by Lee Killough
That sounded familiar. “Like you attacked Claudia Darling?”
In his peripheral vision she blinked. “Who?”
“Your 1942 assault victim.”
Lane sniffed. “Oh, that slut. I should have killed her. You know what she did after getting me arrested?”
“Got you fired and then blackballed around North Beach. She told me.”
“You’ve seen her? Well…how is the little bitch these days?”
“Matronly and rich.”
Lane laughed. “Whereas I am anything but matronly and am very rich.”
His skepticism must have shown on his face.
Her forehead twitched. “Oh, yes, I am. You can learn a lot during pillow talk about making your money grow, especially with a little vampire encouragement. Which brings me back to Irina. Garreth, park somewhere so we can talk face to face.”
“Eye to eye?”
She sighed. “You are paranoid. We’ll sit back to back if that makes you feel — no, not here! Turn right.”
Into the cemetery, not St. Thomas More’s parking lot. So she disliked being even in the vicinity of a church?
“Let’s go to the War Memorial,” she said.
A tall granite obelisk in the middle of the cemetery with cannons on its left and right pointed at the obelisk. Erected in 1920 to commemorate the Great War, which everyone optimistically assumed would be the Last War.
He steered into the cemetery, radioing Doris his location, and parked at the Memorial’s island. Swinging out of the car, Lane strolled through the mist toward the obelisk. He climbed out, too, but remained beside the car.
Her voice came back to him. “Irina looked up at me with big violet eyes and said don’t be angry, join her for tea. Suddenly I wasn’t angry. Matthew and I did join her. Later she came back to our hotel with us and suggested we have a threesome…which Matthew accepted eagerly, of course. I don’t have to tell you how fantastic it was. But the most amazing part came after she told me to go to sleep and she and Matthew went at it again by themselves. I didn’t sleep — maybe she was in too much hurry to be sure of me — so I watched them…and I saw what she did. She doesn’t bite the neck, where the marks show. She prefers — let’s just say she gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘cocksucker.’”
Garreth cringed.
As though seeing him, Lane laughed. “I’m joking. That would be like drinking from a sponge with a soda straw. She goes for the femoral artery. The moment those fangs came out, I knew what I’d been born for! She tried sneaking away, thinking we were both asleep, but I ran after her and asked her to bring me across. She refused, then said she could help me be a happier human if I would agree to be her companion and run her daylight errands. I accepted though I didn’t believe I could be happy as a human. She said don’t regret you’re not cuddly; think of yourself as an Amazon queen. She taught me how to move, how to dress, bought singing lessons. I appreciated it all, but it wasn’t enough and I kept begging to be brought across. Finally I wore her down. Then, suddenly…” Lane’s tone went acid. “…she turned into this old lady, acting every bit her four hundred plus years. Nagging me just to drink, not kill, because that attracts attention.”
“It does.”
“Not if you make the kills look the work of a psycho or wild animal or cult, which I did. But she got so angry she threatened me, and might have tried destroying me if we hadn’t gotten separated in Warsaw when Hitler invaded.” She paused. “Blitzkrieg isn’t just a word when you’ve lived through it.”
“I can imagine it was terrible.”
“Not really.” She ran her hand down the engraved names on the obelisk. “You know what this represents?”
“Bravery. Grief. Lives cut short. Wives widowed. Children orphaned.”
She snorted. “No…it represents a feast! Think of all the blood. I took my time leaving Europe. With so much death, no one noticed a few more bodies.”
Bile rose in Garreth’s throat. “All you see in humans is prey?”
“Of course. That’s all they are to us; that’s all they can ever be.”
“Not to me! I’ve never drunk a drop of their blood!”
“You drink only animal blood?” She came back to stand on the far side of the car, staring mockingly across it at him. “That’s bad nutrition.” She ticked her tongue. “If you’re injured, it affects your recuperative powers.”
He carefully focused beyond, not meeting her eyes. “I refuse to prey on people!”
“How righteous!” Her lip curled. “I notice you have no scruples, however, about cozying up to my mother to get to me.”
That stung. Heat crawled up his neck and face.
“My mother!” Her voice flattened to a hiss. “It almost makes me sorry I didn’t break your neck in that alley.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“You bit me.”
He blinked. She sounded as though that explained everything. Then he remembered his thoughts while reading Dracula, noting the difference between Dracula and Miss Lucy and how Dracula gave Mina his blood in return, but not Miss Lucy. “You mean receiving vampire blood does make a different kind of vampire than someone who’s just bitten?”
She applauded. “Very good. You’ve got a functional brain after all.”
“Why does it matter?”
“My research leads me to conclude it involves a virus.”
He remembered the medical books on her shelves. “There’s a vampire virus? Like rabies.”
She rolled her eyes. “Not like rabies. Yes it’s carried in the blood and saliva and passed on through a bite. That’s the only similarity. Ours is a retrovirus. A healthy immune system destroys the amount of virus in a single bite, but if some survives, because of repeated bites or a weak immune system, it invades the cells and waits until the immune system collapses due to extreme weakness or death.” Lane’s eyes gleamed as she warmed to her subject. “Then the virus activates…takes command of the host and modifies it to serve the virus’s needs, which of course are those of all life forms: survival and reproduction. Mere reanimation appears to need very little virus, because biting a subject long enough to drain him provides enough for that. When a subject receives a massive infusion of virus, though, higher brain functions are restored. Creating the likes of you and me.
“That’s the mystery I’ve yet to solve…why we’re created. All the virus needs for reproduction is zombies. We’re actually counter-productive because we tend not to reproduce. I’ve been thinking that originally the virus intended us to be caretakers, looking after the zombies and — ”
“Blood provides the massive infusion.” The one pertinent fact in her lecture.
She frowned. “You have no intellectual curiosity about your origin? Fine. Because you bit me, I knew you would rise again fully functional…and I decided to see what would come of that.”
He gave her a sardonic smile. “Now you know; what’s coming of it is your arrest for murder.”
Lane sighed. “I’ve told you, you can’t arrest me. There’s no way to force me back to San Francisco and no jail that can confine me. Accept it.”
“No!” There had to be a solution, a way to make her answer for Adair and Mossman’s deaths.
She sighed again. “All right. Suppose you do manage to arrest, try, and imprison me. Having accomplished the purpose for which you’ve insinuated yourself into Baumen and my mother’s life, what are your future plans?”
“I have none. I don’t expect to be around. There’ll be no reason for it.”
She eyed him thoughtfully. “You mean you plan to destroy yourself?”
If it did not occur naturally. “My life is already destroyed. I detest what you’ve made me. Once I’ve seen you face judgement I want out of this existence.”
Lane’s breath wrapped white around her and melted away into the mist. “Do you? When there’s such a wide and wondrous world out there? A world I’m betting you’ve never seen.” Her voice turned musical, floating across to him
along with the light spicy-musky scent of her perfume. “You lived in a seaport, but did you ever think of boarding one of the ships docking there and sailing away on her? Wouldn’t you like to see wonders like the Himalayas above Kathmandu or climb to the temples of Tibet? Or walk the Great Wall of China and explore the ancient ruins of Karnak and Zimbabwe? Poling through the Okavanga Delta in Africa at flood time there is such richness of life that it makes your throat ache, and there’s nothing more awesome than the migrations in the Serengeti, when the plains stretch like a sea of grass and herds of wildebeest and zebra stretch as far as the eye can see. Even the Sahara has raw, stunning beauty…dunes, rock outcroppings, wildlife where you’d think none could exist. In the heat waves you can almost see the cities of ancient civilizations that existed before the sand buried them.”
In movement almost too fast to follow, she came over the car and down beside him, voice dropping to a whisper. “There’s a city in northern China with a winter festival every year that fills the city with ice sculpture, not snowmen but pure, clear ice chiseled into a wonderland of heroes and mythical animals and castles, and ice arbors with ice benches to sit on. Vienna, Rome, and Copenhagen aren’t like they were before the war, but they’re still beautiful, and Beijing, Mecca, and Sri Lanka. You shouldn’t miss Venice, where all greatest glass craftsmen work. There’s so much out there a human life span isn’t enough to explore it all…but ours is.”
The vision dazzled Garreth…places that had always been just names, that he never dreamed of visiting. He and Marti talked about a trip to Hawaii, but listening to Lane made him realize how foreshortened his horizons were. To see all those places…to have time enough for it -
Reality cut the thought short. “One problem. Travel takes money, which I don’t have.”
“I do, blood of my blood,” Lane crooned in his ear.
He felt as if someone jabbed him with an electric prod. It jumped him sideways away from her. “Is that what you expected by letting me live…a companion? There is no way in hell that is ever going to happen!”
“What a pity.” She smiled at him. “Or maybe not. You want two things, you say: justice and death. I can give you one…you dumb mick!” Fast as a striking snake, she grabbed the front of his jacket and drove her knee into his crotch with a force that lifted him off his feet, then hurled him to the ground to lie curled in blinding agony. “I’d kill you right now except people have seen me with you and I won’t shame my mother. But you’ll have that death you want before the night is out.” She ripped his radio off his belt and strode away, calling back from the mist, “Consider yourself a walking dead man.”
Duel
1
Garreth struggled to stand, to pursue Lane, but could not even make it to his knees, only continue to huddle gasping and cursing…at himself as well as her. Dumb mick, all right. Damn right the maiden was powerful. When the hell was he going to get that through his thick skull. He had been kneed in the nuts before, but never with vampire power behind the knee. After this, he reflected, the pain of passing through a door qualified as no more than discomfort.
What felt like hours later he managed to drag himself up the car door and climb in. To sit huddled over the steering wheel. Despite how he hurt, he needed to concentrate on his next move. The lady of ice and steel was out there planning how to kill him. Possessing his radio enabled her to track him and pick where to attack. Being aware of that, however, he knew when to watch for her. The radio might even prove an advantage, luring her to him. By which time he hoped he had a way to deal with her.
Belatedly he became aware of his car radio…Doris calling his number. From the anxiety in her voice, she had been doing so repeatedly. “Seven, respond!”
He thumbed the mike button and tried to make his voice normal. “Seven Baumen.” Not succeeding. He sounded more in Maggie’s vocal range.
Doris shot back, “Seven, do you need assistance?”
Duncan radioed, “What’s your twenty?”
“The cemetery. I’m 10-4.” That came out better. “I lost my radio and just returned to the car after failing to find it. Do you have something for me?”
“Come pick up a radio first.”
Since Doris saw how he limped up the hall to the radio rack, he gave her a quick lie. “I was in foot pursuit of a skeleton and Grim Reaper and tripped and landed astraddle one of those narrow old tombstones. I’ll be fine. What’s the call?”
Duncan had taken the one originally intended for him, but now they had a mother anxious because her fourteen-year-old daughter, who was supposed to be home from a Halloween party at ten, was now almost an hour late.
On the way there, Garreth swung by his place for a quick drink of blood. By the time he reached the call address — a block and a half from the high school, he noted — he walked normally.
“I may know where your daughter is.”
They drove to the gym with the mother shaking her head. “You think Cici crashed the wedding reception? I’ve brought her up with better manners than that.” But when they stepped inside, she said, “Oh.”
“Do you see your daughter?”
She pointed at a Wonder Woman and mini-skirted witch dancing to “Witchy Woman.” “That’s her and her girlfriend Tanya.”
Garreth made his way onto the dance floor and tapped Cici’s shoulder. “It’s midnight for you, Cinderella, and probably you, too, Tanya.” He pointed at Cici’s mother by the door.
The two girls exchanged looks of utter disgust and humiliation but left with Cici’s mother. Though to Garreth’s amusement, Mom seemed reluctant to go.
Before leaving himself, he had the French maid from the buffet table cut a slice of cake for Doris that gave her a whole section of castle wall with a window. Turning toward the door with it tucked in a small box the French maid produced from under the table, he met Anna’s daughter Dorothy.
“You should have come in when you brought Mada back,” she said. “You missed her singing.”
Lane came back here instead of lurking out in town tracking him by radio?
“I never realized how good she is. She sang that song that ends with: ‘These precious days I spend with you.’ Jason and Julie and almost every other couple were hugging and kissing, tears in their eyes. Then she brought the house down with that song Peggy Lee sings, ‘Fever.’”
After hearing her sing in San Francisco, then almost snare him into her Grand Tour, Garreth believed it. “Maybe she’ll sing again. Where is she now?”
Dorothy glanced around. “Around somewhere. After singing she started going from table to table visiting. I’ve never seen her so…friendly.”
A strategy to establish her presence here, he bet. While the reception remained in full swing, and it looked a long way from winding down — even the glimpses he had of Anna and Mary Catherine across the dance floor caught no evidence of them folding soon — everyone would assume Lane was somewhere in the room. But if he planted a suggestion for the crowd to call her for another song, could she appear?
“Baumen Seven.”
So much for trying that.
Doris wanted him to check out a possible prowler at Hammond’s.
On the way he dropped off her cake, but only nodded acknowledgment of her beaming delight as he thought ahead to the greenhouses. Yes, all that glass made a tempting target for vandals tonight. It also made an excellent site for Lane to ambush him.
Nerves strung tight, he worked his way around the buildings and through the bushes behind them, with his radio turned down to a whisper, peering into the mist for any movement. Listening hard for breathing, footsteps, for a whisper of branches moving unnaturally. Sniffing the air for Lane’s perfume. He saw no indication of either Lane or prowlers; smelled nothing suspicious; heard only Doris sending Duncan to a Country Club Drive address for reported vandalism. Then as he neared the front of the greenhouses again, he heard shrieks and a roar of exhaust pipes up 282. Scott and company still out and about.
Back in the car an
d able to relax, he radioed, “No contact.”
“Now you have a 10–47 in Golden’s parking lot entrance.”
Collisions could be expected tonight if people did not drive carefully. At least this one reportedly involved only property damage, no injuries. It was probably too much to expect the accident to involve Scott and his Trans Am.
At the Golden Bowling Alley, Garreth found not only no Trans Am but no accident at all…and no sign of vehicles that could have been involved in one. His nerves snapped taut again. The drivers might have left after examining examined their vehicles and deciding the damage was not worth involving the police…or wanted to avoid being brethalized. Or maybe Lane made the call to lure him here…even though he saw no way for her to ambush him. The mist did not reduce visibility enough to keep him from seeing her sneaking or charging toward him.
Still, climbing out the car to examine the ground at the parking lot entrance for skid marks or broken glass, he watched for her. On the car radio, Duncan reported no vandalism at the Country Club Drive address.
A crank call…or one intending to isolate him by sending his backup to the other end of town? If so, Lane made no use of the opportunity. Nothing came out of the mist at him but a Toyota Corolla leaving the parking lot.
Again he reported no contact.
While he parked under a light with the car doors locked and wrote up preliminary reports on Hammond’s and here, he listened to Doris send Duncan to the high school.
Ten minutes later Duncan came on the radio laughing. “Be on the lookout for a Friday the 13th Jason costume, stolen off the person of the wearer outside the high school gym. Victim is unable to describe his assailant because he is unable to remember the assault, just waking up in the catering truck in his skivvies.”
Garreth’s pulse jumped. Lane’s work! With the reception for an alibi and a disguise to hide her identity, she was free to stalk him. “Did the victim have a real machete with his costume?”