felt the familiar urge to just explode into every direction at once that his teenager was so damn good at evoking in him. But losing your temper with Ian didn’t help anything.
“Come on, guy, let’s get past it.” Nothing. “Hey, we’re on the same side.”
The breathing faded, to be replaced by the small sounds of Ian getting ready for school.
Being ignored did it. Paul kicked the door. From down the hall, Becky said, “Oh, for God’s sake,” as Paul slammed his foot into the door a second time, so hard that it split down the middle and the free half flew into the bedroom.
Ian screamed, and the sound of it—the warbling, boyish surprise of it—set a fire in Paul, and it was all he could do not to tangle with him.
“Goddammit, Ian,” he yelled. “Goddammit!”
Ian slid back against the wall, knocking down his bedside table and radio. His lamp shattered. And then something happened that had never happened before. Instead of cowering, his face covered with tears, instead of Paul getting hold of himself and there developing a trade of damp apologies, Ian laughed. He did not make any sound, but only bared his teeth and shut his eyes and shook in silent laughter.
“Don’t you touch him, Paul Ward!”
Everything slowed down. Ian’s laugh became a fixed, brittle grin of fear. Becky’s hand drifted up, impacted Paul’s cocked arm with all the effect of a landing butterfly. Then his arm began to move, and he could not stop it, he could not because the rage was running him and he—the reasonably civilized man who normally inhabited this big, rough body—was on hold, neutralized, put aside.
The hand—open now, at least, no longer a fist—impacted. It hit not the boy but the table, which hopped and shattered into an explosion of kindling. Paul stumbled, staggered, and then was leaning against the wall breathing hard, feeling his heart go slamslam slamslam and thinking, The kid’s gonna kill me yet.
“You asshole,” Ian shrieked, scrambling to his feet and leaping back across his bed, trying to put something more substantial between himself and his onrushing dad. “I hate you, I hate you!”
“You don’t hate your father.”
“He’s a jerk, look, he wrecked my stuff, he’s a total out-of-control jerk, Mom! Why don’t you see that and get us out of here!”
“Ian—”
“You shut up!”
“Don’t you tell your father to shut up!”
“Shut up and get out, old man! Go on, get out!”
“You listen to me. You open your door when I knock.”
“You did not knock, you just kicked the damn thing down, Dad.”
“Why did you turn that goddamn bitch on like that at six o fucking clock in the morning?”
“Come on, Paul, for God’s sake, it’s obvious why.”
Paul stopped. He’d overreacted, way overreacted. Ian, blushing bright red now, hung his head. “Son,” Paul said, “look—it’s…nature. Oh, Christ…”
“Dad, just shut up.”
“Why do you listen to that woman?”
“Shut up and go downstairs and eat your damn eggs.”
“Lemme help you, here.” He tried to pick the pieces of the table back up.
“I’ll go to Wal-Mart and get another one, Dad.”
“Listen, son—uh—”
“Dad, forget it.”
“Ian—”
“Come on, Paul, you’re hungry, and you’re mean when you’re hungry.”
Ian said in an undertone, “He must always be hungry.”
Paul’s anger flared again, but this time he managed to grab it and stuff it back into the cave where it lived. He told himself, He couldn’t make you so mad if you didn’t love him. But it sure as hell did not feel like that right now.
He went downstairs as Ian and his mother set about cleaning up the boy’s room. He could hear Ian sobbing now, no longer able to put up a show and, in front of his mom, feeling no need to do so. To Ian, Becky was the mother of his heart and blood. He had no idea that he was adopted, and he sure as hell didn’t know who his real mother was, let alone what.
Paul started the coffee in the French press, enough for the three of them. He hardly thought about his breakfast, making it mechanically. A few minutes later Becky came in, wearing a bathrobe and slippers, and took over from him. Drawing his own robe close around his neck, he went out the back door, stopping for a moment in the larger, colder air of morning. It was absolutely dark and absolutely still, with not even a hint of dawn in the east. The morning star—Jupiter, he thought—hung just above the tops of the pines that crowded the woods. To the north, the Endless Mountains tumbled off to the black horizon. He breathed in the pure, knife-cold air and regretted that he had to be in this wonderful moment while feeling so damn sad.
As he hurried along the path that led out to the road, he passed the old tree where his father’s remnant had been found. His dad had been devoured by the East Mill Vampire, long before the existence of the creatures was known. The vampire had operated in the area for generations, ranging as far east as Danbury and Bridgeport, taking its occasional victims from isolated farms, and from the slums of places like Poughkeepsie and Newburgh.
It was disturbing to destroy vampires, because they were intelligent creatures with lives every bit as complex as ours—more so, some thought—but he had found unequivocal satisfaction in the death of the East Mill Vampire. He’d shot it until its head was reduced to chunks, then his team—very efficient by the time they arrived in this comparative backwater—had burned the remains to grease and ash. The site of the thing’s destruction was a hike from here, one that Paul took often. You went across two hills, then through the van Aalten orchard, and finally through a pumpkin patch that belonged, now, to some city people. Beyond the pumpkin patch was Aalten Kill, a speeding little stream of perfect water that was the residence of brook trout far too wise to fall victim to fishermen—including a very frustrated Paul Ward, who’d been working the Aalten’s eddies and pools since he was nine. In a tumble of stones above the brook was the blackened place where the East Mill Vampire had been rendered down. It had died slowly, as they always did, its headless body twisting in the flames like a great decapitated reptile. It had left a tiny, ancient house and a small garden of lilies.
He reached the road and got his papers, the New York Times and the Kingston Freeman. Returning to the predictably silent kitchen, he ate his eggs without a word from his wife. He pushed away the ritual desire for a cigar that followed every meal. No more cigars, no more steaks, no more Mexican food. He felt great, but the medicos told a different story: his heart was struggling, and he had to take care.
As he started down to his basement office, Becky asked, “Aren’t you going to talk to him?”
“Apologize?”
“You were wrong. Badly wrong.”
“No.”
He arrived at the bottom of the stairs and stepped out into the familiar cellar of his childhood. Here, he had made spook houses. Here, he and his dad had built their train set and played “Trains in the Dark,” with all the tiny streetli
ghts glowing and the tiny passenger windows lit as their train raced through the little town with its garage and its church and its people who had been painted with single-hair brushes, detailed down to the color of their eyes.
The third week after Dad had disappeared, Paul had huddled right over there behind the fat, black furnace and begged the good lord to take him, too. He had been greeted with what he had come to see as mankind’s defining truth, the silence of God.
Becky came down, as he’d known she would.
“Paul, look, Ian’s becoming an adult. You have to make room for him.”
“Ian is seventeen, and he needs to open his door when his father knocks.”
Paul went through another, very different door, that led into a very different sort of a room. He flipped on the lights, which filled the room with a soft blue glow.
“Paul, you need to talk this out with him. Come on, now, this is—you talk about childish.”
“Oops. Nope. Wrong approach. Ian needs to come to me. He needs to apologize to me.”
“Sometimes I have a hard time believing that dinosaurs are actually extinct.”
He was going to control the anger. He was going to get her to see what was needed here.
He waited. He wanted her to show that she at least understood that he had a side, that it wasn’t all Ian here and no Paul. But she did not come in. In fact, she pulled his own door closed in his face. He heard her feet on the stairs.
He shut his eyes and took the slow breaths that would ease his aching chest. Far away, as if filtering down from some mad heaven, he heard, “Love me please love me, love me please love me…”
Who was playing the damn CD this time, her or him?
Christ almighty, of all the singers in the world, why did he have to go for that one? Goddammit, dammit, dammit!
He would have pounded the wall, but his hand still hurt from shattering the table. Instead, he decided that his instinct to come down here had been the right one. Throw yourself into work. He’d been a damn fool up there, it was true. But he shouldn’t have to gobble crow the way Becky wanted. Kids heal, for God’s sake.
Prescription for an upset and regretful old dinosaur: lose thyself in thy work.
He lumbered over to his slot of a desk and pressed a button, which turned on a group of three computer screens. He tapped his keyboard a few times, then stopped, waiting for the New York Overnights. These were crime reports that were on their way into the National Crime Database. He glanced at two murders, one in Brooklyn and the other in Manhattan. A drug dealer had come to his inevitable end in Bay Ridge. On the Upper West Side a man of seventy had killed his cancer-ridden wife. He had given police a tape she had made begging him to do it. Poor damn people.
A kidnapping in Buffalo merited a little attention, but not much. Leo Patterson was not in Buffalo. According to Joe Leong, Leo had left her suite wearing a black turtleneck and slacks at 2:17 A.M. She had returned at 3:22. It wasn’t enough to get him any support, not in the absence of hard evidence.
There were no missing persons reports from Midtown North. Midtown South, however, had three: a girl of seventeen with a history of runaways, an elderly man with Alzheimer’s, and a Catholic priest.
This third case Paul went into more carefully. A Father of the Holy Rosary called Joachim Prester had walked out of his rectory on Eleventh Street and never returned. But the case was three days old. They’d waited quite a while before they reported him. Then he saw why: Father Prester was a binge alcoholic and had last been seen wandering the South Street Seaport. Probably lost with the tides by now, a victim of the unforgiving waters that surged around Manhattan.
So, once again, there was nothing solid to pin on Leo. Once again, he would put in a request to allow him to detain her and obtain a blood sample for analysis. Once again, he would be denied.
Leo was not a vampire, she was a human being who’d been “blooded,” that is to say, had vampire blood infused into her veins by a real vampire. A creature that called itself Miriam Blaylock had done it to her, then died in a hail of bullets a few weeks later. After that, Leo had disappeared into the world, another trashy bit of flotsam on the nightclub and cruise ship circuit, singing tired old ballads for tired old people. She’d appeared to sink without a trace.
But then, to his growing amazement and horror, Paul had watched her resurfacing. When he actually saw her again, a couple of years after Miriam’s death, she looked eighteen but sounded—well, she sounded like an ancient child, wise and knowing and infinitely wounded. Her voice broke your heart, just shattered you.
And then her albums began appearing on charts. And then people started talking about her. Her concerts became large, then huge. Her fame exploded like some kind of out-of-control tumor.
A year ago, the first Leo Patterson poster had appeared in Ian’s room.
Long before that, Paul had begun fighting the CIA bureaucracy to get some of his old team reactivated and assigned to her surveillance. CIA didn’t like him, and they feared that his work, if it was ever revealed, would lead to all kinds of unwanted repercussions. He’d killed hundreds of highly intelligent beings, who’d had names and a language and writing. It would be easy to see this as a gross violation of the prohibition against assassination that the agency had been working under at the time. Worse, they were genetically similar to man, so much so that their blood could damn well run in our veins. So CIA kept him under deep, deep cover, and wished that all of his work and his tremendous accomplishment of freeing mankind from a great curse would just disappear.
In the end, he’d been given one guy. They’d had Joe Leong doing close-range intercepts in China—setting devices that were designed to pick up conversations in private apartments and offices. Joe was good at tunnels and basements. He was good in the dark.
Thumbs dug into Paul’s neck. He leaned back into Becky’s eyes. “You’re acting weak,” she said, “and that makes me mad, because I know you’re strong.”
“I’m down here working.”
“You’re down here obsessing. Paul, you go up and be with him.”
“Leo fed.”
The hands disappeared. He could feel a change in Becky as she stood behind him. The careful professional replaced the worried mother. “You have evidence?”
“Joe followed her to Sutton Place. She went in with a victim, came out alone. During this time, the furnace was fired.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Any missing persons report fit? Did Joe get a look at the guy?”
“Mid forties, stocky, not real pretty. Short brown hair, carried a briefcase. Came out of a bar on Third Avenue. Went into the roach motel with America’s Sweetie, did not return.”
Becky dropped down into her own chair. “You want to go in and see Jack Binion?”
He thought about that. The chief of detectives was fairly cooperative, but real careful around a Central Intelligence Agency official with a secret brief. Had he known just how much of an outsider within the company Paul actually was, he wouldn’t have given him any time at all. But he didn’t know that, so fifteen minutes in the man’s office might be productive.
Paul picked up the phone, dialed.
“Chief Binion’s office.”
“This is Paul Ward. I’d like to meet with the chief today. Tell him it’ll take about fifteen minutes, and I can do it anytime from ten on.”
There was a short silence. “You want me to tell him, like, right now?”
“Yeah.”
“Call him at home and wake him up?”
Paul muttered that he’d call back, and hung up the phone. “I get up too early,” he said.
“And you go to bed too late. When you do sleep, you look like somebody waiting to be executed. You have nightmares that you never remember, like last night.”
“I had nightmares?”
“You cried.”
“Christ, that again.”
“And you woke up mean, just like you always do
when you cry in the night.”
“None of this is news. Anyway, I’m working.”
“Look, you’re also down here hiding from Ian, which he knows perfectly well.”
“I have an urgent case, for chrissakes!”
“Paul, the Leo evidence you’ve just presented to me is absolutely worthless, as you know. And even if it isn’t, whatever you’re doing now can wait half an hour.”
“A man died last night.”
“Maybe, but a father’s relationship with his son is dying right now. Why not go up and sit with him while he eats? Talk to him, be with him.”
He was silent.
“Dammit, Paul, then don’t talk. Just be. There’s something important happening here. Right now, today, you two either build a wall or you don’t, and dammit, I say you don’t.”
He met her eyes, found he could not bear that, and looked away. Why had he ever, ever picked that little baby up out of its exquisite antique cradle? But how could he not? You couldn’t just leave a baby, and especially not your own damn son. Ian was pure vampire on his mother’s side, about a third on Paul’s. That made him more than half vampire. And it made his future a huge unknown. He had never fed, never wanted to feed, had no idea that vampires were anything real. As far as Ian was concerned, Becky was Mom and Paul was Dad, and that was that.
The question was, would puberty bring with it an urge to feed? It was already bringing an affinity for vampire blood, Paul felt sure. That was the origin of the Leo fixation. So would he also, one day—
Paul pushed the thought out of his mind with a fury that almost made him groan aloud. The rage that had invaded him told him the hardest truth there was about himself: he loved this son of his more than his own damn life, but if he turned vampire, then he would have to kill him.
How far will she go to protect Ian, if it comes to that? he wondered. Becky was an extremely effective operative, quick and ruthless and as sharp as a knife. She might not be Ian’s natural mother, but she was more loyal to him than she was to her own soul.
“More coffee,” she said, a false lilt in her voice. “Shall I bring it down?”
Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life Page 5