Maybe he saw the shiver. “After your—” He paused. “You need food,” he said. “I can’t even feed you.” He glanced down at himself as if perhaps he was expecting a peanut-butter sandwich to be suspended about his person. If he was contemplating opening a vein and offering it to me, the answer was No. If he was contemplating it, he rejected the notion. I wondered what he meant by can’t even feed me.
“I must also thank you for…retrieving me,” he said. Finally he looked at me.
Retrieving? Shiva wept.
“Any time,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy reviewing my assortment of new scars and recalling how I got them too. The ones from being slammed on my back and landed on like a sack of boulders, and the ones a few seconds later from being thrown across the room into a wall.”
I saw him flinch. One for the human.
“Sunshine,” he said. He made a move toward me, and I flinched away. One for the vampire.
I didn’t mean to say it. I didn’t mean to say anything about it. I was determined not to say anything about it. My voice came out high and strange, and sticky with wretchedness: “Why? I know about having to—invite—one of your kind.” For about six months when you’re thirteen or fourteen it’s every teenage girl’s favorite story: because it’s about finding out that you have power. “Maybe I got the details wrong? Like you need it engraved RSVP—I suppose you prefer the black border to the narrow gold line—delivered to your door at least forty-eight hours before the moment? Maybe you need it printed in blood on—on vellum. And silly me, I couldn’t find your door to deliver it.” My voice was getting higher and higher and squeakier and squeakier. I shut up.
He stood there with his hands loose at his sides, staring at the floor. His hair flopped down over his forehead. I wanted to brush it back so I could see his eyes…I wanted to do nothing of the kind. I would bite my own hand off before I voluntarily touched him again.
“I believe you were inviting more than you knew,” he said at last.
I sighed. “Oh good. Cryptic vampire utterances. My fave. Now you’re going to say something opaque and oracular about the bond between us, aren’t you? That it got me here but let’s not get carried away maybe?”
He moved so quickly I would not have stepped aside in time, but he stopped himself short and did not touch me. But he didn’t stop very short. As it was he was standing so near it was hard not to touch him. I put my hands behind my back like a dieter offered a choice of Bitter Chocolate Death or Meringuamania. “I do not disturb you by choice,” he said. “Can you not believe that?” He made another of those vampire noises: it went something like urrrrrr. “Perhaps you cannot. This—our situation—is not made easier by thousands of years of my kind…disturbing your kind.”
“Disturb is one word for it, I suppose,” I said, nastily. I was still in a bad mood, still unhappy and wanting to cause unhappiness in return. And still half blasted out of my skull by events since I had found out that evening that my landlady knew I was jiving with a vampire. A lot had happened in a short space of time. Not just one particular thing out of a morbidly kinky soap opera.
“I too am disturbed,” he said quietly.
I had my mouth open for my next uncharitable remark and changed my mind. I moved away from him, found the wall, and leaned back against it. I didn’t want to sit on the floor—and have him looming over me—and there wasn’t anything else to lean on. Except him, of course, and that wasn’t an option right now. Disturbance: okay. If I could stop feeling mortally wounded in the ego for a moment I might begin to remember again what was going on here. He was a vampire. I was a human. We weren’t supposed to have any bonds between us, except straightforward generic ones of murderous antagonism and so on. And, speaking of kinky soap opera, no one ever had an affair with a vampire, not even in Blood Lore, which was always getting prosecuted for one thing or another. The reason why, when you were thirteen or fourteen, you outgrew your fascination with the idea that a vampire couldn’t do you unless you let him is that you began to take in the fact that shortly after you’d said, “Come and get me big boy,” you died.
It was illegal to write stories and make movies about sex between vampires and humans. It was, in fact, one of the few mandates the global council really agreed on. The stories and movies got written and made anyway, but if the government caught you at it, they threw your ass in jail. For a long time.
Okay. He probably was disturbed too.
I looked at him, wondering if he was wondering how we’d wound up here, wherever here was. About why we’d been able to create this antithetical bond, and what exactly it consisted of. It probably was a good idea not to make it any more complicated—and intense—than we had to.
A small part of me whispered, “Oh, rats.”
Another small part whispered, “Yeah, well, how come he’s the one who managed to remember?”
Suddenly I was exhausted. “Truce?” I said, still leaning against the wall.
“Truce,” he said.
I was only going to shut my eyes for a moment…
I woke up feeling rather comfortable. I was lying on something soft, but not too soft, and wrapped in something warm and furry. And there was a smell of apples. My stomach roared. I opened my eyes.
No, I didn’t open my eyes, I only thought I had. I was having the most ridiculous dream of my life thus far—and I’d had some pretty ridiculous dreams in my day—something out of Gormenghast or The Castle of Otranto or House of Tombs. I wanted to say to my imagination, oh, come on.
But my stomach was still roaring (I often eat in my dreams, I know you’re not supposed to) and the apples were sitting beside me with a loaf of bread, and a fantastic goblet hilariously in keeping with the general flamboyance of my immediate surroundings, so I sat up and reached for the nearest apple. And saw the silky black sleeve falling back from my arm.
I didn’t hiss as well as he had, the night he discovered the wound in my breast, but I gave it a good shot. I was so used to my eyesight behaving strangely that the flitteriness of the lighting hadn’t at first registered, but it did now: both that there was light, and that it wiggled. There was some heat source behind me; I turned around.
The fireplace, of course, was huge. It was shaped like some monster’s roaring mouth; you could see the monster’s eyes (well, two of them; I chose not to look for more) gleaming above the mantelpiece of its writhing lips (you might not think writhing lips would have any flat spots, but there were candelabra balanced up there, shaped like snakes’ bodies and dismembered human arms); each eye was bigger than my head, and gleamed red, although that may have been the firelight. No, it wasn’t the firelight.
Con, cross-legged on the floor, straight-backed, shirtless, barefoot, his head a little bowed, looked rather as he had the first time I saw him. Only not so bony. He was also less gray, washed in the ruddy firelight. And my heart beat faster when I looked at him for different reasons than it had that first time. He looked up as I turned; our eyes met. I looked away first. I picked up the apple and bit into it. So, maybe he lived near an orchard (how long had I been asleep)? That didn’t explain the bread. I wasn’t going to ask. I wasn’t going to ask about the bottle of wine on the floor next to the little table either (the table was a depressed-looking maiden in a very tight swathe of material with no visible means of support, holding the carrying surface at an implausible angle between her neck and one shoulder. Even more implausible was the angle of her breasts, which I don’t think even cosmetic surgery could achieve), which was a straightforward local chardonnay. I’d have preferred a cup of tea. A glass or two of this on top of everything else that had been happening and I’d be off my chump. But hey, I was already. Off my chump, I mean. I poured some wine gingerly into the goblet. Pity to waste it: he’d already drawn the cork. Ever the polite host. The wine seemed to go a long way down before it hit bottom, like dropping pebbles in a well.