“Because I needed to look different. Because I wanted to look different.”
“Looks to me like you wanted to look like me.”
Ardeth was on her feet before she knew it, the black rage goading her muscles into action while her mind was frozen beneath the cold core of truth in Sara’s words. She stopped herself somehow, found the invisible wall that had stalled her sister and kept herself behind it. Suddenly, she felt alien and awkward in her self-created image, a child caught playing make-believe in her mother’s clothes. Her armour of blackness was shredding, fading and she felt the Ardeth-that-was forcing her way back into life, threading blonde back into her inky hair, turning her limbs soft and ungainly.
Then she looked at her sister’s white face and horrified eyes and knew that Sara didn’t see any cracks in the armour, didn’t see anything frightened and human beneath the vampire mask. For a moment, triumph flooded through her, washing away the old life trying to gain a foothold in her heart. Now you see, now you see what I really am! Not at all what you thought, am I, little sister? You are not angry that I look like you—you’re angry that I look better than you. And that’s the one thing you never thought you’d see. But the exultation only lasted a moment, then Sara’s stricken expression wiped it away. She’s not the enemy, Ardeth told herself. What you wanted, what she was, doesn’t matter now. What’s left to compete over? You don’t even exist in the same world any more.
“You see now, don’t you?” she said quietly, still standing. Sara nodded slowly.
“Ardeth, what . . .” She groped for the words, then laughed unsteadily, “Jesus, what do I say? I’m sorry you’re a vampire? I’m glad you’re still alive, sort of?”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m not.” Ardeth settled back onto her bed, suddenly weary. The burst of anger had set her adrenaline pumping; coming off it, she realized it had awoken the hunger. She was aware of it as a constant, nagging ache, like a headache waiting to happen. Hurry up, Rozokov, she thought to the distant smoke on the horizon of her awareness. God knows what they plan to feed me. If they plan to feed me. She glanced at her reflection in the false mirror and had the uneasy suspicion that putting Sara and her together had been more than a way to make her tell her story.
“The vampire,” Sara began suddenly. “The one who made you. What did he look like?”
“Grey hair, grey eyes,” Ardeth replied wearily. “Terrible and beautiful at the same time. Why?”
“One night, at your apartment, there . . .” She stopped suddenly, eyes flickering sideways towards the camera for a brief moment. For a briefer moment, Ardeth saw suspicion in her sister’s eyes. She may believe the vampirism, but she hasn’t bought it all, Ardeth realized. “I had a strange dream, that’s all.” She shrugged the subject aside as abruptly as she had raised it. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What happened to Mickey’s friend Rick? He was a street musician. Mickey thinks you killed him.”
“I didn’t kill him. He was hit by a car. I took his blood, but not enough to kill him.” Ardeth leaned forward a little to catch Sara’s uneasy gaze, compelled suddenly to tell the truth, to put an end to the sudden relaxation, the complicity between them. Her death had cut the ties between them forever; this belated truce was just a ghost of whatever friendship they had once had. “But I can kill Sara. Don’t think that I’m still the sister you knew, who was too squeamish to kill spiders. Don’t think that I’m anything like her at all.”
“Then what are you doing here? If you’re not Ardeth, if you’re not my sister, why didn’t you just walk away?” Sara asked, voice ragged with pain and defiant refusal to believe, just as she had refused to believe Ardeth was dead. Ardeth’s heart caught for a moment, overcome by sudden blind desire to refute everything she had just said, to pretend that somehow the hard facts of her second birth did not irrevocably sever her from the bonds of her first. She had come to make Havendale pay, to end the threat to Rozokov and her, that was true. But first of all, most of all, she had come to save Sara. And if Sara saw that truth in her eyes, she would clamp down on it with her bulldog persistence and not let her deny it again. And then they would go on haunting each other forever, just as she had haunted her sister through the nightly outpouring of loss and longing strung on electric guitars.
“Because,” she began slowly, looking past her sister’s dark gaze to the darker one waiting behind the mirror. I’m not telling them anything they don’t already suspect, she thought, to excuse the half of the truth she was about to reveal, to hide the deeper one. “I got tired of hiding from them, running from them. Of always being so damned careful because of them. I wasn’t careful that night in the asylum—and you know what, Sara? You were right—not being careful was fun. It was the most fun I’d ever had.”
She leaned back against the wall behind her cot with a slow, lazy stretch, and put her sunglasses on. The camera could see only the predatory smile frozen on her lips. It could not see the disbelieving horror in Sara’s eyes. It could not tell that, behind the shelter of the black lenses, Ardeth’s own eyes were shut tight, so she would not have to see it either.
Chapter 31
Mickey yawned and stretched surreptitiously, wincing as the leaves around him stirred at his movement. Come on, you weird old bastard, hurry up, he thought to the cooling night air. Rozokov had woken up about an hour earlier and vanished back into the woods surrounding the house. Mickey supposed it was too much to hope that he was going for doughnuts and coffee.
They had been stuck here for more than sixteen hours now. After tracking the van to the entrance to the estate and noticing the two guards posted at the gate, they had parked in a mall parking lot on the far side and gone over the ten-foot stone wall. Mickey grimaced and sucked at the cuts on his fingers for a moment. The height and the barbed wire at the top hadn’t seemed to slow Rozokov down—he wished he could say the same for himself.
Circling around towards the house, they’d had to crouch in the brush while someone stamped through the woods off to their left. Some sort of perimeter alarm, Mickey had decided and spent the next too-long moments preparing his excuses before the man wallowed back the way he had come, apparently writing off the warning to either raccoons or kids, both of which probably snuck onto the estate with annoying regularity.
I suppose we should be grateful good old Althea hasn’t bothered to keep the gardener on, Mickey thought idly, glancing up at the lights from the house through the screen of lilac bushes. It was only fifty feet from his vantage point to the nearest door, but the shadows of the overhanging oaks and the dense branches of the bushes seemed to have kept him invisible all day.
Watch them, Rozokov had told him, before retreating farther into the wood to sleep. Mickey had tried to argue, suggesting that shifts might be more practical, but the old man had rejected that sensible idea. “I have no power until dusk,” he had said and there didn’t seem to be any argument for that. Mickey had ended up sleeping anyway, catnapping when the heat and heavy, green-scented air lulled him into drowsiness. But he seemed to jerk awake every time someone closed a door, so he didn’t think he’d missed anything.
Not that there was much to miss. Once in a while, the door at the end of the house would open and a man would walk down the long driveway towards the gate or make a circuit of the house. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to their movements and he never saw more than one man at a time. For all he knew, there could be two men inside the house . . . or twenty. The only thing he knew for sure was that they were armed; he’d seen enough movies to know a sub-machine gun when he saw one. It was not a reassuring sight. It made him suspect that Rozokov really didn’t know much more than the few details about Althea Dale and Havendale he had been persuaded to part with before he went to sleep.
Something moved behind him and he twisted around as a dark shape settled into the bushes at his side. “Nice to see you,” Mickey said sarcastically.
“I had som
e business to attend to.” In the darkness he couldn’t see the man’s smile, but he was sure it was mockingly amused.
“I don’t suppose it involved getting reinforcements.”
“No, regrettably not. I was just finding some nourishment.”
“Jesus, you ate and didn’t bring me anything?” He managed to keep the accusation to a furious whisper.
“I did not think you would care for squirrel.”
“Squirrel? You ate a squirrel?”
“Not ‘ate’ precisely but . . .”
“Never mind,” Mickey interrupted, suddenly certain he did not want to hear any more. “Now that you’re back, what are we going to do about Sara and Ardeth?”
“What happened today?” Impatiently, Mickey outlined what he’d seen during the day. “No one came from outside?” Rozokov asked curiously.
“No. No one left either, not since the van this morning.” The silence lingered on for a moment and Mickey squinted at the pale shadow beside him, making out Rozokov’s profile as he studied the house. “So how are we going to get in?”
“The man who called you . . . he should be coming back tonight. We will get in with him.”
“And if he doesn’t come?”
“I cannot believe he will stay away. But if he is not here by midnight, we will try something else.” He sounded so certain that ‘something else’ would occur to them that Mickey was almost convinced. Almost.
It was nearly eleven o’clock when they saw the headlights flickering through the trees lining the driveway. Rozokov was gone without a sound, slithering up through the weeds to crouch in the shadow of a tree at the edge of the driveway. Mickey started after him, froze as the headlights swept the patch of ground where he lay, then forced himself on. The car pulled to a halt just beyond Rozokov’s hiding place, at the base of the stone steps that led up the hill to the house. The brake lights winked as Rozokov’s shadow moved across them then Mickey stood up and ran.
He reached the far side of the sleek convertible sports car just as the driver saw the dark shape standing at his door. “Good-evening,” Rozokov said pleasantly with a smile that had too many teeth.
Mickey saw the man lean sideways, his hand snaking towards the glove compartment. He lunged forward without thinking, catching the man’s wrist. There was a muffled grunt from his left and he glanced over to see the man held against the door, Rozokov’s long fingers over his mouth.
When the glove compartment snapped open, he found what the man had been so desperate to reach. He hoisted it up at Rozokov with a grin, then pointed the gun at the man in what he hoped was a professional manner.
Rozokov’s hand left the man’s mouth and he kept it shut, eyes trained on Mickey. The free hand vanished like a pale spider into the man’s coat and came out with a wallet that it tossed onto the seat.
“Martin Rooke,” Mickey announced, checking the driver’s licence. He studied the photograph of the lean, dark-haired man and then looked back at the real thing; for once the photograph didn’t lie. Rooke’s suit might look like a genuine Armani but his face looked like a genuine killer, all angles and bones and blue arctic eyes. He checked the business card. Vice-President, Special Projects, Havendale International.
Rozokov’s hand on Rooke’s collar tightened and hauled the man up and over the closed door of the Jaguar. When his feet hit asphalt, Rooke pulled himself up and leaned as far away as Rozokov’s grip would allow. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Rooke.”
“You’re Rozokov, I assume.” The voice was cold and steady, recognizable even without the backdrop of bar chatter.
“Of course. Now you will escort my associate and me inside to Ardeth and Sara. If you try to warn anyone, or to mislead us, my associate will shoot you. Is that clear?”
Rooke nodded. Have to give the old bastard credit, Mickey thought with distant humour. He puts on a good show. And he’s avoided mentioning my name, which is considerate of him, I suppose. Thought I hope to hell he doesn’t really expect me to shoot Rooke. The gun felt suddenly awkward and heavy in his hands, like a prop he had no idea how to use.
They walked up the stairs in silence, Rozokov at Rooke’s right shoulder, hand on his arm, Mickey at his left, gun against the man’s ribs. We won’t fool anyone, he thought, as they approached the far door and he saw the camera above it. But when they reached it, Rooke pressed the buzzer on the door lintel and nodded up into the lens. Mickey noticed that Rozokov hung at the edge of the light, face tilted away from the camera’s curious gaze.
Something clicked deep within the door. Rozokov was at Rooke’s shoulder again, reaching past him to the open door. There were guards on the other side, rising inside their glassed cubicle with curious expressions. Mickey saw their eyes flicker over Rooke’s face, slide past his own, and widen when they saw Rozokov. Mouths began to open, arms jerk back to grope for guns. The gun, he thought, they have to see the gun. He raised his own weapon, jamming it hard into the side of Rooke’s throat.
Rozokov was in the cubicle before the guards’ guns were clear. He caught the first man’s jacket and held him still for the fist that caught him in the throat. The body was sliding bonelessly to the floor when the second blow sent the other man slamming into the wall so hard Mickey was sure he heard the skull crack.
Mickey felt Rooke’s muscles tense under his hand and he tightened his grip, pressing the gun behind Rooke’s ear until it forced his head to tilt awkwardly to the side. Rozokov came back out of the cubicle. “Very impressive,” Rooke managed to croak.
“Did you . . .” Mickey started, then felt his voice trail away as the words got stuck in his throat.
“Of course he killed them,” Rooke answered contemptuously. “That’s what he does. You don’t have any idea what he is, do you?”
“I don’t give a shit. I know what you are,” Mickey answered and shoved Rooke down the hallway after Rozokov. They were halfway down the corridor when Rozokov suddenly cried out, his body jerking as if struck. Rooke started to run, pushing his way past the stumbling figure. The gun came up before Mickey had time to think about it but his attention wavered between Rooke’s back and the figure crouched on the floor between them and then the moment to act was gone, swallowed up as Rooke vanished through the steel door at the end of the corridor.
“The machine,” Rozokov gasped out, eyes wild in a face gone grey with pain. “Shoot the machine.”
“What machine? Where?” But the only reply was a cry, smothered as the man bent over in pain. Machine, what the fuck was he talking about? The only machine was the camera ahead of them. Mickey ran forward, skidded to a halt beneath the black box. It wasn’t a camera after all, he realized, as he raised the gun and fired. The machinery exploded into a hail of metal and sparks.
When he turned, Rozokov was hauling himself back to his feet, leaning hard on the wall. “What happened? What was that?”
“Where’s Rooke?” The words came out hoarse and ragged.
“Through there.” Mickey jerked his head towards the door. “What do we do now?”
But Rozokov didn’t answer that question, just slumped against the wall drawing in slow, shuddering breaths. After a moment, Mickey put his back against the wall beside him and looked down at the door shining with implacable serenity at the end of the hallway.
Oh Christ, Sara, he thought, what am I going to do now?
Chapter 32
Glancing from the window to the video monitor’s image of the two dark figures in the tiny room, Lisa Takara muttered a steady stream of imprecations under her breath. The guard behind her, seated at his own set of monitors, shifted uneasily but, not understanding her, did nothing else.
Videotapes keep giving you away, Rooke, she thought bitterly. If the last one hadn’t shown me what a monster you are, this one would have. Whether the woman in there is crazy or a vampire, it was your kind that made her that way. It was clever of you to kidnap her sister to get her, to p
ut them together to make her talk. But you should not have made me study her while she did. Because now she has a name and a life that your company ripped from her and gave her this madness or this curse in its place.
And now you are making me sit here and watch in the hopes that the hunger you put in her will drive her to the unspeakable.
Behind her, beyond the guard, the other scientists were still working, poring over the microscopes and computer reports. There was nothing conclusive yet, nothing more than a few anomalies in the blood tests and Parkinson’s suspicion of a shift in the tissue structure of the skin samples. She knew that they all glanced at her occasionally in guilty, reluctant fascination. On their way across the lab they would pause and stare for a moment into the narrow cell. There was one proof that could not be denied—they were all waiting for it to happen.
Ardeth knew they were there and Lisa suspected that at least some of Ardeth’s words and gestures had been aimed at the watchers, not her sister. But there were things she guessed the other woman would have hidden if she could: her restless shifting on the cot, the fingers curling and uncurling in the sheets, the almost imperceptible twist of her mouth as she gnawed at her inner lip.
“Subject A increasingly agitated, restless. Subject B has tried several times to engage her in conversation but failed.” She jotted the notes in her own cryptic shorthand, English and Japanese characters combined. Then, without thinking about it, she wrote in Japanese only: “Subject A waiting for something to happen.”
The guard behind her swore suddenly. Lisa turned instinctively and caught a glimpse of the monitors over his shoulder. There were three men moving down the hallway towards the lab. She recognized the middle one as Rooke. The one in the lead had smoke-grey hair and a narrow face. Beautiful, terrible . . . the words echoed in her mind.
The guard hit one of the mysterious switches littering the console. The lead figure jerked spasmodically and then Rooke was moving, vanishing out of the camera’s sightline for a second. A second switch triggered the grinding unlocking of the lab’s door, then Rooke was inside.
The Night Inside Page 26