Eternal Hunger

by Cameron Dean

  “Come for me,” I panted. “Let me watch you, Ash. I want to see you fly.”

  “I have wings for that,” he managed, and made me laugh, and as I did I felt my passion slip its bonds.

  “I know. Oh, damn it anyway. Oh, God.”

  I heard him laugh then, the sound so filled with joy.

  “Together. Together, Candace. Now and forever.”

  I felt his arms wrap around me. I held on tight. Together, we flung ourselves out over the void.

  Three

  “Wings,” I said, some time later. Ash and I were lying entwined on the couch. “Wings. That’s what it was.”

  “What what was?” Ash inquired.

  Now that our lovemaking was over, he’d pulled a soft blanket around my shoulders for warmth. The truth was, my bodily sensations sort of faded in and out. One moment, everything was sharp and focused, the next, indistinct. It was as if my body was still tuning in to its own personal wavelength as a vampire. What it felt like to be human, what it meant to be a vampire, were all jumbled up inside me. I couldn’t quite make the two join.

  “Right before the attack,” I said. I thought for a moment, casting my mind back. “I heard a sound I thought I recognized. But it was over so quickly, the attack was so sudden, I didn’t have the chance to figure out what it was at the time. I think it was wings, the wings of the vampire.”

  Ash was silent for a moment, rubbing the palm of one hand absently back and forth over my shoulder.

  “Did you see who it was?”

  I frowned. “Sort of. Just bits and pieces, really, it all happened so fast. He was a Hollywood vampire.”

  Ash’s hand stopped moving. “What?”

  “You know—a Hollywood vampire,” I said. “Obvious. Dark hair. Dark eyes.”

  “I see,” Ash said, and I thought I heard the faintest edge of laughter in his voice. It made me happy to realize I could make him laugh even in these extreme circumstances. It made me feel the world might yet right itself, somehow. “Hollywood vampire, hmmm,” Ash went on. “Dare I ask if I have a type?”

  I settled my head a little more firmly onto his knee. “Absolutely,” I said. “They call it: one of a kind.”

  He leaned down, dropped a kiss on the top of my head.

  “I’m pretty sure I marked him,” I went on, after a moment. “I caught him with silver down one side of his face. Not enough to take him out, just enough to make him let go. I’m sure he now has a nice long scar.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Ash said. “It will make him easier to recognize if he’s stupid enough to stick around.”

  Ash will hunt that vampire down, I thought. I had been threatened once, several months ago, attacked by a group of street thugs. Ash had found and killed the man responsible for setting up the attack twelve hours after I told him about it.

  I sat up. “So what happens now?”

  “What do you want to happen?” Ash asked in a carefully neutral voice.

  I felt my first spurt of annoyance. I shifted myself off Ash’s lap, scooting to the far end of the couch. I kept the blanket. Apparently, I was still human enough to equate being naked with being vulnerable.

  “I’m serious, Ash,” I said. “I want to know.”

  “What makes you think I’m not serious?” he asked at once. “It’s not a simple question, Candace. You don’t have the same boundaries you used to. That means you don’t have the same possibilities for what happens next, either.”

  “All right. I guess I can buy that,” I acknowledged. “It still doesn’t tell me what I need to know. I have a life, Ash, or I had one. I’m not so sure I do anymore. I’m not so sure I know who I am.”

  “Becoming a vampire doesn’t change the fundamentals of who you are,” Ash replied. “You are who you have always been, Candace. You’re also something more.”

  “A bloodsucker,” I said, unable to keep the bitterness from my tone. Now that the initial fear of death, the initial joy at the fact that I survived at all were beginning to dim, I could see the reality that the crisis had pushed to the background.

  Maybe Ash is right, I thought. Becoming a vampire hadn’t changed me in the ways that counted most. Because I still had the same problem I had always had. The thought of surviving on the blood of living things filled me with revulsion.

  “I don’t want this,” I whispered, the words welling up and out before I could stop them. “I never wanted it, no matter how much I wanted you. I don’t want to kill people and take their blood!” I dropped my head down into my hands. “Sweet Jesus, what have I let you do to me? What have I done?”

  “The only thing you could,” Ash answered simply, but his tone was firm as iron. “And you haven’t taken living blood, Candace. You’ve only taken mine. As long as you feed only on me, your transition is incomplete. I gave you that much.”

  I lifted my head. “I don’t think I understand. Gave me what?”

  “A choice,” Ash said. “You are not yet irrevocably a vampire. That comes only with your first taste of living blood. But I can only sustain you for so long. And the longer you resist completing the transition, the stronger your bloodlust will become.

  “Make no mistake, Candace,” Ash continued. “I want you in my world with me, fully a vampire. It’s what I’ve always wanted. But of your own free will, not by force.”

  “But all you’re really saying is that my options are the same as they’ve always been,” I said, unable to keep the dismay out of my voice. “Become a vampire—a true vampire—or die. The only difference I can see between making this decision yesterday and making it today is that now I won’t make it as a human, I’ll make it as a vampire.”

  “But that makes all the difference, don’t you see?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t. It’s impossible, Ash. It always has been.”

  “Only because you refuse to see it any other way.”

  I would have stood then, but Ash was too quick for me. He reached out to catch me by my upper arms.

  “Let me go.”

  “No,” Ash said. “I want you to listen to me, Candace. You’re doing the same thing you did when you were human. The same thing you’ve always done. You’re closing your mind, your heart, to possibilities. You want to walk away from me? Go on, try it.”

  I did my best to jerk away, but Ash’s grip only tightened.

  “I’m not going to let you do it, Candace,” he said, an intensity in his voice greater than any I had ever heard there before. “I will not let you go. If I was willing to do that, you would be dead by now.

  “Why can’t you learn to see with new eyes? Look at what’s happened as a gift. Stop fighting and reach for me as I reach for you. Reach out and hold on.”

  I stared at him, forgetting to struggle in sheer astonishment. “A gift,” I said. “Are you out of your mind?”

  Ash hauled me forward then, until his face was just inches from mine. His eyes burned bright enough to light the whole world.

  “I love you, Candace. I’ve loved you from the very first moment I saw you. Do you love me?”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  He gave me a quick shake, cutting me off. “Just answer the question,” he said. “Do you love me? Yes or no?”

  “Yes, damn you,” I said. “You know I do. Satisfied now?”

  “Not by a long shot,” Ash said, but he smiled and dropped a hard, swift kiss on my mouth. “Start thinking like a woman in love, Candace. A whole new world is opening before you, and all you can do is react like a little girl afraid of the dark.”

  “But I am afraid of the dark,” I said. “Can’t you see that’s the problem? It’s dark and I’m scared and I don’t know which way to go. There’s more to a relationship than just spectacular sex, Ash. There’s even more than love.”

  “I know that, Candace,” Ash said simply. His arms gentled around me then. I leaned into him, rested my head against his chest. “I know. And I know what I’ve asked of you, joining me in my w
orld, has seemed unthinkable. But the unthinkable became reality about two hours ago.”

  He shifted back to gaze down into my face, caressing it with a featherlight touch.

  “Can you really not see the way everything has changed?” he asked. “I’ve seen our future…in my world. All you’ve been able to see is the unknown. But now you can decide whether or not to be with me as one of us. You’re not an outsider anymore, Candace. You are a vampire.

  “If I’d been even two minutes later, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’d be dead. But you’re not. And now we have a chance to be together. A chance we never could have predicted or looked for. We have been given a gift. The gift of time. But if you waste it, if you fight what’s happened, it will slip away. We’ll both be left with nothing.”

  I opened my mouth then closed it again. “That’s quite a speech,” I said.

  “Yes, but has it convinced you?” Ash answered with the glimmer of a smile. It faded as quickly as it had flickered into being, and he was serious once more.

  “The way I see it, things are really very simple, Candace. We love each other. We deserve a chance to be together. We have that chance now. I say we take it with both hands, hold on to it for as long as we can make it last.”

  These were the kinds of words a woman dreams of hearing from the man she loves, I thought. If Ash and I were human, would I be hesitating as I am now?

  Of course not, I realized. I’d be seizing the chance he spoke of with both hands. Grabbing hold of my own happiness and holding it as if I’d never let it go. The truly unnatural element in the situation was me. I was the one willing to throw away our chance for love.

  “You’re right,” I said slowly. “Being afraid of the dark doesn’t have to make me blind.”

  I felt a tremor run through him. Felt the power of my love, my choice. I reached up, and brought his lips down to mine.

  “Love me, Ash,” I murmured as his mouth left mine to press fierce kisses across my face. “Love me like there’s no tomorrow.”

  His lips found mine again, captured them in a searing kiss. “You’re getting it backward,” he said. “There are more tomorrows than you can count.”

  And then, again, we were making love.

  Four

  “The thing you have to remember,” Ash said as we walked through the luxurious hallway that linked the Beijing’s residential wing with its casino, “is that most of what humans feel and think is utterly trivial, even to them. There’s no reason for you to consider it at all. But there is a knack to learning how to filter the wave of information humans put out. A knack that takes practice. That’s why we’re here tonight.”

  The end of the hallway opened into the casino, and we were greeted with a wave of sound. Was the Sher, the casino where I worked, this loud and I no longer noticed? Another sound pierced the casino’s cacophony. My cell phone, completely forgotten since the attack, was ringing in my purse. I pulled it out, stared at it as if I had never seen such an object.

  “Who is it?” Ash asked.

  “Bibi,” I said, seeing her name on the screen. Bibi Schwartz was my best friend, one of the few humans who knew about vampires, and the only person I’d told about Ash. We hadn’t talked in two days. She was undoubtedly wondering where I was. “I can’t talk to her now,” I said, still staring at the phone. I couldn’t tell Bibi what had happened. I couldn’t deal with her at all.

  Ash lifted the phone from my hand, slipped it back in my purse. “You’ll talk with her later,” he said. “Now there are things you must learn.”

  Ash and I had spent the last two days together, all of it in the privacy of his apartment. Somehow it didn’t occur to me to return to my own house. The woman who lived there didn’t exist anymore—and it was almost as if the house didn’t, either. So we stayed together, at Ash’s, exploring my newly acquired vampire powers. Not that mine were anywhere near as developed as Ash’s, of course. The aspect of my new existence that was strongest was still what I’d noticed first. The world literally looked different, leaner—clearer, more in focus. My other senses had expanded as well. Taste, touch, smell. It was as if I’d gone from tube technology to HDTV. Every single experience was heightened.

  Satisfied that I was now reasonably comfortable in my new vampire skin, Ash had decided it was time to take my period of adjustment to the next level: exploring the capacity of my new vampire mind. Step one: direct human interaction. So we had returned to the Strip, to the Beijing, the most luxurious of the new casinos, where Ash happened to have a penthouse condo.

  “What I’m going to ask you to do is a matter of focus,” Ash explained.

  “And here I thought you were taking me out.” I took a few more steps past one of the blackjack tables, when somewhat to my surprise, my feet slowed. What’s this about? I wondered.

  I was enthusiastic about the evening’s adventure. I had visited vampire hangouts while still human. All I was doing now was turning the tables, and it wasn’t as if a casino setting was unfamiliar. I did work in one, after all. But the farther I moved into the casino, the more overwhelming the wave of sensory information became.

  “I am taking you out,” Ash replied. “We’re just doing some multitasking along the way. It’s something we vampires are very good at.”

  “You are so romantic.”

  “And you’re stalling, Candace.” He put firm but gentle fingers in the center of my back. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  With Ash propelling me, we made a slow circuit of the casino floor. More than once I was grateful for the pressure of his fingers at my back. Without them, I might have simply stopped, cold. Blood. I could hear it, rushing through thousands of human veins; hear the beating of hundreds of human hearts. Sweat dripping down a nervous bettor’s cheek sounded like a spring creek in full flood. Fingertips drumming nervously on a denim-clad knee were as loud as gunshots.

  I turned my head to look up at Ash. “Are things always this loud?”

  “Initially, yes,” Ash replied. “That’s one of the reasons I wanted us to come out tonight. The trick is to let the human sensory input flow over you, through you. Don’t let it lead or distract. You choose when to get involved. The ability to choose is the first step to gaining control—over them and yourself.”

  All of a sudden I gave a quick shiver. I knew what he meant—this was establishing rapport. Among other things, it was how vampires who fed on humans selected their victims, then made them submissive, bending them to their will before delivering the coup de grâce. Rapport was something I had always considered nearly as revolting as having your throat torn open.

  “Let’s try an experiment,” Ash suggested. He nodded toward a man sitting not far off, at the end of a row of slot machines. “What can you tell me about him?”

  I looked, considered for a moment. Some things were obvious, even without my vampire abilities.

  “He’s getting older, for one,” I replied. “I’d put him mid- to late sixties, probably from a rural background.”

  “What makes you say that?” Ash asked.

  “His clothes. Worn denim, snap-front shirt. And those cowboy boots are not for show.” I cocked my head, narrowed my eyes as if drawing a bead on him. “You see the way he’s sitting? His back hurts. It has for a long time.”

  “So far, so good,” Ash said. “But not really anything the guy sitting next to him couldn’t see just as well. Who is that old man, Candace? What can you tell me that takes our eyes?”

  I gazed at the old man, letting everything else fall away, narrowing my focus to him the same way I’d just narrowed my eyes. For several moments, nothing seemed to happen. What if I can’t do this? I thought. Were my senses less acute, diminished because I hadn’t fed on living blood? Then, with a suddenness that left me dizzy, all my vampire senses seemed to snap into play at once. I was inside the old man’s skin, inside his head, though I wouldn’t have called what I was experiencing reading his mind. I didn’t hear complete sentences, specific thoughts. It w
as more like a series of still images in rapid succession, a flip-book of his life.

  His face, as it was now, superimposed on what it had been years ago. He was once a handsome man, I thought in some surprise. I saw children, a woman in an apron standing in a dingy kitchen with an old-fashioned linoleum floor. And then an image of the man himself, head down on his arms at the table, sobbing as if his heart would break, and I understood in that moment what the trip to Vegas was all about. To forget. To use the bright lights and loud noises to block out the fact that the house was empty now. His wife, dead. His children, gone.

  “Now reach back, Candace,” I heard Ash say.

  I pulled my senses back, reaching deep inside myself, until I found the place that was still and silent, that had no living counterpart. The undead place, I thought. And I drew that place up and out until it filled my body, filled my mind. This is who I am now. This was my center, my place of control. The place I must inhabit in order to survive. And, in that moment, I understood the essence of establishing rapport. It was establishing this balance. To see the human needs, but to respond as something other than human. I could still see the old man’s pain, read it as clearly as print on a page, but it no longer had the power to touch me. I was undead, isolated, a being apart.

  I was a vampire.

  “He’s desperate,” I heard myself say, my voice absolutely calm. “Everyone he loves is gone. He’ll do something desperate before very much longer.”

  Even as we watched, the old man seemed to explode. Screaming at the slot machine, pounding it with both hands. Security appeared in the blink of an eye. Flanking him on either side, jerking him from his seat. He fought like a cornered dog.

  “He thinks he’s got nothing left to lose,” I said. I pulled all my senses back then, into myself. “He’s about to discover that he’s wrong.”