Gillian watched, puzzled. What is she up to now? She understood when Camille rolled to the side, reclined on one elbow next to her, and scored her own breast with a claw-like nail.
No, she promised! Never this!
Gillian leaped off the bed and sprang toward the door. Instantly Camille was there, blocking the exit. Gillian threw a wild glance at the window.
“Don’t even think it!” Camille panted like a wolf at the end of a chase. “You’re too young to jump three stories down. And I’d get to you—long before—you could—open it or break it.”
Camille’s hands shot out to grab Gillian by the shoulders and force her to her knees. In the same inexorable motion Camille knelt too. Her arms wrapped around Gillian and wrestled her into an embrace with the strength of animate stone. Gillian felt smothered against the woman’s cold bosom.
Like all female vampires, like Gillian’s mother Juliette, Camille had small breasts. The incision she had made bisected one of those spare curves. Gillian, her eyes closed to shut out the violation, her mouth involuntarily flattened against the thin slash, experienced a sudden rush of tactile memory. Until the age of three, she had fed on her mother’s blood as well as milk, in this very position. Since Juliette had never sampled from her veins in return—mothers and infants didn’t bond that way—weaning had meant an irreversible break. Gillian allowed herself to remember, for the first time in years, the tearless sobs that had burned her eyes when Juliette had announced it was time for them to part, for Gillian to move on to the next phase in her growth.
Beads of Camille’s blood oozed between Gillian’s lips. She couldn’t stop her tongue from lapping the wound. A black void opened to swallow her. Beyond thought, she clung to the woman as she had once clung to her mother.
Gillian whirled in a maelstrom of nothingness. After an immeasurable time, a sound reverberated through the dark. A pounding. A heartbeat? No, two heartbeats synchronized. As Gillian floated to the surface of the whirlpool and reawoke to her own identity, she realized the paired pulses were hers and Camille’s. The woman’s blood tasted bitter, and the touch of her mind seared like acid.
Alone, forever alone. My twin, my other self, annihilated. Outcast, untouchable, bad blood. Never a mate, never a child. Nothing but darkness, cold, starvation, emptiness. Fill the void—devour them, devour all of them. They exist to fill me. Life, hot, sweet, rich fountain of life.
Dimly Gillian realized that she was sharing the trauma of Camille’s imprisonment. She ripped her mind free of the memory’s talons. [No! I am not you. I am myself, Gillian! And we aren’t locked in a casket. We’re free! Your hunger does not have to go unsatisfied.] She groped in Camille’s mind for an image of their animal prey of their first night together and projected that image back at the woman.
Camille’s passion dissipated, and she replied in a mental voice not too different from her audible one: [Nice try, child, but not good enough. It’s not raccoon blood I’m thirsty for.] She ravished Gillian with the girl Bonnie’s last breathing moments, with the flavor of the victim’s blood, the heat of her flesh, the vibrant life-force she’d radiated.
Thirst overwhelmed Gillian. Mindlessly she clutched Camille and drank as if the vampire woman could nourish her. Then somehow she found herself flat on her back on the floor. Camille stood in the alcove outside the bathroom, washing up at the sink.
Suddenly cold, Gillian hugged herself. The motel room seemed two-dimensional and monotone-hued after that shattering exchange.
“Don’t pretend you’re too weak to move,” said Camille with an air of tolerant amusement. “Thanks to what you’ve done, we can’t stay here. Now that there’s no chance of your betraying me again, it’s safe to leave. You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
Gillian squeezed her eyes shut as if to blot out her humiliation. “Yes.”
ROGER STARED AT the telephone, emitting a dial tone that mocked him. Britt, across town in her apartment, spoke inside his mind: [You’re going to her?]
[Of course. But I’m terribly afraid it’s too late.] While answering Britt, he was already collecting his jacket and car keys.
[A little while ago, I spoke to Eloise on the phone. Now that the convention’s over, I don’t see any point in their going back to the Hilton, so I invited them to stay at my place until Christmas. They agreed—subject to your approval—and they’re headed here now.]
[My approval?]
[Obviously, I’d have to move in with you.]
[I already surmised that.] Roger locked the front door behind him and sprinted to his car. [I suppose I have no choice, and I won’t deny I’ll enjoy your company. I just don’t know whether I’ll be able to handle the constant temptation.]
Too anxious about Gillian to toss him a light comeback, Britt silently lingered in his mind as he accelerated away from the condominium. The image of Gillian in Camille’s grip both frightened and angered him more than he would have expected. He gritted his teeth in frustration when he thought of how futile this excursion would probably be. It seemed unlikely that Camille would wait around for Roger to track her to her lair.
Unless she’s lying in wait with Gillian as hostage. The thought chilled him. Would a frontal attack, as Claude had suggested, endanger the child? I don’t necessarily have to attack. I can decide on tactics when I find them.
He maneuvered the car toward Route 50 as fast as traffic would allow. At twilight on a Sunday evening, the highway wasn’t overcrowded. Thankful for the continued clear weather, he set the cruise control at eighty on the freeway. He wished he dared to drive still faster, even as the rational part of his brain reminded him that Camille and Gillian had probably moved elsewhere.
Gillian wanted to return to him. That news lifted the weight of indecision and freed him to act. He only prayed Camille hadn’t warped the girl’s mind too badly in the short time they’d spent together.
Forty minutes after leaving home, he screeched to a halt in front of the motel Gillian had described. Since she’d given him the room number, he didn’t bother entering the lobby. All the suites opened directly onto outdoor breezeways, so he went directly to the door.
The curtains covering the picture window were shut. Not reckless enough to charge up and knock, Roger crept silently to the door from the side opposite the window. He pressed his ear to the hinge. No sound of breathing, no vibrations of a living presence in the air.
Gone. Then another possibility hit him. Suppose Camille had murdered Gillian and left her body here? Nonsense. That would be utterly irrational, even for Sandor’s sister.
The image wouldn’t leave him alone, though. Wrapping his handkerchief around the doorknob, he wrenched it open.
The cool, dusty smell of the dark room, with only a fading trace of Gillian’s scent, reassured him. Nevertheless, he made a quick search before withdrawing. On closer inspection, he picked up a faint tang of blood. But no smell of death. Camille had left nothing tangible behind. Well, he’d hardly expected such convenient carelessness.
Pulling the door shut to look undisturbed, Roger hurried around the empty swimming pool to the lobby. At the front desk he latched onto a young man with black hair and moustache, who offered no resistance to a straightforward hypnotic assault. Roger wasted no time on subtlety. If the woman talking on the telephone at the other end of the counter happened to notice her coworker’s dazed manner, Roger was prepared to overpower her, too. “The woman and girl in room one-seventeen,” he said as soon as he’d cast his target into a receptive trance. “How long ago did they leave?”
The clerk answered in a subdued mumble, “Maybe twenty-five minutes.”
Damn, so close! Roger kept his own voice low to encourage the man to remain quiet. “Did the woman say anything about her next destination?”
The man shook his head. Roger had expected no different.
“What kind of car was she driving?”
“Blue hatchback.” Good, she hadn’t replaced it yet.
“Did you get a look at the girl w
ith her? Did the child appear healthy?” That trace of blood he’d scented in the bedroom worried Roger.
“Pale, skinny kid. She hung around just inside the door while the lady checked out. The kid looked okay, except she wasn’t dressed right for this cold weather.”
“Very well. Forget I mentioned them. If anyone asks, I only wanted directions.” Roger quickly walked out, not trusting himself within reach of innocent bystanders. His head was pounding.
I refuse to give up this easily. Camille had less than a half-hour start on him. If she had stopped somewhere within a few miles, for whatever reason, a systematic search might stumble upon the car. It could do no harm to try. He drove around the block, then commenced to crisscross the area in a steadily expanding grid.
TO GILLIAN, CAMILLE’S presence felt like a wasp buzzing inside her skull. Huddled against the right-hand door of the car, Gillian said, “Why did you do this to me? You gave your word.”
“Circumstances change.” Camille’s lips curled in a humorless rictus. “Do you think I wanted to be tangled up in your mind this way? I had to, because you betrayed me. You won’t do that again, will you?”
Gillian said nothing. A cooperative answer would be a blatant lie, yet she didn’t want to antagonize Camille with open rebellion.
“How could you turn on me that way? We belong together now. I took risks to free you from our late friend Adam.”
Gillian sensed that Camille’s expectation of gratitude was sincere. “Only because you wanted revenge on Roger.” How she wished she had the strength to eject Camille from the inside of her head.
“That was my original motive. But now I’ve decided that we should stay together. There’s so much I can teach you, and I’ll never have a child of my own.”
Gillian felt the bitterness and recalled the cryptic fragments of thoughts during the blood-exchange. “Why not?”
“You have no concept of what your—father—stole from me!” Camille revved the accelerator, making the car leap forward and whip around an eighteen-wheeler they’d been following. “Not only my brother’s life—and fourteen years of my own life—he made me an outcast, too! Not officially, but enough that it makes no difference. People who should be my peers are wary of me, don’t want to get too close—after all, I’m unstable. And no male would consider siring a child on me. Not with my brother’s taint —it might be hereditary!”
Gillian didn’t grasp how Neil Sandor’s taint could be blamed on Roger. She said timidly, “But your brother did kill a woman of our race, didn’t he?”
“Which he never would have needed to do, if Roger hadn’t identified him to the police in Boston. Betrayed one of his own kind to ephemerals!” Camille’s fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “True, I didn’t see much of Neil during his last two years of life. He was becoming careless about how and where he fed. But in our early decades we were very close. After he rejected our advisor, nobody else would associate with him.” Her thoughts grazed Gillian’s in a phantom caress. “You can understand that, can’t you? You ran away from Volnar.”
Gillian tried to shield her thoughts, though she doubted Camille could sift much sense out of their confusion anyway. True, Gillian could sympathize with Neil’s reluctance to bond with his advisor. Especially if it has to be like this! On the other hand, “careless” seemed a feeble term for the slaughter the renegade had supposedly indulged in.
Gillian kept quiet until the car abandoned the freeway for two-lane rural roads. “Where are we going? I thought you were looking for a new shelter.”
“Not yet. I want to show you some of the advantages of pairing with me.” Shortly, Camille parked on a dirt road marked Private Drive, under a concealing overhang of pine trees. “Unless the owner happens to drive past, the car should be perfectly safe here.”
When she got out, Gillian followed without bothering to ask questions. Since the fight in the motel had left her ravenous, she hoped this was a hunting foray.
Camille sensed the desire and answered it. “Maybe later. I’m not sure whether you’ve been punished enough yet.” She no longer radiated anger, just a gloating delight in her power over Gillian. When they reached an area where the trees grew sparsely, she faced Gillian and held both of her hands. “Look at me. Let my thoughts flow into yours. No, I’m not planning to hurt you again.”
Wearing a blouse and sweatshirt without a coat, Gillian flinched from the frigid night wind. She forgot any discomfort, though, when Camille began to dissolve from human shape into the form of a gigantic, black she-wolf. [Do as I do. Be my mirror.]
Atavistic instinct stirred in Gillian’s viscera. With Camille’s thoughts and hers intertwined she could channel that tingling electricity under her skin. She willed molecules of skin and enamel to rearrange themselves, allowing fangs and fur to sprout, and had no trouble stopping there. For the rest, she molded her outward appearance into the same lupine illusion Camille projected.
Camille’s illusory beast-form melted from wolf to panther. Resonating to the silent chord, Gillian followed her lead. When Camille segued from cat to winged monster, Gillian did the same. The wings of spider-silk lightness and strength were real, and their eruption from her shoulders—she had automatically wriggled out of her upper garments without conscious thought—shot spasms of ecstasy through her.
Camille levitated toward the treetops. [You know the real truth behind the mirror legend, don’t you? Not that we have no reflections, of course, but that a mirror reflects our natural appearance. Illusions don’t work in mirrors. Remember that.]
Gillian wordlessly acknowledged the advice. She floated, shivering with pleasure at the wind that tickled her wing membranes. Trailing over the woods in Camille’s wake, she used the wings only to steer and balance. They were, of course, too flimsy to support her weight.
Camille said, [After a few weeks of practice, you’ll have the skill to levitate and maintain the transformed shape at the same time without my guidance. It’s like swimming; you have to develop it into a system of learned reflexes.]
Though she begrudged the fact, Gillian had to admit that changing and flying were easier with direct telepathic help from an adult. Would Volnar’s initiation have been so violent? Surely not! She hastily buried the thought for fear of angering Camille with it.
Such conflicts were easy to forget in the glory of flying. Gillian savored the crisp chill of the night, the sharp scent of pine, the glitter of the stars in the cloudless sky. Only the gnawing of hunger marred her pleasure.
[Would you like to get dinner less strenuously this time?] Camille asked. [I notice a house with a barn over there to the east.]
The house stood near the road in a field of several acres, partly grass, partly dried remnants of corn stalks. Camille alighted at the edge of the woods, flowing into her natural form. When Gillian did the same, her naked arms and chest prickled with the cold.
Camille grinned and licked her lips. “Chilly? A drink should fix that.” She sniffed the air. “No dogs roaming outside tonight. Horses in the barn—three, I think.”
Veiling themselves against a casual glance from the house or a passing car, they walked across the open field to the barn. Camille paused to listen. “We’re in luck. I don’t think anyone is home.”
Gillian gave her a sidelong look. Could the woman really distinguish life or the absence of it in the house at this distance? Together they silently opened the unlocked barn door and slipped inside. The horses, alarmed by the inhuman scent, stamped and snorted. Camille led the way to the nearest stall. A brown mare, teeth exposed and nostrils flaring, backed away from the intruder.
Camille vaulted over the chest-high stall door. Leaning on the partition, Gillian watched her mentor stalk up to the restive beast. Gillian was glad to see Camille take the lead, for she herself wouldn’t have cared to approach those hooves. Projecting confidence, Camille gentled the horse with a tuneless hum. The glitter of hostility faded from the brown eyes, and the laid-back ears perked forward. Camille stroked
the broad neck until the mare stood still, head drooping.
The woman nipped through the tough hide and sipped the trickle of blood. Its metallic tang mingled with odors of manure and horse-sweat. Gillian didn’t mind the smells, which were clean and natural compared to the pollution generated by human beings. She felt too dizzy with hunger to care about her surroundings anyway.
After a couple of minutes Camille licked her lips clean and beckoned to Gillian. Concentrating to make her body momentarily lighter, an abbreviated version of the levitation she used to fly, Gillian sprang over the barrier. She hugged the horse’s neck, weak with gratitude for the life-essence flowing into the hollow place within her. She burned with more than physical hunger, for she had partaken of the emptiness at the core of Camille’s being. Gillian feared animal blood could never fill that void.
Camille’s hand on her shoulder shattered her feeding trance. “Listen, someone’s coming.”
Gillian shook her head, but the mental prodding that accompanied the words wouldn’t let her return to her meal. Outside, she heard a car pull up the driveway and decelerate.
[They’ve come home,] Camille said. [We’d better leave.]
[But I’m not finished!] Gillian’s silent wail went unheeded. Following Camille’s example, she made herself invisible, drifted out of the stall, and edged through the barn door. The door, left ajar, banged shut as they glided across the field.
[They’ll probably think it was left unlatched, and the wind opened it,] Camille suggested.
Behind her, Gillian heard the car door slam, followed by uneasy murmurs and running feet. She swallowed her fear, the better to focus on keeping herself unnoticeable.
Once under cover of the trees Camille shifted to her winged form. Though she had to do likewise to keep up, Gillian had misgivings. [Aren’t we supposed to avoid changing so close to human habitation?]
Camille’s words sounded like a ghostly echo inside her head. [Cub, you worry too much about what ephemerals think. They exist to provide for us. Why should we let them rule our lives?]
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