Child of Twilight

by Margaret L. Carter

  The door of the shed didn’t creak when she opened it just far enough to creep through. Nor did Camille’s thoughts flare into wakefulness.

  Breaking into a trot, Gillian headed for the gate. She’d noticed a pay phone by the entrance, and she had loose change in her jeans pocket. She dialed Roger’s number, got the answering machine, and recited a quick message. With every second, she was terrified of Camille’s waking and catching her. When she slipped back into the temporary lair, though, the woman still slept.

  I’m chained to her. Though comatose, Camille held her prisoner. Against expectation, despite her fear, Gillian sank into oblivion. But the welcome darkness didn’t last long. She dreamed of Juliette, of being torn from her mother’s breast and flung onto the scorching heat of a sun-baked slab of rock.

  JUST AS SHE finished playing the recording on the telephone, Britt heard the doorbell ring. For an instant she thought she was imagining it. Retying the sash of her robe, she went to the door, opened it with the chain on, and peeked out.

  The fuzziness left from too little sleep cleared the moment she saw Eloise. “You’re supposed to be at my place with Claude. What’s up? Is he all right?”

  Eloise stepped into the foyer, shutting out the cold. “Sure. He’s dead to the world.” She folded her arms when Britt tried to take her coat.

  “So is Roger. Come into the kitchen.” Though Britt hadn’t expected Roger to sleep well today, considering the tension of the past weekend, exhaustion had plunged him into the normal daylight coma.

  “Good, because they’d try to stop me.” Eloise perched on the edge of a chair at the kitchen table. “I’m going to look for Camille and Gillian.”

  Britt froze at the counter with a hand on the coffeepot. “How?” Not that it mattered, given the message she’d just heard.

  “And don’t you try to talk me out of it. I came to ask you to go with me.”

  Pouring two cups of coffee, Britt said, “For heaven’s sake, take off that coat. We aren’t rushing out this instant, regardless.”

  With open reluctance, Eloise shrugged out of her heavy coat and draped it over the back of her chair. “I don’t want to waste any time. I can’t believe those two are sleeping away the entire day!”

  “They’re superhuman, but they aren’t machines.”

  “Granted,” said Eloise with an impatient shrug. “All the more reason why we should make use of the daylight hours. They’re planning another visual search the way Roger did last night, aren’t they?”

  “They won’t have to,” Britt said. “Listen to this.” She pushed the Play button on the answering machine.

  “Roger, this is Gillian. Camille’s rented a storage shed in a place just off Route 2 in Severna Park. Please hurry, before she wakes up. I can’t talk anymore.”

  Eloise sprang to her feet. “Then what are we waiting for?”

  “Hold on a minute. Have you eaten this morning?”

  “Sort of. Orange juice.”

  “Insufficient,” said Britt. She took two cups of strawberry yogurt from the refrigerator and plunked one in front of Eloise. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “I don’t feel like—”

  “Have to keep up your strength if you want to be any use to Gillian.”

  Eloise picked up her spoon and dabbled in the yogurt. “We shouldn’t be wasting time,” she said again.

  “Then eat fast.” Britt started on her own food. “But if Camille didn’t wake up when Gillian sneaked away to phone us, she’s not likely to do so before sunset.”

  “Are you coming with me? Without Roger and Claude.”

  Britt suppressed the urge to scold Eloise for that reckless notion. “You know what they’d think of that. They’d say we aren’t equipped to handle Camille the way they are. And they’d have an excellent point.”

  Eloise’s eyes hardened. “They don’t own us.” She took a sip of her black coffee. “You said yourself, they’re exhausted. And a point in our favor that they tend to forget—she would sense a pair of vampires coming a hundred feet away. She won’t be on subconscious alert against mere mortals.”

  “What do you figure on doing if we find her?”

  “Not if, when. Young vampires need less sleep than adults, right?”

  “So I’ve been told,” Britt said.

  “Then Gillian may be awake or sleeping lightly. And we know she wants to be found. When she hears us prowling around, she’ll come out to meet us, and maybe we can get her away without disturbing Camille at all.”

  “Maybe.” Britt thought the idea sounded farfetched, though not totally impossible. “If it’s that simple, why doesn’t she just escape on her own while Camille’s unconscious?”

  “I’ve wondered that, too. But we can’t waste time speculating about it.” Eloise’s eyes shone with threatened tears. “We can’t just abandon her!”

  Britt pushed aside her empty bowl and leaned across the table. “Gillian means a great deal to you, considering how short a time you’ve known her.”

  Eloise nodded, wiping her eyes with a napkin.

  “At the risk of sounding like a shrink,” said Britt, “could this feeling be related to the loss of your baby? Because you couldn’t save the baby, saving Gillian is especially important to you?”

  “Maybe.” Eloise gave her a guarded look from under damp eyelashes. “Does there have to be a subliminal reason? Can’t I worry about her just because she’s a child in trouble?”

  “That, too,” said Britt. “So do I. But I’m not sure aiding and abetting you in charging to the rescue without weapons or backup is the best way to help.”

  “If you don’t feel able to come with me, I’ll go alone.”

  With a sigh Britt stood up to clear the table. “Blackmailer. You know darn well I won’t let you do that.”

  “Then let’s get started.”

  “Okay, I’ll drive, and you navigate.” After stashing the dishes in the dishwasher, Britt got dressed, then collected the phone book and a street map of the Annapolis-Baltimore area from Roger’s office. She decided against leaving a note for him. If he woke before they returned, he would quickly discover where she’d gone. Leaving a message would neither increase nor decrease his anger at the risk they were taking.

  Eloise sat in the right-hand seat of Britt’s kelly green Porsche and checked the index against the street addresses of self-storage companies in Arnold, Severna Park, and other communities along Route 2. Gillian, after all, didn’t know the area well; she might not have identified the location correctly. “I never expected there’d be so many,” Eloise said, flipping through the yellow pages. “Too bad she didn’t stay on the phone long enough to give the name of the place.”

  After making a list of likely hideouts, they visited each one in turn, cruising the parking lots for a glimpse of the car Camille was supposed to have been driving last. At least, Britt reflected as they ticked off prospect after prospect, they had a clear day for the quest, rather than the nasty weather so common in December.

  “I’m not suggesting we give up,” she said as they restarted the car after a pit stop at a gas station, “but don’t get your hopes too high. Look at how many entries we have left to check.”

  “If you don’t have any better suggestion, I’ll keep going until I’ve run out of places. You suit yourself.”

  Eloise’s intensity worried Britt. “Oh, I’m sticking with you. I promised that. But have you forgotten Camille’s driving a stolen car? What if the police have already picked it up?”

  Eloise said with a wan smile, “Are you telling me the police in your area are so underworked they can afford to give high priority to a missing vehicle? Even one involved in a murder case?”

  Britt couldn’t help chuckling at that notion. “You do have a point. The car may well be sitting right where she left it when they holed up for the day.”

  So the two women continued their circuit of a dreary succession of storage complexes, which all began to look alike after a few hours. Britt insisted
they break for lunch at one. Eloise would recover from her depression more rapidly with proper nourishment. They refueled on a reasonable facsimile thereof at a fast food restaurant in a small shopping strip. Britt nudged Eloise toward the broiled chicken breast sandwich and overruled her suggestion that they eat on the road.

  Tucked into a corner booth with a view of two toddlers spinning on a merry-go-round shaped like a giant hamburger, Britt said between nibbles, “Do you still feel the same way about trying to conceive again?”

  “I won’t change my mind.”

  “What does Claude think about that?”

  “I haven’t asked him.” Eloise dispiritedly plucked at a lettuce leaf dangling from her bun. “I know what he’d say. He would endorse the idea out of a sense of duty. I don’t want to be an obligation.”

  Britt refrained from expressing her opinion that Claude saw his bond-mate in entirely different terms. “Have you considered adoption?”

  “Are you kidding?” Eloise glanced around and lowered her voice. “Adopting a human baby would be out of the question. I can barely see Claude as a father to one of his own kind. A human child—no way. And what woman of his race would give her baby to an ephemeral?”

  Britt had to concede that she had a point. Few vampires were sympathetic to Volnar’s interbreeding project. “Surrogate motherhood? If you’re convinced that your body can’t support a hybrid fetus, what about in vitro fertilization—your ovum, Claude’s sperm—with the embryo implanted in a vampire mother?”

  “Same objection. Where would we find a female willing to have her body used that way? And there’s the added complication that they’re capable of pregnancy only once every few years.”

  Britt gave up on the argument. With Eloise in this yes, but mood, no rationale would change her mind. Only the healing influence of time might accomplish that.

  Tossing her salad with the plastic fork, Eloise stared at Britt with a thoughtful frown that made her uncomfortable. “Enough about me. What about you? I know you had your tubes tied at age thirty-five. But have you ever thought of adopting?”

  “I admit visiting my sister, Darlene, and her kids puts me in a might-have-been mood sometimes. On the other hand, the idea of all that responsibility and loss of freedom is pretty scary.”

  “Physician, heal thyself. How can you blame me for being scared?”

  “I don’t blame you a bit. I never meant to imply blame.” Britt crumpled a sandwich wrapper in her fist. “If I’d never met Roger and had married an ordinary guy, I might have considered it. But I don’t see myself as the single parent type. As for Roger, even if we lived together, Gillian gives him more than enough to deal with.” She forced a smile. “This road not taken stuff isn’t very productive. We make our choices and live with them. I have no regrets.”

  “I envy you.” Eloise bowed her head on her hands. “Oh, God, Britt, I’m so confused. Maybe you’re right, maybe I hope rescuing Gillian will get me un-confused.”

  After Britt had nagged Eloise into finishing her lunch, they bundled up to face the clear, cold day again. A few steps from the car Eloise stopped to look up at the sign over a bookstore two doors down the row of shops. “Start warming the engine while I run in here. There’s something I want to pick up.”

  Wondering what had suddenly changed Eloise’s frantic need for haste, Britt complied. Within a couple of minutes Eloise emerged carrying a small paper bag, which she stashed in the back seat without volunteering any explanation.

  In view of her dejected mood, Britt decided not to bug her with questions. They hit the road in silence. The problem wasn’t so much the length of their list of possibilities as the travel time from one to the next, with traffic congestion and wrong turns constantly delaying them. By late afternoon, Eloise drooped with fatigue, clearly beginning to accept Britt’s estimate of the long odds they faced.

  The sky was growing dim with the onset of twilight. Aside from the danger of facing an emotionally unstable vampire after dark, Britt preferred to minimize Roger’s annoyance by getting home, if possible, before he awoke.

  They crept along side streets, Eloise reading directions from the relevant page in the map book. In the gathering gloom the warehouses and abandoned used car dealership they passed impressed Britt as more threatening than any Gothic haunted mansion.

  She was peering ahead, trying to get her bearings on the self-storage billboard they’d glimpsed from the highway, when Eloise cried, “Britt, I think that’s the one!”

  Braking, Britt checked the license plate of the car parked at the curb against the wrinkled scrap of notepaper bearing the stolen vehicle’s description. Not that she needed to, since by now they had both memorized the data. She felt an involuntary grin spread across her face. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  AT ONCE THE gathering gloom of dusk felt thicker. Britt flicked on the high beams to confirm her first impression that the car was empty. “Looks like we found them.” Her heart raced. She was having second and third thoughts about not having brought Roger along.

  She drove around the block and up to the main gate of the storage complex. A white cottage, apparently part office and part home, stood guard just outside the chain-link fence. “You wait in the car. No need to descend in force on whoever watches this place.” Britt strode to the cottage and rapped on the door. In the back of her head she felt a stirring as Roger began to rise from the depths of his day-sleep. She ignored it.

  No one answered her first knock. She knocked harder. A minute later she heard slow footsteps approaching. A burly man with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching moustache yanked open the door. “What’s the matter, can’t you read?” He pointed to a hand-printed sign next to the door— Business Hours, 7 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. Only. “Christ, you’d think I could eat supper in peace!”

  To judge from the TV noise in the background, he was eating in front of the evening news. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you,” Britt said, “and I won’t keep you long.” She reached into her purse for the first bill she came across in her wallet, which happened to be a ten. “A friend was supposed to meet us here so we could help her unload some stuff, and we’re getting concerned that she hasn’t shown.”

  The manager’s expression mellowed a degree at the sight of the ten-dollar bill. “I ain’t seen anybody for a couple of hours.”

  “She’s a tall, thin woman with black hair,” said Britt, not sure whether to mention the child. She maintained eye contact with the man; though she couldn’t hypnotize instantaneously as Roger might, she hoped to exert psychic pressure to make the manager suggestible.

  “Maybe you mean Miss Karnstein?”

  “Karnstein?” Oh, Lord, talk about chutzpah! “Yes, Carmilla Karnstein. When was she here?”

  “Yeah, that’s the name. She rented a slot early this morning, right after I opened. I ain’t seen her since.”

  “Maybe she came in while you were busy, and she’s waiting for us inside.” Britt gave a subliminal nudge, wishing she could do that as reliably as a vampire could. “Which unit did she take? I can go look for her and not bother you anymore.”

  The man showed no suspicion, just impatience. “She’s in B-thirty-seven. Now, can I get back to my supper before it freezes to the goddamn plate?”

  “Yes, please do. Thank you for your help. Don’t worry about anything.”

  He slammed the door. Hoping he would stay safely occupied until they were gone, Britt returned to the car. “We don’t have the code for the vehicle gate, so we’ll just walk in,” she said after repeating the conversation to Eloise. Britt extracted a flashlight from the glove compartment. In the alleys formed by the rows of cinderblock buildings, between the infrequently placed floodlights pools of darkness lay in ambush. Her heart raced like a caged mouse in an exercise wheel. Vampires could well be awake by now. Camille, invisible, could be watching them from any patch of shadow.

  Roger’s nagging presence in Britt’s mind became impossible to ignore. She
acknowledged him. [Where the blazes are you, and what do you think you’re doing?] he demanded.

  She told him. [Stop distracting me. I didn’t think it was a great idea, either, but we’re here now.]

  [Good God, Britt, of all the harebrained stunts—Retreat and stay out of sight until I can get there.]

  [Absolutely not. By then, Camille will be awake for sure. Now we still have a chance to catch her off guard.]

  When Britt refused to answer any further objections, Roger stopped talking. She still, however, felt his disapproval weighing on her.

  “Carmilla Karnstein—do you believe it?” Eloise whispered as they tiptoed over the blacktop, imagining that their every step reverberated through the cement canyons. “She’s ready for a confrontation. What else could that mean? She’s throwing out a challenge.”

  “Let’s hope we can evade it, the way you planned,” Britt said. She flashed the light at the nearest row of identical doors, trying to get her bearings. The numbering system didn’t follow an immediately discernible logic. She veered in the direction where she thought B-thirty-seven should be.

  Six minutes later by her watch, though Britt felt she’d been wandering for an hour, they located the end of the row that included Camille’s storage shed. “Looks depressing, doesn’t it?” Britt said. “The humiliation of stooping to this couldn’t improve her temper.” A blaze of anger from Roger assailed Britt’s mind. A reaction to her own nervousness? She reflected it back to him and felt him struggle for calm.

  “This time I take the lead,” said Eloise. “You stay here for backup. If Camille is awake, we can’t give her a chance to grab us both at once.”

  Much as she hated hanging back while her friend plunged into danger, Britt had to agree. The fact that they hadn’t been attacked yet gave her hope. Either Camille was still dormant, or she wasn’t there at all. Unless, of course, she was waiting until they crept up to the door to pounce on them.