Once bitten

by Stephen Leather

  She was standing by a sink and as I sat up she came over with a glass of water.

  "I'm sorry, Jamie," she said. "I guess it was a mistake giving you the brandy."

  "Even though it was a good year," I said and took the water from her and drank it. It felt cold and refreshing and went some way to clearing my head.

  "Even though it was a good year," she repeated and smiled. "Are you OK?"

  I laughed ruefully because OK didn't exactly sum up the state of my mind just then. Pole-axed maybe. Stunned, possibly. But not OK. Definitely not OK.

  "How did I get here?" I asked, looking around the lab. There was no way of telling if I was even still in the same building, or how long I'd been out. I checked my watch. Two-thirty in the morning.

  "I carried you," she said. She carried me. Just like that. I must weigh almost half as much again as she does and she carried me. And if she carried me then she could just as easily have carried Matt Blumenthal, with or without the eight pints of blood that should have been in his body.

  "You were asking about the blood," she said as if she'd been reading my mind.

  "The blood?"

  "You wanted to know how we got the proteins we need, the ones our own bodies can't synthesise." She went over to a large refrigerator that was big enough to walk in. She pulled at its big, chrome handle and it made a hissing noise as it opened. She held it open wide so that I could see its contents. Plastic sachets of blood, all neatly racked and labelled. "We don't go around biting the necks of young virgins, Jamie. Not any more, anyway. There's no need. It's not the blood we need it's just a small fraction of the proteins in it. We buy the stuff in the bulk through a couple of medical supplies companies we own and we extract the proteins here."

  "We?" I asked.

  "A friend of mine helped me set up the lab, a guy called Neil Hamshire. Lately he's really got into science in a big way. He's the one who found identified the proteins we're missing, and worked out the extraction procedures using collection tubes containing silica gel polymers."

  "Where is he?" I asked. I held out the empty glass for her to take.

  "I wish I knew," she said. "He disappeared about six months ago. I think the Government has got him. They've been on our trail for at least ten years. Possibly longer."

  "I don't understand? Why would the Government be after you?"

  "Think about it, Jamie. We're a threat to them. Not because we mean them harm but because of the way we are. We are outside any of their controls, financially and legally. We are in a position to amass any sort of knowledge we want, we have the time to acquire any skills we want just be applying ourselves over a long period of time. Neil has spent more than fifty years in various laboratories around the world. If he were to ever publish some of the stuff he's discovered he'd have a dozen Noble prizes. There are no secrets in the world that we can't get to, eventually. We just have to keep trying and eventually we get what we want, because we outlast everyone else."

  "So long as you aren't discovered?"

  "That's right. We have to keep moving, and we have to keep changing identities, and that's getting harder and harder because more and more records are stored on computers and crossreferenced.

  They've caught several of my friends over the years."

  "Friends?"

  "People like me. And the more they find out about us the easier it becomes for them to track us down. It'll only be a matter of time before they find out that we buy in blood, for instance. And I think they're already trying to track us down through bank records. It isn't as easy to hide money as it used to be. It used to be that you could put $1,000 in a bank account and leave it for fifty years or so at compound interest and go back and take it out. Not any more. It's as hard now to transfer assets and property as it is to switch identities."

  I thought of the millions she had in the bank downtown, and wondered how much else she had squirrelled away around the world. Fall back positions.

  "Who in the Government does this, who is trying to catch you? Is it the FBI? The CIA?"

  "Worse. Much worse. They don't even have any of the restrictions on their actions that keep the CIA in check. It's like a witch-hunt. No, it's not like a witch hunt. It is a witch hunt. That's exactly what it is, and if they get their way they'll be burning us at the stake."

  "And you think they've got this friend of yours, this Neil…what was his surname?"

  "Hamshire. Without the 'P'. Neil Hamshire. Yeah, he was on his way to the lab here one evening and he just vanished. He wouldn't have gone voluntarily because he was in the middle of an experiment, something he'd been working on for over a year."

  "What was that?"

  "Genetics. He was trying to find a way of correcting the flaw in our genes so that we don't need to ingest the proteins. And he wanted to do something about the problem we have with sunlight.

  And some other stuff. He wouldn't have just walked away from it, I'm sure of that."

  She put the empty glass down by the sink and walked over to me, the dress flowing behind her like a black sail. Her hands reached up to hold my head, a cool palm on each of my cheeks and then her lips were against mine, the action so sudden that I didn't have time to draw breath and when she took her lips away I was gasping, my heart racing and my pulse pounding in my ears.

  "What do you want?" I asked. "What is it you want from me?"

  "Haven't you guessed?" she said. "Isn't it obvious?" She paused and then tilted her head down a fraction so that she was looking at me from under hooded lids as if telling me a guilty secret.

  "Jamie, I love you. I have done since I first saw you, even before you ran that ridiculous program by me."

  "Ridiculous!" I snorted. "What do you mean?" Hell, she was dismissing my life's work as if it were no more than a child's crossword puzzle.

  "I'm sorry," she said, reaching out and ruffling my hair. "It's just that when you've taken on so many personalities as I have, psychological tests like your's are, well, laughable. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is." She saw how crestfallen I looked. "Oh, come on, Jamie. Just accept that I'm in a different league to the normal psychos you come across in your line of work, don't take it as a personal affront against your professionalism."

  "Do you mean it?" I asked.

  "About your professionalism?"

  "About loving me."

  "Totally."

  I smiled and slid off the couch and took her in my arms and her head came up and this time I remembered to take a deep breath first. Her tongue slipped in between my teeth while one of her hands gently massaged the back of my neck and the other moved down the front of my trousers, caressing and feeling for me. I tried to pull her down onto the couch but she slipped out of my grasp and took me by the hand out of the laboratory and along the corridor to another room. She didn't turn on the main light but led me confidently through the pitch dark and switched on a small lamp on a side table next to a king's size four-poster bed. She pushed me back onto the bed and took off her dress before climbing on top of me and removing my clothes and then she did all the things she'd done to me before in bed and a few other things too and then I guess I must have passed out again because when I woke up I had a splitting headache and I was alone. Terry's dress was lying on a chair so she couldn't have been far away. My throat was dry and I had trouble swallowing so I pulled on my boxer shorts and went looking for a bathroom and a painkiller. I found the bathroom door on the second try and hit the light switch. I was getting used to rooms without windows. There was a glass by the sink and I filled it with cold water and took a mouthful, swilled it around my mouth, spat it out and then drank for real. I drained the glass and refilled it and then opened the mirrored cabinet on the wall looking for painkillers. There was mouthwash and antiseptic and a couple of sachets of herb hair shampoo but nothing that would get rid of my headache. I closed the cabinet and pulled open a drawer under the sink. There were no painkillers there but there was a black leather wallet. I took it out and flipped it open. There wa
s a plastic window on the left hand side containing a private investigator's licence in the name of Matt Blumenthal. His driving licence was in a side pocket along with a green American Express card and a couple of hundred dollars in the section for notes. The photograph on the driving licence made it look as if he was dead. Prophetic, as it turned out.

  When I looked up it was to find Terry's face looking back at me from the mirrored cabinet. I turned round quickly and the wallet fell to the floor. She knelt down in front of me and picked it up and tapped it against her leg as she stood up. She had on a black silk robe with an orange and green dragon on the back that rippled as she moved as if it was preparing to breath fire.

  "I didn't kill him, Jamie," she said quietly. "You must believe me."

  "That's his wallet, though," I said, trembling. "And you were found over his body."

  "He came around her one evening when I wasn't at home. But my friend was. He surprised my friend in the laboratory, and he reacted without thinking."

  "There was no blood in the body when it was found."

  She lifted her chin and tutted as if I'd said something irrelevant. "Christ, Jamie, my friend stabbed him in the chest, what else do you expect?"

  "And you moved the body to the alley?"

  "We both did. I mean, I could have managed on my own, either of us could, but we did it together, he was in his car when the police arrived so he left. There was no point in both of us getting caught."

  "He left you?" I said in disbelief.

  "Like I said, there was no point in us both getting caught. We knew there was no murder weapon around so there'd be no hard evidence. We'd removed all his identification. We thought he was a burglar, it was only afterwards that I discovered that Greig had hired him to track me down.

  Jamie, come back to bed." She hugged herself in the robe, the wallet still in her hand.

  "There was blood on your face, Terry. On your lips."

  "I don't know how that got there. I suppose I must have got it on my hands when I helped move the body and then maybe wiped it across my face. Let's go to bed, Jamie. Please."

  "I want to sort this out first. This friend, this man. Who is he? A lover?"

  She shook her head. "No, he's not a lover."

  "Where is he now?"

  "Around. He doesn't live here, if that's what you mean. I live here alone. In fact most of the time I live in the apartment upstairs, it's cosier. This is more of a storage place and somewhere to work."

  "Why do you keep all that stuff? The pictures, the portraits, the books?"

  "Memories," she said, and there was genuine sadness in her voice. "They're all I have left. The people who gave me those things, most of them anyway, are long dead. I can't keep them, but I can keep what they gave me. I owe it to them. Can you understand that?"

  I leant back against the sink and felt the marble dig into my spine. "What are you planning to add to your collection that'll remind you of me in years to come?" I said bitterly.

  She took a step forward and put a finger up against my lips, silencing me. "It won't come to that, Jamie."

  I seized her hand and pushed it away. "How can you say that?" I shouted. "How can you possibly say that? How many others have you left, how many have you walked away from? Why do you think I'll be any different?"

  "Because of the work Neil was doing," she said softly. "He had isolated the gene that gives us our longevity, and he was close to designing a way of incorporating it into normal human DNA.

  Jamie, he can make you one of us. If that's what you want."

  She held out her hand for mine and I slowly reached out and took it. She squeezed gently. "You have to decide, Jamie. I want you with me for all time, and if you want it too it's yours for the taking. No bites on the neck, not like it is in the movies, just a straightforward scientific procedure."

  "But this Hamshire guy is missing."

  "We'll find him," she said. We, she said. Not I. That's what I remembered as she led me back along the hall to the bedroom. We.

  The Dream I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn't wake up. Couldn't, or didn't want to, I'm not sure which it was or to what extent there was an element of free will, but no matter what the reason I just let what was happening flow over me. Terry was there, and maybe that was the reason I didn't want to wake up. She was dressed in black, a jacket that might have been my motorcycle jacket over a black tshirt, black jeans and black boots with what looked like silver tips on the toes. Her hair was tied back in a ponytail and I remember thinking that I'd never seen her wearing her hair that way before and how good it looked.

  We were in a wood, but not the normal sort of forest you find in real life, it was a caricature, the sort you'd see around the wicked witch's castle in a Walt Disney cartoon: deformed, gnarled trees with spindly branches that seemed to writhe and grasp as we moved close to them. It was a cold, dark, fearful place. The trees had no leaves or buds and there was no grass on the floor of the forest, just damp musty-smelling soil the colour of coal.

  It was night but I had no trouble seeing Terry or the trees because overhead hung a full moon, the sky so clear that I could see the individual craters on its surface. Terry looked at me and smiled and her teeth were as white as the moon and sharp, as sharp as a wolf's. She slowly put her head back so that I could see her whole throat exposed and the ponytail hung backwards away from the upturned collar of the jacket and then I heard the howl. I thought at first that it was coming from somewhere far in the distance because it was so quiet, but as it built and echoed around the forest it became obvious that it was her, howling at the moon. It was a terrible, mournful sound, the sound of a she-wolf in pain, howling for some great injustice that had been done to her. The howl tailed off and she lowered her chin and looked at me again. She pointed her index finger at her throat and moved it down a short distance, to where the Adam's apple would be if she had one. The sign for thirsty.

  I put my index fingers together at waist level, pointing forward, and then moved them to the left, separating and bringing them together as they moved. The sign for also. I was thirsty, too. I knew too that it was important that we didn't speak, that whatever we were doing had to be done in silence.

  She waved me behind a tree and I hugged a large trunk, its bark cracked and creased into deep furrows filled with a pungent brown moss. Terry moved next to another twisted tree but I could still see her clearly. It wasn't just the moonlight, something had happened to my eyes that allowed me to see clearly even though it was well past midnight and we were in the depths of the forest and I knew that if I reached up to feel my teeth I'd find them long and sharp, like her's.

  She made quick, stabbing motions with her pointed index finger, then pointed both index figures at each other and made a series of rolling motions. They come. She pressed her index finger against her pursed lips. Be quiet. I scowled. I knew that. Who did she think I was? Did I have Dumbshit written across my forehead, or what?

  I crouched down and waited. My hearing was intensified, too. It was as if I could hear the slightest noise no matter how far away it was. High overhead I could hear the feathery flapping of an owl on the wing, to my right, a hundred yards or so, a small mouse scuffled along the ground and if I really tried a could hear its tiny heart beating a hundred times a minute. I could hear the footsteps of men walking in the distance. Three men. No. I put my head on one side and focussed on the sound. Two men and a child. A small child, its steps hesitant and clumsy. I listened carefully and realised that the two adults were holding the child by an arm each because occasionally the small steps would disappear as if the child was being swung in fun. I heard the swish of a skirt against smooth legs and knew for certain that it was a man, a woman, and a child.

  Almost half a mile away. So far away and yet I knew everything. That was why I didn't try to escape from the dream, even though I knew I was asleep. I was enjoying the power.

  Terry looked at me over her shoulder. No deaf and dumb sign language this time, she just raised one
eyebrow. Ready? I nodded.

  She moved, so quickly that I couldn't see the individual motions, it was just a black blur like a shadow cast by a curtain waving in the wind. A flicker. One moment she was crouched down at the base of the tree, the next she was in the air, her arms outstretched, her ponytail streaming behind her. I stood up and tried to follow, not sure what I should do. I ran and then my foot caught in something, a tree root perhaps, but instead of falling I kept moving through the air, a few feet above the ground and then I arched my back and I began to move up, curving through the air, twigs brushing against my arms, my eyes stinging from the wind. There was no need to flap my arms, or push, or do anything, I kept moving faster and faster and I seemed to be able to change direction just by moving my head. Terry was ahead of me and she turned and smiled and beckoned for me to catch her up. I flew faster, not knowing how I was speeding up but doing it anyway, and then I drew level with her and she reached out and touched me lightly on the shoulder, congratulating me, making me feel good.

  We flew up so that we were skimming the tops of the trees and then she pointed and I saw the three figures in the distance, walking side by side down a narrow path that threaded its way through the forest. Terry grinned and licked her lips and then she swooped down and I followed, the sudden descent pulling the wind from my lungs and making me gasp. They didn't see us until we were right on top of them. The man was in his early fifties, a strong, weatherbeaten face, dark brown eyes, a firm chin, wearing a dark workman's jacket and dirt-streaked jeans, the woman a few years younger but still pretty, big blue eyes, a laughing mouth, her hair hidden by a colourful scarf, she was wearing a dark green coat over a green and white checked dress. The girl was about four or five years old, curly blonde hair, giggling and tugging at her parents' arms, wanting to be lifted.