But Cuza stood there, not six inches from her, blocking her way. He smiled sensuously and she saw the blood glistening on his teeth. The smell overpowered her. She wanted to run but was paralyzed. She could only watch with frightening anticipation as he raised his hand, blood on his fingertips—no, no, please, not that—and lightly touched her lips.
Like a jolt of electricity on a living body, the blood sent her rigid with spasm. In an instant it was no longer merely a taste or a smell, but a force that roused every cell in her body to cry out. He kissed her and she tasted more, which only increased the frenzy. Why had she stopped? Why had she cut herself off from this—
Words failed her entirely as he pulled away from her, still smiling, and gently guided her across the cave.
“I meant to share with you, my dear,” he whispered, urging her toward the body. She could have found it in the dark, the lust was upon her so strongly now.
Lamia’s entire world contracted, focused on the warm body before her. She drank eagerly and stopped feeling or tasting or smelling or hearing. She had no senses, no mind to process information. White-hot pleasure ripped through every cell, exploding the body, disconnecting the brain. Time stopped. Reaching for the fulfillment only found in oblivion, she was…
…jerked back. He held her and spoke to her, but she couldn’t comprehend. Why did she stop? She needed more. Why couldn’t she have more? Words began to make sense, and she moaned as he talked.
“You have returned to me,” he crooned, caressing her face, kissing her gently. “You are still hungry, hmmm? Come with me, my dear.”
33. Along Came a Spider
“All of a sudden, they claim never to have heard of him,” Alexandru brooded, regarding his lamb stew with a dark stare that threatened imminent eruption.
“Hmmm?” Caleb asked insouciantly, eating with appetite as he paged through Troglodyte Today. “When all the vampires know Cuza, it’s good, but when they deny it, it’s bad?”
“This is how he works,” Alexandru replied, so sternly that Caleb put down his journal. “He terrorizes the weak, forming a circle of servants whom he swears to secrecy.” His tone remained steely, but a shudder passed through him that the servant didn’t fail to notice. “Thank you, Mihail,” Alexandru murmured, as his wineglass was refilled. He drained half of it in a gulp, and added in a strained voice, “My brother…and my wife…She may still be running free somewhere, and I never give up the search.”
“Ana Maria was—?” Caleb widened his eyes in surprise, ignoring Mihail’s vigorous head-shakes behind Alexandru’s back. He had long since stopped noticing the carved gold frame in the portrait gallery near his room, which held only charred shreds of canvas. Neither Mihail nor Alexandru ever spoke of Ana Maria Arghezi, Alexandru’s bride of sixty years ago. Caleb wondered suddenly what she had looked like. “And you could…could kill her?” burst from him unexpectedly.
“She died the moment she was bitten for the third time,” the old wizard declared, draining the rest of his glass and handing it to the servant for yet another refill.
Alexandru had lost interest in the food, so Caleb appropriated the loaf of bread and spread it with fresh sweet butter before dipping it into the thick stew. He could never understand people who stopped eating because they were upset. “But don’t you think…” he began, “that it’s possible for a vampire to—to change his nature? To give up human blood?”
Mihail emitted what sounded like a scream, and Alexandru choked on a mirthless laugh. “They cannot give up blood the way we might pipe-smoking or spirits,” he said, in a tone that was unmistakably scolding. “A vampire is passionate, not in any human way…and what he loves, he must possess. Do not think, my young friend, that because you are immune to their bites, you are also immune to their call.”
The old wizard rose from his chair with effort, assisted by Mihail. The servant darted furious looks at Caleb as he helped his master to bed.
Caleb didn’t notice the glares; before Alexandru could finish his warning, Caleb had returned to reading about bat transfigurations by non-vampire wizards and finishing his dinner. He wasn’t particularly worried. Surely Lamia wasn’t going to risk “rabies” by biting him? Except for their lovemaking, she was passionless and unemotional, and she’d said herself that she wanted Cuza dead.
He looked up only as wood scraped against stone, and found himself facing Mihail’s liquid black eyes. The servant waited a minute, maybe two, frowning at Caleb’s failure to display respect for Alexandru’s pain.
“Those were the Mistress’s words,” the bitter old man said at last. “She believed that a vampire, that a monster, could change…that he only desired to be with her, rather than to devour her as you do a boiled potato!”
The last words were delivered in a staccato bark, and Caleb, surprised, spat out the potato he was chewing.
“It happens from within,” Mihail pondered, his distant eyes no longer seeking Caleb’s attention. “All the wards in wizardry will not protect from that. Mistress Arghezi was one of the most powerful magicians in the country…I fear that for the master as well, it is too late. And for you, I have little doubt.”
He had finally succeeded in making Caleb lose his appetite, though the young American wizard registered no emotion. When the servant departed with a tray bearing brandy and a hot-water bottle for Alexandru, Caleb slipped out the stable gate and took off in the direction of the Petrosna caves. It wouldn’t hurt to check.
The moon would be full in two days, and a silvery light illuminated the forest. Before meeting Lamia, Caleb had rarely gone out at night in human form, and was always surprised by how dark and quiet the mountains seemed. Only with effort did he see a number of nocturnal hunters as he flew by. He spied the telltale tufted ears and bobbed tail of a lynx; the orange-green flash that could only be the eyes of a wolf; and a large, stealthy owl, its gaze on the prey the cat had chosen as its own. Was Lamia out tonight, too, hunting rabbits?
The panicked voice, speaking English, was shockingly loud after the hush of the forest. It wasn’t a voice that Caleb recognized. A Romanian accent, he thought at first, and then realized it wasn’t. Italian, that was it.
He sprinted up the pathway to find the camp in chaos. Enormous boxes were everywhere, metal rods and containers and equipment tossed haphazardly into them. Caleb only recognized Taofang, the Chinese student. The other three there were strangers, and all four were shouting.
“Forty gigabytes of data, wasted!” roared the Italian—a scruffy, bearded middle-aged man in baggy shorts and a T-shirt that read “Physicists do it with Models.” This must be the research director from the university that Lamia had talked about, Caleb guessed. Physics professors looked the same everywhere. “If you stay for two more weeks, you might get enough for a paper. The neutrino events are almost convincing.”
Even Taofang, usually ensconced so firmly at his workstation, would not be budged. “Not me. I leave before full moon.”
The Italian and his two younger companions threw up their hands in disgust. One said something in Italian that neither Caleb nor, apparently, Taofang understood.
“That’s right,” corrected the older man, switching from good-natured outrage to dangerous fury. “If you abandon this experiment, you will never get a PhD. Not from my lab. And there are precious few others who would hire you, after this! In fact, I’ll see that you never get into another school, anywhere on this planet! And you quit because why—you believe in vampires?”
“Mike bit,” Taofang said. “Vijay bit.”
At that, Caleb pushed his way through the boxes and the shouting and stood in front of Taofang. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. “Who’s been bitten by what?”
But the graduate student kept his eyes on his boss, clearly someone with nearly life and death power in the world of science, and ignored Caleb utterly.
“A spider,” spat the Italian professor in disgust. “You are running around like little babies because of a spider bite.”
Caleb felt his stomach jolt. Surely Mike hadn’t been bitten for a third time? Giving up on this unrelenting conversation, he started exploring the rest of the camp. The tents had been taken down, and the pavilion was nearly dismantled too, though a lantern shone on an otherwise bare folding table.
“Lamia!” Caleb called, knowing if she was anywhere nearby, she could hear him. “LAMIA!” he tried again, slightly louder.
But it was Mike who came out of the cave to greet him. “Aha,” he chuckled, “it’s the vampire botanist.”
“Werewolf,” Caleb corrected impatiently. “Where’s Lamia? Did you get bitten again?” As Mike approached, Caleb could see that he was draped head to toe in garlic.
“Not me.” He seemed inordinately amused, perhaps at no longer being the only victim. “I was sleeping innocently in my tent, draped in garlic like your girlfriend told me to do.”
Caleb let out a long sigh of relief. “Vijay, then? What bit him?” he demanded, praying for wildlife.
“Same thing that bit me, man. Passed out in the cave, just like I was. Last time I was out for three days. Three days! Even when I rolled my motorcycle going ninety I wasn’t out for that long. And you can’t get a blood transfusion in this third-world hellhole.”
“Does Vijay have garlic with him now?” Caleb persisted before Mike’s outburst turned into an irrelevant rant against the Communists.
Mike laughed scornfully, even though he had enough on himself to repel all the vampires of Transylvania. “More than me,” he admitted. “I piled it all over him. Want to see?”
“Yes, that’s a good idea,” Caleb agreed, relieved that while Mike may sneer, he was at least prepared to take advice—and he had finally figured out Caleb was no botanist. “And Lamia?” he asked, as they picked their way through the boxes.
It was too late to get more information. Mike had been intercepted by the angry Italian, who by now had reduced Taofang nearly to tears.
“Tell him is not spider!” Taofang pleaded. “Tell him is dangerous…”
“Duuude.” Mike turned and faced their advisor, but even he lost much of his scornful tone as he addressed the irate physicist. Mike pulled down the neck of his T-shirt to show off his twin vampire bites. “Not a spider,” he said, firmly.
The two cronies pointed at the garlic bulbs in Mike’s pocket, and the ring of them around his forehead, and started laughing.
“Ridiculous!” fumed the boss. “Superstition! You come to Transylvania, and your heads are full of Hollywood! You jeopardize your careers over fairy tales!”
“Better than jeopardizing my life,” Mike replied boldly.
The younger visitors spoke in English for the first time. “Not sure of that,” said one, laughing bitterly.
“You’re dead to physics, Mike,” said the other.
They were both thin and terribly pale, with circles under their eyes. They could be mistaken for vampires, Caleb thought. Maybe Lamia wasn’t the only one back at that university.
Mike glared at each of them in turn. “Fine,” he said at last. “You take the data.”
“That’s your job,” said the first. “We’re postdocs. We analyze.”
“You get your degree, you can be like us,” added the second.
Mike looked at them one more time, then tore the braid of garlic off his head and threw it at them. “Hell, no,” he said. “I’m going to become a botanist.”
Stomping away to dramatic effect, he almost ran into Caleb, who was trying not to laugh at Mike’s declaration.
“Show me Vijay, please,” Caleb said quietly. “I’d like to be sure.”
“Yeah,” Mike agreed. “I thought Lamia would’ve told you.”
Caleb slowed his pace without noticing, an ominous worry building in his core. “I haven’t seen Lamia for several days,” he admitted. “Did she say she was going to find me?”
“Nah.” Mike shrugged. “She disappeared the night Vijay got bitten. We thought she was going to go get some herbs from you, but she never came back.”
34. Short Leash
The tower loomed above the rock formations, a sullen beacon against the late afternoon sky, reaching up to pull down the heavens. Was it calling her home or warning her away?
Lamia could not see the rest of the castle from her position behind a low rock ridge, but her memory filled in the hidden parts: the high wall of dark granite clinging to the steep cliff like hardy gray lichen; the inner courtyard paved with close-fitting stones; the great vaulted roof; the high narrow windows lining the library and Great Hall. She saw it all as if she were flying, for that was how she had arrived at the castle many, many times. Soon, Cuza promised, she would fly there again.
Her hand traced the whorls of lichen on the rock beside her: tough, gray life imitating cold, gray stone. Pale white fingers caressed the rough surface—soothing, lulling, controlling—in the same way they might stroke the neck of a victim, undead flesh imitating life.
The large wooden gate menaces her, looming like an enormous brown bear ready to devour her. As it swings open to reveal an inner courtyard and castle of dark granite, she does not feel comforted. A man takes her arm, guiding her through the gate, whispering with pride, “This is your home now.”
Lamia froze. Memory, human memory, seized her brain and forced her to relive what she thought had died. She could not consciously call forth many memories from that time before she joined the Undead, but when her brain was addled as it was now, the recollections often came to her unbidden.
She was no longer human and felt it keenly as she once more hunted with Cuza. Each night they had found a new victim, until she had reached that delicious state of unknowing, of uncaring. For days now—How long? A week, since the moon would be full tonight—she had feasted on humans, gorged on the one thing she’d denied herself for five years.
Why had she stopped? She could not recall. How could she give up that utterly numbing pleasure, when every cell in her body thrilled to the taste-touch-smell of human blood? Sex was nothing by comparison, a feeble reflection of a blinding white light in a scratched and dusty mirror.
Why had she stopped? All those years, she tried to forget what it was like and had succeeded in blunting the memory, her mind telling her body lies. Mind had nothing to do with it, though. Now her arms, legs, fingers, toes tingled with each movement, no matter how minute.
Vampires, although capable of some emotions, lose the subtlety of human feelings and are like creatures who look at a rainbow and see only red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet—not the thousands of subtle shades in between. Human blood, hot and indescribably tangy, restored some of those emotional hues as it delivered its load of ecstasy. Her body still sang with the feelings of her recent victims: worry from an old woman, twin surges of fear and lust from a girl, anger and desire from a young man. All the lovely and terrifying emotions collided, and she felt almost alive again.
But today it had faded, this explosion of emotional color. Today her mind was beginning to reassert itself because Cuza had insisted that they not feed last night, saying that there was much to be done on the full moon. She resented that, but he promised her more after they had taken the castle.
Cuza. Scheming and ambitious as ever, that one was. But after all these years apart, he still desired her, which was oddly comforting somehow. She felt safe when he caressed her and spoke soft words, remembering dimly the girl who had fallen under his spell over half a century ago.
She plays chess in the library with the darkly handsome visitor. He listens to her raptly, resting his smooth pointed chin on his hands. She tells him of her secret hopes and he drinks them all in with his fathomless black eyes. The servant glowers at her as he brings them tea, but she pretends not to notice, enchanted by the attention paid her.
Cuza, of course, still considered her to be his possession, gloating each time he touched her, his eyes devouring her with
every look. And the cruelty she remembered had not diminished either. He could just as easily taunt her as kiss her, occasionally raging at her for abandoning her kind and for taking up with the American werewolf.
Lupeni. She didn’t know his real name or why he lied to her or how he fooled her. She tried very, very hard not to think of him at all, hoping the tide of blood would drown those feelings, would build a wall between her and the enigma of the wolf who loved her. That was a lie, too, probably.
Lamia thought about the tower again, so she wouldn’t have to think about her brief doomed affair. The sun sagged toward the horizon, flitting in and out of clouds. Now and again, the side of the tower would be bathed in its waning light, yellow for now, but surely the sun’s last rays would turn it a bloody red.
In her lap she held the small glass vial that Cuza had enchanted so that it was bigger inside than out. He obviously had something large he wished to put in it, although he hadn’t told her yet what it might be. The vial hung on a thick gold chain; he gave no explanation for this either. Cuza hadn’t changed in his obsessive desire for control and secrecy. He had a plan for entering the castle, that much was certain, and he would tell her when the time was right. Until then, she tried to sink back into the memory of bliss that still echoed within her body and forget about those who lived within the castle walls.
A faint sound, the sudden rush of air: In an instant, Cuza and another man stood before her. The vampire held the human stranger by the scruff of the neck with one hand, and with the other grasped a large wrought-iron cage. An evil-looking black raven peered up at her from between the bars.
The stranger was as tall and as gaunt as the vampire, but there the resemblance ended. His dark, greasy hair and scruffy beard hung about his face, making him look like a wild animal. And he acted the part, whimpering as Cuza dragged him by the collar of his ragged shirt and threw him roughly to the ground.
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