There would be no reason to think SOF should get involved. Who else would Mom or Mel ask? Yolande. But she wouldn’t know anything either. They’d figure out that my car was missing. Would anyone think to go out to the lake and look at the old cabin? Not likely. Nobody else went out there but me, and I hadn’t been there in years. I’d never even taken Mel there when we went hiking. I didn’t think there were any regular patrols out there either; there wasn’t any known reason the lake needed patrolling. And there were the bad spots. But if someone had gone out to the cabin and found my car, then what? I wasn’t there, and I doubted vampires left clues. You heard about vampire trouble on the news when people started finding bloodless bodies with fang marks. And this house was very well guarded by the bad spot behind us.
I drank the rest of the water. I didn’t wipe the mouth first. I thought, is my arm or my dress likely to be any more sanitary?
I turned toward the window. I felt the vampire watching me. “I have to pee,” I said irritably. “I’m going to do it out the window. Will you please not watch? I will tell you when I’m done.” Since I’d never heard him move before, he must have made a noise so I could hear it. I looked, and he’d turned his back. I had my pee, feeling ridiculous. “Okay,” I said. He turned around and returned to watching me, his face as expressionless as before.
As he had seemed to grow smaller as the sun rose he seemed to grow larger as the sun set.
The last light waned and so did I. I was cold as well as sick and frightened, and my headache felt bigger than my head. I wrapped myself in the blanket and huddled as near to the corner as my chain would let me. I remembered the other loaf of bread, and pulled it out and began to eat it, thinking it might help, but it sat in my stomach like a lump of stone, and I didn’t eat very much. Then I hunched down and curled up. And waited.
It was full dark. The moon would be up later but at the moment I could see almost nothing. On a clear night it is never quite dark outside, but we were inside. The windows left gray rectangles on the floor, but I could not see beyond them. I knew he could see in the dark; I knew vampires can smell live blood…No, I thought. That hardly matters. He isn’t going to forget about me any more than I am going to forget about him, even if I can’t see or hear him—even if I’ve got so used to the vampire smell I’m not noticing it any more. Which just made it worse. I thought I would have to see him cross the gray rectangle between him and me—I was pretty sure his chain wasn’t long enough to let him go round—I knew I wouldn’t hear him. But…I hadn’t seen him drink either. I bit down on my lips. I wasn’t going to cry, and I wasn’t going to scream…
I almost screamed when I heard his voice out of the darkness. “They are coming now. Listen. Stand up. Fold your blanket and lay it neatly down. Shake your dress out. Comb your hair with your fingers. Sit again if you wish, but sit a little distance from the corner—yes, nearer me. Remember that three feet more or less makes no difference to me: you might as well. Sit up straight. Perhaps cross your ankles. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I croaked, or squeaked. I folded the blanket and laid it down. I wrapped the sack tidily around the remains of the bread. I put the empty water bottle with it. I shook my dress out. It was probably a mess, but there was nothing I could do about it. My hair actually looks a bit better if it doesn’t get combed too often, so I tried to pull my fingers through it the way I would have if I were in front of the mirror at home. I wiped my face on my hem again. I felt unspeakably grubby and grimy—ironically perhaps, since I was still whole, I felt denied. I certainly did not feel attractive. But I smoothed my skirt before I sat down again, just inside the darkness on my side of the gray rectangle, a good six feet from my corner. My chain lay slack, lazily curved.
“Good,” he said from the darkness.
A for effort, I thought. June Yanovsky would be proud of me.
“They are coming” is perhaps a relative term. It seemed to me, my nerves shrieking with strain, that it was a very long time before the chandelier suddenly rattled ferociously—and then burst into light. The candles were all new and tall again. My gran had told me that setting fire to things from a distance was a comparatively easy trick, which helped explain why so many houses got burned down during the Wars; but the houses were already there, you didn’t build them first. That two-second rattle had given me enough warning to swallow any cry, to force myself to remain as I was, ankles crossed, hands lying loosely one in the other, palms upturned and open. I doubted I was fooling anyone, but at least I was trying.
There were a dozen of them. I hadn’t counted last night, so I didn’t know if there had been more or less. I recognized Bo’s lieutenant, and the one who had been my other guard. There are some people who say that all vampires look alike, but they don’t, any more than all humans look alike. How many live people outside the staff in those asylums have seen a lot of vampires anyway? These twelve were all thin and whippy-looking and that was about the only clear similarity among them. And of course that they were vampires, and they moved like vampires, and smelled like vampires, and were motionless like vampires when they weren’t moving.
“Bo said you’d hold out just to be annoying,” said Bo’s lieutenant. “Bo understands you.”
I thought, he’s frightened. That was supposed to be an insult, Bo’s understanding, and he can’t pull it off. And then I thought, I must be imagining things. Vampire voices are as weird as vampire motion and as unreadable as vampire faces. Hell, I can’t even tell the boy vampires from the girl vampires. How do I know what vampire fear sounds like? If vampires feel fear. But the thought repeated: he’s frightened. I remembered how reluctant they’d seemed last night, bringing me here. “Let’s get it over with,” Bo’s lieutenant had said. I remembered how they didn’t want to get too close to their “guest,” and how they did most of their talking from near the door, farther than his chain would stretch; how the vampire who’d held me had dropped me and run, when he realized his friends were leaving him behind.
“Is she still sane, though, Connie? It’s harder if you keep them till they’ve gone mad, you know, and the blood’s not as sweet. Bo finds this very disappointing as I’m sure you do, but that’s the way humans are. You wouldn’t want to waste what we brought you, would you?”
They were all standing just beyond the chandelier, so not quite halfway across the room. They had fanned out into a ragged semicircle. As Bo’s lieutenant spoke, he took an ambling step toward us. The others fanned out a little more. My poor weary heart was beating desperately, hopelessly, in my throat again. This reminded me of any human gang cornering its victim; and however wary they were of Bo’s “guest,” they were still twelve to one, and the one was chained to the wall with ward signs stamped all over the shackle. I couldn’t help myself. I curled my stretched-out legs under me. I wanted to cross my arms in front of my breast, but I reminded myself that this was useless—just as curling my legs up was useless—so I compromised, and leaned on one hand, and left the other one in my lap. I managed not to squeeze it into a fist, although this wasn’t easy. The vampires— all except the one sitting against the wall next to me—took another slow, floating, apparently aimless step forward. I was pressing my back so hard against the wall my spine hurt.
I wished I knew what was going on—why were Bo and his guest old enemies? But then, even if I did know what was going on, how would that help me? What I wanted—to get out alive—didn’t seem one of the options. So I might as well distract myself with wanting to know what was going on.