They talk funny, thought Pierre. Not French. Not British. Even though vampires have incredible language facility and can speak the language of wherever they are, they can still get hung up on regional accents. He supposed they must be American, and not from the South, which was the only American accent Pierre was familiar with.
“We’ve come a long way to find you,” said the vampire. “My name’s Dominic,” he said, and let out an enormous cackle while grabbing Pierre and swinging him up and over his shoulder. “All the way from Chicago. Ever been to Chicago, Pierre?” he said. “Oh right, never mind,” and cackled again.
Dominic cracked himself up, that was clear. But he was not in Mourency to entertain himself.
“mMMMmmmff,” said Pierre.
“Is that so?” Dominic said. “I’m just taking you to my car. Rented a Mercedes. Love it. Ever driven one? CLS-class. I really wanted the SL-class roadster, but then we wouldn’t have room for you, would we?”
The car was parked on the sidewalk across from a footbridge crossing the river. Dominic waited for Maloney to unlock the trunk, and slid Pierre in, leaving the trunk-door open. He grabbed Maloney by the arm and walked him out on the footbridge. The river slid quietly underneath them, the green surface impassive, showing nothing of the life underneath. The night-birds were singing, and there was a hum of insects down by the water even this far into October.
“I want you to calm yourself down,” Dominic said. “We need him alive because we have a long list of questions to ask him and we need. those. answers. If we don’t get the answers, You-Know-Who is not going to be happy.”
The big man looked like he might cry.
“Cheer up, Maloney! When we’re done with this, we’ll almost be ready to go home. Where our reward awaits us.” Dominic looked a little misty-eyed just thinking about it. It was important to focus on the reward, or else he would be tempted to toss Maloney in the river to be done with him.
9
Henri had spent the evening combing over every square centimeter of his lab, and at long last, had solved at least part of the mystery of the break-in. His lab was an old building–old if you consider 17th century old–and the walls were two feet thick, made of irregular flint stones roughly half a meter across. He was unsure what the building’s original use had been, but it was not designed in a simple rectangle as so many outbuildings were. There were indentations and extrusions, which on the inside were handy for making closets and bookshelves. The outside of the building was largely surrounded by bushes simply to make the mowing easier on the landscaping staff.
In any case, it was a building of nooks and crannies. And Henri discovered, in the back of a closet full of broken umbrellas and worn-out boots that he had intended to take care of, someday–he discovered a fine layer of dust and some tiny crumbles of stone and mortar. Looking carefully at the wall with a strong flashlight, he saw that someone, or someones, had managed to break up the four hundred-year-old masonry and ease a few of the big pieces of flint out of the wall, without causing the whole thing to tumble down, and then put them back again.
The hole would easily have been big enough for a man to crawl through.
Those pieces of stone were heavy. It must have been very difficult to do without machinery. And risky.
When he went around outside and crawled beneath the bushes, he saw bigger crumbles of stone and more of a mess, with the perpetrator likely figuring no one was going to be tidying up deep in a bank of viburnums.
The thing that made Henri the angriest was that the break-in was successful in spite of his iris recognition device. All that work, and he ends up with a hole in the wall and his valuable stuff stolen! At least it looked as though Hemo-Yum was safe.
He expected Hemo-Yum to do very, very well, once it was in wide distribution and word had gotten out. But that word was going to take some time to develop. Vampires had been drinking from living humans for centuries, and a switch to synthetic blood wasn’t going to happen overnight, Henri didn’t kid himself about that. It didn’t help that the American synthetics already on the market were pretty much the equivalent of fast food–it all tasted the same, was sort of addictive, and made you feel like crap after you drank it. But luckily, those products had not yet made it to France, and Henri hoped that being first in his home country, with a truly good product, would mean he would gain an advantage that would be hard to take from him.
The bandages were less complicated. Henri believed the bandages would be an immediate bestseller. Claudine and her team had better come up with a terrific name for them, because it was unquestionably a terrific product, something every vampire needs. It was obvious, and simple, like many wonderful things we can’t imagine how we lived without now that we have them.
A basic bandage, like an ordinary Band-Aid–it covers a bite mark completely, melts into the skin as it heals the wound, so that once the bandage is applied, there is no evidence of any bite at all. You can’t see the bandage, you can’t see the bite. That plus a brainwipe will get a vampire a quick and safe drink any old time. No risk of the brainwipe not fully working and the woman blabbing to the cops with the evidence right on her neck.
Every vampire will carry them in their back pocket. The teen market alone was going to be explosive, and all vampire parents would insist their offspring carry them, since it would make the teens and their sometimes reckless biting much less detectable.
For Henri himself, whose darkest vampire urges were fairly successfully repressed, the prospect of centuries of existence drinking only Hemo-Yum was a fine one. But he understood that for every vampire like him, there was one like David, who was extremely unlikely to give up human blood entirely. Not the blood–or the biting. So to reduce the risk for his brother and others like him, he had developed the bandage.
The one problem, thought Henri, for the millionth time, is that no one had any idea how many vampires there were. Not as many as before, is all anyone knew. He hoped his inventions would have an invigorating effect–and that there were still enough vampires left that the species could be saved.
There were still a few hours left until dawn. David had walked Jo back to her tower, and like a gentleman had only given her a kiss on each cheek and said goodnight.
But he was no gentleman, and he knew it.
He had wanted nothing more than to bed her and bite her. She had looked so lovely in that blue silk dress with her strong arms and long legs bare. He couldn’t shake the thought of her wrapping those limbs around him and holding him tight, so tight he couldn’t move, vampire strength and all.
But even as he was thinking of her, wanting her, he was walking towards the row of guest cottages beside the Château, thinking also of that older woman he had just drunk from last night. She had been…feisty. Her flavor was a distinctive sort of herbal thing, he couldn’t put his finger on it, but he wanted more.
David always, always, always wanted more.
He let himself into her cottage, expecting the woman to be sound asleep. But as he closed the door softly behind him, he heard a rustling.
“I hoped you would come,” the woman said, with a broad smile. “We had such fun last night, didn’t we?”
David became very still. Had he forgotten to brainwipe her? Does she…remember?
“Has it been a pleasant evening so far?” he said smoothly. “I wondered–the stars are magnificent tonight. Would you like to take a stroll around the grounds and look at them?”
The older woman, whose name was Katarina, had kept smiling during David’s invitation, and now she nodded and stood up.
“A stroll sounds lovely,” she said, and somehow, she made that plain sentence sound salacious.
Oh, she remembers all right, thought David.
He tried to think seriously about the situation because obviously something had gone wrong with the brainwipe, and that could mean a nuisance for him and the Château. But it was difficult to think rationally when Katarina’s suggestive tone had made him instantly hard, whe
n his fangs were tingling like mad, and all he could think about was possessing her.
He held out his arm and she slipped hers around it. At first there was no sound but the crunching of their shoes on the gravel path, and the strange churring song of a nightjar on the edge of the forest.
David did not bother to trot out his speech on constellations. He and Katarina had advanced beyond that now. Once they had gotten out of sight of the Château, on the other side of the lake and in a copse of birches, he stopped, and held her arms firmly in his hands. He looked her all over, at her dark hair with handsome silver streaks, at her cashmere sweater, her long skirt, her scuffed boots. To him, she wasn’t a dowdy older woman–she was a different flavor, even a bit exotic. She had a beautiful face, even if it was not young; in fact, some of its beauty was in the history of her life that was finely etched around her mouth and eyes.
Katarina lifted her face to his. “What a spectacular night,” she said. “Now go on,” she said, turning her head to the side and offering her neck, “Bite me.”
Her words and the rough tone in her voice set him on fire. David’s fangs shot down and he felt a wave of power ripple through his body, a surge of domination, the feeling a lion has as it brings down a gazelle and its flesh is right there for the ripping and gorging.
He plunged his teeth into her neck and drank.
She flinched at the brief sting, and then moaned “Ahh,” pressing her body against his. “Oh, David…”
Rosemary, that was it. But there was an undertone of something else–anise perhaps? Fennel? And that wasn’t all….
The couple fell to the ground as David slurped and sucked from Katarina’s artery. He loved how it seemed to excite her, and she writhed next to him, wanting as much of her body against his as possible.
Finally he was blood-sated, but that only made his sexual need even more urgent. Trying to slow himself down, he went up on one elbow and touched her face. He kissed her cheek, then her ear, then the wound. She was beaming.
“My vacations are usually rather sedate,” said Katarina with a soft laugh.
“Ha!” said David, grinning. “I don’t believe you.”
Slowly he pulled up her skirt, his fingers trailing on her leg higher and higher.
Suddenly he stopped and sat up. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a bandage. “Here,” he said gently. “Let me take care of your neck.” He peeled off the paper over the sticky edges and placed it over the seeping bite marks, pressing it down firmly.
He had to admit, the bandage was a marvel. Her neck looked perfectly normal with no sign of a bandage or a wound of any kind.
“Now then,” he said, his face contorted with excitement but still handsome, the scar over his eye turning scarlet, “for the rest of the evening’s entertainment.” He climbed on top of her, taking her hands in his and pinning them over her head. Somehow he had loosened his pants so that his cock was hot between her legs, hot and sliding closer, and closer as they kissed, their tongues darting in each other’s mouths, both of them moaning with animal pleasure.
“Come inside me,” whispered Katarina. She was wet and slippery and he slid in and began thrusting, harder, deeper, his hips moving in an unending circle, unstoppable.
David could keep that up for a very long time. Until they were both on the verge of delirium.
Katarina pulled one of her hands away and took his fingers, guiding them to her breast. He touched her hard tip, then lowered his mouth to it, careful with his fangs not to nip her, and flicked it with his tongue and sucked, still thrusting into her, until she came in an oceanic wave, crying out and shuddering with pleasure.
David had a pang then, a little needle in the middle of his chest. The image of Jo had leapt into his mind, and he felt a bit of remorse for lying with Katarina.
Remorse was not his usual way, and almost instantly he felt angry at Jo for causing it.
Because David was David, none of these thoughts affected his sexual performance. He rode Katarina, allowing himself to get right up to the peak and then fading back, only to let the sensation build again.
When she bit him on the ear–and not a nibble, a real bite–he came in a paroxysm of surprise and delight.
Anise, definitely anise, he thought, smelling her sex smell and pulling it deep into his nostrils, and forgetting all about Jo for the moment.
10
Damn this jet lag, thought Jo, as she woke with a jerk in the darkness before dawn. It’s a much bigger hassle than I expected it to be. Grumbling, she climbed out of bed since going back to sleep seemed impossible. She stretched her arms up, and whoa, she was sore from her ride on Drogo. She kept stretching, wanting to feel limber when she took him out again this morning.
She folded her body over at the waist and grabbed her ankles, keeping her legs stiff and straight, feeling the pleasant ache as her hamstrings stretched. Then she went over to the window, planning to hold on to the sill as she stretched out her back.
It was still mostly dark. She could see a blanket of fog beginning to dissipate, and the staff of the Château beginning their work already. A man in blue coveralls heading to the outbuilding where the furnace lived. A pair of women carrying rakes making their way to the kitchen garden. And in the distance, barely visible in the pre-dawn murky light, she saw a couple wandering along, a man and a woman, holding hands, nuzzling each other as they walked.
Usually Jo would turn away from a sight like that, not allowing herself to feel anything. But this time, she watched the couple, saw them turn down the path to the guest cottages, and she felt a yearning to have that kind of warmth in her life too.
She couldn’t really imagine what it would be like, but she wanted it. And for the first time ever, admitted it to herself without flinching away.
Her parents hadn’t had it, that was for sure. Jo had grown up in a run-down little box of a house just outside of Trenton. Her father had drunk up his paycheck most weeks, and spent his time at home on the sofa watching TV in a total haze. Her mother was so wrapped up in trying to keep her husband from drinking, or yelling at him for drinking, or threatening to leave him because of his drinking, that she wasn’t available to give Jo much of anything either. Jo had latched on to teachers at school and a few neighbors, who got her through those hard early years. And then she had left that house as soon as she was old enough to make it on her own, and never looked back.
She wasn’t sure her parents had noticed she’d gone.
She was sitting on the floor now, with her legs spread out as wide as she could get them, leaning to one side and then the other, twisting her torso, feeling the muscles pull until they would go no farther. She made a time zone calculation and realized it would be a good time to call Marianne. She grabbed up her cell and slid back under the covers for some girl-talk.
No answer. Jo started to leave a message but remembered that Marianne detested voicemail, and so she texted her instead: aMAzing. cant sum it up in a txt. get ur butt ovr here. xxoo
The sun was peeking up over the horizon and the sky was turning pink. Jo put on her riding clothes and boots and trotted downstairs, looking for coffee. And maybe, if she were going to be completely honest, looking for David as well.
Later that day, Tristan, Alain, and Jessica reluctantly left La Petite Espionne, after five courses followed by glasses of digestif, feeling heavier than when they went in, heavier but suffused with happiness.
“I have had snails many times,” Tristan was saying. “It is not a dish of my region but I have loved them since I was a child, and order them whenever I have the chance. No plate of Helix pomatia has ever come close to the pinnacle of deliciousness as that one. The ingredients are so simple. And each one was bursting with flavor on my tongue, so fresh it’s as though the chef ran outside to pick the parsley after getting my order.”
“I always thought escargots were like chewy pencil erasers,” said Jessica.
“Well, yes,” said Tristan. “But with garlic, parsley, and butte
r sauce. That rather changes the effect.”
Alain smiled somewhat painfully. That last bit of crème brûlée had been a step over the line, and he would rather not think about food for at least a few minutes.
Paris in October, Tristan realized, was a revelation. The tourists were few enough that they were invisible unless you went to the Eiffel Tower or other major picture-taking sort of attraction. The sky was a brilliant blue. And the Parisians seemed full of gaiety, now that they had survived another season. It felt neighborly to be there, not like a big city, but friendly and relaxed. Tristan had been to Paris numerous times in his life, but he had never experienced it quite like this. And the conversation at lunch–and the company–had been more than interesting.
He glanced over at Jessica, noticing how the top button of her blouse seemed to have come undone somehow during their long feast. He could see just a thin strip of lace on her bra, and the swelling of the tops of her breasts.
“Still hungry?” she asked him, eyebrows raised but with a little smile.
Maybe it was more like a smirk. Tristan wasn’t sure. He was too pleased with the world, with himself, and with Jessica to feel any embarrassment to be caught peeking. In response, he gave her a look of frank desire and appreciation. Not pushy. Just letting his admiration be known.
Jessica caught the compliment and accepted it with grace. And gave Tristan a once-over when he wasn’t looking. Not bad, she thought. A little older than I usually go for. But you can’t dislike a man who is that ga-ga about lunch. Very nice brown eyes. And for sure a twinkle in his eye, except when he’s talking vampires.
The three got back to Alain’s office and continued talking.
“So please, clear up my confusion about vampire gender issues, I suppose you could call it,” said Tristan, settling in a comfortable armchair.
“Well, most–but not all–vampires are males,” said Alain. "And the males vastly prefer to drink from female humans. We aren’t clear on the details, but what we guess is that it verges on taboo for a male to drink from another male. It’s not totally unheard of, but not at all the usual thing. Perhaps sort of a homophobic tendency there, although there are plenty of homosexual vampires, especially in big cities.
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