The sudden shift from world-wise woman to child left Garreth groping in mental confusion. Like a child, too, she leaped from the car at the park and raced from the parking lot up a path toward the swinging bridge. The bridge connected to an artificial island made by digging a channel looping from the Saline River around a large oval of land and back.
She danced across the bridge in a rapid tap of boot heels, pausing only to laugh over her shoulder at him. "In case you haven't already discovered it, yes, vampires can cross running water. It's amazing the superstitions humans have dreamed up to convince themselves they're protected from their nightmares."
In the center of the island lay an open stone pavilion with a raised bandstand. Garreth caught up with her there, and found her peeling off the middle-aged face she wore, so that he truely faced Lane Barber again, youthful face shining pale in the twilight of his nightsight. She raised her brows. "No lights and yet not a misstep anywhwere. Isn't it wonderful being able to see in the dark?"
What was she trying to do? "It has its uses, yes."
She stuffed the latex bits of her mask in a pocket, grimacing. "How solemn you are. Too bad I couldn't have brought you here in the spring, with tulips and crocus and daffodils everywhere, and peonies later in the summer. They used to have a band on Friday and Saturday nights. Lights lit up the pavilion so you could see it from miles away. Everyone in town came. Mama and Papa would polka and waltz until they were almost too tired to walk home."
The ghosts of those dancers haunted the pavilion. He could see them in the leaves the wind whirled across the paving. The ghosts and the sudden wistfulness on the girl-woman face sent a pang through him. Maybe there were things she could do to him that had nothing to do with physical assault. He regretted having come. "Whenever you're ready to talk, let me know."
She sat down on the steps of the bandstand. "All right; let's talk." It was the woman's voice again. "You can't beat me, so why try? It isn't worth it for a couple of arrogant, self-centered humans. There's no reason for you to care about them. There's no reason for you to care what happens to any humans any longer."
He sat down at the other end of the steps from her. "The way you don't care about your family?"
She flung up her head, eyes flashing, and in the motion he saw another ghost . . . of the girl in the photo album, and the singer who attacked Claudia Darling in 1941. Then she laughed. "Touché. But . . . family is one thing, the rest of humanity another."
"Not to me. I'm sworn to protect them, and all my friends are human, of course."
Lane snorted. "Friends are people you can do things with and bare your soul to. Do you have anyone who fits that description, anyone you can sit and talk with as openly as we're talking? Is there a someone you'd trust to tell what you are without being afraid that the next time you saw him he'd be carrying a sharp wooden stake?"
That stung. He remembered the morning he woke up to find Lien above him and had wondered about that very thing.
She leaned toward him. "Reality, Inspector . . . humans are only one thing to us: a source of food."
He sat up straight. "Not to me. I've never drunk a drop of human blood."
Her eyes narrowed. "You drink only animal blood?" She shook her head mockingly. "No wonder you're so thin. You really ought to eat properly, Inspector."
His jaw tightened. "I refuse to prey on people!"
"Oh, really." Her lip curled. "How righteous. But I notice you have no scruples against using my mother as an informer and tricking her into thinking you're a friend to get to me."
That stung even harder. He felt faint heat crawling up his neck and face. "I'm sorry about that. I didn't like doing it. I like your mother."
Her voice flattened to a hiss. "I could kill you for that. It almost makes me sorry I didn't break your neck when I had the chance."
"I keep wondering why you didn't."
For a minute he wondered if she were going to answer. She leaned back against the steps and looked away. But after a bit, she said, "I intended to, but . . . you bit me."
He blinked. She sounded as though she expected that to explain everything. "So?"
Lane sighed. "The drawback to immortality is that while we go on, nothing else does. I hold on to my possessions because I lose the people. They die or are left behind when I take a new identity. I'm enjoying my family while I can because when they're dead, I won't have anyone left in the world I give a damn about. Everything I know best, the world I was born into, will be gone forever. It'll happen to you, too."
Without wanting to, Garreth saw it . . . his parents dying, even his son passing him in age. Eventually, he could become the contemporary of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, except they would be alien to him, looking at the world through different eyes and even speaking a different language. Look at how the little slang Lane permitted herself-like calling him a mick-dated her.
"Immortality and vampirism are very lonely, Garreth."
The words echoed through him. Almost desperately, he thought of Helen Schoning. "It doesn't have to be. There's nothing wrong with serial relationships. Every time period ought to offer at least several people who can meet some of our emotional needs."
"And what if you could find someone like that, someone just right, like your late wife, say?"
That hit like a knife in the ribs. Garreth shot to his feet with the pain. "How do you know about Marti?"
Lane smiled. "I asked around about you. Your neighbors were only too happy to talk to a reporter about the Man Who Came Back From The Dead. They told me you and Marti had a very special relationship. Her death must have been extremely hard for you."
His throat closed tight, trapping the pain suddenly filling his chest. "Leave my wife out of this."
"But that's just the point." Lane leaned toward him. "What if you found someone else like that. You'd know from the beginning that you were going to lose her eventually. And what if you found another soulmate, then another, always to lose her. How long could you endure that kind of pain?"
Agony wracked him now just thinking about it. He clenched his fists and whispered hoarsely, "God damn you!" Then he laughed bitterly. "Except you already are, and me, too."
She raised her brows. "Surely you don't believe that nonsense. Damnation has nothing to do with us. We're neither demonic nor Undead. We're as alive as humans, only in a different, superior way. What mechanism do you think actually produces a vampire?"
The question surprised him. He thought about it for a minute and had to shrug. "I never thought about it."
"Well I have, and I've studied. I'm convinced there's a vampire virus."
He remembered the medical books on her shelves. "Like rabies."
She laughed. "Close enough. It's carried in blood and saliva like rabies. A person bitten receives a small inoculation of the virus. In a normal, healthy person the immune system destroys it. If there are repeated inoculations, though, some viruses survive to set up housekeeping in the host's cells, and when the body becomes very weak-dies-they take over, modify the host to suit their needs, and reanimate it." Lane's eyes gleamed as she warmed to her subject. "It would appear to take very little to just reanimate the body. The amount of virus from several bites or one long drinking session ending in death are sufficient for that, but apparently there has to be a large colony to affect the brain enough to restore higher intellectual functions."
He stared at her, suddenly understanding. "Blood would carry the most, and I received your blood by biting you."
She nodded. "I knew you would reanimate with higher functions intact, unlike Mossman or Adair." She stood and came over to reach toward the scars on his neck. "Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood."
The light spicy-musky scent of her perfume curled around him. He jerked away. "I don't believe you, lady. I'm a cop and you're a killer and you thought you'd make me your companion? How in hell did you ever think I'd agree? Didn't it occur to you that once I realized what had happened to me I might tell everyone
what you were and destroy you?"
Her smile was knowing. "You didn't, did you? You haven't told anyone anything, just came after me on your own."
Something he had done once before, he remembered with a sudden chill, and had died for the error. He bounded up the steps into the bandstand. "But not to become your companion. I'm taking you back, even if I have to tell everyone everything."
She followed him up. "And destroy yourself, too?"
He turned his back to the rail and leaned against it for support. "Why not?" he said steadily. "I detest what you've made me. You destroyed my life; you almost destroyed my partner's. You've brought misery to the lives of Mossman and Adair's families. All I care about is seeing you face judgment for that, then I want to die . . . finally and for always."
Lane's breath wrapped white around her and melted away into the night air. "Do you? When there's so much you've never seen or experienced?" The musical cadence of her whisper filled the bandstand. "You lived on the bay for years, but did you ever once climb aboard one of the ships that dock there every day and sail away with her? Do you really want to die before you've seen wonders like the Himalayas above Katmandu or climbed to the temples of Tibet? Or walked the Great Wall of China and explored the ancient ruins of Karnak and Zimbabwe? Poling through the Okavanga Delta in Africa at flood time there is such beauty and richness of life that it makes your throat ache, and there's nothing more awesome than the migrations in the Serengeti, when the plains stretch like a sea of grass and there are wildebeest and zebra as far as the eye can see. There's a city in northern China that holds a winter festival every year and fills the city with ice sculptures, not just snowmen but pure, clear ice chiseled into a wonderland of heroes and mythical animals and castles, and ice arbors with ice benches to sit on."
The whisper sang on, naming cities, describing mountains and rivers and caves, most he had never heard of but all sounding awesomely breathtaking . . . sang on and on until Garreth's head swam and he ached in longing. He had looked at the ships along the bay, yes, and thought about the places they sailed, but he could never afford to board one. "Most people don't ever see those places," he said. "There isn't time for them all in a life."
Garreth did not recall seeing her move, but Lane suddenly stood beside him. The scent of her perfume filled his head. "Not a human life, no, but we have all the time in the world. We can explore every wonder completely before moving on to the next."
Yes, he thought with a slow wonder. "You can afford a trip like that?"
She slipped an arm through his and laughed-a low, rich sound. "My dear, a woman with hypnotic powers can learn a great many investment tips from the business giants she beds." She sighed happily. "It will be the grand tour of grand tours. Vienna and Rome and Copenhagen. They aren't like they were before the war, but they're still beautiful, and Peking, Mecca, and Sri Lanka. Carrara, where the best marble in the world is quarried, and Venice, where all the greatest glass craftsmen work. And there are pleasures I'll show you that are beyond your imagining, pleasures no human can appreciate. I'll teach you survival techniques it's taken me decades to learn. Garreth, my love, we will bestride the world like a colossus."
The bandstand felt like a carousel, with the night spinning dazzlingly past them. But uneasiness still stirred beneath his growing excitement and anticipation. What? Something he had forgotten? No matter; he would remember it later.
He shook his head. "I'm surprised you've waited this long to go. Wasn't the vampire who made you interested?"
Lane sighed. "We were going to. All the signs indicated Europe was about to fall apart, though, and we couldn't leave until the Polish property was secured or sold off. Another week and we'd have been clear, but . . . Hitler pushed in so much faster and more brutally than anyone ever anticipated." She shuddered. "Blitzkrieg isn't just a word when you've lived through it. Warsaw was in chaos. Irina and I got separated and I never saw her again, not even when I went back to look for her after the war."
Garreth blinked. "Irina? Her? A woman made you?"
"Don't sound so scandalized, love." Lane squeezed his arm. "Human blood is human blood; we don't have to drink from the opposite sex. That's usually the choice and Irina normally fed only on men, but . . . I begged her to take from me and let me drink from her. She called herself Irina Rodek and she had a Polish passport."
He felt his brows hop. "Polish."
Lane giggled. "All vampires aren't Transylvanian, you know. Not that she was really Polish. She once told me she was nearly five hundred years old. She'd been Russian for a while, an aristocrat, but had to flee during the Revolution. We met in Vienna." Her voice went dreamy. She leaned her head down on his shoulder. "July, 1934. Vienna really wasn't the place to be that month with Hitler's putsch and Dollfuss's killing, but Matthew was stubborn. What were politics to us, he said, as long as the cafes and museums stayed open? That was when he had his reservations and that was when we would use them."
"Matthew? That's the professor you ran away with?" Garreth said.
"Matthew Carlson, yes, but it's more accurate to say I ran after him. I'd had him for history that spring and knew he'd be going to Europe on his sabbatical, and I wanted so much to get the hell away from Baumen and Kansas. I threw myself at him. He was middle-aged with a middle-aged wife so the idea of some coed, even an over-sized, clumsy one, finding him sexy turned him to putty. He left his wife and took me with him instead. We were sitting in a cafe and I noticed his eyes going past me. I turned around to see what he was looking at. It was a who, a woman at the next table." Lane laughed. "I hated her on sight. She was so exquisite, like a Dresden figurine, small, perfect cream complexion, hair like sable, and violet, violet eyes. And she was looking at Matthew, flirting with him. Worse, he looked back, all goggle-eyed. Suddenly I was furious. I threw myself at her, fully intending to ruin her beauty for life."
Garreth remembered the photograph in the Chronicle. "You have tended to react violently to other women interfering with your meal ticket, haven't you."
She grinned. "Oh, yes. And this would have been another nasty scene except she looked straight at me and said very calmly, in the most charming accent, 'Please don't be angry. Sit down. It would delight me to have you join me for tea.' And suddenly I wasn't angry any longer, and Matthew and I did join her."
The scene played in Garreth's head. He glanced sideways at Lane, fascinated. "How did you come to find out she was a vampire and ask her to make you one, too?"
"I found out by observation, watching her with men, always a different one, including Matthew once, and seeing the man afterward. She sort of took me under her wing after that afternoon. 'I sense you are a very unhappy young woman,' she told me several days later. 'You think you are ugly.' She taught me to dress and walk properly. 'You cannot be small and cuddly so don't waste your youth longing to be. Think of yourself as a goddess, a queen, and move like one.' Irina was the one who showed me that I had a singing talent. She even paid for coaches to train my voice. But that was later. At first she was just kind and when I saw how much men fawned over her, I wanted to be just like her, so I watched her closely in order to imitate her." Lane frowned. "Why I realized she was a vampire, I don't know. Even though I had always been fascinated by werewolves and vampires and ogres while growing up, dreaming of becoming one and wreaking revenge on all my tormentors, I didn't believe in them. If I'd been back in Kansas, the idea would never have occurred to me; it would have seemed preposterous. But I was in Vienna, where it seemed all the fairytales in the world might be true. I'd found myself a kind of fairy godmother, hadn't I? I figured it out and when it came time for Matthew and me to leave, I refused to go with him. I went running to Irina, weeping, claiming he'd been over come with remorse and guilt about the way he'd treated his wife and had abandoned me. I begged to stay with her, as her maid if nothing else."
"And she let you."
A complacent smile lifted the corners of Lane's mouth. "Yes, but as a companion, not maid. I was useful t
o her, you see. She quickly realized I knew what she was and didn't care. She also saw that as I gained self-confidence, I attracted men . . . meals for her. After a couple of years, I begged to join her in her life. She refused at first, saying how hard and lonely a life it is, but when I pointed out that she wouldn't have to be lonely anymore, she agreed. I think she was sorry. She kept scolding me and threatening to leave me on my own if I killed another man. 'It is excessive; it is dangerous. You must learn control,' she would say."
The uneasiness, the feeling that he should be remembering something, stirred again in Garreth. "Irina was right," he said.
Lane snorted. She flung herself away from him, pacing across the bandstand. "Not if it's done right, like a wild animal did it, or a fanatic cult. I knew what I was doing. Irina came from a superstitious age, when people believed in vampires, and was careful out of habit. Even so, sometimes . . ." She turned back to face him. "Sometimes I wonder if she comprehended how much power we have. And how much safety in this age of logic and technology. We can do whatever we like with no fear of reprisal."
The chill inside him exploded outward, shattering the warm spell her plans had woven around him, reminding him why he was here and what he had to do. "No. We can't. We still have to be accountable."
Her frown told him she saw she was losing him again. Lane hesitated, mind churning visibly, then shook her head with an indulgent smile. "Ah, we're back to that again, are we?"
"I'm sorry, yes."
She shrugged. "I'm sorry, too, but I suppose it's too much to forget what you were so soon. You have to grow out of it. Then let me start you on your way by dispensing with this foolish illusion you have of returning me to San Francisco. It can't be done. Rosary handcuffs and a garlic cell might hold me, but you'll never get me from here to there. I'll kill you first, even though I adore you and long to show the world to you. Now lay down these wisps of humanity you cling to and come with me. Enjoy the power that is ours."
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