by Lund, S. E.
"Is playing part of my job description?" I say, trying to be a smartass.
"No, of course not. Music is my greatest love. It makes existence bearable."
His words have a strange effect on me. Music makes his existence bearable? I'm a bit unnerved by that and I don't know what to say for a moment.
"I'm out of practice. I've been pretty busy with finals and haven't played for quite a while."
He frowns. "You shouldn't let your skills rust, Eve. When you have a beautiful gem, you should make sure to keep it polished. Such a waste otherwise. And so sad that all you have is this old piece of junk on which to play."
"It's all that could fit in my apartment." I turn away and make a face, unsure how to respond. Is he chastising me for not playing enough? Where does he get off?
He stands in the middle of my piles of paper from my mother's files, which are spread out on the hardwood floor.
"You need a filing cabinet."
I start picking up the piles, placing them on my desk at the side of the room.
"They're my mother's files. The university just released them from the archives."
When I'm done, I sit on the couch while he wanders around my apartment, my knees weak from everything that's happened since this afternoon.
He moves to my desk eyeing the pile of books and papers, pushing them around, stooping to my wastebasket – the letter … I've been writing a letter to include in a birthday card to my best friend Cecile, who's off in Philadelphia to do her MD. I've handwritten them and crunched up one after another draft, unhappy with the results.
"Those are my private things," I say, alarmed.
"I know."
"Leave them alone." I try to sound forceful, which is ridiculous, given who and what he is, but I don't want him to read anything too personal. He rustles through the letters in my wastebasket and pulls out the one on top.
"Don't," I say, dreading the thought that he'll read my uncensored remarks. "That's private."
"Dear sweet Eve," he says with his soft almost-imperceptible French accent, "I've already been in your mind. This," he says and holds up the letter, "this is nothing in comparison."
He reads it, and I close my eyes, grimacing in embarrassment at what I've written. I go to him and snatch it out of his hands and go back to the couch, reading it over to see which version he's read.
Dear Ceci,
Happy Birthday, girl! I miss you so much and wish you were here or I was there so we could go out and dress all up and pretend we're the geek versions of Carrie and Charlotte and drink those crazy cocktails you love so much!
What's new with me? I finally have my mother's research – after three years of fighting. Looks like some interesting stuff in her archives. Should keep me busy all summer.
In answer to your question, I really hate blind dates, so thanks but no thanks. You know I have a weakness for men in uniforms but I'm afraid of flying so dating an airline pilot? Not such a good idea …
Don't worry about me living by myself now that you're in Philly. I really don't mind being alone. Much. Not really much at all. Hardly. Barely lonely. Really… I'm sleeping well enough. Besides, it's time for nightmares to stop. I'm a big girl now so no more being afraid of the dark. After I check all the closets at night and triple lock the door and windows, I'm fine… Honest, I will get rid of my old Barney doll – some year! He's twenty now and time for the back of my closet. Where he can protect me from the monsters…
Yes, I have been seeing my counselor about the cutting. She says I have to keep my mind busy so hopefully I'll find something in my mother's files to occupy my summer. It's just that I'm so bored sometimes I cut myself just to know that I'm alive. She says the cutting stops the memories. She wants to do this whole regression stuff but it scares me. Some things are better left forgotten.
Really, Ceci. Don't worry. I know you're afraid I'll end up a crazy cat lady dying alone in my apartment, no one noticing until the meowing of my cats drives the neighbors crazy and the police break down the door to find my rotting bloated corpse . . . But I'm sure things will eventually get better for me. I'm so happy the university finally released mom's files. It makes me feel closer to her to carry on her work.
Happy twenty-second birthday and I will come to Philly and see you soon,
Love, Eve
Oh, damn.
Then, I feel him on the couch next to me, and I try to cover my face, but he takes one arm and pushes up my sleeve. He sees the scars running up the inside of my forearm – some old, silvery ghosts of past pain, some new and still angry and red, barely scabbed over. Razor blades are my weapon of choice.
I freeze, my body tensing. He runs his fingers over the scars.
"I didn't see these," he says quietly and looks in my eyes. "Eve…"
He takes the letter from me and pushes me down on the couch, lying on top of me. He holds the letter in one hand, and with the other, he turns my chin so I have to watch him reading it, his blue eyes so intense.
After reading for a moment, he stops and shakes his head.
"You're so bored sometimes you cut yourself just know that you're alive?"
I close my eyes, but he shakes my chin and I open them again, my vision suddenly blurry. And then he leans down and kisses me. Softly, the kiss chaste, and I feel him trying to enter my mind, as if he's hoping to find out why I'm a cutter but there's nothing to find except a big black hole of fear. When he pulls away, he examines my face, touches my cheek with a finger, running the tip through my tears once more, licking his finger and closing his eyes.
"I can't see why you need pain when I read you," he says. "It must be very deep."
I turn my face away. I don't know why I need the pain. It must be because of my mother.
Finally, he gets up and takes the letter back to my desk, smoothing it out, leaving it on top of the pile rather than in my wastebasket. I sit up and feel as if I need a drink of something strong for his touch and the feel of his body lying on top of me have made me uncomfortably aroused. He's still standing there, staring at my things and I'm sitting here, wondering what it would be like to have sex with a vampire.
There – I'm now officially a traitor and all it took was one meeting.
"Your flat is very small."
"I'm a student," I say defensively.
He ambles over to my bedroom door, which is ajar, and looks through the crack. I hear him inhale as if he's trying to smell my bedroom, which I find just a bit creepy…
Hey—quit looking at my private life. Which is, of course, a ridiculous thing to think. Who knows what secrets he's mined from my memories while touching me?
After returning to the living room, he sits on the chair across from me, crossing his legs and stretching out his arms on the back.
"What's your scent?"
Huh? None of your business. He asks such personal questions and once again, I feel that he's intruding.
"Why do you ask?"
"I like it."
"It's 'Noir' by this little French perfumer I visited on a field trip to Paris."
He smiles. "I like the note of citrus in it. And jasmine I think. Very nice."
"Are we going to talk about my perfume and piano practice habits?"
He ignores my attempt to be rude and leans forward, his face earnest now.
"There's a whole process to you becoming my Adept, Eve, and working for the Council. You have to pass a few tests, interviews, that sort of thing."
His Adept?
"Is there some kind of vampire hunter job?"
"Yes. I can set the process in motion," he says and nods, looking at me with that intense gaze. "Plead your case. You were supposed to have been better-trained by now, but obviously, things didn't go as planned with your family. Your foster parents started training you in martial arts and science but you're not ready. I can train you. Are you willing to undergo the tests?"
"Will it mean I can take over my mother's work?"
He nods, his head tilted to
the side.
"What about the manuscript? Are you going to let me read it?"
He sighs. "What is it about the manuscript that intrigues you so much?"
"Your brother gave it to my mother for a reason. I have to know why. Maybe it has something to do with her death."
He lifts the messenger bag from the floor and opens it, withdrawing the manuscript.
"You really want to read it?" he says, taking it out of the envelope and laying it on my coffee table. "It's very explicit. Too explicit and personal."
I nod, unable to get Sir Julien's words out of my head from even the short passage I did read.
"Is the manuscript that violent?" I frown. "I know all about violence." I say quietly. "And pain."
"Yes, I think you do. But this," he says and holds the manuscript up. "This is both very violent and very personal," he says quietly. "And sexual but not in a good way." He looks away from me. "You can understand why I don't want it translated."
I squirm a bit. Now I'm dying to read the manuscript.
"It's that bad?"
"I'd burn it now, happily, if I wasn't curious myself. I have to read it at least once before I do."
"You're going to burn it? But you can't! It's not yours to burn. Your brother gave it to my mother and now it's mine."
"Eve," he says and his voice is frustrated. "This documents my debasement and destruction. It's nothing more than a chronicle of my pain and despair. I consider it part of the world of vampires and Ancients and want it and them destroyed."
Ancients?
I don't say anything, for I don't want to appear ignorant. I'll have to read more in my mother's files to find out what that means.
His debasement and despair? Now I'm desperate to read that manuscript. The thought of him being debased, his chastity taken from him as he described it is horrifying. He's so beautiful.
"But just to build trust between us, Eve, to lay a foundation, I will read you some of it. Not tonight, and not the parts about myself, for they would only pollute your memories, but those Julien wrote about his own experience. He wanted those to be known – he wants to be known. So be it."
My jaw drops at this offer. "When?"
"Oh, Eve," he says and shakes his head. "So eager to read about our fall? To know our pain?"
"It's about vampires," I say, but I know, deep down inside, that it's more than just curiosity about vampires. "My mother's life was dedicated to killing you off. I want to know why your brother gave it to her."
"Who can understand Julien's motives?" he says and packages the manuscript up. Then he stands. "I'll read it to you another night. Now, I have to go. I'll arrange the whole interview process to test you and see if you can be an Adept for the Council. I'll send you an email or call you with the details."
He takes one last look around my apartment and then at me, his head tilting to the side.
"You won't be safe any longer, now that you've re-emerged. I'll be putting a security detail on you 24/7 but they should be invisible to you. You may not be cut out for this work. These trials will let us know either way."
Then he's gone and I'm alone in my apartment, but the world has changed and I wonder what I've gotten myself into.
Chapter 4
"Whether we fall by ambition, blood or lust, like diamonds, we are cut by our own dust."
Webster
Several days later and an hour after dusk, I get out of a cab half a block down the street from the address Michel included in his email with details on my first interview. I glance around but so far since that first night, I haven’t been able to spot the security detail Michel claimed he'd put in place, but it makes me feel strangely safer knowing people are watching me.
I spent the last few days in the library and at home going through my mother's files, box by box. The university released almost twenty cardboard file boxes and they're piled up in a corner of my tiny flat. I'm searching through each one methodically, indexing them in an Excel file so I can keep track of everything. So far, I've only gone through five. These boxes are mostly histories and articles on the vampire species. There's lots to read and absorb, and slowly, a picture is emerging in my mind about vampires – their secret world that most people have no idea exists. But with another fifteen boxes to get through, I know there's so much more to learn.
I have an hour to kill before the interview and stop at a little diner on the way to grab something to eat. It's one of those fifties replicas, with posters of James Dean on the wall and faux leather seats. There's even old tableside jukeboxes, with music from the fifties and sixties.
I sit at an empty booth and examine the menu – old favorites. Cheeseburgers, fries, hot turkey sandwiches, meatloaf, liver and onions. Not much for a vegetarian. There's an all-day breakfast so I order a veggie omelet and some tea.
I'm sitting deciding what to play when someone stands besides my booth. I startle out of my reverie of music choices and gasp. It's Michel – except it's not Michel unless he's just had his hair cut and has a scar that's very rapidly healed, for one follows the side of his head next to his hairline from his brow to below his ear. He looks very dashing, dressed in a black leather trench, a black fedora and black and white patterned scarf around his neck. Underneath, he's wearing a black sweater and faded jeans, big black military boots of some kind. He smiles at me.
"Hello."
I put my hand over my eyes for a moment. When my heart's slowed just a bit, I look up at him.
"You must be Julien."
"The very one. Let the bells ring out and the banners fly. Feast your eyes on me." He grins that characteristic de Cernay grin and holds his hand out to shake.
I glance at his hand. It's bare and I don't want to shake, but I do to be polite and of course, he leans down and kisses my knuckles. "Eve," he says.
"Julien."
If he's reading me, I don't feel it. I quickly end the shake.
"I hear you found my manuscript," he says. "Quite the read."
"I don't have the manuscript, if that's why you're here. Michel took it from me."
He frowns and shakes his head, then sits down across from me.
"Michel is such a prude to deny you some good smut."
"It's smut?"
"Just kidding. To him it would be." He leans over. "He's got a terrible soft spot for you, Eve. He wouldn't want you to think less of him." Julien shakes his head, still grinning. "You know – devout priest debauched, turned into a vampire's plaything. Only a prude would deny the reader the pleasure of reading it and I thought he got rid of all his prudery long ago."
"He doesn't even know me."
"He doesn't even know you? Are you kidding? He's known you since you were ten and your mother returned to Boston."
"He never said anything. He said he didn't really know my mother."
"Well," Julien says, pursing his lips, his hands clasped on the tabletop. "Know could mean many things." He grins suggestively at me.
"I thought you were the one who knew her."
He nods. "You know, you were supposed to be for me."
"What do you mean?"
"Your mother – she wanted me to have you as my Adept." His expression is serious now. "She trusted me to train you. She just wanted you to have a choice and decide yourself whether to join the Council once you were eighteen rather than being forced into this life. She was going to have me train you in martial arts and forensics so you could be a Blood Witness – if you wanted. Then, she was murdered and everything came crashing down."
"Blood Witness?"
"You know – like a human psychic sleuth. You have the ability to connect with vampires telepathically and read memory traces in the objects killers touch. The SCU will use you to police the Treaty, investigate cases. Didn't Michel explain? Didn't he show you?"
My face heats at the memory of just how he showed me.
"Oh," he says, smiling slowly. "I see he did show you. Oh, Michel, Michel…" He shakes his head, still grinning suggestively. "Tha
t surprises me. But a Blood Witness?" he says and settles back. "It's like any other crime scene investigator, except your job will be to touch vampires who are suspected of killing a human outside of the treaty to see their last kills. You can see if they were sanctioned or not. Gather evidence to use against them and read violent memory traces in physical objects they touch."
"I can do that?"
"Yes, but you've been kept out of this world and are untrained. Your skills have to be developed. Training should have started when you went through puberty, but we lost you…"
"You said the SCU. What is it?"
"The SCU is Special Cases Unit of the Council of Clairveaux. It's a special police unit that investigates vampire killings to ensure they are sanctioned. Blood Witnesses work with ordinary police investigators to gather evidence. A Blood Witness's testimony is used as evidence in a trial. You can also use telepathy to search for evidence at crime scenes, but I suppose if you work out, Michel will be explaining it all."
"Are there others like me?"
"Exactly like you? Not very many, no. There are some humans with touch telepathy but not with your special gifts. You're like gold."
"Special gifts?"
"Now that would be giving too much away. Besides, that will be determined tonight at the interview."
I frown at his unwillingness to tell me more. "My mother never said anything to me about you."
He shrugs one shoulder. "She was waiting until you were older. Didn't want to start you too young. Wanted to give you a chance to shine in the arts."
"You gave her the manuscript so she could understand you and Michel."
He nods and his gaze moves over my face. "Michel must love torturing himself," he says. "To take you on."
"Why?"
"Because you look a lot like her."
"Who?"
"Oh, that's right. You haven't read about her. Danielle." He gives a low whistle. "You look a lot like her. No wonder my brother's smitten."
"I don't know about that," I say and avert my eyes, my cheeks hot. "We just met."