Blood and Chrysanthemums

by Nancy Baker

  “Hello again.” The voice from the shadows at her left spun her around, and she stepped back as her hands lifted in automatic defence. “Did I scare you? I’m sorry.” The climber who had given her advice on the wall was rising from a crouch by the bike rack.

  “It’s all right. I was preoccupied . . . you startled me.” He pushed a battered mountain bike into the light as she spoke. With her mind now undistracted by the necessity of conquering the overhang, she truly saw him for the first time. He was bigger than she had thought; over six feet and solid, wide jaw around wide grin, big nose, thick eyebrows over blue eyes. His hair was muddy brown, shot with lingering sun-streaks.

  “My name’s Mark, Mark Frye.” He held out his hand and she stared at it for a moment, then shook it hesitantly. His fingers were calloused and dusty with climbing chalk, but the heat of his skin felt as though it might scald her.

  “Ardeth Alexander.”

  “You new in town?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “Thought I hadn’t seen you around before.”

  “Do you climb on the wall often?”

  “Not really . . . but Banff’s a small town. Sooner or later you see most people here on the street at least once. Especially now that tourist season is almost over.”

  Ardeth frowned, realizing that he was right. Her Toronto-bred sensibility could not conceive of knowing everyone in your apartment building, let alone everyone in a town. This was a complication she had not foreseen—and another reason to be moving on.

  “Besides,” Mark continued, “I work over at Domano Sports, so I see a lot of people buying skis and things. You been climbing long?”

  “Just since I got here.”

  “You’re pretty good. Have you been out on any real climbs yet?” She shook her head. “There are some good ones outside of town. I could take you, if you’re interested.”

  Ardeth looked at him for a moment, knowing the offer could mean more than climbing, feeling the brand of his skin on her hand. She could scent his blood, beneath the sweat and chalk. For a wild moment, she imagined saying yes. To the mad risk of climbing, the madder risk of sex. To the maddest risk of all.

  “I can’t,” she said at last. “I’m allergic to the sun. I couldn’t climb in daylight. Thanks anyway . . . it was nice to meet you. . . . Goodnight.” The words tumbled out, to drown his objections. She turned away quickly and walked towards the street. He said nothing but she felt, or thought that she could, the weight of eyes on her retreating back.

  Out on the main street, she felt safer. There was still the semblance of a crowd there, though she noticed it had thinned considerably since the first nights of their arrival, a month earlier. Frye was right, the tourist season was almost over. Or at least in a lull that would last until the skiing started in December. Ardeth hitched her pack up onto her shoulder and wished she did not feel so suddenly exposed. They had never intended to stop here; they had been heading for Vancouver. Their car, cheap and barely roadworthy, had finally died just outside the town. They had resigned themselves to a longer stay when it became apparent that fixing it would cost more than they could afford. But as they looked around, it seemed as if Banff was the perfect place to hide. Tourists thronged the streets and young travellers from all over the world came and went, seeking brief employment to subsidize the climbing, hiking, cycling and camping that were the reasons for their trips.

  Now, seeing it through new eyes, she no longer felt invisible. In the summer sea of Japanese tourists, her short black hair did not merit a second look; now, compared only to the predominantly long, natural styles of the locals and transient travellers, it looked like the dye job it was. Her dark clothes, so perfectly anonymous in Toronto’s Queen Street bars, seemed suddenly too strong a contrast to the bright outdoor gear favoured by most of the tourists and townspeople alike.

  You couldn’t be more conspicuous if you put up a sign, she thought, catching a glimpse of her reflection in the window of a coffee shop, moving past a knot of late-lingering tourists. Pick the one that doesn’t belong in this picture.

  Then, thankfully, she was past the bright blaze of the stores and restaurants that lined Banff Avenue and onto the street that led to their rooms. The rounded bulk of Tunnel Mountain rose in front of her and seemed to promise shelter in its shadow.

  The natural glory of the place had overwhelmed her from the start. She had never been attracted to the outdoor life but for the first time could understand the allure. Nothing she had seen in photographs or films had prepared her for the encircling embrace of the mountains, the raw beauty of rock and trees, even glimpsed only by moonlight or the long twilights that lingered here as the sun disappeared behind the peaks. She had been frightened setting out on their first hunt, city-bred nerves jumping at every breeze in the tall pines around her, but her night-sight had turned the moonlit woods bright silver. If there were other predators in its depths, they stayed well away.

  She was almost home when she heard him call. There were no words, just the sudden knowledge in her heart that he had left the observatory and was on his way across the bridge over the Bow River. It was early for the hunt but she knew that he was going up the mountain, beyond the last line of houses carved from the woods. Hunger twitched into life and the memory of Mark Frye’s hand burning against hers made her throat ache.

  Wait for me, she whispered in her mind and felt his assent. She swerved back to the main street, crossed the river and found the trail that would take her to him.

  He was waiting at the edge of the small clearing, partway up the mountainside, across from the path she had taken. As he stepped from the shadow of the trees, the moonlight struck him, turning the loose grey hair to silver, revealing a fine-boned face. Ardeth felt something twist deep inside her, something perilously close to pain. But she did not move, simply waited beneath the branches as he stared into the woods to her left.

  After a moment, he lifted his hand. She heard the faint rustle of leaves, the crack of a twig. A dark shape moved into the clearing. It tossed its head, the wide rack of antlers seeming to rake the sky, and pawed at the dirt. Ardeth felt the edges of the call that drew it and found her fingers digging into a tree-trunk to keep herself from moving.

  At last, the great head dropped. The elk took two steps forward and was still. The hand dropped onto its sharp shoulder.

  Ardeth moved from the trees and crossed the clearing to the animal’s side. Across the lowered spikes of its antlers, she met Dimitri Rozokov’s eyes. For a moment, something moved in the grey gaze, a darkness she could not identify, then he smiled. She put her hand over his on the elk’s withers.

  In the moonlight, on the mountain, the vampires fed.

  Chapter 2

  The stars, wrapped in the gauzy veils of the nebula, burned through the glass. Dimitri Rozokov caught his breath and shifted his fingers slightly, adjusting the lens that brought the brilliant vision into even sharper focus. Copernicus might have sold his soul for this sight; Galileo might have recanted if they had promised him an instrument this fine. God knew, he had lost his own mortality for the promise of a knowledge less fantastic than this, for a science less full of wonder. His eyes traced the filaments of gas between the stars.

  How far away was it? Reluctantly, he lifted his gaze to flip through the book resting on the table by the telescope. Seven million light years from the Earth. For a moment, his mind refused to fathom the number, struggling to fit it back into a universe discovered with Copernicus and last studied when men believed there was life on Mars and there were only eight planets in the solar system.

  Seven million light years. And there were nebula upon nebula, galaxy upon galaxy beyond that, well beyond the range of this telescope, visible only from the great observatories in South America. And beyond the grasp of those lenses, ranks of stars and systems and galaxies fading away into eternity.

  And the world reckoned that he was an impossible thing. R
ozokov smiled and put his eyes back against the lens, then swore softly when he discovered a cloud had drifted over the view. He contemplated moving the telescope but after a glance at the sky decided that the cloud would be moving on in a few moments and settled back in the chair. Until he had seen the night sky for the first time through the telescope, he had not realized how much he had missed the stars in Toronto, where the city lights kept out all but the brightest. He had not known how much he needed them.

  On clear nights, there could be a dozen people waiting to glimpse the stars, but they thinned out as midnight came and went and by the usual time of Rozokov’s arrival the observatory was often deserted. At first, the opening of the shed’s roof had made him nervous, but the inhabitants of the house seemed to be accustomed to the sound and no lights ever went on, no one ever came to join his solitary contemplation of the night. Once or twice Ardeth had come with him, but she was a child of a different scholarship, weaned on television documentaries about the big bang, and the view did not intrigue her for long.

  Thinking of Ardeth, he frowned. He understood her current passion for climbing; he had engaged in his own forms of recklessness after his rebirth. She would tire of it sooner or later, no doubt, but he should not begrudge her her enthusiasms.

  She had an eternity in which to experiment with anything she chose. It was when she ceased to want to change that he should become concerned.

  It gave her something to do, just as this place gave him a way to occupy his time. There were other reasons she was doing it, he knew just as there were other reasons he came here. He closed his eyes, shutting out the moon. She is escaping into it, he acknowledged, just as you are escaping into the bright mystery of the stars.

  A month ago, he believed that all the escapes had been made, at least for a while. A century and a half earlier, he had escaped from Paris and the fire that had destroyed his reckless vampire companion Jean-Pierre, and Roxanne, their mortal servant and sometime lover. Victorian Toronto had been his safe haven for almost thirty years when the eccentric millionaire Ambrose Dale had discovered his existence. He had escaped that threat as well, concealing himself in a specially created shelter within the walls of a warehouse. Hidden away, he induced the deep sleep that was the closest to death he could now come. A rest of twenty years had been his plan, long enough for the aging Ambrose to die. When he awoke, almost a hundred years had passed and he found himself the captive of Ambrose Dale’s descendant.

  For a moment, the hands resting in his lap tensed, his fingers curling into claws. Images of his captivity seemed to flicker on the dark curves of his lowered lids. The slow swing of the bare light bulb outside his cell in the abandoned asylum, the chafe of the iron chain around his ankle, the all-encompassing pain his captors could summon with their strange device, the ultrasound. There were things they made him do, unknown rituals that seemed to be enacted in a shadow-world quite apart from the one that he inhabited. It was enough for him that their obscure rites all ended the same way—with the blood that seemed his only reality. He had escaped then as well, into the madness and hunger that ruled inside the circle of his skull.

  Then Ardeth had come. Trapped by fate into the same webs that had entangled him, she had not been the first warm blood-source that had occupied the cell beside him. But she was the only one who spoke to him, told him stories in the long nights to keep her own fear at bay. She was the only one who said his name. As he drank from her wrist or the delicate curve of her inner arm, it seemed as if he drew in sanity as well as life. He recognized the obscenities in which they had forced him to participate, the draining of his victim as the climax to the secret pornographic films they made to ensure their own fortunes. He realized that he had only one chance at escape from this hell and that Ardeth was the key.

  Somehow he had kept it from her until the moment that she had acknowledged that her own death was inevitable. Until she saw for herself their only means of deliverance. He gave her blood from his wrist but she had given him more: her kiss, her touch and finally, despite the bars between them, her throat.

  She had returned the next night from her grave in the woods. They had both surrendered to madness then, he acknowledged. The slaughter of their captors was necessary, but neither of them thought of survival as they did what they must. They had thought only of revenge.

  So another escape was made. He regained some semblance of virtue; he sent Ardeth away, knowing that the power behind their captors was seeking only him. In their separate solitudes, they walked some of the same streets. He hid in the guise of a street person and gathered knowledge of the new world into which he had awakened. Ardeth, out of her own perverse logic, her own old wounds, remade herself into the beautiful, dangerous vampire seductress of the world’s dark dreams.

  At last the forces of Ambrose Dale’s business empire—Havendale—now headed by his mad descendent Althea, gathered them in again, dragging Ardeth’s sister, Sara, and her friend Mickey into the maelstrom as well. Dale planned to make laboratory specimens of them, to have her captive scientists slice the secrets of immortality from their undead bodies. We escaped that too, he reminded himself, forcing himself to remember the moments that he listened to the dying Althea try to buy both eternity and immeasurable power, to feel again the heat of her skin, the roughness of her hair as he put his hands on her head and snapped her neck.

  He was more than five hundred years old. He had faced a thousand dangers in his lifetime: torture, hunger, floods, plagues, fire. He had survived them all. Surely here, in this quiet place, beneath this sky of wonders, there was nothing that he needed to escape.

  Nothing external, he acknowledged. Those other questions, the ones you carry inside, the ones you divert with science and Ardeth denies with physical challenge, cannot be eluded forever.

  He opened his eyes. The clouds were gone, at least for the moment. He leaned forward and found the nebula again. For tonight, its mysteries were the only ones that he was prepared to contemplate.

  Chapter 3

  It was just past seven. . . . and time for the dose of caffeine he’d need to make it through till closing. Mark Frye paused by the cash register to ask Kellie if she wanted him to bring her anything, then left Domano Sports, heading for one of the five coffee shops that had sprung up in the last year. They were part of the increasing gentrification of the town that had rendered the main street almost unrecognizable as the one he had driven his battered used car along for the first time ten years ago. He would be quite happy if the Ralph Laurens and Club Monacos went back where they came from. . . . but the coffee shops could stay. Cappuccino was rapidly becoming a necessity of life, not a luxury.

  It was the enduring paradox of living in a tourist town; tourists paid the bills and spoiled the ambience, profit supported his habits and led to the increasing commercialization and sometimes ugly development. Because the town was inside a national park, growth was regulated. . . . but where there was money, or even the smell of money, there was also a way. Someone could always think of reasons the town needed more hotel rooms, more golf courses, more malls. One person’s livelihood destroyed another person’s vision of the town, and which side of the line you were on often depended on whether it was your livelihood in question or not.

  Something across the street caught his attention, a flash of red against the store windows, a blur of darkness where there should only have been light. Attention dragged from the irresolvable question of the future, he looked across the street and saw her. It was the woman from the climbing wall. . . . Ardeth Alexander. He matched her pace, watching her.

  On the street, she stood out even more than she had at the wall.

  Everything about her seemed to be black: low boots, leggings, short skirt, loose jacket. Her only concession to the prevailing fashion in Banff was a bright red polar fleece top beneath the jacket. The breeze stirred the line of her hair and a red stone flashed in her ear.

  He remembered looking down int
o wide brown eyes.

  She turned down the alleyway and headed for the door of Snow Rats, a small shop as well known for its tasteless and outrageous T-shirts as for its snowboarding and ski equipment.

  He remembered the flush across her pale cheeks as she hauled herself up by one impossibly slender arm.

  The smell of coffee wafted through a suddenly opened door and reminded him why he had come.

  He hovered on the sidewalk, balancing the promise of coffee and a break from work and the memory of her fingers in his. Jesus, Frye, for a guy who likes risks, you sure are a coward, he mocked himself. How long has it been since you met a woman halfway as interesting as that one? The coffee will be here tomorrow. She might not be. What have you got to lose?

  He ran across the road before he could answer that question.

  Snow Rats was cramped and loud, metal or thrash or whatever the latest popular noise was called was pounding from the stereo. Mark eased his way in and saw her immediately, squeezed in between a rack of skis and the wall of T-shirts. She was working her way through the shirts, head bent, hair falling like shadows around her cheeks.

  “Hey, Mark,” a voice hailed from his left, and he looked over to see the clerk leaning on the counter looking at him. “Steve,” he acknowledged, suddenly embarrassed, and noticed almost absently that Steve had cut his long, blond dreadlocks and acquired a pierced nose since the last time he’d seen him.

  “In here checking out the competition?” Steve asked, though their stores were hardly genuine rivals. Snow Rats’ adolescent snowboarders didn’t venture into Domano’s main-street store and Domano’s well-heeled patrons tended to be looking for expensive equipment and the clothes that suggested they knew what to do with it, whether they did or not.

  “Been out yet?” Mark asked, moving over to look at the rack of snowboards, Ardeth a dark blur at the edge of his vision.