“What is your favorite fairy tale?”
I made a noise that under other circumstances might have been a laugh. “Beauty and the Beast,” I said.
“Tell me that one,” he said.
“What?”
“Tell me the fairy tale of Beauty and the Beast,” he said.
“Oh. Yes. Um.” I’d learned to tell this one myself almost first of all, because the pictures of the Beast in the storybooks always annoyed me, and I didn’t want any kids under my influence to get the wrong idea about him. I wondered if any even-more-than-usually-misguided illustrator had ever tried to make him look like a vampire. “Well, there was this merchant,” I began obediently. “He was very wealthy, and he had three daughters…”
How to tell a story—how to make it go on and on to fill the time—how to get interested in it yourself so it would be interesting to your listeners, or listener—all that came back to me, I think. It was impossible to know, and presumably vampires have different tastes in stories than little boys. I thought of a few car journeys we’d had on those holidays to the ocean, when I would tell stories till I was hoarse. There was a lot you could do with the story of Beauty and the Beast, and I had done most of it, and I did it again now. I watched the arc of the sun over my left shoulder. The light crept across the floor, and the vampire had to move to stay out of it. First he had to move in one direction, sliding along the floor as if all his joints pained him (how could he both look as if every movement were agony, and still retain that curious fluid agility?), and then he had to slide back again—back again and farther still, nearer to me. I moved to stay in the sun as he moved to stay out of it. I went on telling the story. There was no spot on the floor that he could have stayed in all day, and stayed out of the light. Vampires, according both to myth and SOF, did something like sleep during the day, just as humans sleep at night. Do vampires need their sleep as we do? So it wasn’t only food and freedom Bo was depriving this one of?
He’d said it wasn’t hunger that would break him. It was daylight.
I wondered dispassionately if I might be getting a sunburn, but I rarely burned anyway, and the idea in the present state of affairs, like worrying about a hangnail while you are being chased by an axe murderer, seemed so ludicrous I couldn’t be bothered.
The sun was sinking toward the end of day, and my voice was giving out. I had drunk several more mouthfuls of water in the course of the story. (If you haven’t seen a vampire’s lips touch the mouth of your bottle, do you have to wipe it off first?) I concluded in a vivid— not to say lurid—scene of all-inclusive rejoicing, and fell silent.
“Thank you,” he said.
My tiredness was back, tenfold, a hundredfold. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I had to keep my eyes open—this was a vampire. Was this one of the ways to—persuade a victim? Had he been killing two birds with one stone—so to speak? Make the day pass, make the victim amenable to handling? But didn’t they like them unamenable? I couldn’t help it. My eyes kept falling shut, my head would drop forward, and I would wake myself up when my neck cracked as my chin fell to my breastbone.
“Go to sleep,” said his voice. “The worst is over…for me…today. There are five hours till sunset. I am…harmless till then. No vampire can…kill in daylight. Sleep. You will want to be awake…tonight.”
I remembered there had been a blanket in the sack. I crawled over to it, pulled it out, put my head on the sack and the remaining loaf of bread, and was asleep before I had time to argue with myself about whether he was telling the truth or not.
I dreamed. I dreamed as if the dream was waiting for me, waiting for the moment I fell asleep. I dreamed of my grandmother. I dreamed of walking by the lake with her. At first the dream was more like a memory. I was little again, and she was holding my hand, and I had to skip occasionally to keep up with her. I had been proud of having her for a grandmother, and was sorry that I only ever saw her alone, at the lake. I would have liked my school friends to meet her. Their grandmothers were all so ordinary. Some of them were nice and some of them were not so nice, but they were all sort of…soft-edged. I didn’t know how to put it even to myself. My grandmother wasn’t hard or sharp, but there wasn’t anything uncertain about her. She was unambiguously herself. I admired her hugely. She had long hair and when the wind was blowing off the lake it would get into a tremendous tangle, and sometimes she would let me brush it afterward, at the cottage. She usually wore long full skirts, and soft shoes that made no sound, whatever she was walking on.
My parents split up when I was six. I didn’t see my grandmother for the first year after. It turned out that my mother had gone so far as to hire some wardcrafters—smiths, scribes, spooks, the usual range—and on what money I don’t know—to prevent anyone in my dad’s family from finding us. My father hadn’t wanted to let us go, and while his family are supposed to be some of the good guys, it’s very hard not to do something you can do when you’re angry and it will get you what you want. After the first year and a day he had probably cooled off, and my mom let the fancy wards lapse. My grandmother located us almost at once, and my mother, who can drive herself nuts sometimes by her own sense of fairness, agreed to let me see her. At first I didn’t want to see her, because it had been a whole year and I’d been sick for a lot of it, and my mother had to tell me— that sense of fairness again—what she’d done, and a little bit, scaled down to my age, of why. I was only seven, but it had been a bad year. That conversation with my mother was one of those moments when my world really changed. I realized that I was going to be a grownup myself some day and have to make horrible decisions like this too. So I agreed to see my gran again. And then I was glad I did. I was so happy to have her back.
She and I had been meeting at the lake every few weeks for a little over a year when one afternoon she said, “I don’t like what I am about to do, but I can’t think of anything better. My dear, I have to ask if you will keep a secret from your mother for me.”
I looked at her in astonishment. This wasn’t the sort of thing grown-ups did. They went around having secrets behind your back all the time about things that were horribly important to you (like my mom not telling me she’d hired the wardcrafters), and then pretended they didn’t. There’d been a lot of that that nobody explained to me before my parents broke up, and I hadn’t forgotten. Even at six or seven I knew that my mom’s wardcrafters were the tip of an iceberg, but I still didn’t know much about the iceberg. I didn’t know, for example, that my father might have been a sorcerer, till years later. And sometimes grown-ups said things like “Oh, maybe you’d better not tell your parents about this,” which either meant get out of there fast, now, or that they knew you would tell anyway because you were only a kid, but then they could get mad at you when you did. (That this had happened several times with some of my dad’s business associates is one of the reasons my mom left.) But I knew my gran loved me and I knew she was safe. I knew she’d never ask me anything bad. And I knew that she really, really meant it, that I had to keep this secret from my mother.
“Okay,” I said.
My gran sighed. “I know that your mother means the best for you and in many ways she’s right. I’m very glad she got custody of you, and not your dad, although he was very bitter about it at the time.”