I was so hungry that standing there with bread in my hands made my legs tremble, and I had to keep swallowing.
“It is food for you,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with it. It is just food.”
“Why?” I said again. My continuing total-immersion course in vampire mores.
Something like a grimace moved momentarily across his too-still face. “Bo knows me well.”
“Knows…” I said thoughtfully. “Knows that you wouldn’t…right away. The bale of hay to keep the goat happy while the hunters in the trees wait for the tiger.”
“Not quite,” he said. “Humans can survive several days, perhaps a week, without food, I believe. But you won’t remain…attractive for that long.”
Attractive. I looked down at the cranberry-red dress. It had had a hard night. It was creased, and there was more than one smudge of dirt at the hem as well as the spots that wiping a teary face make, and my feet, sticking out from underneath, were scratched and filthy. I would have looked no less a lady in my T-shirt and jeans. I ate the bread in my hand, and then I broke off more, and ate that. It tasted no better than it looked, and while it had a funny aftertaste I assumed that was just flour improvers and phony flavoring garbage and nothing worse. It also might be my mouth, which tasted pretty funny anyway after the night I’d just had. I ate most of the first loaf. How long were these supplies supposed to last? I opened the bottle of water and drank a third of it. It was a standard two-quart plastic bottle of brand-name spring water and the ring-seal on the lid had been intact when I twisted it loose.
I looked at him again. His eyes were only half open, but still watching me. He was well in shadow but while he sat as unmoving as ever, he looked smaller now. Under siege.
I moved into the sunlight streaming through the window. Food and water had helped and the touch of the sun on my skin helped even more. I set the sack down again, with the rest of the bread in it, and sighed and stretched, as if I were getting out of bed on a Monday morning, the one morning a week I got up after the sun did. I felt tired but…alive. I clung to this tiny moment of comparative peace because most of me knew it was false. I wondered how much worse the crash would be when the rest of me remembered, than if I hadn’t had it at all.
As I say, I am a light freak. My mom found this out the first year after we left my dad. She’d got this ugly cheap dark little apartment in the basement of an old townhouse—she wouldn’t take any of my dad’s money so we were really poor at first—and I spent eight months crying and being sick all the time. She thought this was about losing my dad, and the doctors she took me to agreed with her because they couldn’t find anything wrong with me except listlessness and misery, but the minute she could afford it she got us into a better apartment, on the top floor of the house next door, with real windows. (This was when she started working for Charlie, and the minute he heard she had a sick kid he gave her a raise. He didn’t find out till later how young I was, and that she was leaving me home alone while she worked, and that the reason she tried for a job at the coffeehouse in the first place was because it was so close she could run home and check on me during her breaks.) It was winter, and she said I spent three weeks moving around the new place lying in every scrap of sunlight that came indoors—including moving a table and a heavy chest of drawers that were in my way—and by the end of that time I was well again. I don’t remember this, but I do remember that that eight months is the only time in my life I’ve ever been sick.
I stood there in the sunlight feeling the life and warmth of it and holding off the crash.
I was still clutching the bottle of water. I looked at the vampire again. His eyes were shut, perhaps because I was standing in the light. There seemed to be a thin sheen of sweat on his skin. Did vampires sweat? It didn’t seem a very vampiry thing to do.
I stepped out of the sunlight, and his eyes half opened again. He didn’t look around for me; his eyes opened on where I was. I almost stepped back into the sunlight again, but I didn’t quite. I walked over to him, to within easy arm’s reach. “You haven’t…killed me yet because if you did, that would mean Bo had won.”
“Yes,” he said. His voice, inflectionless as it was, sounded exhausted.
Pretending to myself I didn’t know what I was about to do, I held up the bottle of water. If vampires sweated, maybe they drank water…too. “Would you like some water?”
He opened his eyes the rest of the way. “Why?”
Involuntarily I smiled. His turn for the intensive course in human mores. “I don’t like bullies.” This wasn’t quite the whole truth, but it was as much of the truth as I knew myself.
He made the cough-growl noise again. “Yes,” he said.
I held out the bottle and he took it. He sat looking at it for a moment, looked at me again, then at the bottle. He unscrewed the plastic cap. All of this was happening at ordinary human speed, although all his movements had that creepy vampire fluency. But then…another third of the water disappeared. I didn’t see him drink. I didn’t see his throat move with swallowing. But there was only one-third of the water left in the bottle, and he was screwing the cap back on. And he looked a little better. The mushrooms he was the color of hadn’t been in the back of the fridge quite so long, and they weren’t quite so wizened. “Thank you,” he said.
I couldn’t quite bring myself to say, “You’re welcome.” I moved far enough away again that while I was still mostly in the shade, the sun was touching my back, and sat down. The band of sun-warmth was a little like having a friend’s arm around me. “You could have just taken it.”
“No,” he said.
“Well. Ordered me to give you some.”
“No,” he said.
I sighed. I felt irritated with this treacherous, villainous, mortally dangerous creature. The weight of irony might smash what remained of my mind into pieces before he did, in fact, kill me.
He said slowly, “I can take nothing from you. I can only accept what you offer. I can at most…ask.”
“Oh, please!” I said. “I can refuse to let you kill me! Vampires have never killed anyone who hasn’t said ‘oh yes please I want to die, I want to die now, I want you to drink all my blood and whatever else it is that vampires do so that even my corpse is so horrible that after the police are done with it I will be burned instantly and the ashes sterilized before they’re turned over to the next of kin!’ ” I would never have said such a thing while it was dark. Daylight was my time. For a few more hours I could forget that the nightmare would come again too soon. I was tired, and half-crazy with what I had already been through, and at some level I didn’t care any more. I had seen the sun once more—it was a beautiful day—and if I was going to go out now, I was going to go out still me.
“If you have the strength of will you can stop me or any vampire,” he said. Again the words came slowly, as they had when he had first spoken to me in the night. The curious thing was that he seemed to want to speak. He’d also used the word vampire. Well, so had I. “These signs,” and he gestured briefly at his ankle. “They are…effective signs. They will do what they are made for. They will—contain. As Bo arranged for them to do here. They will also prevent inhuman harm to a human. But they can only do that if the human who bears the warding holds against the will of the one who stands against. Vampires are stronger than humans. Rarely can any hold out against our will. Why do you think you should not look in our eyes? We can…persuade you anyway. But looking into a vampire’s eyes is any human’s doom.”