“Um, perhaps. There are lots of stories.” And more, besides, if only she knew.
What if she did befriend the new girl? It was not as if she had to look at fulfilling all the aspects of the Wyrd. Perhaps, as Etienne suggested, the girl was not such a lost cause.
As if sensing where Arwen would be taking her next words, Szandor spoke, a warning in his tone. “Arwen.”
Arwen grinned now, turning around to look Helen directly in her startled gray eyes. “So, Helen, do you believe in ghosts?”
Chapter 9
Trouble in the Air
No small Karoo town would be complete without a Royal Hotel. Aberdeen was no exception. Out here, the only businesses that could rely on regular income were liquor stores, bars and shebeens.
Aberdeen’s Royal Hotel was a long, single-story building which lurked on the corner of two main thoroughfares. Even during its heyday in the sixties, it had held an air of seediness, from its scuffed industrial blue carpets to the yellow-glazed bricks covering its facade.
The lazy overhead fan did little to cool the interior–it simply stirred the miasma of cigarette smoke in slow swirls. Trystan would have a fine time removing the stench from his hair and clothes.
On a whim, he had decided to mix with the mortals. He needed to pretend, to fool himself that he was still part of something. Even now, he realized his mistake.
Trystan kept to the shadows, hugging a corner where the slot machines and their bright, flashing lights drew the patrons’ attention. He didn’t really want them to see the lone, skinny white male who had nursed his beer so long the liquid had warmed to room temperature. The stench of humanity nearly overwhelmed him.
Thirty-two heartbeats hammered, thrumming in his ears. Trystan could tune into each frequency without even bothering to reach. The mingling sweat, bad breath and a dozen competing aftershaves and perfumes flattened his sense of smell.
Alcohol had dulled what Essence, what awareness might have existed here. Even the blood did not appeal to him, although it had been more than two weeks since he had last fed, and the taint of hunger wriggled in his veins.
Well-tanned brown or black skins shone with the gleam of perspiration. Darkened patches showed up on fabric pulled too tight around armpits. Why must humans be so visceral, so dirty?
Vampires didn’t smell like much–perhaps dusty, or like the scents they used to perfume their clothes. God forbid like mothballs. They didn’t sweat. Only dust followed in their wake. They didn’t breathe unless they needed to speak. To him it sometimes seemed as if their human shape was only an afterthought, a placeholder for the Essence searing through their veins.
The first words Trystan had spoken in more than a week had been when Helen had asked his name. Like a fool, he’d gone back–this time undetected–and had heard people talking. Helen Ashfield–a nice, pretty name.
He spared a thought for the other Helen, the one who’d burned with so much Essence and built the Owl House–the one whom he’d been too afraid to approach, who’d learned the art of the light that was anathema to his kind. She’d painted her walls with bright colors before applying a layer of crushed glass that had caught the light of her candles and lamps like a thousand tiny splinters of sun.
He had longed, no, yearned to draw near her, yet her obsessive need to keep the night at bay had proved too successful. Now her home stood empty, a draw card for tourists to the small town. Her light had been extinguished in the mid-seventies. Suicide. Crushed glass and caustic soda. Sometimes people’s lights burned too brightly.
For humans to be filled with so much Essence was rare enough, even rarer for them to wield it.
Even now, he struggled to go near the Owl House. Something of Miss Helen’s magic surely still lingered in the glass-eyed owls guarding the veranda.
He shivered.
“You can’t be cold.”
The beer bottle almost dropped from his nerveless fingers and he pressed himself against the rough bricks, all muscles tensed to propel him away from this confrontation.
She stood so close he didn’t need to reach to know what she was. The small hairs on top of his arms and on the back of his neck prickled.
“Mantis!” he hissed. “What are you doing here?”
Mantis laughed and threw her lustrous black hair over her shoulder. “I might ask you the same, Trystan. It’s been, what, well, fuck me silly... It’s been a hundred years!”
She laughed again, so loudly and with so much abandon that people stopped speaking to turn and stare.
Oh, as if they weren’t already staring at that ashen skin pulled tightly over a slender, yet well-proportioned frame. Form-hugging leather trousers were tucked into riding boots. Her skin-tight blouse beneath a leather waistcoat with half the laces undone, left little to the imagination.
“Like what you see, kin-killer?” She pitched her voice low, her initial friendliness gone. Her eyes glittered with malice.
Trystan looked away and put his beer down on the shelf behind him. He didn’t want to say anything. All these years without being able to speak to someone who understood...and now this, to face a hunter and, indeed one who’d been hunting him all these years.
Mantis wouldn’t go away, however. That was a foolish wish. “Yes,” he whispered.
How could he forget her flesh pressed to his in a mockery of mortal passion? How could he forget that Essence in her blood calling to him?
“Did you really think we’d forget you, Trystan? Won’t the councils be glad to finally discover that you are still ghosting around? I must admit that you’ve done well. Not even Barney Barnato fooled them for so long.”
“I suppose it’s too much to ask for you to pretend that you never saw me?”
Mantis snorted. “Please. There’s quite a lot of status to be gained from your capture. Although, looking at you now, I can’t imagine why. Have you no pride? You dress like a homeless peasant.”
“I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.”
“Evidently.”
His thoughts raced through dozens of options–none of them suitable for escape–and he looked everywhere but her. He should kill her, but how? Not here.
“Well, then, we’re wasting our time in this sinkhole,” he said. “Let’s go outside.” Might as well play for time and draw the conversation out long enough to find some sort of option.
“So that you can find a dark corner to kill me? Uh-uh. I’m not stupid. You may have fooled some of the other jagters with that ploy but it won’t work on me.”
“Well, then, how do you propose to bring me to justice? I can simply wait here for the sun to rise. As far as I can recall, your allergy is far worse than mine.” He forced a smile, allowing his fangs to extend ever so slightly. The older vampires burned much nicer than the youngsters.
Mantis hissed. He’d brought up one of her most profound weaknesses. At more than six hundred years of age, she’d burn up in a matter of half an hour, or less.
Yes, he didn’t much like the sun, either, but had tried to forestall the inevitable allergy by exposing himself whenever he had the opportunity to push his limits. The less he fed, the less his true nature took its toll, though that, in itself, meant walking the knife edge of starvation. He had to have some advantage living out here in this thirst-land.
Mantis slid her hand into her waistcoat and revealed the hilt of a dagger. The ruby in the pommel winked at him.
“You wouldn’t,” he said. “Not here. Not with all these humans surrounding us. You’d get into worse trouble than I did.”
He had to stall, make a plan, but how? He was trapped.
That was when he spotted Buks, one of the regulars here. The man stood near the pool table, impossible to miss. Broad shoulders rippled with muscle and a considerable layer of subcutaneous fat. He contained about as much Essence as a flea.
“Be reasonable,” Mantis said. “You can’t continue hiding. Even if I do let you go tonight, at the next council meeting I attend, I will tell the elder
s I saw you. They will send other jagters. If you decide to come peaceably I won’t hurt you and I’ll speak in your favor at the hearing.”
“Your promises mean nothing to me. I won’t be fooled a second time. I didn’t mean to kill her. It was an accident.” Unbidden, painful memories resurfaced–ones Trystan had tried to avoid considering, of his one love dead by his own hand. His fault.
Mantis snorted and covered her mouth with her hand. “Carry on saying that until you believe that tired line as well. You expect me to swallow such a cock-and-bull story? You’re an Essence junkie. You’re too dangerous to leave on the loose.”
Like a moth to a candle, he thought, remembering the Owl House with its thousands of lamps. Scared, he’d hang back, forever itching to damn himself.
Trystan shivered again, his fingernails raking into the flesh of his upper arms. He reached carefully, sending a near undetectable tendril toward Buks, who leaned so far over the pool table his crack of doom peeped out from the back of his jeans. He hoped Mantis took his lack of attention for shame.
“Trystan, what will it be?”
“Huh?” He glanced at her, projected a worried frown and what he hoped was an attitude of confusion.
“Are you going to make this easier for the both of us?”
Buks straightened, scratching his left buttock, clearly puzzled that he’d missed his shot. Small piggy eyes set in a florid face scanned the room, finally settling on a target. No, not me. Her.
“Mantis, I don’t know why the council still bothers with me. I’ve been out of the loop for so long now I may as well be dead. I suggest you go back to Jozi and pretend you never saw me here tonight. That will be the easiest, for both of us.”
“Please, Trystan, do I look stupid?”
Part of him was tempted to say yes, just to piss her off but he held his tongue, all the while tugging at that thin thread attaching him to Buks. It was like fishing for a very large, stupid toad, the man’s mind sluggish from the large quantities of alcohol he had consumed.
Trystan sighed, looking at his beer, feigning boredom–anything to put Mantis at her ease, to make her overconfident. “It’s too late for you to make it back to Jozi tonight.”
“I’ve got a place down in George. I’m not going up to Jozi until next week.”
God damn it! What was she playing at? The last he’d heard, the Garden Route was still under renegade control, with the Wild Coast and most of the Eastern Cape off the national roads.
He smirked at her. At the edge of his vision, Buks approached. “What, so now you want to take me on a honeymoon along the Garden Route? Shall we take a ride on the Outeniqua Choo-Tjoe and play a round of golf down in Plett? I thought I’m too dangerous.” Steady, there, you lumbering ogre. Look at the chick with the black hair and the pert breasts. Not the guy sitting next to her.
“Not quite, but there are some folks down in Knysna you may want to meet.”
“What, you freelancing on the side? The council’s not going to be glad about that.”
Big meaty Buks chose that moment to interpose himself between Trystan and Mantis. The female vampire looked up into Buks’s small-eyed countenance with evident dismay.
“Hey there, pretty lady. Can I show you a good time?”
Now!
Trystan twisted his grip on Buks’s mind and the thug reached out and clamped a fleshy hand on the woman’s arm. Just hold her steady, boy.
He made a dash for the door, drawing on his Essence to lend him a burst of speed. There was no way in hell Buks would hold Mantis for longer than ten seconds at most but those ten precious seconds would buy him a valuable head start while Mantis extricated herself from her would-be suitor’s clutches.
Faces and bodies blurred past him, frozen while he dashed out the entrance. Oh, he’d pay for this abuse of his body later when the hunger struck but right now, his only wish was to get out, to escape the woman he knew would be in close pursuit. He ran toward the church building then took a sharp turn down a side road, doubling back in time to press himself against a pepper tree.
Mantis burst out of the Royal Hotel amid a rumble of angry men’s voices inside.
The vampire stood in the center of the main road, her head lifted and eyes closed. She was reaching. He pulled his Essence as close to his heart as possible. Like sticky fingers her awareness snaked out, probing for him.
In another time, another age, he would have waited in ambush. Now, all he could think of was to put as much distance between him and his own kind as possible. A long night of cat and mouse lay ahead in this small town.
Trystan was patient. He knew of many hiding places.
Chapter 10
All’s not Well
“God, that girl’s a loony,” Damon said when the silver Volvo pulled off. “You’re not seriously going to go with her, are you?”
“She’s kinda cool, I think. I haven’t decided if I’ll take her up on her offer,” Helen said. “If I change my mind, I can still meet her at the gate and tell her no.”
The shadows were already lengthening but the trees provided some relief from the late afternoon heat. Bars of sunlight slid through a haze of dust suspended in the air.
Helen and Damon hefted their bags and opened the gate. Deep within the house, Odin’s deep barks reverberated through the structure and the thump of paws–claws clicking on wooden floors–announced that the great gray beast lumbered toward the front door.
“Brace yourself,” Damon said, reaching for the door handle.
Already Odin whined and scrabbled at the barrier. Anabel had warned them that the dog was, well, enthusiastic in his greetings.
He accosted them with a fury of licking, his long tail thumping legs, furniture and walls in his frenzy.
“Some watchdog.” Helen laughed. “He’ll most like lick a burglar to death.”
“Ma! Anabel!” Damon called. “We’re home.”
Only the regular tick-ticking of the wall clock in the hall answered them with the hum of the fridge, farther down the passage. It seemed to her somehow wrong to enter without permission. This was not home yet, with its polished golden oak floors and the dusty, oval-framed faces of illustrious ancestors glaring at them from rows on the walls.
“We may as well go up then,” Helen said, with a shrug. “It’s not as if the old lady’s gonna eat us for first dropping off our things in our rooms.”
As much as Helen still had to get used to her new home, she had to admit she liked her room.
“No sticking up posters of rock stars!” Anabel had admonished on that first day. “That putty stuff will damage the wallpaper.”
Helen had only smiled. She doubted her grandmother knew the true worth of the wallpaper in many of the rooms in this house. The previous owner must either have been loaded or had had exquisite taste–she suspected both–for she recognized the intricate floral patterns from her studies.
“William Morris,” she’d said, tracing the gilt highlights. This might only be a reproduction but part of her hoped the paper was still the original, with its sinuous curves of golden lilies entwined with leaves and stems.
She thought, ruefully, of all her art books lying in storage, packed far away in boxes. Her current predicament couldn’t be helped.
Her mother sat on the back veranda, a blanket drawn over her knees, as if she already were an old person. She glanced up at Helen with tired eyes, bruised-looking bags beneath them. The first gray in her hair seemed more pronounced.
“Hey, sugarplum.”
“Mom. How are you?”
“So tired.”
Her eyes remained unfocused and she gazed out across the backyard where, at the far corner, next to the field where two gray donkeys grazed, Anabel scattered corn for the chickens.
“School’s all right,” Helen said, hoping to start a conversation.
“I miss him,” her mother said. “Mom won’t have me talk about him when she can hear and I’ve had no one else to talk to all week. I miss him so much and h
e doesn’t phone me.”
Her mother startled her by grabbing at Helen’s wrist, clutching so fiercely her ragged fingernails bit deep into flesh.
Helen’s initial reaction was to pull away but the sudden clarity–the need–in her mother’s wide green eyes made her hold back. She licked her lips, hopeful her mother would let go.
“Father hasn’t called at all?”
“No!” The word came out as a wail.
“Well, he’s an asshole, Mom. I shouldn’t have to say it, and you know it!” Her chest constricted and she marveled at how a perfectly adequate Friday afternoon–all circumstances considered–could so rapidly turn pear-shaped. She’d purposefully avoided contacting her father since that last time when Mom’d been taken up in hospital. The man could go to hell. He was no father to her.
“Mom!” Damon’s greeting almost caused Helen to sag in relief.
As sudden as a cloud dissipating in front of the sun, their mother’s expression shifted. “Damon! How was school?”
Her mother could perk up long enough to ask Damon about school?
She suppressed the stab of jealousy before her expression betrayed her. Damon couldn’t help it that he looked like their father.
Like a bird, their mother nattered, animated in her son’s presence, but could not stick to the topic. Fortunately the conversation did not last.
“You’re back,” Anabel said.
Helen started. She had not seen the woman return to the house.
Placing Anabel’s age was difficult. A tall, spare woman, she wore her long gray hair in two braids on either side of her face. The same mint-green eyes as her mother’s were watchful–but with far more awareness–and, despite the years out in the Karoo sun, Anabel had looked after her skin. Although well tanned, she had few wrinkles.
“Yes, we’re back,” Helen answered, trying not to feel some annoyance for the accusatory tone she detected in her grandmother’s words.
“The school is adequate?”
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