He stiffened. "I don't drink human blood."
She eyed him. "So I see." Irina paused, then added, "One can survive on animal blood to a point, but never well. We need human blood. That's why you're always hungry."
"A little hunger is better than treating people like cattle." As the words came out, Garreth winced. God that sounded self-righteous.
Irina regarded him with amusement. "Is that what you believe we do . . . that we are all like Mada?" She sobered. "No. Think. How could we have survived all these centuries and faded into mythology if-" She broke off. "Nichevo. Never mind. I understand your feelings. Truely. Few of us enter this life by choice. When I realized what I had become I despised Viktor with such passion that I, too, swore I would never treat people as he did and never drink human blood."
"You mentioned him before," Garreth said. "Is he the vampire who-"
"Yes. Prince Viktor." She spat the name. "Some called him Viktor the Wolfeyed. I was sixteen, and much plumper, when he saw me in Prince Yevgeni's household. My mother was a kitchen servant there. She would never say who my father was, but I have always felt he must have been a boyar, quite possibly prince's younger brother Peter. Sometimes I envied his legitimate daughters, but not usually. They had to live confined to terem in house and go veiled in street."
Garreth blinked in astonishment. "Russian women lived like that?"
She smiled faintly. "Five hundred years ago, yes." Her eyes focused past him. "My freedom cost me, however, when it gave Viktor chance to see me. He had his men abduct me one day on way to market with my mother. I didn't know he was responsible, of course, not until three nights later, three terrible nights of abject terror, waiting for what I knew must appear sooner or later. For years peasant and servant girls had been vanishing, then reappearing days or weeks later as walking dead.
"I was almost relieved when Viktor came out of dark with his fangs bared. I fought him, biting and scratching-my mother's father was a Mongol, after all-and though he still overpowered me and drank, was not before I tasted his blood first. Second night he came, I was hiding behind door. I hit him in face with a stool and escaped." Irina smiled wryly. "Unfortunately was winter. I froze to death before I reached home." The smile faded. "I woke in snow. You can perhaps understand my feelings when I discovered cold no longer bothered me and realized why."
Garreth sucked in his breath. Oh yes, he knew.
Irina focused on him. "Only my hatred of that devil kept me from throwing myself on a stake. I swore to destroy him."
The words reverberated in Garreth. He thought of Lane's grave. "Did you?"
Her teeth bared in a wolfish grin. "I am a Mongol's granddaughter, remember. At home I resume my life, claiming I could not remember where I had been. Pretending to be still human was difficult-agony when I went to church-but thought of vengeance helped me endure pain. At night I spied on Viktor, studying his habits and his house until I knew when he was vulnerable and how to reach him. Then I pretended to recover my memory. I denounced him. Prince Yevgeni gathered a hunting party at Viktor's house. I led them to cellar where he slept by day and persuaded prince to let me drive in stake."
"They didn't suspect you of having become a vampire?"
She smiled grimly. "I had sworn on an icon that I escaped before he fed on me . . . most difficult thing I have ever done. Was like putting my hand in fire. That convinced them, but I took no chances anyway. While prince was beheading Viktor and burning body, I helped myself to as much gold and jewels as I could carry from that devil's treasure room and ran away to Moscow."
"Where you gave up your vow of not drinking human blood?"
He winced at the edge on his voice-he had not intended to sound judgmental-but she shrugged. "Where rashness of youthful passion gave way to reality and necessity. Garreth, feeding does not have to be an act of-"
The computer beeped.
Irina spun her chair back toward it. "Finally. Several references, too. Very good." Before Garreth had time to read the list on the screen, she tapped a key.
The printing convulsed and vanished. The drive light flickered for several minutes. When it stopped, the computer beeped again. Irina tapped more keys.
CONNECTION BROKEN, the screen announced.
"Now let's see what we have."
At her tap on another key, the printer spat into life. Paper spewed into the receiving basket. Irina ripped it off and after skimming the readout, handed it on to him. "You will find this interesting."
The database had found and sent them three items: an entry from Contemporary Authors, and article on Fowler from the Writer's Digest magazine, and an interview that had run in Playboy several years before.
According to the biographical data in Contemporary Authors, Fowler had been born in London in 1939 to Margaret Graham Fowler, the daughter of stage actor Charles Graham, and Richard "Dickon" Fowler. Fowler's father, who worked for British Intelligence with the French Underground during World War II, died in France late in 1945 of a broken neck sustained in a fall.
A ripple ran across Garreth's neck hair. Fowler said his parents met Lane in France shortly after the war. That could not have been long before the father's death.
He went on reading.
Fowler's mother remarried and Fowler spent the rest of his childhood shuttling between boarding school and his actor grandfather. He enrolled at Oxford, but instead of studying history, began writing horror novels and after selling one two years later, quit college to write full time. A few years later he switched from horror to thrillers. His first American publication came in 1972.
Garreth glanced back at the line about Fowler's father. His skin prickled again. "A broken neck."
Irina glanced up at him through thick, dark lashes. "Interesting, yes? Read farther."
The Writer's Digest article talked only about writing discipline and how growing up around his grandfather had provided an atmosphere rich in imagination. Garreth went on to the Playboy interview. A few questions into the article one leaped up at him.
"Playboy: In a BBC interview several years ago you stated that you began writing as an act of exorcism. That's an interesting reason to write. Would you care to explain for your American readers?"
"Fowler: Yes, of course. When I was six a savage dog attacked my father. He fell from a cliff trying to escape from the beast and was killed. As a child I could never accept that. How could a mere dog kill my father the spy? It had to be some monster responsible. His death haunted me for years. I'm not sure what made me turn it into a story and write it down, but eventually it became my novel Blood Maze. In it a boy witnesses a werewolf tearing his father's throat out. No one will believe him so he vows that when he grows up, he will find and destroy the werewolf. As a grown man, he fulfills that vow. In a sense, the same happened to me. By writing about destroying the instrument of my father's death, I laid his ghost. I went on writing horror novels for a while, of course, because I knew I could, but eventually I switched to thrillers. The horror novels were exorcism, the thrillers a kind of memorial. In a sense, each spy hero is my father."
Garreth felt for his own throat, tracing the scars where Lane's teeth had ripped through the flesh.
"See this question also," Irina said, pointing.
"Playboy: If your characters are symbols for people in your life, who is the tall woman who appears as Chatelaine Barbour in Blood Maze, Tara Brenneis in Mind's Eye, and Magda Eberhardt in Our Man In Hades, to name a few of her incarnations? When she appears, she is always the beautiful seductress who turns traitor."
"Fowler (with a rueful laugh): I'm afraid I'll have to take the Fifth on that one, as you Americans say. I don't fancy being sued for slander. Suffice it to say she was an older woman I fell madly in love with years ago and who spurned me for the callow youth I was. No doubt it's unsporting to make her the villainess, but . . . she keeps popping up when I need one."
"Lane," Garreth said. A beautiful seductress betraying the hero over and over . . . as she had turned on
Fowler's father? "I could have sworn there was no anger when Fowler talked about his childhood meeting with Lane. I didn't hear any bitterness or resentment, absolutely no hint of hatred. Can someone hide his feelings that well? He'd have to be one hell of an actor." A hell of an actor, too, to come into the squadroom Wednesday morning looking like the most disturbing thing on his mind was a hangover, which had to be a pretense as well.
"He may be mad," Irina said. "Or both."
Fowler would have to be riding the edge of a crackup carrying his obscession around buried that deep all these years.
Irina turned off the computer and stood. "So . . . now we must catch this Englishman and deal with him."
Garreth stiffened. "Shoot him, you mean, like you were going to shoot me last night? No." Garreth shook his head. "I won't-" He broke off, but finished the sentence silently: won't kill again. The fact that taking Lane's life had, in the end, been a matter of self-defense made no difference in the wrongness of it. What gives you the right to judge me? Lane had flung at him that Thanksgiving night. He needed no second face haunting his dreams. "There's been enough killing."
The violet eyes reflected red. "How can I convince you how deadly and ruthless vampire hunters are. They are . . . driven . . . blindly self-righteous, so positive we are evil that they see nothing but their 'cause'. Like berserkers, nothing stops them but death."
"Criminals disregard the law, too, but we punish them through the system. How can you sneer at hunters for being self-righteous if we arbitrarily set ourselves up as their judges?"
She sighed. "Ah, your law again. What do you suggest, then?"
It furthers one to appoint helpers, I Ching had said. Garreth took a breath. "First we need proof Fowler is our killer, and since the killer has to be watching me, and now you, we can't be involved or he'll realize we're on to him. We need help, human help, official help . . . someone who can find probable cause and enter Fowler's hotel room to search it. We need Harry."
8
Irina said, "You realize you are risking more lives than yours and mine."
Garreth nodded.
The two of them sat at the kitchen counter with pewter tankards of blood, his horse blood from his thermos, hers from a unit of human blood she had brought from the Foundation. He buried his nose in his tankard in an effort to block out the tantalizing scent leaking toward him from hers. Thirst scorched his throat.
He distracted himself by thinking about Fowler. Where was the writer now? Watching the house, they had to assume. To keep Fowler from suspecting he was now the hunted, Garreth had come home from the Foundation on foot, with a stop at the police stables to fill the thermos. Irina had followed later, parking her car several blocks away and approaching the house through the back yards.
An anxious voice said, "Garreth, you shouldn't be out-who is this?"
He looked around at Lien in the kitchen doorway. "Meet Irina Rudenko." Then he noticed Grandma Doyle behind Lien. Introducing her, too, it occurred to him that Irina was also his grandmother of sorts.
A rap sounded upstairs. "Garreth!" Harry's voice called.
Lien glanced up. "I'll say I let you out."
Garreth shook his head. "I have to tell him everything anyway. We need him."
She studied his face for a moment, then sighed and nodded. Moving around the work island, she reached up into a cupboard for a bottle of brandy.
Grandma Doyle stayed near the door fingering the Maltese cross around her neck as she eyed the girl.
Irina smiled. "Mrs. Doyle, you have nothing to fear from me." She held up the tankard. "As you see, I have my breakfast."
Grandma Doyle's expression became accusing. "You're the one responsible for the creature who did this to me grandson."
The smile faded. "To my regret, yes. Even one as experienced as I can be a fool."
Harry came thumping down the stairs and through the doorway from the hall. "Lien, see if you can-Garreth?" He plowed to a stop, staring in open-mouthed, almost comic disbelief. Garreth felt no desire to laugh, however. "Your door is bolted on the inside."
Here it came. Garreth's gut knotted. He took a deep breath. "Yes. I don't have to open doors to go through them."
Irina caught Garreth's wrist. "Gently, tovarich. I am Irina Rudenko, Mr. Takananda."
"Rudenko?" Harry's eyes narrowed. "You were going to meet him at noon today."
She smiled. "No. Twelve o'clock our time, I told him. That's midnight."
Harry blinked. "What?" Then he started, staring back at Garreth. "What do you mean you don't have to open doors to go through them?"
That had taken long enough to sink in. "Harry, maybe you'd better sit down. I need to talk."
Tautly, Harry groped for a stool. Garreth smelled an acid tang beneath his old partner's blood scent. Fear Garreth was about to confess to the killings?
Garreth hurried to reassure him. "I didn't kill those men, Harry, I swear."
Harry let his breath out. "I didn't think you could, Mik-san."
"What I have to say is about me . . . why I act strange sometimes, how I left the bedroom without unbolting the door."
The almond eyes narrowed. "You went out the window."
Garreth shook his head. "Harry-" Shit. How do I say this? Maybe he should take off his glasses and- He discarded the idea in mid-thought. No, this was something Harry had to understand and accept of his own volition.
Good luck, lover, Lane's voice laughed in his head.
He groped desperately for words. "Harry . . . if you were watching a movie and the detectives had some murders to solve where the bodies had two punctures in their necks and were all drained of blood, and then one of the detectives was found dead with his throat torn out by the killer only he sat up in the morgue with his throat almost healed, and after that he stopped eating food and preferred night to daylight and he couldn't stand garlic . . . what would you say they were dealing with?"
Harry frowned. "I thought we were going to talk seriously."
"Harry, I'm deadly serious."
A pulse jumped in Harry's throat. He stared at Garreth in silence for a long time, then with face smoothed into a bland mask said in a careful, flat voice, "This isn't a movie."
"No," Garreth agreed. "I wish it were. Then we could shut off the TV and go on with normal lives. But everything that happened to me is real. I wake up from sleeping and I'm still a-still changed."
The skin between Harry's brows rippled, as though he started to frown but thought better of it. He said slowly, "You know, Dr. Masethin sees private patients, too."
Garreth's gut twisted. Masethin. The department shrink. Harry thought he had gone bananas. Well, what else did you expect, man? He kept his voice even. "Harry, I'm not crazy."
"Of course not," Harry said hastily. "But maybe-you know, the mind plays funny tricks sometimes. Chemical imbalances from starvation might-"
Garreth slapped his hand down on the counter. "I'm not anorexic either! I eat. This." He poured some of the blood from his tankard onto the counter top.
The pulse leaped visibly in Harry's throat again as he stared at the crimson puddle. After a minute he looked up with a friendly smile that sent Garreth's stomach plummeting. "All right. I'm convinced."
Like hell, Garreth reflected in disappointment. That was Harry's let's-humor-thesubject-until-he's-off-guard-and-we-can jump-him smile.
From the faint shake of Irina's head Garreth saw she read the situation as he did.
Grandma Doyle said, "I'd be thinking of a demonstration, Garreth."
Nothing less was going to convince him, it appeared. Hopping off the stool, Garreth strode over to the hall door and closed it. Then he leaned against it, hands above his head. "Watch, Harry. I don't touch the knob."
Wrench. He stood in the hall. Turning, he pressed against the door again. Wrench. Would Harry be glaring in revulsion?
Not quite. Harry stared but with eyes white-rimmed in disbelief, mouth working soundlessly, face drained of blood.
Grandma Doyle eased him backward onto a stool.
Lien wrapped his fingers around a glass of brandy. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than you or I have dreamed," she said gently.
The brandy went down in a single gulp. Garreth doubted Harry even noticed the action, much less tasted the liquor. After Lien refilled the glass and he tossed that off, too, he stared at the glass in astonishment. Then he looked at Garreth and closed his eyes. "Tell me I didn't see that."
"You saw it," Irina said. "Speaking from experience, it is easier if you forget trying to understand what you saw; just accept it."
Lien put an arm around him. "Accept Garreth, too. Basically he's still the same person he always was."
Harry stiffened.
Garreth sucked in his breath.
But it was Lien Harry turned to frown at. "You knew about this, and you didn't tell me?"
He seemed almost relieved by the omission, Garreth noticed.
Glad to have something comprehensible to think about?
Lien said, "I learned just yesterday. Garreth tried to tell you himself then, but you were too set on believing Vanessa's diagnosis of him." She poured more brandy.
He pushed it away. "I won't be able to drive if I have any more. Or maybe I'll call in sick. I can't handle anything more today." He picked up the glass. Garreth caught his wrist. "Harry, you have to go in! We think we know who the killer is and we need you to prove it."
"The killer." The expression in Harry's eyes wiped the past five minutes out of existence to leap at Garreth's words. "A killer I can handle. Who is it?"
Garreth told him.
Harry listened with a concentration like a drowning man clinging to a life preserver. At the end of the recitation he jumped up. "Van hasn't been happy about that stair window as an entry point. I'll tell her Garreth mentioned not checking the storerooms because they were locked. She'll jump at checking them. After the lab processes them, we'll bring Fowler in to compare prints and fibers."
BloodWalk Page 46