by Andrew Pyper
“Depends on what one means by the term,” he says. “Her nanna had certainly acquainted her with the making of tonics, passed down a book of cures that involved incantations. All just primitive snake oil for the most part. But she went further with it than her grandmother ever did. She always told me it was like she was being guided by a dark hand, one that showed her how to bring natural things together in a way that brought about unnatural results.”
“How far did she go?”
“So far it frightened her. Once she was older she wanted only to be free of that place. But the dark hand was always with her.”
“It made her run away.”
“Only to find there was nowhere to run. She was a wanderer, just like me. A shared burden that drew us together. The demon in me and the magic in her. But when I entered the tent at a traveling carnival outside Huntsville, Texas, to have my fortune told, I knew she would be the one even before she took hold of my hand. ‘I see a change,’ she told me. ‘I see a light, and blood, and life. I see a girl.’ It was her own future she was reading as much as mine.”
Lily moves the arm she’s reminded still lies atop the table and knocks her glass over, the champagne making a river on the reflective wood and dripping off the side. Neither of them move to right it.
“You decided to try with her,” she says.
“Yes.”
“And it worked? You turned her into whatever you are?”
“Enough for us to conceive a child. Enough for her to be stronger, age more slowly than others. She was half human and half me. We both feared that attempting to push her all the way would be too much. And soon there was a baby to consider. There was a change, just as she foresaw.”
“Did she . . . hunt?”
“Some of the time. She was halfway in that respect too. I had teeth and claws like mine made for her, and I tried to teach her how to use them. But as much as she longed for blood—as much as she needed it—she was hesitant. I often had to do the work for her.”
A picture of her mother comes to Lily. One with the steel teeth in her mouth, her face smeared with blood. The horror in her eyes as she swallowed.
“What about after I was born?” Lily asks. “Did she still feed that way?”
“Never again. She was resolved to be as human as she could for your sake.”
“How long did you stay with her?”
“I didn’t leave her side the first year. But it was increasingly difficult to hide the three of us from the hunters and the police. We parted, but not before we had devised a system of sending letters to post office boxes, an improvised code of meeting places so that I could see the two of you. But even this proved dangerous. It was essential that the hunters not know you existed. And so your mother kept moving, I kept moving. Until we decided on the cabin.”
“A home.”
“A place as far away from the world as the world permits.”
“But they still found us.”
“They found her.”
“I don’t understand.”
He rises from the edge of the bed and he appears a foot taller than before, wider too. Swelling and lengthening as he floats closer.
“She thought the hunters could keep her safer than I could. She had regrets over what she had become, what she blamed me for. So she left a note for them, told them where I was. They ambushed me and I knew she was the cause. Even the hunters confirmed it. ‘Your lady friend sold you out,’ one of them said, though they were the last words he ever spoke.”
“What did you do?”
“I came to the cabin. And there, something strange occurred. Something that has never happened to me before or since.”
He spreads his arms out from his sides, so wide Lily thinks he’ll be able to touch the window with one and the far wall with the other.
“I was the horse you rode on, Lily,” he says, and his eyes seem to round to resemble those of the animal he describes. “A white Lipizzaner like the ones old Eszes kept. I couldn’t have gotten you out of there before you either froze to death or the hunters came to take us both down. So I asked God to change me—I prayed, Lily! Though I don’t believe it was Him who did it. Something so strong it reshaped me, as the poets say only love has the power to do.”
He stops when he’s a half step away from her, brings in one of his arms, and runs a finger through the puddle of champagne on the table.
Stay away.
She sees it now. This was the lesson her mother wished to impart to her daughter, a lesson Lily was too young to discern at the time. Lily’s mother—Alison—worried she might one day meet this man, and he would share the same stories of his remarkable origins as he had shared with her. Dracula, Mr. Hyde, Victor Frankenstein’s creature. The bedtime horror stories her mother told were a warning, not against talking to strangers or getting lost in the woods, but against Michael.
And now a whisper of her mother’s voice is summoned to Lily’s mind. Not anything she said in life but something she calls out to her daughter now from the other side.
Run.
The intent of the stories she told, the gun lessons and survival tips and the instilled instinct to find a secret place, of everything her mother did to prepare Lily if she ever had to face her father.
Run like I should have run.
But Lily hadn’t run anywhere except to him. She’d listened to his stories and come to believe them, fallen for them, been fascinated by them just as her mother had. And like her, she’d allowed herself to wonder what it would be like to be a part of them, someone who plays a crucial part in an extraordinary history-in-progress, a late-arriving character who sets the plot on a new course.
She was frightened by the stories her mother told when she was five and six years old, just as she was frightened by Michael’s telling of his monstrous past, but in both cases not frightened enough. There is revulsion in our response to what we fear, but as the psychiatrist in Lily knows, there can be, for some, an attraction too.
“Was it you, Michael?” she asks, her voice breaking, falling away. “Did you kill her?”
“Listen to me—”
“You did, didn’t you?”
“Lily—”
“You fucking bastard! You did! You lying—”
He grabs her wrist and it instantly silences her.
“The hunters were coming. Maybe a day behind me, maybe only hours,” he says. “They would destroy your mother and me both. But they didn’t know about you. You were the one who could still be saved.”
He releases her, and her anger, at least the frothing surface of it, is released as swiftly as it appeared. There’s only the weight of acceptance, the already-dwindling, childish resistance to fact.
“But why did she have to die?”
He bends low, using his wet finger to draw a square on the table with streaks of champagne. And then, within it, smaller squares in rows. A chessboard.
“Look ahead to the way the pieces would have moved,” he says, now drawing lines through the squares, engagements and traps. “They wouldn’t have left her alone after their failed attempt on my life. They would have tried to use her to lure me again, and if that didn’t work, they would have gotten rid of her. And in doing so, they would have discovered you.”
When he’s finished speaking he wipes the table clean with his palm.
“You had to make it look as though the line ended with her,” Lily says, finishing his reasoning for him.
“That’s right.”
“Did they know you’d attempted to turn others before?”
“Yes. And they knew Alison was the only one I’d had any success with.”
“Which meant they would pursue you alone if they saw that she was dead. They wouldn’t be looking for me.”
“You would be safe. To grow up, to become what you are.”
Lily smells his breath and is surprised by its sweetness. Instead of the animal odors she’d detected before, she finds herself suddenly hungry, as if the last thing he’d eaten
was freshly baked bread.
“How much of my mother’s blood is mine? What does it make me?”
“Only you can answer that.” He pauses, taking her in with his gray eyes. “Because you believe me, don’t you?”
“I do,” she says, and it echoes in her head with the solemnity of a marriage vow.
He lifts her hand and guides her to the bed. There is some vague speculating over what he might do to her, but she’s not really concentrating on that yet, as if it’s a troublesome errand she has to run tomorrow but hasn’t the time to worry about today.
“There’s something you’ve wished for from me, isn’t there?” she says as they take their steps over the lush carpet. “Me coming after you, the journal—it hasn’t only been about showing me who I am. You want me to join you.”
“I will do only what you ask me to,” he says when they reach the bed and she sits.
“And after? What do we do then? Run from the hunters together? Kill together?”
He sits next to her. “We can live forever,” he whispers. It feels to Lily like she’s lying against the ground and finding for the first time that she can hear the earth speak. “A father and daughter walking together to witness the end of time.”
She has never felt anything like she does right now, at once revolted and comforted, wanting to run for the door while wanting to turn his head to her and trace the outline of his lips.
Lily looks down and sees his hand is at the top of her chest, just below her collarbone, pressing her down, a gentle weight easing her back onto the bed.
“In the morning, you will go to Hampstead Heath,” he says. “I will meet you there.”
Her eyes are closed. She feels as though she’s being swallowed into the softness under her, down and down, buried alive but able to breathe through the soil. It would be a nightmare if it wasn’t so real, so thrilling. She is part of life and part of death, some elements growing and others receding, all of her prickling with the awareness of one thing turning into another.
25
* * *
Lily opens her eyes to a cluster of stars directly above her, so close she feels that if she raised her arms she could touch them.
She remembers Michael but not the things he said. She recalls his touch and feels a belated shriek halfway up her throat.
It’s by force of will that she doesn’t let it out. His words coming to her now, the information that fights to be considered first. She’s also able to see that it isn’t stars above her, but a crystal chandelier in the darkness.
He told you he’s a monster and you believe him. So who’s the psycho now?
“Both of us,” she answers herself.
But you don’t think that. You think you two are the only ones in the world who know the truth.
“Yes,” she says, and hears herself laugh. An alien sound that instead of comforting her makes her realize she’s in even worse shape than she thought.
He’s where today’s vampires and homicidal split personalities and the walking dead all come from.
“Yes.”
Okay. Definitely both of you then.
Once she’s sitting straight up on the bed she can look out the window at the black river, the yellow dome of electric light over south London held tight by low clouds. She sees herself reflected in the window, a ghost face hovering in a room decorated with antiques. It could be a hundred years ago. It could be two hundred years.
* * *
IT TAKES COLD WATER SPLASHED on her face and two of her pills for Lily to shake free of him and let the rage fill the space he leaves behind. She had been half hypnotized by him for the time he circled about her in the room, enchanted by a cocktail of surprise and champagne and fear.
But that was gone now.
He killed her mother so he could go on killing. Her mother, who fought so hard against illness and poverty all for her baby, to keep her safe, keep her from him. He’s murdered thousands in the name of giving life to nightmares. And now he wants Lily to join him. For her to kill too.
Michael was the monster who knocked at the cabin door.
She dresses, her clothes smelling of the horse stable scent of his skin. An exciting musk in his presence, but in his absence merely the sourness of urine and straw.
To stop herself from drifting around the room she turns on the TV. The news. An anchorwoman reporting on a breaking item about a “grim discovery in the River Thames.” And then a photo of the victim, one she recognizes. The boy whose image she’d seen on the TV screens in the shop window on Oxford Street. The twelve-year-old with big ears wearing a Spurs jersey.
Lily listens to the details and knows it was Michael who did this even as the evidence aligns in her mind. The body strangely drained of blood as in a stabbing though without apparent wounds consistent with a knife attack. Then the screen shows the place where the remains were found. The north side of the river at the rear of the Savoy. The police lights and sirens that had prompted their exit of the Lyceum and, later, that Michael had looked out upon from the suite’s window, without reaction, as he spoke to her about being the last of the survivors.
He’d taken the boy. Fed on his blood. And when he was done he’d thrown what was left into the cold gray of the Thames.
Lily turns off the TV. Goes to the phone and presses the number that Will gave her and that she memorized before tearing up his card.
Revenge, her inner voice tells her. For the boy in the river. Your mother. For you.
Lily is going to make him pay for what she saw him do when she was six years old. The Spurs jersey boy too. All of them. She’s going to do it because he’s the reason she can only see the world as the place where monsters hide. She’s dedicated her life to naming their sicknesses and helping put them away but in the end they just keep coming.
“Lily?”
She hears Will’s voice and presses the earpiece against her as if bringing him closer.
“He told me everything. What he is.” What I am, she almost adds, but stops herself.
“What is he?”
He’s my father. “He kills people for their blood.”
“We know that.”
“He’s been alive for over two hundred years.”
“We know that too.”
“He wants me to be with him.”
“Be with him? How?”
“By turning me into whatever he is.”
There’s no going back now. She has betrayed Michael just as her mother did, though for different reasons. Her mother did it for her, and Lily is doing it for her mother. For every mother who has lost a child to the bogeyman.
“Where are you now?” Will asks.
“The Savoy.”
“Is he still with you?”
“No.”
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No. But I think I can bring him to me.”
“Okay,” he says. “We need to talk. But not on the phone. Not with you in that room.”
“Where do I go?”
“The lobby. Get out now. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
26
* * *
The entrance of the Savoy at night is different from the place Lily swept through during the day. It’s that Michael was holding her hand, which turned everything around her into a blur. She sits in one of the leather chairs and watches the strains of global super-wealth parade before her in their black ties and gowns and burkas and turbans.
When she sees Will enter she stands, but he walks right by without looking her way. She nearly calls his name before she gets it: he’s intentionally not looking at her.
Will glances at his watch, then heads for the doors. Lily counts to five and follows him out to the drive in front of the hotel where there’s a BMW 7 Series sedan with black tinted windows that he gets into. She slips in the back and the car starts off before she’s closed the door.
“I like your new hair,” Will says.
He’s sitting next to her, but it’s so dark he�
�s little more than a presence, his leather jacket the same tar color as the interior. Even his face is smoothed by shadow.
“Where are we going?” she asks.
“Nowhere. It’s safer when we’re moving.”
“Safer from him?”
“Yes. But there’s other considerations too.”
“Like?”
“Surveillance cameras. Witnesses. We’re the good guys, but we’re still doing something several miles outside the law.”
The possibility that this all might end with her going to prison hadn’t occurred to Lily. She is helping total strangers kidnap someone in a city far from home. People don’t get away with that sort of thing, do they? And yet she trusts this man to get her out before it will come to that.
“He asked to meet me in the morning,” she says.
“Where?”
“Hampstead Heath.”
He smiles, though it looks like a grimace. Lily tells herself he’s likely trained to be sweet to people in her position, make them feel like they’re friends. His scars could be something he uses to his advantage, the disarming reactions of pity mistaking disfigurement for harmlessness. It doesn’t matter. She likes him. She appreciates the way he wears his hurt on the outside.
“You mentioned on the phone that he wants the two of you to be together,” he says. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”
“Exactly? I don’t know. But he can get into my head. When my thoughts are loud, he can read me.”
It feels safe floating through the night streets alone with this man. The notion of anonymous handlers back in Washington aware of their every move makes her want to propose running away with him, right now, disappearing with the only living human being she knows this side of the ocean.
“In the morning, you go to Hampstead Heath just like he told you,” Will is saying. “We’ll be there too.”
“You mean to arrest him? I’m not sure that’ll be so easy.”
“We’ll sedate him first. We have tranq darts that would probably kill a fit hundred-and-ninety-pound man, but should disable him until we can vacate the scene.”