Zillah gently pried Nothing away from Christian. Nothing shut his eyes tight and curled into Zillah’s arms. His head lay heavily against Zillah’s chest. In an instant he seemed to have fallen into deep shock.
Zillah caressed him absently. “Mardi Gras?” he asked Christian. “That little girl at your bar?”
Christian nodded.
“Well,” said Zillah. He was paler than usual, but he held himself straight, and his eyes were fiercely happy. More than that, Christian realized. Zillah’s eyes were proud. “Well. That changes things, doesn’t it? That makes things even better. Lovely.”
Molochai and Twig began whispering to each other. Christian heard a smothered giggle. The singer had been listening to the exchange, but he was more concerned with his friend. The girl seemed to be in a world of her own, slumped against the side of the van, her arms wrapped around herself, her chin tucked into her chest. The streetlight was very bright on her hair.
Christian looked up at the moon. It hung gravid in the sky, nearly full. Its light was strong enough to hurt his eyes, and he closed them, but still the moon shone through. It shone down upon them all there on the sidewalk—Steve, his head in Ghost’s lap, furious, wounded, defeated; Zillah, with his sleeping child in his arms; Molochai and Twig, clutching each other, still whispering.
And Ann alone. Ann alone under the moon. Some of Zillah’s seed was trickling out of her, seeping slow and creamy down her thighs.
Some—but not all. Inside Ann, two specks of life had glued themselves together, and deep inside her where all was raw and red and wet, something came alive. A microdot of meat, part human, part strange. Nothing’s half-brother, or his half-sister.
Steve shuddered and lay still again. Ghost stroked his hair helplessly. Nothing moaned, beginning to surface from his shock, burrowing into his father’s arms. The moon shone down, and Christian stared back at it. And inside Ann, the infinitesimal blob of meat stretched and began to grow.
PART TWO
21
Night.
Heavy green night, pine branches bending low to sweep the gravel road, the dying grass, the trash in the ditches. Snaky night, riotous with the last October kudzu. The kudzu would be dead in another month, like a dry brown blanket thrown over the trees and the roadsides. But now it still writhed under the moon, succulent, shifting, green.
Green night.
Violin Road.
A trailer up on cinderblocks, a silver Bel Air and a sagging black van parked in the scrubby dirt yard, behind the trailer a tangled thicket of rosebushes that would bear great lacy blossoms on into November. The roses had gone wild.
Nothing knew that if he turned his head, he would be able to look through the bedroom window and see the spiny etchwork of the rosebushes against the night sky. But he didn’t really want to turn his head. Instead he lay very still, stretched out flat on his back in Christian’s bed. His hands moved through Christian’s glittering black hair, stroked the long curve of Christian’s back.
Christian sighed and moved closer, nestling his head under Nothing’s chin, and Nothing felt a tiny sweet flare of pain as Christian’s teeth slid a little deeper beneath the skin of his throat.
He knew Christian was being careful. He knew Christian wouldn’t hurt him, would take only a taste of his blood. This was not feeding; this was lovemaking. Weren’t Christian’s long fingers moving over him, tracing patterns on his ribs and his thighs, seeming to worship the texture of his skin? Still, Nothing had seen those teeth. They were beautiful; he envied them and wished he might have been born hundreds of years ago, before the adaptations of life among humans caught up with his race—but having to stay sober every night of his life would be too great a price even for fangs that curved down over his lips like hooks of ivory.
At first the teeth had only pricked Christian’s lower lip. They lengthened imperceptibly. Nothing looked into Christian’s mouth, but he could not see how it happened. They were simply longer all of a sudden, like hooked needles, silver-white and glistening. Nothing felt those teeth hard against his lips when Christian kissed him, and when he drew back he tasted blood.
Christian bit into Nothing’s throat as gently as a junkie sliding a hypo into a sore vein, but Nothing still caught his breath and shivered at the cold exquisite pain. Then Christian’s tongue was there, licking the blood away. Christian stroked him, a different touch from Zillah’s: slower, gentler, less sure. They strained against each other.
At last Christian’s mouth unfastened from Nothing’s throat, and blood flowed between them, trickling over Nothing’s chest, staining the sheets a little more. Nothing realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a great rush. What had he been afraid of? Christian wouldn’t hurt him. He was of Christian’s kind.
Still, he hadn’t wanted to turn his head.
“Nothing,” moaned Christian: a breath of fading ecstasy, borne on the scent of blood. “O Nothing. I would like to rip your throat open.”
“Thank you,” said Nothing. He knew this was a compliment. Then, after a moment: “Tell me about Jessy again.”
Christian sighed. “She looked like you. The same great dark eyes. The same pointed chin. The same listening silence.”
“You, um, you fucked her.”
A pause, then: “Yes. Many times over a hot New Orleans summer.”
“She was sixteen,” Nothing said thoughtfully.
“Something like that.”
“A year older than me.”
“Yes.”
“How old were you?”
A pause. “Three hundred and sixty-eight.”
Nothing wanted to laugh, but he could not. The thought of all those years stored up in the being who lay beside him, belly warm with his blood, mouth slick with his spit… no, he could not laugh. The sheer weight of those years overwhelmed him. He wondered how it was for Christian. Surely three hundred and sixty-eight years of feeling could not be borne. Had Christian stopped feeling? Did he simply look upon the world, watchful, shutting out joy to keep back the pain of all the years?
Nothing pressed his face into the pillow. His eyes had gone hot and wet. He kissed Christian’s throat, his mouth. It was just a mouth again, a rather cold mouth now, with a dark sweet taste on the tongue. Two of the top front teeth were unusually sharp… but Christian didn’t smile much. Probably no one ever noticed those teeth.
“Will I live that long?” Nothing asked.
“Perhaps. If you’re smarter than Molochai and Twig, and more cautious than Zillah.” Christian stroked Nothing’s head. “I can see the true color of your hair at the roots. Golden-brown. It was that color when you were a baby.”
“I need a dye job.” Absently he twirled a piece of his hair, put it in his mouth. Then he took a deep breath and asked, “What’s it like to live such a long time?”
Christian didn’t reply. He glanced at the window and said, “I have to leave. I’m to be at the club at eleven.”
Nothing wanted to hold Christian, to take away those years, to do something for him. “I could come with you,” he said.
“Thank you, but no. I’ll lose my job if I keep slipping you drinks. You stay here with the others. When they wake up they’ll want to go out.” Christian stepped into a pair of impossibly long black trousers, buttoned a black shirt up to his chin. He turned to go. At the bedroom door he paused.
“Christian?” said Nothing.
“I would not wish it upon anyone,” Christian told him. He disappeared into the dark recesses of the trailer. A moment later Nothing heard the front door close. Then the Bel Air was grinding out of the driveway, heading down Violin Road toward town.
Nothing lay among the cool tangled sheets, staring at the rags of mist that drifted past the window and obscured the rosebushes. For a while he played with his damp pubic hair, uncurling strands of it, gently tugging at them, letting them spring back. It wasn’t often he had a bed to himself anymore. .Usually he slept in a sweaty knot of blankets, hair, limbs. He would wak
e to find Molochai’s fingers in his mouth or Twig drooling on his pillow. Often he woke to the perverse, sometimes scatological endearments that Zillah liked to murmur in his ear. So he relished this bit of privacy. He lay and let his mind drift where it would.
How old was Christian now? He calculated and came up with three hundred and eighty-three years. Nothing’s mind tried to balk at the thought of all those years, but he would not let it. No, he told himself. You might be that old yourself someday, so think about it.
That was so much time. Unless you found others of your kind, others who lived as long, you were bound to spend a lot of that time alone. Others—he made himself think it: humans —would just die on you. Steve and Ghost would die, and he would still be young and roaring—but he would not think about Steve and Ghost.
Still, he had Zillah, his father, his lover. And he had Molochai and Twig and Christian. They would be there with him, alive. But there must be others of their race who were alone. Christian had been. Maybe that was why Christian seemed so reserved, yet so hungry for love when someone offered it. Just because you got used to being alone didn’t mean you had to like it.
Maybe time passed differently in New Orleans. Maybe a sort of dream-time existed there, a time that could stretch a single day or compress three hundred and eighty-three years. In New Orleans he had been conceived by the bright sperm of Zillah. In New Orleans Christian had made love to Jessy. His mother. That thin, dark-haired girl of sixteen. That girl who had died giving bloody birth to him.
Nothing tried to imagine that summer in the French Quarter. The endless sweltering days above the bar. Christian’s long bony hands moving over Jessy’s slick breasts, her distended belly. Her belly that cradled him, unborn. He wished he could be Christian’s hands. He wished he could feel Jessy’s weight above him, her skin slick as if with oil. He imagined Christian thrusting up into her, parting her womb, nudging up against the fetus there. Me, he thought. In the womb, had he been bathed with Christian’s semen? Had it nourished him along with the blood of Jessy?
And there in the womb, half-formed, had something in him known even then whose child he was? Had he longed to be nourished by Zillah’s sperm instead of Christian’s? Had something in him wanted his father? Was that why he had spent the first fifteen years of his life alone, always alone, always searching for a place he might belong—for a perfect love?
Well, he had it now. Body and soul and all the realm between.
He remembered the night outside the Sacred Yew, now a month past, and all that had transpired on the cold sidewalk. The night of punishment and revelation. He had awakened sometime past sunset the next evening—even then he was beginning to get used to the hours his new family kept, sleeping most of the day and howling all night. He woke back at the trailer, in Christian’s bed. Zillah lay beside him, his head turned slightly away, his hair making colored stripes on the pillow. In slumber, Zillah’s face was almost innocent. When you could not see those eyes.
Father, Nothing thought.
He had slipped quietly out of bed, not wanting to wake Zillah yet. He had looked at himself in the bathroom mirror, still able to meet his own eyes, and he had told himself: For a week now you have been fucking your own father. His tongue has been in your mouth more times than you could count. You’ve sucked him off … you’ve swallowed stuff that could have been your brothers and sisters!
But he could not disgust himself. He could not make himself ashamed. He knew these were things he was supposed to feel, things the rational daylight world would expect him to feel. But he could not force himself to feel them. In a world of night, in a world of blood, what did such pallid rules matter?
He wasn’t sure he could ever have felt the things expected of him in the normal world, not even when he had been an unwilling part of it. Its morals had never been his; its baubles of status had never hypnotized him with their false glitter. He tried to imagine his friends back home making love with their fathers: Julie humping her fastidious attorney dad, Laine sucking off his hippie-throwback old man who grew stunted pot plants in his study and was supposed to be a genius at computer language. The idea did not offend him; it was sort of gross, because most of the fathers were not what Nothing would call hot-looking, but he could not label it with words like wrong or bad. He wondered if he had ever known what those words meant. Were members of his race born with some sort of amoral instinct that shielded them from the guilt of killing to stay alive? If he had not been born with such an instinct, could he have taken that first bite out of Laine’s throat?
Nothing tried to imagine the circumstances that would lead, purely by coincidence, to a half-breed vampire leaving home, hitchhiking more than two hundred miles, and being picked up by the very member of his race who had fathered him fifteen years before. He could not do it. This was not coincidence; this had all been meant to happen. A map of his life was printed somewhere, and for a long time he had been wandering its boundaries, hopelessly lost. Now he had found its pattern. That the map might be printed all over with the legend Here There Be Monsters did not bother him in the least.
His bond to Zillah was also his bond to this world of blood and night. He knew that now Zillah would not leave him, would not abandon him. He had faced Zillah down once, and he could do it again. In a weird way, it seemed to make Zillah proud of him.
Zillah had wanted him from the beginning. There must have been some biological pull between them. The seed returning to the sower. But Zillah hadn’t known why. The sentiment might still have been revocable. The pull might have weakened, even dissolved, when the next bottle of cheap wine was gone. But when Christian spoke those words outside the club—those terrifying, magical words, You’re Zillah’s son—the bond had become flesh.
No, not just flesh. Blood. The bond was forged in blood, of course, his and Zillah’s, and Jessy’s that had poured out of her. Nothing was of Zillah’s blood, and Zillah would not let him go now, not in a thousand years. They might live that long, might live a thousand years or more, and still they would be together. He would ride the highways with Molochai, Twig, Zillah, and now Christian, forever. They would drink and make wild love and never grow old. And he would never have to be alone.
Nothing smiled at the ceiling. Though he did not know it, there was a wantonness to his smile that had not been there a month ago.
A soft footfall made him look toward the bedroom door. A figure stood in the doorway, a black shadow haloed by a thin line of silver light. Long wavy hair, straight shoulders. A small slight figure that stood as if it might be seven feet tall, massive and regal. Zillah.
“Come here,” said Nothing. Zillah came to him and slipped under the cold sheets with him. As Zillah’s arms tightened around him, Nothing heard himself say, “Daddy.”
Zillah kissed his eyelids, his forehead, his lips. “Yes. That’s lovely. Call me that.”
“Daddy,” Nothing whispered as Zillah unwound the sheets, kissed his throat, his chest, the tender concave stretch of skin below his ribs.
“My baby,” said Zillah, and bit him gently. Nothing felt the last tattered shreds of his old life—the town, the desperately apathetic crowd at Skittle’s, the two well-intentioned fools who had pretended to be his parents—tear loose and drift away on the warm river of Zillah’s tongue. On the scent of blood, of herbs, of altars.
A night for reflecting.
A night for thinking of matters ordinarily left untouched, left half-buried in the sludge of the unconscious. Some nights seem shaped by an unseen dark hand. Some nights seem made for lying awake, eyes following the cracks and flyspecks on the ceiling, or the dead leaves and flowers pinned there, or the painted stars. Some nights seem made for plodding through the mind-sludge, poking at swollen and corrupted things, then ruthlessly heaving them over and staring them full in the face.
Some nights are made for torture, or reflection, or the savoring of loneliness.
Zillah lay draped around Nothing. To someone who lifted the tin roof off the trailer an
d looked upon the two small figures tangled in the sheets, Zillah’s position would have appeared both protective and possessive. He lay with his cheek against Nothing’s smooth hair, and he thought, Mine. More than anything was before, more than anything will ever be again, this is mine. My seed, my blood, my soul.
In town, a bad country-and-western band took the stage at the Sacred Yew. Christian wiped down the bar and tried not to listen to the mournful strains of the Rickenbacker, tried to blot out lyrics like “This heart was made for drinkin’, not for thinkin’.” His mind turned to Zillah and Nothing, to their obsessive incestuous passion for each other. Well, he asked himself, what difference can it make? Who can it hurt? There are so few of us, and if it stops two souls from being alone, then where is the harm?
He worried for Nothing because he knew Zillah was mad. Madder even than he had been fifteen years ago at Mardi Gras. The green light in his eyes was crazier, his passion for violence and pain more evident. But perhaps the whole race was mad in one way or another. Surely years upon years of living on the fringes of the world would drive anyone to madness. Zillah and the others—their madness was that they had grown to love living as nomads, outlaws, murderers. Their madness made them happy. And as for Nothing, perhaps being loved by his mad, beautiful father was better than being alone.
In another part of town, out where the pines hung heavy and green, where the October colors of the other trees flamed darkly in the night, where the kudzu marked the passage of the road, Ghost lay curled in bed. He was aware of Steve in the next room, sleeping the sleep of alcohol, sodden and dreamless. Steve wasn’t drinking so much beer lately. He had started on Jim Beam instead. Tonight he had begun by drinking it with tap water and ended up taking straight slugs from the bottle, and by the time Ghost helped him stagger to bed, he had put away a fifth of the stuff.
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