“It wasn’t bitten off, damn it,” Crawford said. “It was shot off.”
Keats smiled. “I’m sure it seemed that way. Try telling that to the neffers, though—the people you’ll be meeting who live the neffer life.”
More mystified than ever, Crawford drank some of the syrupy sherry and then set the glass down hard. “What,” he said levelly, ignoring a faintly echoing groan from the darkness behind him, “is that?”
Keats spread his hands and opened his mouth to speak, then after a moment exhaled and grinned. “A sexual perversion, actually. More often than not, anyway. According to the police, it’s a taste for congress with certain sorts of deformed people, like Barker there with his big jaw. According to its devotees, though, it’s the pursuit of … succubae, Lamiae.”
Crawford was both unhappy and amused. “So I’m the sort who’d mistake Barker for a beautiful female vampire, am I? Goddammit, John—”
“No, you’re not one of the pursuers.” He sighed. “The problem is that there aren’t any pure-bred lamiae, pure-bred vampires, anymore.” He squinted at Crawford. “Hardly any, that is. And so people nearly always make do with remote descendants of that race. And it’s generally some sort of … tumor … that distinguishes such. The tumor is the evidence—the substance, in fact—of the kinship.”
“And just knowing that some person, like your man Barker there, is descended from Lilith or somebody is enough to make him irresistible to these deviates? I swear to you, John—”
Keats overrode him. “The thing that blocked that pistol shot this morning was no half-breed. That was the most … poisonously beautiful example I’ve ever seen, and there are wealthy neffers that would get you a baronetcy and a manor and lands in exchange for just half an hour with it, even if they knew it would kill them.” He shook his head almost enviously. “How on earth did you meet it?”
“Hell, man, you were there; it jumped out of that dead lad’s throat, you said.”
“No, it was able to use him as a … a channel, because he was one of the people with a trace of their stony blood—or, conceivably, a victim of one such—but it came because it knew you.” He stopped, staring up into the darkness, then went on in a whisper. “Knew you and felt some obligation to you, as if you were … an actual member of the family, not just prey, like what the patrons of the Galatea would love to be. How did it happen? When did she bite off—” He smiled. “Shoot off your finger?”
“I never saw the thing before, honestly. And the finger was shot off by some man in Sussex. He didn’t look like a vampire.”
Keats looked skeptical.
“Damn it, I’m telling the truth! And how do you happen to know all this stuff, anyway? Are you a snarfie?”
The young man’s smile was like smiles Crawford had seen by firelight aboard battle-locked ships at night, on the faces of young sailors who had survived much already and hoped to survive until dawn. “I guess maybe I am. I’m told I have the look, and the old habitués here think I’m very priggish to avoid this place, not give them the benefit of my situation. But if I am one, it was a consequence of my birth, and no choice of mine; I’m a … what, a pursuee rather than a pursuer. I’m pretty certain you are too.”
Keats stood up. “Ready to go? Come on, then. This is a good place to be out of.” He threw down some coins and started toward the ladder closest to the distant gray glow that was the front windows.
A groan echoed hollowly from the other direction, from the dark depths of the place; glancing that way, Crawford thought he saw a cluster of figures around the foot of a cross, and he hesitantly took a step toward them.
Keats caught him by the arm. “No, St. Michael,” he said softly. “Anyone who’s here is here voluntarily.”
After a few seconds Crawford shrugged and followed him.
Lamplight fell across Crawford’s eyes as he blundered past one table, and the elderly man sitting at it stared at Crawford for a moment—and then bit one of his fingers, struggled out of his seat and followed Crawford all the way to the door, whining like a begging dog and waving his bleeding hand enticingly.
Back up at street level, Crawford’s nervousness only increased. He was fairly sure Josephine hadn’t followed them from the hospital, but she might well have given up on the idea of personal revenge and gone to the authorities, who could easily find out where he lived from the hospital records. Sheriffs might be waiting for him at the Dean Street house right now.
He was wondering how fully he could trust Keats when Keats spoke. “Since you haven’t even referred to it, I guess you knew the nurse.”
Deciding to trust the boy brought no feeling of relief. “Yes. She’s my sister-in-law. She thinks I murdered my wife Saturday night.” He peered ahead nervously. “Could we walk along the bankside to the west?”
Keats had his hands in his pockets and was staring at the pavement, and for several seconds he didn’t answer. Then he squinted up at Crawford; it wasn’t quite a smile. “Very well,” he said quietly. “We could have a beer at Kusiak’s—
it’s your round, and I have the feeling I’d better get it while I can.”
They dodged across High Street between the jostling wagons, slowing again when they were under the overhang of the houses on the west side of the street. “She seems fairly sure of it,” Keats remarked when they were walking down one of the narrow streets that paralleled the river. “Your sister-in-law, that is.” The old housefronts to their right were bright with sunlight, and Crawford led Keats along on the left side of the street.
“Everybody is. That’s how I lost my finger, actually—somebody shot at me while I was running.” Crawford shook his head. “We, she and I, were in a locked room with a tiny window, and when I woke up in the morning, Julia—that’s my wife, or was—was—”
Abruptly he was crying quietly as he walked along, not even sure why, for he knew now that he hadn’t really loved Julia; he quickly turned his face toward the doors and brick walls and windows that were passing at his left, hoping that somehow Keats wouldn’t notice. Behind one of the windows a fat merchant met his tear-blurred gaze and wheeled around in alarm to look at the far doorway of his office, evidently supposing that Crawford had seen something lamentable behind him.
“Not tuberculosis, I gather,” said Keats in a casual tone, looking ahead attentively for Kusiak’s. “More often than not it’s tuberculosis, or something so close to it that the doctors don’t bother to look further. That’s how my mother went.” He was walking faster, and Crawford had to blink his eyes and hurry to keep up. “It had been coming on for years. I … knew it was my fault even when I was a child—when I was five I stood outside her bedroom door with an old sword, trying to keep out a thing I’d dreamt about. It wasn’t the fact of its being a sword so much, I remember, as the fact that it was iron. Didn’t do any good, though.” He stopped, and when he wheeled around there were tears in his eyes too. “So don’t assume that I agree with your sister-in-law,” he said angrily. Crawford nodded and sniffed. “Right.”
“What are your plans?”
Crawford shrugged. “I thought I could become a surgeon again under the name Frankish—my real name is Crawford, and I’m—”