“Or maybe I’m the perfect target,” I shot back. “Someone low on the food chain, who you wouldn’t bother to watch as closely.”
“Which is why I asked someone from outside the Porters to look in on you and confirm your humanity.”
Someone from outside… “De Leon?”
“He owed me a favor. Isaac, there are larger problems here. Moscow was struck by an ‘earthquake’ two weeks ago which appears to have been magical in nature, destroying several former KGB facilities. Similar strikes have been reported in London, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, and Nigeria over the past three months.”
I remembered hearing about the quakes in London and Hong Kong. “Automatons?”
“Possibly. Though we suspect at least one such attack was carried out by a Porter with an all-too-human grudge. There’s no pattern, and with Gutenberg and the automatons gone, I’m doing everything I can to keep the Porters from fracturing beneath the weight of regional and national differences.” She took a long, slow breath. “None of which is your concern. What else have you learned?”
I described my fight with the vampire, including the way he had self-destructed at the end. “I’ve never come across anything like it, either the eyes or the ability to burn a vampire from within.” I hesitated, then added, “I think it might have been Gutenberg’s work.”
“Unlikely,” Pallas said flatly.
“Who else could control the automatons? Who else would speak a six-hundred-year-old German dialect?”
“I know Johannes Gutenberg as well as you knew Ray Walker. Better, in fact. We would know if he had been turned. He would never turn against his own Porters, and there’s not a man or woman living today with the power to force him to do anything he doesn’t want.” When she spoke again, she sounded pensive. “You’re certain about the dialect?”
“As certain as I can be without having lived in fifteenth-century Mainz.”
Another pause. “So what do you intend to do next?”
“Ted said there had been other problems among the vampires. We need more information, and I figure the best way to get it is to go to the source.”
“I see. Be careful, Isaac. I’m short on people, and would prefer not to lose any more.”
The phone went dead. I stared at it in disbelief. “She didn’t tell me to back off.”
“That’s good, right?” The bed shifted as Lena sat down beside me. “Would you have followed her orders if she had?”
“Pallas doesn’t generally give her underlings much choice in the matter.” I replayed our conversation in my mind. “She doesn’t believe Gutenberg could do this.”
“You disagree.” It wasn’t a question.
“There are Porters who treat Gutenberg like a god, but he’s not. Nobody’s invulnerable.” Even if Pallas was right that no one alive had the power to control Gutenberg, that didn’t mean he wasn’t acting of his own free will. We just didn’t know why. “I’ve got to talk to the vampires, find out what they know.”
“Tomorrow.” Lena’s tone was hard. These were the same vampires who had taken Nidhi Shah, who had pursued her into the U.P. and tried to kill us both.
“Will you be all right?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, too quickly. She smiled and traced the veins on the back of my hand with her finger. “Though I could be better.”
I tried not to stare at her bare legs, or the way her breasts pulled the thin material of her shirt taut, or the quirk of her full lips that suggested she knew exactly what was going through my mind, dammit.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” Lena said softly. “About me. Why I sought you out.”
I nodded, lost for words and distracted by the gentle tingle of her finger on my skin.
She glanced at the wall. “The couple two rooms down is having sex right now.”
I managed a moderately coherent, “Huh?”
“I can feel it. Their desire. The pleasure.” She tilted her head slightly, a bemused smile on her face. “He’s not terribly good at this. He’s trying too hard.” She turned her attention back to me and shrugged. “This is what I am. I can’t stop any more than you can stop seeing the world in color.”
“Actually, the rods in the eye only see black and white, and they require less light than the cones, so if it’s dark enough-”
“Shut up.” She gave me a playful smack on the arm. “Did you know we passed one couple and two individual men having ‘automotive relations’ on the road today? Including one on the Mackinac Bridge?”
“Thank you so much for telling me that. In addition to everything else, now I can worry about some lonely guy jerking his wheel at the wrong time and driving my car off the bridge.”
She laughed. “On the bright side, being able to sense desire and lust means very few men can sneak up on me. It’s not something I want to know. It’s voyeuristic and uncomfortable. But it’s what I am, meaning I can’t help knowing how much you’re struggling with your desire, trying so hard to do the right thing.”
“I’m-”
“If you apologize, I’ll drag you out of the room and throw you into that sorry excuse for a pool. You’re supposed to want me, Isaac. It’s how I was written. And the more time I spend with you, the more I see you in action…” She smiled again. “Just know the feeling is mutual.”
“What about Doctor Shah?” Between my exhaustion and the labyrinthine tangle of urges and emotions, it came out more harshly than I had intended.
Lena jerked back. “I should lie to you,” she said softly. “Say you’re the only one I want now. But I love her, too.”
“Too?” I repeated.
For the first time, I saw Lena Greenwood blush, her cheeks and ears darkening. She raised her chin and looked me in the eyes, which glistened with unshed tears. “Nidhi used to struggle with the same conflicts. She felt guilty. She questioned whether I truly loved her, or if that love was just an artifact of what I was, a magical rebound after losing my former lover. ‘It takes time to truly fall in love,’ she said.”
“How did she move beyond that guilt?” I asked.
“By accepting what I was.” Lena stared at the TV, but it was obvious she wasn’t seeing it. “She worked with one of your catalogers to figure out where I had come from. We read my book together. I remember lying in bed, laughing with her over some of the more over-the-top scenes. I remember holding her as she wept angry tears after we read the chapter where the rules of my being were spelled out. She is… was a good person, Isaac. She made me a good person.”
“I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry.”
“I want to show you something.” She took my hand, tugging me toward the door. We walked together out of the hotel and around to a small park out back, beyond the fenced-in pool that smelled of mildew and chlorine.
The playground was old and ill-tended, built back before brightly-colored plastic equipment replaced aluminum and steel. The heavy chains of the swing set clinked in the breeze. A chipmunk darted through the muddy wood chips at the bottom of the slide and vanished into the pine trees beyond. I filled my lungs with the humid air and the smell of the clover that had overgrown much of the ground. It made me momentarily homesick for the U. P.
Here I was, walking hand in hand with a gorgeous woman, slowly starting to relax for the first time in days. Naturally, I had to open my mouth and spoil it. “How much of who you are is you?”
“You mean, how much of who I am will change and shift to adapt to my new lover?” She didn’t appear offended. “Physically, my coloration shifts, but my body doesn’t change. Beyond that… I don’t know. I don’t think of it as changing so much as getting to experience more of life. With Nidhi, I learned to love rock climbing and skydiving, country music, fresh malapua, and old episodes of M*A*S*H. Before her, Frank Dearing taught me to love the earth, the feel of the soil, the pride of the harvest, the satisfaction of a long day’s work. Those loves don’t go away, exactly… but they fade to make room for the new.”