“I will just dig before sunrise.” I’d never thought of that, proving again that I would make one terrible vampire. I told her to look me up once she got settled—and washed all the blood off and found some clothes and all of that. She said she would.
* * *
Almost two hours into the trip, and my knee is swelling up horribly. I have the pant leg rolled up so I can study it in all its black-and-blue glory. It’s unpleasant, bordering on nauseating. And every bump in the road is a special treat, let me tell you.
I’ve had injuries of this sort before, and usually they heal themselves given enough time, so I’m not too worried. And my shoulder has calmed down a bit. We had to pop it back into place before leaving, which was decidedly unpleasant. But, by comparison, I’m pretty lucky. Not as lucky as Clara, who doesn’t have a scratch, but lucky.
With the sky turning brighter from the impending sunrise, Clara finally breaks the silence.
“She doesn’t hate you, you know.”
I frown. “Eve.”
“Yeah. Her description of you, from the website? It’s actually quite nice. You know, considering.”
“You’re going to have to show me that site when we get the chance,” I say.
“I will.”
I shift in my seat to try to get a little blood flowing, and also so I can look at Clara’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Seems I did something to her once,” I say. “Any idea what?”
“No,” she says, her eyes flicking up at the mirror to catch mine. “She won’t talk about it. I’m guessing it was something pretty bad.”
“You think? She’s been nursing a grudge that’s older than written history. It’s probably something more serious than me pissing in her rose garden.”
“But you don’t know what,” she says flatly. I’m not so sure she believes me.
“Honestly, I don’t. I wish I did.”
The sunrise starts to brighten up the sky to our left. It’s still nice and cool out, but in another hour or two we’ll have the windows up (we raised the top before we started driving) and the air conditioner blasting away. Soon after that, hopefully, we’ll reach something approximating civilization—and a hospital—provided we’re driving in the correct direction.
“You know,” I say, “I’ve been thinking.”
“About?”
“Something Bob said that’s been bothering me. Maybe it’s just the concussion talking but…” I trail off. I’m not so sure I want to bring this up right now.
“Go on,” she prompts.
“He said he needed to test his formula on a human subject.”
“Yeah…”
“And he implied that he was that subject.”
Clara says, “He was. Told me so himself. If you were him, wouldn’t you want to be the first in line?”
“True, but work through this with me. He nabbed Eve months ago, right? And she’s just as immortal as I am. And really, other than her being able to disappear into thin air, there’s only one difference between her and me.”
“Boy-girl,” she offers.
“Exactly. So, fine, they have her, but there’s something wrong. They can’t get whatever extract or clone sample, or whatever, to work on everybody. So they have to go out and find another immortal, which is when Bob kick-started his search for me. Do you follow?”
“So far.”
“I’m thinking I was critical because Eve’s sample only worked on other women. Bob needed me—specifically me—so he could become immortal.”
“Are you saying that, or asking that?”
“I’m guessing.”
“Not a bad guess.”
“I didn’t think it was.” I lean forward some more. “Clara, when Bob was trying to escape in the end there, he had you and he had his suitcase, and he said he had everything he needed. But what he needed was an immortal man AND an immortal woman—plus one vampire—to deliver the product to his investors. He can pick up a new vampire more or less anywhere, if he knows where to look. But he only had an immortal man.”
“You’re getting to a question in here, right?”
“Yeah, if Bob was the first one in line, who was the second?”
Clara looks up at me in the mirror and gives a sly smile.
“Told you I’d figure out this immortality thing eventually,” she says.
On Gods and Succubi
“Tell me about the gods,” she purred. She was curled up next to me, wrapped loosely in a cotton sheet with a pillow under the crook of her arm. The light breeze from my open bay window threatened to lift the sheet off her, because nature abhors a covered succubus.
Her name was Rowena, and I’m not calling her names; she actually was a succubus.
I slid out of the bed and padded over to the pitcher of water on a nearby table. After my third or fourth encounter with Rowena, I learned that keeping drinking water available was a good idea. I had tried wine first. That didn’t work out so well.
“Do you want some water?” I offered.
“No,” she said. “I want you to come back to bed.”
I smiled to myself and drank. We were in a private country house in Northern England that I happened to own, in the middle of the day and the middle of the week. I had nowhere to go and nobody to see, and I expected those facts to remain unchanged for quite a long time. So there was no hurry. Despite this, my heart skipped and I fought the urge to race back to the bed, because she asked for me.
This is how things work with succubi. The whole business about them being demons is a bit of nonsense, but it contains a grain of truth. A succubus will enjoy sex a lot—nearly as much as whomever they happen to be with—but what she really appreciates is the obsession. Thus, men (and women, more often than you’d think) might find themselves doing things that turn out to be a touch self-destructive in hindsight. It’s not exactly the same as enslaving a man and sucking his soul out of him and causing premature aging and whatever else people are saying nowadays about her species. But when a man throws away his family, career and inheritance just to spend all the uninterrupted time he can with one, it’s nearly the same thing.
Not that it always ends up that way. I personally love finding a willing and able succubus whenever I can, because aside from their obviously wonderful physical attributes, the average succubus looks roughly twenty-two human years old for approximately fifty actual years, and that is a fantastic thing for a guy who’s been alive as long as I have. Despite that, even if I completely lost control with one, unlike an ordinary human, I could outlive her.
That’s my solution. I don’t know how mortals do it, though.
Rowena was not a long-term companion for me in that sense. She spent most of her time enthralling high-ranking members of the Anglican Church, including at least one Cardinal I knew of. That was no less scandalous then—this was 1862—than it is now.
I was her vacation.
“Why do you want to know about the gods?” I asked, returning to the bed. She sat up and let the sheet fall away, revealing a deeply tanned body and two perfect, pert breasts, and for a moment I forgot what we were talking about. I slipped under the sheet beside her. “And which gods do you mean?”
“I’m curious,” she said, curling under my arm. Her hand slid down my chest and to my crotch. “And we have a few minutes, it seems.”
I brushed the red hair from her eyes and lifted her chin so I could see her properly. “This isn’t a casual bedside inquiry, Rowena. Why don’t you ask what you want to ask instead of hoping I stumble upon it?”
She grinned and I fell in love, for just a half second. “Plato,” she said.
“Plato?”
“You’ve read him?”
“I knew him.”
She pushed away and tucked her knees in until she was sitting up and opposite me and my heart broke, for just a half second. Although she was still entirely naked, and fully apparent as such, and that eased the pain.