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 -