Blood and Chrysanthemums

by Nancy Baker

  She paused at the door of the Department of Medicine building and looked out through the glass towards the parking lot. It’s all right, she told herself firmly. It’s perfectly safe out there. She could see the small knots of students moving beneath the lights of the campus.

  Lisa took a deep breath and pushed through the doorway into the cool September night. Shifting her grip on her briefcase, she headed for her car on the far side of the university parking lot.

  With each step, she felt herself relaxing a little. This would be like all the other times she’d made this walk in the month since she’d returned to Vancouver from Toronto. Most of those times had been in daylight, but on the few occasions she had been caught out after sunset, she had made it home safely.

  It was only sensible to be cautious, she told herself. Avoiding the dark streets when she was alone, spending most of her nights at her brother’s house in the suburbs, these things were only reasonable. Other precautions had crossed her mind as well but she had rejected them. She would not give up her job, leave the city, change her name. She would not rub garlic on the sills of her windows and wear a crucifix.

  She went on being sensible . . . but there was another part of her that acknowledged that all her precautions, reasonable or otherwise, would not make any difference in the end. If the yakuza gangsters wanted to kill her, they could do it. If the vampires wanted to destroy her, superstitious follies like garlic and crosses would not stop them.

  All this because of a debt her father incurred before she had even been born. She pushed that thought away, guilty at her anger at a man who now lay in the hospital, half-paralyzed from a stroke.

  You should go and see him tonight, Lisa told herself even as she admitted that by the time she reached the hospital visiting would be over. She had not been to see him in two days. Tomorrow night, she vowed. No matter what, you’ll go tomorrow night.

  Somewhere behind her, she heard someone shout. She looked back over her shoulder, automatically increasing her pace along the walkway. Against the bright entrance to the Department of Medicine building, she saw silhouettes move and circle, then head off towards the student residences.

  She let her breath out and smiled slightly, turning back towards the parking lot. There was her car, waiting in a half-empty row. She found her keys and hurried across the pavement.

  The key was in the lock when she heard the creak of a car door behind her. Her fingers turned to ice and her throat seemed to close. Don’t look, she thought, hearing the click as the lock mechanism opened. Just don’t look.

  “Dr. Takara.” It was a male voice, gruff and accented. Lisa slid her fingers under the door handle and lifted. She had to open the door and get in the car. If she didn’t turn around, she could be in the car before he could stop her.

  She heard a footfall, then a black-sleeved arm came around her shoulder and a wide, brown hand flattened against the edge of the car door. “Come with me please, Dr. Takara.”

  Lisa swallowed once and turned around. The man who stood behind her was neatly dressed in a black suit and white shirt. He was no taller than she was but much broader. Bodybuilder’s shoulders and a thug’s face, she thought. Beyond him, parked one space down from her car, was a long black limousine. The windows were smoky and impenetrable but the front doors were open and the driver stood on the far side of the car.

  If I scream, will anyone hear me? she wondered, but did not dare look around to see if there was anyone else in the dark parking lot. Can I stall them until someone comes?

  “I’m sorry,” she began, her voice sounding reedy and breathless. “You must have confused me with someone else.”

  “Please come with me to the car, Dr. Takara,” the man said, as if she hadn’t spoken. His hand closed over her upper arm.

  “I’m not . . .” The words died as she was pulled forward sharply. She saw the back door of the car begin to open.

  The scream was at her lips when the man’s hand closed over her mouth. He was at her back, pushing her inexorably towards the dark interior of the limousine. She flailed out and caught the edge of the open door in one hand. Her foot found the bottom of the doorway then slipped away, skidding onto the pavement. Someone pried her fingers from their grip and she was thrust into the waiting shadows.

  The door slammed behind her.

  She found herself sprawled between the thickly upholstered seats, her knees on the carpeted floor. There was a man sitting in the centre of the back seat, his foot only inches from her outflung hand.

  If you’re going to do something, she thought wildly, you’d better do it now, before the car starts. But what was there to do? She could fling herself back towards the door that she had been thrown through or gamble that she could make it past the man to the far one. The back seat of the limousine was sealed off from the front and other men might never know she had moved.

  If you try to escape, perhaps they’ll shoot you, a cold voice inside her whispered. That might be the best choice you will have.

  The car shuddered into life beneath her and she closed her eyes for a moment. “Dr. Takara.” She looked up. This one was a little older, she decided, and his suit looked more expensive. He had a hard-edged handsomeness she might have found attractive under other circumstances. In the dim light, she could not see his eyes. “Please make yourself more comfortable.” He lifted his hand and gestured to the seat across from him.

  Lisa manoeuvred herself up onto the seat, settling as close to the door as she dared. She reached down for her purse but he was there before her. He set it and her briefcase on the far side of his own seat with a faint smile but allowed her to retrieve her car keys from the floor without interference. She put them in her pocket, remembering with absurd amusement a long-ago class in self-defence that advocated using keys as a weapon. It seemed a hopeless consolation, but she kept her fingers closed around them anyway.

  A glance out the window told her they were on their way out of the university grounds.

  “Don’t be afraid, Doctor. I apologize for the unorthodox approach but you seemed to be avoiding us. You never called the number that my associate, Mr. Moro, gave you.”

  “I lost it.” Lisa refused to look at her purse, where the tattered business card bearing Mr. Moro’s number was folded into her wallet. All she had to do was lie. That should be simple enough. She had lied to everyone else: the Toronto police, the reporters, her father. To get out of this, she only had to stick to her story, no matter what happened.

  “That explains it then. Well, there’s no damage done. You can simply tell me what you would have told him. If you’d still had his number.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Takashi Yamagata. I am Mr. Moro’s employer.” He leaned forward a little and his dark eyes met her. “Please begin at the beginning, Doctor. We have as much time as you need.”

  Lisa took a deep breath and told the story again. How Mr. Moro had come to claim her services as an immunologist as repayment of her father’s old debt to the yakuza. How she had been delivered to the Dale estate and ended up in the hidden laboratory. How one night one of their captors had gone crazy and killed several of the other scientists, then set the house on fire, leaving her as sole survivor. She had crafted the story so carefully, basing it on as much truth as she could, and told it so often, that she almost believed it herself.

  “I don’t know why you were interested in Havendale and I don’t care. I never did any research for them,” she concluded.

  “In all those months, you did nothing?”

  “They kept waiting for some specimens we were supposed to study but nothing ever came.”

  “They never told you what the research was about?”

  “Something to do with longevity, I think.” She risked another glance out the window. An anonymous stretch of road ghosted under the streetlights. When she glanced back at Yamagata, he had leaned back in his seat and his face was onc
e more obscured.

  “I would like to believe that you are telling me the truth,” he said, after a long moment.

  “If you don’t believe me, check the police reports in Toronto. You can do that, I assume.”

  “It has already been done. You might have been lying to the police as well.”

  “Why would I lie? I didn’t owe anything to Althea Dale and her company,” Lisa pointed out, trying to sound sensible and reassuring. “I kept your organization out of the police reports, for my father’s sake. I repaid the debt as best I could.”

  “Yes, your father. I understand that he’s not well.” She fought the surge of panic and pain that filled her at those words. No, he’s not well, she thought angrily. He’s dying. Let him die in peace. She licked her lips and said nothing, not trusting her voice. “Your brothers are well though. And your nephews. Perhaps if one of them were to come for a ride with us, you would tell a different story.”

  “If you threaten my family, I’ll tell you any story you want to hear. But that won’t make it true. I told you the truth tonight.”

  “Tell me again.”

  She told the tale four more times as the limousine glided through the streets of Vancouver and quiet roads beyond the city limits. With each telling, her confidence grew. He asked her questions, slippery, repetitive questions designed to trip her into betraying herself. But they were not the truly dangerous ones she had feared. He hinted at the things she wanted to avoid but did not say their names out loud.

  As she spoke, a treacherous relief began to steal into her mind. In a way, she was glad that this moment had come at last, after so many weeks of waiting for it. Perhaps this would finally be the end of the nightmare. She willed herself not to trust in that thought and continued her careful answers, refusing to let either his subtle questions or her own hopes distract her.

  It was after midnight when the limousine at last drew to a halt. Lisa looked out the window and saw her car sitting alone in the centre of the university parking lot.

  “Can I go now?” she asked. Yamagata leaned forward and light slipped across his face, touching the narrow black eyes.

  “For now. But I think that we’ll have to speak again.” His hand reached across the space between them and caught her wrist, his fingers circling her flesh. “I’m not unreasonable, Doctor.” His grip tightened. Lisa clenched her teeth to keep herself from wincing. “I only need the truth from you, that’s all. Please don’t make things unpleasant for either of us. Or for anyone else.”

  He held her wrist a moment longer, until the pressure of his fingers made her catch her breath in a painful hiss, then he released her and sat back.

  The door beside her opened. “My things,” Lisa said and Yamagata smiled thinly and handed them to her. She climbed from the car with as much assurance as she could muster, pointedly ignoring the bodybuilder gangster who held the door for her.

  She was halfway to her car when she looked back, hoping to see the licence number. But the limousine was already gone.

  Her car door was unlocked. She slid into the driver’s seat, put the key into the ignition and set her hands on the wheel.

  Yamagata wasn’t sure whether or not to believe her, that much was clear. The questions that he had not asked her were significant—either he knew much less than she had expected or he had his own secrets he was afraid of betraying.

  How long can you hold out? she asked herself, distantly aware that her body was shaking, her hands clenched on the wheel. If he threatens Robert or Derek or one of the little boys . . . what will you do? What if he says the words you fear? Rozokov. Ardeth. Vampire. If he knows that much, can you lie about the rest? Can you tell him that they died in the fire and make him believe it?

  Trembling, she fought the nausea that churned in her stomach. Emotions seemed to surge through her in succession, fear of Yamagata mutating into anger at her father, changing into guilt and grief and then transforming back into fear again.

  After a moment, she took a long, shaky breath and forced her fingers to loosen. She would have to think about this carefully and decide the most reasonable thing to do.

  But later. She would have to do that later. Right now, she could not bear to think at all.

  Chapter 6

  “A black hole is omnivorous, all-consuming. It defines the space around it by its hunger. It is the ultimate abyss.”

  Rozokov felt a sudden queasy sense of recognition. The need for blood had often been like that, he thought suddenly. Such a small thing but so dark, so obliterating. Whatever other life he had been able to scavenge existed only while it resisted the pull of the black hole’s well of overpowering gravity. His existence had been defined by his distance from the point at which the strength of his inevitable need would overcome all his intentions and resolutions. And in the end, the hole swallowed everything and reduced it to the smallest part itself. To the blood and only the blood.

  And is it different now? a dark voice inside him asked. Will it ever be any different?

  Does a black hole die? Even if it wants to?

  He set aside the astronomy text through which he had been struggling and looked at Ardeth, curled in the battered armchair across from him, head bent over a loose sheet of paper. For a moment, he saw again the quiet graduate student who had crouched at the edge of his cell and told him the story of her life. This is what she must have looked like so many days and nights before that morning they took her from the street to feed your hunger, he thought. This is what they took away from her.

  This is what you took away from her. The silence accusation ghosted through his mind and he thrust it away. It had been her choice, he reminded himself. A choice I did not have to give.

  Then she looked up and smiled and the guilt slid away. Her hair was different, it was true, and her eyes still bore traces of her wild initiation on the streets of Toronto, but surely her soul was the same, surely the core of her had not changed. The smile faded into curiosity and he felt compelled to justify his sudden abandonment of his reading. “I am afraid my fifteenth-century brain will not absorb any more twentieth-century marvels. I was thinking of going for a walk.”

  “If you can wait a moment, I’ll come with you,” she offered, and, when he nodded, bent her head again. After a moment, his own curiosity overcame him.

  “What are you reading?”

  “Diagrams of routes up one of the local climbs. At least that’s what the man who gave them to me claims they are.” She laughed and waved the sheets, covered in incomprehensible lines and squiggles. “I’m sure they’ll make sense once I’m up there.”

  “You’re going climbing? On the mountains?”

  “That’s generally where it’s done. Yes, I’m going climbing. If there’s a clear sky and a full moon, it’ll be just like daylight for me. I’d like to get in at least one real climb before we leave here.”

  “I was under the impression climbing alone was dangerous,” Rozokov said carefully, ignoring her last words. She shrugged.

  “I suppose it is.” She looked at him with a faint flirtatious air. “You could come with me.”

  “I think that might make it more dangerous, not less,” he acknowledged with a wry smile. “But don’t rush into it. We have time.”

  “Winter’s coming.” The words had a sharp edge and Rozokov knew she would not be distracted for much longer from what she believed was the real issue.

  “The cold will not bother you.”

  “I know that.” Her tone was sharp and the papers scattered as she gestured angrily. The silence was chilly, as if their words had conjured up ice to fill the spaces between them. “We can’t stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too small. Everybody knows everybody else, once the tourists leave.”

  “The tourists will be back in a month or two when the ski season starts.”

  “That’s long enough for someone to notice us.�
��

  “Why would they notice us? This town is full of transients and travellers. We are simply two more. If we are careful, no one will pay any attention to us.”

  “It’s dangerous,” she insisted, and for a moment Rozokov sensed something behind her stubbornness, some secret motivation she was unable to admit.

  “And if we leave here as you desire, where would you have us go?” he asked mildly.

  “Vancouver, New York, Europe, I don’t know.”

  “You have already said we cannot leave the country without the proper documents.”

  “So? Canada’s a big place. How about Montreal?”

  “Do you speak French?”

  “No. But I bet you do.”

  “I speak nineteenth-century Parisian quite well, as a matter of fact, though with an accent that people never failed to point out to me. I am not certain how far that will get us in Quebec.”

  Her fist struck the arm of her chair. “It doesn’t matter where we go. Let’s just go.”

  “We are safe here. It is quiet, it is remote, and our needs are met.”

  “It’s expensive. We don’t have much money left.” That was true enough, he acknowledged. Their small supply of money had dwindled rapidly. Now they had barely enough to stay—and barely enough to leave.

  “We will manage. The world will be there tomorrow, and the day after that, and for a millennium more, for all we know. We have time to decide what we want. Do not be so impatient, child.”

  She was out of the chair in a blur, shoulders sharp with anger, fingers curled. “Don’t you talk to me like that! I know what we are . . . and I know when you’re making excuses. We’re no safer here than we’d be anywhere, maybe less. As for our needs . . . maybe I need something to do besides watch stars and drink elk blood.” The words were hot and contemptuous, and, when they were said, she stalked back behind her chair, as if it gave her strength to have it between them.

  “Would you rather drink something else?” he asked softly and watched the anger fade to confusion as she leaned against the chair.