by Nancy Baker
Five minutes later, Sara sat in the living room, looking at the black-clad figure of her older sister huddled on the couch. Mickey leaned against the wall of the kitchen, hands in the pockets of his hastily donned jeans. Behind him, the kettle was beginning to boil.
They had managed an awkward embrace and uneasy pleasantries. She could see Ardeth’s eyes registering the changes in her condominium: new posters on the walls, the guitars propped in the corner, the boom-box stereo and tapes scattered on the emptied shelf of the bookcase.
Her sister had changed as well, though not as dramatically as she had the last time, after her disappearance six months earlier. Her hair was still black, cut in a rough approximation of the Louise Brooks helmet bob, though her bangs had definite signs of having been self-trimmed. And she was still dressed in black, though the red polar fleece sweater was a surprising touch and she was wearing pants and sturdy shoes rather than the short skirt Sara had seen her in last. But her face seemed thinner, and there were faint lines around her mouth and eyes that made her look worn and worried.
“Have you had any problems with the place?” Ardeth asked suddenly.
“Not yet. We’ll see what happens when your post-dated cheques run out in December. But nobody from the building has said anything yet.” The condominium was Ardeth’s; Sarah had moved in after her sister’s disappearance and Mickey had joined her after the final night of revelation and destruction on the Dale estate. Because Ardeth had provided post-dated cheques for the maintenance fees and the mortgage payments came automatically from her savings account, still propped up by her half of the money from their parents’ estate, moving in had been an easy solution to Sara’s own ongoing housing problems. And her money problems, as well. Her own inheritance was long gone, spent supporting her band, Black Sun, through times that seemed perpetually lean. As long as Ardeth’s money paid the mortgage, she and Mickey could come up with the maintenance money, making the condominium a perfect, and much more comfortable, home base for touring with the band than her other, usually temporary, accommodations had been.
“I talked to the bank about your accounts, by the way. Unless you’d like to publicly reappear, your money isn’t going anywhere without someone declaring you dead. And we can’t do that for seven years anyway.”
The kettle began to whine and Mickey disappeared into the kitchen. Ardeth laughed, an unsteady, bitter sound. “I suppose I could come back from the dead now, couldn’t I?”
Sara felt a twinge of disappointment, then a stronger stab of guilt. If Ardeth was safe, she should be happy. If Ardeth could come home, she should be grateful. Never mind what it did to her own plans. “Where did you go?” she asked, to deflect both the conversation and her own thoughts.
“Out west.” Ardeth glanced at Mickey as he reemerged from the kitchen carrying a tray with a teapot and cups. “We made it to Banff before your friend’s car died.”
“That’s about a province farther than he predicted,” Mickey replied. “So where’s the old man?”
“Back in Banff, probably.” Her voice was casual but Sara didn’t miss the undercurrent of pain there. It sounded familiar somehow, like an echo of her own voice. So that was the reason for the thin face, the haunted eyes. Something had happened between Ardeth and Dimitri Rozokov. Ardeth glanced around the room again. “I hoped I could stay here for a couple of days. Just until I work out something else.”
“Of course you can.” Sara avoided Mickey’s glance. It is her place, after all, she thought to herself. And god knows you crashed here often enough when she still lived in it. “What are you planning to do?”
“I’m not sure. I might go back to school.”
“Go back to school?” Sara echoed in disbelief, hearing Mickey choke on his tea.
“Why not? If no one has been around looking for me then it’s probably safe. All I have to do is think up some believable explanation for why I disappeared. And,” she managed a smile, “make sure all my courses have night classes.”
It sounded plausible enough—as long as Sara didn’t think about Mickey’s accusations that she had killed his roommate or about the feelings of her sister’s mouth drinking the blood from her wrist. And those thoughts wouldn’t go away.
“I suppose it might work . . . though I don’t know if it’s safe to assume Havendale has forgotten about you. We don’t know what information might have survived the fire. The Japanese doctor did, you know. I read about it in the paper.”
“She didn’t tell anyone the truth, did she?”
“Hardly,” Mickey answered. “She wouldn’t be that stupid. Besides, Rozokov trusted her.” Sara saw Ardeth’s eyes shift, her mouth tighten.
“If she did tell, it didn’t make the news,” she said hastily. “All I’m saying is be careful.”
“I thought that was my line,” Ardeth countered, smiling, and for a moment she wasn’t the dark-haired stranger, but Sara’s older sister, recalling the rituals of their relationship, warnings and rebellions that had sprung from affection and envy on both sides. “So how are things with you?”
Sara didn’t miss the glance at Mickey. “Good. We’re close to a record deal. Things are going well.”
“I’m glad.” Silence settled in again. Sara took a sip of her tea.
“Why don’t you go back to bed, Mickey? No point in both of us being up.”
“I’m fine . . .” he started, then set his mug down. “Oh. I get it. Girl talk and all that.”
“You don’t have to . . .” Ardeth started but he was already on his feet.
“No problem. I’ll see you,” he paused, trying to work out the correspondence of their sleeping schedule, “whenever.” As the bedroom door closed, Sara went to sit down on the couch.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“About what?”
“About whatever happened between you and him that made you run back here?”
“What makes you think something happened?”
“Come on, Ardy, give me a little credit. Besides, when you said he was in Banff, you sounded just like me when I used to talk about my unfaithful, unlamented lover, Tyler, back before his screwing around finally made me leave.”
Sara did not know what she had expected, what personal problems she had thought vampires might have. But the tangled tale of moonlight climbs, temptation, frustration, arguments and final betrayal left her more confused than before.
“You left Rozokov because he drank blood from a woman?” she asked when Ardeth finished her halting but dry-eyed recital. Her sister nodded. “And you were tempted by this guy, Mark?”
“Yes.”
“Ardy, I hate to sound dense about this, but you’re vampires. You’re supposed to drink blood.”
“But it doesn’t have to be human blood. Not unless we want it to be.”
“But other blood doesn’t . . . work as well.”
“No.” Ardeth swallowed convulsively. “And that’s the trap. If we drink human blood and don’t care about the people we prey on, we become monsters. But if we do care . . .”
“Then it would be easy to do more than just drink blood. And then you think you’d be cheating on each other,” Sara finished. “I wouldn’t think vampires had the same definition of fidelity humans do.”
“You keep talking about vampires as if there were hundreds of us, as if there were rules and precedents and Miss Manners columns,” Ardeth said angrily. “You don’t understand. We’re the only ones—or we might as well be. I don’t know how ‘vampires’ are supposed to think or feel. I thought Dimitri did—he made it sound like he did when we were in Toronto. But after we got to Banff, it all seemed to change. I didn’t understand him anymore. So I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel—I only know what I do feel.”
“And you think he betrayed you.” She nodded. “You almost did the same thing to him.”
“I know.” For a moment, Ardeth was silent, head b
ent, then she looked up. “But I didn’t. I didn’t.”
Sara looked at her for a moment, fighting a losing battle with the absurd laughter bubbling inside her. Ardeth’s expression, wounded and indignant, only made her chuckle harder. “I’m sorry, Ardy,” she managed at last. “But do you know what this sounds like?”
“What?”
“It sounds like real life.”
“I don’t want real life!” Ardeth cried suddenly, rising to pace across the room. “If I have to have real life, I want my old one back.”
“What if you can’t?”
“I can try. That’s all I want to do, Sara. I’ve thought about this a lot on the way here. I want to try to get my life back, whatever way I can. Will you help me?”
Sara stood up, looking at the dark figure of her sister, aching at the desperation in her voice and the painful hope in her eyes. All the amusement she had felt died. Not trusting her own voice, she opened her arms and embraced her sister. With her eyes closed, it could be the old Ardeth back again, warm and living. So she kept her eyes closed for as long as she could.
Chapter 17
Ardeth’s foot hit a beer bottle, knocked it into a silent fall to the carpet. Liquid dripped onto the dirty fabric.
She moved her foot and shifted her position against the couch, eyes on the television screen. A music video flickered there, the thin, bare-chested young men whipping their long hair about as they flailed away at guitars. The sound was turned down low, reduced to the thump of bass and drums and the mosquito whine of the singer’s voice.
She contemplated changing the station, then decided she would never find the remote control in the jumble of newspapers, books and empty beer bottles on the floor. Instead, she picked up the kitchen knife resting on top of the pizza box by her side and turned it over in her hands. The remains of dried tomato sauce looked like blood. The thought made her smile thinly.
It was not working.
Maybe if she tried harder, she told herself. Maybe if you stopped being so cautious. Just walk into the history department and announce that you’re back. Make up some story about a nervous breakdown. They’d buy that—it wouldn’t be the first time it had happened to a doctoral student. You can make the police buy it too, if you do it right.
She had planned it all out, during the long nights of travelling since her conversation with Kate Butler. She could move back into her apartment permanently, after Sara found somewhere else to live of course. She could finish her Ph.D. She could teach. She could find the blood she needed from street people and students, from careful seductions and midnight visits. It was manageable. It could be done. She could have her old life back.
Except that it wasn’t working.
Even after four nights, she still felt like an alien walking through the campus. There was no comforting familiarity about the buildings. The people looked terrifyingly young, clothes in fashions she did not recognize, talking a language that seemed suddenly foreign to her. She saw no one that she knew, and, held back by fear of committing herself irrevocably, she did not try to find them.
Would that make it real? If she found Carla and Peter or any of her friends from the days when this had been her world? Once the round of questions and answers was over, would she feel as though she belonged again?
Something stirred at her shoulder. She glanced back at the boy sprawled on the couch.
She had crawled through the window into the ground-floor room half an hour ago, drawn by the blue light of the television falling through the half-open window. At three in the morning, even the fraternity houses were quiet. As she’d hovered by the windowsill, she’d heard the hallway floor creak once, then a distant rush of water through the pipes. After the soft pad of footsteps returning, there had been silence.
The room smelt of stale beer, pizza, marijuana. The boy had been indulging in all of the above. He lay on his back on the couch, fully dressed except for one running shoe that he had somehow kicked off before he fell asleep. Ardeth had crouched by his side for a long moment, watching the rise and fall of his chest beneath the worn T-shirt. Then she had brushed aside his long, dark hair and bent her head to his throat. He had made a soft sound as her teeth slid into his flesh and one hand lifted, as if to touch her, then fell away again.
Then she had heard her own, terrible moan and pulled herself away to sit and stare at his forgotten television in the dark stillness.
Looking at him now, the exposed line of his throat bracketed by the sharp point of his collarbone at one end and the glitter of a gold stud in his earlobe at the other, she felt the hunger return. His blood has tasted hot and sweet, like drinking wine after months of water, like tasting spice after years of ash.
He moved again, taking a soft, grunting breath, and turned onto his side. One arm slipped over the edge of the couch, leaving his hand to dangle bonelessly. Ardeth put one finger out to touch the vein in his wrist.
I had forgotten how good it was, she thought distantly. I had forgotten how easy it was. Did we truly believe we could give this up?
She found his pulse: slow, steady, unchanging. This wasn’t really the way she had planned it. This was not the glorious revenge she had imagined—she hadn’t been able to manage even that. This boy was not substitute for Mark . . . but she had needed sustenance and there were no animals in the city. I wonder what he is doing now? she thought and tried to make herself believe that it was Mark she meant.
The pain surged back suddenly, along with the memories. Rozokov in the asylum, kissing her throat through the bars that held them apart. The night they had found each other on the Toronto streets again, his arms opening silently to welcome her. His voice as he promised her that they could find a way to be more than the things the word “vampire” had come to mean. The cold line of his profile as he turned all the promises into ashes.
For a moment the ache was more than she could bear, so she drowned it the only way she knew how, as her mortal self might have washed it away with wine, as another might have dreamed it away with drugs. The boy, still held in the grip of his own choice of painkillers, shook and groaned beneath her.
Finally, she pushed herself away and sat back, her hands rising to cover her mouth, to hold in something that felt terrifyingly like a sob.
She found her way to the window and out it, leaving the boy, unconscious and unknowing, on the couch.
She found her way to her old apartment, walking the silent streets without seeing them.
And on the steps of the apartment building, she found someone waiting for her.
The woman stood on the broad stone porch, shadowed by the columns that supported the overhang of the doorway. Ardeth had seen her climb out of the car parked on the street and walk towards the apartment building. Automatically, she had hung back a little, to give the woman plenty of time to get to her own apartment before Ardeth entered the building.
But here she was, waiting as Ardeth climbed the stairs of the old mansion that had been converted into condominiums during the city’s real estate boom. It’s nothing to do with me, Ardeth told herself covertly noting the woman’s sombre clothing, the brown circle of her face beneath the black hair. She’s forgotten her key or she’s waiting for someone to come down and get her. She made herself give a neutral nod as she reached for the door.
“Good morning, Ms. Alexander.”
Ardeth froze, hand still on the door pull, then turned her head slowly. “I’m sorry. You must have confused me with someone else,” she said, the lie automatic.
“No. You are Ardeth Alexander. Please do not be alarmed. I am not here to . . .” she paused, as if decided on a proper word, “harm you in any fashion.”
Ardeth did not let go of the door. Her senses strained, struggling to determine if the woman was alone of if others waited in the shadows around them. If they don’t know about the ultrasound, I’m safe, she told herself desperately. If they don’t know that, they can’
t take me. If they don’t know about the weapon that had kept Rozokov mad with pain, that had almost killed her . . . she fought back the memory of the pain in her head, tumbling her into helpless anguish. But the woman seemed to be alone and for a moment, Ardeth felt more confident. Then she realized that that might have more frightening consequences than any other scenario. If she is here with me, alone, in the middle of the night, she is not afraid.
“How do you know my name?” she asked at last, deciding it would be better to concede and discover what the woman wanted than to drag out the process by pretending.
“Dr. Takara was good enough to tell my employer about you. He sent me here to find your sister, who lied most convincingly she had not seen you in months and that you were probably dead.”
“What do you want?”
“My employer would like to meet you. And he would like to know where to find Dimitri Rozokov.”
“Who is your employer?”
“His name is Sadamori Fujiwara. He is one of you.”
“One of what?”
“Those who died and did not die. A vampire.”
Shaking, Ardeth let the door fall away and took a step forward. Calm black eyes met hers. Ardeth put her hand out and touched the other woman’s shoulder, and closed cold fingers hard over cloth and flesh and bone. “Prove it,” she said at last.
The apartment was dark when Ardeth opened the door and stepped aside to let Akiko Kodama enter. By the time she had started dialling the telephone, Sara had emerged from the bedroom, squint-eyed and wrapped in a faded flannel robe. She saw Akiko and her eyes widened. Ardeth’s gesture cut off her question as, across continent, a sleep voice answered the phone.
“Lisa Takara?”
“Yes.”
“This is Ardeth Alexander.” There was a long silence.
“What do you want?’
“Did you tell a man named Sadamori Fujiwara about me?” Ardeth held her indrawn breath.
“Yes,” Lisa acknowledged, after a moment.”