Unbitten

by Valerie du Sange

But of course, the man was no reptile. He was the only remaining vampire out of a small number of village vampires, most of whom were descended from a serf who had lived around year 1362 and had been turned to vampirism by David and Henri’s great-great-great-OK, a lot of greats-grandfather, when he had cut himself and forced the serf to drink his tainted blood. Through the generations, the sons drank from the fathers and became vampires themselves, or some perhaps had their first drink outside of the family, but either way, Mourency had been home to vampires since about 874, deep in the Dark Ages.

  His name was Pierre, and he looked in every way like the quintessential Frenchman he was, even wearing a blue beret when the weather was chilly, and smoking Gauloises. Pierre was a walking cliché–except for the part about the retracting fangs and the thirst for warm blood. Human blood. Skinny young women’s blood, if you wanted to get down to Pierre’s personal specifics.

  Mourency did not get hordes of tourists, the way the villages on the coast did. So for Pierre to come across this American girl, such a delicious little morsel, a little waifish really but he liked them that way, not all strapping and tough like some of the Scandinavians and Germans–it was a bit of luck, coming around the corner at that moment, having just gotten up to greet the evening, barely even begun the night’s hunting, and there she was, waiting for him.

  Like she was meant for me, thought Pierre, not springing after all but instead walking right up behind her and sniffing her hair. Like all he had to do was unwrap her like a bon-bon, and suck her, and suck her, and suck her.

  He opened his mouth very wide, as wide as he possibly could–it felt better that way–and his fangs shot down, at the ready. Pierre leaned towards the neck, the pale neck, faintly sweaty; he closed his eyes and started to reach for her as he lowered his teeth towards her flesh, his brain already starting to melt with pleasure.

  A car horn suddenly started blaring like mad. Screeching, horrible noise! Pierre went limp. He scrambled away from Jo as the car, a navy Citroën, careened into the parking lot. He clapped his hands over his ears and ran down the road, absurdly fast, around the corner, and disappeared into the village.

  Jo had barely realized he was behind her and he was gone. She jerked, startled, even though the man was already out of sight. Where had he come from? And what kind of town was this, anyway? She smoothed down her skirt and tried to compose herself, pushing the thought away that maybe she could just go back in the station and arrange to go home. When the woman leapt from the car and ran up to her, she smiled faintly. “Angélique?” she said.

  Angélique put her arm around Jo. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

  “I’m fine,” said Jo, a little defensively. “I didn’t even realize he was behind me, it’s nothing.” It felt to her as though Angélique was too motherly and it made Jo bristle.

  “Come on,” said Angélique, taking her by the arm and leading her to the car, opening the door for her and then gathering up her duffel and carry-on bag and throwing them in the trunk. “The Château is very close by, we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Angélique was capable, and hardheaded, and no dummy. She took care of quite a lot of the Château business, all of the day-to-day running of the place, in fact. She was a woman you wanted on your side.

  Jo realized with surprise that she had shifted easily into speaking and understanding French–as though the incident with the creepy man had momentarily distracted her from any anxiety about whether all that French she had taken in school would mean anything once she was really and truly in France and talking to an actual French person.

  “That was not much of a welcoming,” said Angélique as they sped out of the village and down a long straight road lined with poplars. “Mourency is a lovely village. I grew up here, and really, we do not have problems of violence, not usually. But of course, no place is without its scoundrels, yes?” She glanced in the rearview mirror as she speeded up even more.

  Jo smiled to herself at “scoundrels”. Such a romantic word choice, she thought.

  “Good police? Or just…nobody committing crimes?” she asked.

  “I’d say the latter,” said Angélique. She paused before continuing. “It is not fortunate,” she said, “but in Mourency, the head of police–he is not a good man. Lazy. Corrupt. Dealing with him is usually a waste of time, comprenez?”

  Angélique began talking about the stable and the horses and upcoming shows, in a fast stream of quite good English, waving her hands around but still managing to keep the Citroën on the narrow road.

  Jo mumbled something in response and looked out of the window. She began to look forward to meeting David de la Motte, feeling excited to see the stables and meet the horse she was supposed to ride, and drinking in the scenery of France where she had never been before. She looked at what she could see of the fields of sunflowers whizzing by in the dark, and small cottages, cozy with lights on, none of it looking even in the smallest detail like Trenton, where she had grown up.

  “…you’ll be staying in the left tower. I am in a tower bedroom on the other side of the Château,” Angélique was saying. “You do not mind if I shift into English? I need the practice,” she said, with a rueful look.

  “Your English is really good, Angélique. And the tower room sounds amazing,” said Jo. She struggled to find more to say. “How is David to work for?”

  Angélique smiled. “David…” she said.

  Jo waited, but Angélique never finished her sentence. She stopped the car and pointed a clicker at an immense iron gate with gold-tipped spikes, and then as it slowly swung open, guided the Citroën through, past eighteen foot high stone posts covered with carvings, a coat of arms, and lots of decorative flourishes.

  Down a long drive they went, ancient plane trees towering on either side like a row of guards, watching them pass.

  Around a bend, up a short hill, and then, across a field, Jo saw the lit-up Château Gagnon for the first time. She couldn’t help gasping even though she had seen photographs online.

  Angélique laughed. “Yes, it has that effect,” she said. “I remember the first time I came here, as a little girl,” she said. “I’m French, I had seen plenty of châteaux before. But this one, she is a little bit of different,” she said.

  Jo loved the way Angélique’s English was perfect and then all of a sudden it would hit a bump.

  The central part of the Château looked very old–and in fact it was, certainly by an American’s frame of reference, having been built in the early 1400s. Then it expanded on either side, with additions of various architectural styles, so that the Château was like a textbook example of French Architecture Through the Ages, going from early fortress-like Romanesque all the way through 19th century Neoclassicism. But remarkably, the building did not look like a crazy mish-mash, but almost as though it had been designed by one architect, who had been able to predict the styles of the future and thereby create a building with a coherent and powerful beauty as it developed over the centuries.

  France, thought Jo, really is a different world. It’s not like New Jersey with a different accent plus snails.

  Angélique expertly weaved through various obstacles–an old wooden cart, a sleek black Peugeot, several dogs–and parked next to what looked like a garage with wooden doors two stories high.

  “Here we are!” she said. “Let’s go straight in and see David. Someone will be out to take your bags to your room, don’t worry about that.”

  Jo followed Angélique inside, her eyes wide, taking everything in. Her jet-lag was forgotten as she felt a surge of her usual excitement and energy, wanting to get to know her new home. She was chattering to Angélique, wanting to know about the dogs, about the stable; she had questions about everything she saw.

  Then she saw him.

  David was striding down a corridor on his way to meet them. He was wearing a white shirt with several buttons open so she could see a wedge of his chest. Jodhpurs with suede patches on the inside of the thighs, wit
h high black riding boots. Jo felt blood rising into her neck and face and she was helpless to stop it. It was infuriating. She wished as she had wished so many times before that her body would not so easily betray what she was feeling.

  “Enchanté,” said David, taking her hand and slowly raising it to his lips, a hank of hair falling over one eye. He smiled at her, a knowing smile, as if to say that they were in on a little joke together, that this being kissed on the hand by an aristocrat was not just a bit of old-world politeness, that it could also be modern.

  In other words, seriously and blazingly hot.

  She felt his lips brush her fingers and linger, just a moment, on her fingertips. Her blush intensified so dramatically that she looked feverish.

  “I am so very glad you are here,” David said, his English impeccable. “Please, let me know anything at all I can do for your comfort and happiness. I know you are a little bit, what is the expression, fish out of water? And I want you to feel at home here,” he said, licking his lips, his hands on his hips and legs apart, like he was thinking of straddling something.

  “Thank you,” said Jo, looking at his face intently, as though she needed to memorize every detail. She noticed a scar over one eye. It was a clean, smooth scar, like he had been sliced with something extremely sharp. She wanted to run her finger along it.

  “I’m afraid you have missed lunch,” David said, “but I can have someone bring you something–our dinner is later, I believe, than Americans are used to.” He smiled a smile of such confidence that Jo felt that she was in a place where the men were able and strong and knew what the hell they were doing. She smiled an ironic smile at herself for being at the Château for maybe fifteen minutes and already imagining she trusted this man.

  What would Marianne say, she said to herself.

  “Actually,” she said, “I’m starving.” Feeling her blush reignited, she looked down at the stone floor, silently swearing and praying for the blood to stop pumping into her face.

  David, meanwhile, was praying for just the opposite.

  The sight of this blonde American girl with her pale skin and excitable manner had him more inflamed than he could remember feeling in years. Her face kept becoming charmingly red, flushed with her hot blood–he could even see her carotid artery bulging and throbbing.

  Jo glanced at Angélique, thinking that David’s sexuality was so powerful, so overwhelming, that any woman in the room would have to be feeling the same heat she did.

  Angélique was making herself useful, neatening up some leaves and petals that had fallen from a flower arrangement on an ancient console table, her face composed with the expression of a good assistant–pleasant, ready to listen and get to work, no complicated emotions.

  Jo wanted to slide David’s white cotton shirt off his muscular shoulders, and press her body up against his chest. She shook her head a bit, trying to push such thoughts out of her head. Which never seemed to work.

  “Angélique will get you settled upstairs,” David said gently. “And I will send Albert up with a little something for you to eat.” Again, his eyes were dancing with merriment, though he was not laughing or even smiling. His expression was full of promise that whatever the future held, it was going to be…interesting.

  4

  Tristan Durant leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. The police station was quiet, as it usually was, since crime in the village and even the entire département was minimal. You had your vacation home break-ins, your teens stealing mopeds, and that was more or less it.

  And if that had indeed been all there was to it, Tristan would have found another job and forgotten his dream of being a gendarme–because Tristan wanted his job to matter. He wanted to do something with his life besides molder in the small village, eating the same dinner his father had eaten, and his grandfather, and on into genealogical infinity. He wanted some excitement, and the knowledge that he had helped people in a meaningful way, something more than getting their moped returned.

  But Tristan had not gotten a different job because this one was turning out to be a whopper after all. He wasn’t absolutely sure. Maybe he was wrong. But he thought, finally, that he had proof. Not court-of-law proof, but enough proof to convince himself to carry on with his investigation.

  Tristan Durant believed that Mourency was home to a vampire. Make that vampires.

  For starters, the Marquis’ younger brother, David de la Motte.

  He had been suspicious for years, really. He had wondered why the family was so reclusive, why they never joined the village for fairs and markets and all the other seasonal rituals that other noble families of other villages considered it a duty to participate in. He had tried, once he was a gendarme, to get to know the family in an official capacity, offering his support and expertise on security.

  But Tristan had been utterly and completely rebuffed. David de la Motte made it clear that he and his family had no desire to interact with Tristan Durant or anyone else from the gendarmerie for that matter–no driving by to check on the Château, no offering of services, no conversation, no nothing, rien.

  Which by itself, of course, was inconclusive. The la Mottes were aristocrats, and even though the French Revolution had been rather bloody for their social set, some of the families that managed to survive held on to their belief of being elevated, better than the rabble, and they carried on their lives with as little contact with regular people as they could arrange.

  Tristan had even heard of families living in enormous châteaux who could no longer afford any help, and who believed themselves too noble to get jobs. So they lived strange and lamentable lives, isolated from the rest of the village and the world, scraping by with meager vegetable gardens and hunting, cutting firewood for heat. A few were actually squatters on their ancestral estates that the government had long ago seized for failure to pay taxes. It was a kind of mental illness, thought Tristan, to consign yourself and your family to a life without electricity or contact with the outside world, just so you can pretend you are something that in the real world no longer has the meaning you are assigning to it.

  So at first he thought perhaps the la Mottes were one of those families. But, as he kept up his watchful eye, certain facts did not fit. For one thing, they certainly did not isolate themselves but had even opened up their home to strangers with their chambre d’hôte, something any of those hermit aristocrats would consider anathema. And from what Tristan could see, they seemed to embrace technology, not recoil from it.

  But then there was the incident with Pierre Aucoin. That baffling, exceptionally unusual incident, and suddenly, the la Mottes were falling all over themselves to be helpful to the investigation, and helpful to Pierre as well. That was what sent Tristan looking in other directions.

  And all of those paths had led him, whether circuitously or straight, right to vampirism.

  Rumors of vampirism’s existence had been around for as long as he could remember. Whispers, mostly. Certainly not talked about in polite company. Most people, if asked directly, would scoff and say of course there was no such thing as a vampire…but many of those same people discreetly carried silver crosses, just to be on the safe side. Many of them made sure their wives and daughters were not out alone at night, especially in those areas whispered about the most. And the wives and daughters themselves, the potential victims–the more practical-minded, the most prudent of them–they took precautions, even if they did not speak about it openly.

  It was still difficult for Tristan to get his head around it. It’s the second millennium, after all, not the Dark Ages! It’s a time of science, not mythology! And yet, facts are facts. His police training had been excellent and thorough, and his mind was naturally logical and clear. So even if the facts led him to a conclusion he would prefer not to make, Tristan had the intellectual strength to make it anyway. Or at least to give it a chance to continue to prove itself, or not. He was not afraid to speak up, to drag this subject out from the shadows of gossip a
nd into plain sight where it could be evaluated fairly.

  So now it was time for Tristan to travel to Paris, where he had found a group that called themselves “slayers,” and that claimed to know quite a lot about modern vampires.

  And getting rid of them.

  Tristan Durant was a tolerant man, even an exceptionally tolerant man. He did not have even the tiniest smidgen of prejudice or distaste for anyone who was different. Any race, any sexual persuasion, too fat, too skinny, oddball religions–he would give a Gallic shrug, and say: to each his own tastes. If the vampire at Château Gagnon, as well as Pierre Aucoin, had kept to themselves, Tristan would likely have kept their secret. But the vampires did not mind their own business. There had been…incidents. More than a few deaths whose explanations did not entirely satisfy. Spates of missing livestock, where the recovered bodies did not look like the prey of a bear or wolf. Reports from the local clinic of young women coming in with bite marks on their necks but no memory of being bitten.

  To a gendarme who took his job very seriously, that sort of thing was insupportable. He was going to put a stop to it, and he was unfazed by la Motte’s title, the family’s vast acreage, their reputation in the village for aloof generosity, or the brothers’ rather daunting physical presences.

  David de la Motte, and Pierre Aucoin, as well as any other vampire in Mourency whose existence was so far unknown, were going to find out just how determined a man Tristan Durant was.

  Angélique made sure Jo was settled in her tower room with a view of the lake, and then she hurriedly trotted down the long passageway to her own tower room on the other side of the Château. She couldn’t help, as always, taking an appreciative look out the windows at the rooflines of the building, the amazing turrets with their spiraled tops, the crenellations that archers used to hide behind, and the green expanse of pastures beyond, ending at the dark forest that surrounded the estate.

  She whipped out her cell phone the minute she was in her room with the ancient thick door closed behind her.