Blood Rites (4 page)

Staring at the canvas, Helen wondered what she should paint. One scene, one emotion eclipsed all the others. Now that she saw it there was no way she could avoid creating it.

She didn’t reach for charcoal, only for prints and palette. She saw no need to sketch her work. The entire painting was fixed in her mind as surely as if the lines were already on the canvas.

She began.

A self-portrait—nothing anyone would recognize. She didn’t need to be warned to avoid that. Instead her features were distorted, a cubist puzzle of old and new pieces and parts in-between. Confused. Reluctant. Anticipating. Her face through the flames of last night’s ceremony. Her feelings from her changing a few days before.

Hours passed. The light began to dim but her new sight did not notice. She finished after dark. Without looking at her painting, she cleaned her brushes and her hands and left the workroom.

She thought she had created something magnificent. She was afraid to look and find the flaws.

On the sideboard in the main room were a bottle of wine and some glasses, kept no doubt for human friends. Without really thinking, she poured a glass. The taste astonished her, the aroma, the feel of the tannin on her tongue. When she realized she was also hungry for conventional human food, she wasn’t surprised. Unlike Stephen whose throat was too narrow to swallow solid food and whose stomach would not digest anything beyond the simplest protein, her body was outwardly human. But her soul craved more—life. Life and blood.

And she was hungry in both respects.

She showered, not minding that the house had no hot water. Cold water no longer bothered her and it cleansed just as well. Through the sound of the shower and the silence of her mind, she sensed Stephen had come home.

—It’s magnificent!—he told her. His praise held no surprise as if he’d always known she would be capable of this.

Helen dried off quickly, found the robe she’d discarded, and joined him. He sat on a work chair a few feet from her canvas still staring at it. She wanted to paint him as he looked right now, his long legs stretched out, his arms crossed, one hand with its thin, tapering fingers resting on his shoulder. His red cotton shirt and loose black pants were covered with dust and she saw a line of dirt along one pale cheek. He looked no more than twenty. Legally he was forty-one. Actually, he’d crossed a millennium two centuries ago.

“You’ll be famous,” he said.

“Is that wise?”

“Denys is famous. His paintings are displayed throughout the world. His name changes with the centuries, that’s all.”

“Is he still here?” she asked, hoping for a fellow painter’s critique.

Stephen shook his head. “He only came for the ceremony. It would be awkward if someone recognized him. Most of Chaves believes he is dead.”

“Weren’t you planning to stage your own death soon?”

Laurence and Ann were already settled into their positions here and Laurence would be named director at the annual meeting. “If it weren’t for you, I would never have come back,” he replied. Sensing her need to stay with her new family, he added, “When I leave, you don’t have to join me.”

“I know.”

But she wanted to stay with him, wanted it more than her new family or the fragile ties to the old one she had left behind in Ohio.

“Perhaps it is good that I returned,” he added. “Laurie isn’t ready to assume full director’s duties. At least not yet. He is like Denys—obsessed with his art. With Denys it is painting. With Laurie, music.”

“Or you with your church windows?”

“With my work—all of it, though the windows are the most satisfying part. I only wish the family could appoint Rachel as the firm’s director. She deserves it more than any of us.”

“Why can’t you?”

“We attract enough attention for the age of our directors. We should not break new ground with sex, yes?”

“Not yet.”

Stephen smiled. “Rachel tells me this as well. As soon as we can, we will gladly give her this honor. As for me, I can wait one more year for you to make your decision to stay or to leave with me. When you do, think of what you need, please.”

“I promise.” Helen stared at the painting again. “Maybe a year will be long enough,” she said more to herself than to Stephen.

“Are you through for today?” he asked.

“I have no idea of what I’m going to do next,” she confessed.

“Rachel sent a gift for you. Try it on while I wash off today’s grime. Then we’ll find inspiration, yes?”

“Stephen?”

“There’s nothing to fear, no reason to apologize. When the night is over, you will understand.”

He makes understanding sound like an order
, she thought as she went to their bedroom to open Rachel’s package. Inside was a tent dress of deep forest green. The soft cotton knit was lined in the bodice, cut in a deep V in the front with a woven leather belt that gave it a medieval touch. She put on her leather sandals and stared at herself in the mirror.

Tonight she would feed on some unknowing mortal, would steal his blood, leaving him with scarcely a memory. She could understand this, even accept it, if her change had been more dramatic. But outwardly she was still Helen Wells, still nineteen, shy and pathetically nervous. She bit the back of her hand in the fleshy part between thumb and forefinger and her pain was rewarded with only an indentation that quickly vanished. Yesterday, Elizabeth had offered to pull four molars so that the long sharp fangs would grow in their place. Helen had declined the half-serious offer. She didn’t want any outward changes, at least not yet.

She looked at her palm, noticing that the skin that had formed over the blisters was paler than the rest of her hand. Would every wound make her less human? Something in that thought troubled her, and as had become her habit, she gripped the black crystal pendant on the chain around her neck. Its power was beyond anything she’d experienced in the pale blue stone her grandmother had given her a few months—a lifetime—ago. That had been part of a family window. This was part of the family itself—Charles Austra’s ashes a tie to its past, its tragedies, its glory. And the tip, she noticed, had been made conveniently sharp.

III

They walked down the mountain on a narrow path leading around the glass house, the AustraGlass corporate building, the Colony where most of the workers lived. They continued taking a winding path through the trees to the isolated Portuguese mountain town of Chaves.

They did not speak as Stephen led her through narrowing streets, finally stepping down a flight of stairs into a small, crudely stuccoed café lit only by bare candles on each rough wooden table. Stephen exchanged some words in Romany with the swarthy barkeeper who took them to a seat against the back wall.

“This is as close to an Andalusian cave as you will find in all of Portugal,” Stephen said, paying a barefoot girl of not more than ten who carried over a tray containing a carafe of water, a small bottle of wine, stone mugs, and a plate of coarse wheat bread and cheese.

Helen watched her leave, then commented sadly on her poverty. “They live as they choose,” Stephen replied. “Her father owns this café. Later he will play the violin and you will know he could possess whatever he desired.”

“And he desires this?”

“His family has food, shelter, and centuries of tradition. If you gave them one of our snug comfortable houses, they would break the windows to let in the air. They are as different from the complacent Spaniards in the houses around us as we are. Feel his emotions as he plays, sense the music in his soul, his ties to his family and his land.”

“Of course,” Helen replied, puzzled at Stephen’s vehemence.

Vocal conversation ended as the gypsy began to play. He walked through the tables, gripping his violin with gnarled fingers that seemed to have curved to accommodate the violin’s neck, the tips narrowed and callused by the strings.

Stephen poured her wine, and as she sipped it, the warmth filled her. For the first time tonight, she relaxed, and let Stephen help her weave her thoughts with the old musician’s and glimpse the source of his music—his old loves, his travels, his family, his beliefs.

As Helen sat, lost in the magnificence of the songs, desire began to grow. Not for the old man but for the emotions that gave his music its life. The hunger grew with it. She fought it back but it surfaced just long enough for the gypsy to sense it, miss a note, and pause, staring at her, caught by her eyes. She nodded and he walked slowly to her and, leaning against an empty neighboring table, played a soft Andalusian love song.

When he’d finished, he whispered something to her in Portuguese. She didn’t know the words but the meaning was clear. “If I were only younger,” he’d said.

—When the time comes, give him that.—

Startled, Helen looked at her lover, then back at the gypsy who had turned to play another song for another table.

“Leave a gift for what you take,” Stephen said softly. “Then the ones you use remember only what you’ve given.”

Later the old man joined them, sharing Helen’s wine and food, telling stories about his children, all but the youngest grown and gone. As the patrons in the café dwindled to a few stubborn hangers-on, he joined Stephen and Helen outside, walking with them to the river that ran behind the café.

“You looked at me so strangely inside. What were you thinking?” Helen asked through Stephen.

“Of a woman I used to know.”

“Do I resemble her?”

“No, but there’s something about you.” His old love’s features formed in his mind, and with no real effort, Helen trapped his thought and directed it back to the day he had first made love to the woman under his wagon and the stars. Now he seemed to fall asleep where he stood and Helen lowered him slowly to the ground.

He smelled of sweat and wine but they were only undertones to the heady, perfect scent of his blood; his breathing scarcely a ripple compared to his pulse. She dreamed with him of love and youth and need, then, at the moment when she uncertainly thought she should drink, felt her pendant pressed in her hand. Stephen guided her, showing her where to cut.

At first she gagged, then relaxed as his life filled her. She became one with the man, yet still herself, viewing his life with an artist’s eye. She shared his love for his family, his music, these magnificent mountains, the distant barren planes. Her lips shook as she pressed them against the wound. Sucked. Drank. All of it felt so odd, so beautiful she would have kept on forever but Stephen laid his hands on her shoulders and carefully pulled her away. As carefully, she unwound her mind from the gypsy’s.

They left the old man sleeping on the riverbank. Later he would wake and watch the town’s lights play on the moving water, thinking of Helen and the vivid dream he’d had of his first love, never guessing that, for a moment, both had held him.

The next afternoon, Helen painted the scene most vivid in her mind—the old gypsy in his café, his twisted ancient fingers on the strings and bow, his young dark-eyed soul surrounded by the lines of age.

In the weeks that followed, Helen painted six more scenes from the old man’s life. What critics would one day call the Andalusian Series was complete.

She began directing their late-night hunts, leading Stephen through the dark and silent Chaves streets, her mind moving outward, listening to the motion behind the stuccoed walls, seeking souls best suited to an artist’s brush. They would crawl softly through open windows, stealing blood and visions. Helen lived a dozen lives in a matter of weeks, painting their desires and nightmares, their pasts and the futures they feared.

And Stephen went with her, quietly guarding her, watching her become so much a part of her new world yet so human in her enthusiasm. What he never sensed and she never revealed was her obsessive need to touch everyone she met, to open them and store their lives; and her fear that her human mind could not contain this much experience without bursting. She wanted to stop the hunts or at least slow down. She didn’t know how. People had become her addiction, a way of holding on to the part of her that was rapidly slipping away.

IV

In the weeks after her changing, she wrote long letters to her uncle and young cousins in Ohio. She described the cities, the countryside, the firm, her work with an aloof and obsessive fixation on details.

Her uncle read them to his children. Carol, older, would sit entranced by her cousin’s new life and the descriptions of the people, unfolding the hurried sketches Helen would send so she could later tape them on her bedroom wall. Alan listened more carefully, rarely smiling at anything Helen wrote. He had been closer to his cousin than any of them, and though the boy never spoke of it, Dick knew he missed her. Because Alan was a sensitive child, Dick suspected Alan also had guessed the obvious—Helen never mentioned how she felt because she wasn’t happy, at least not yet.

At St. John’s Church on Sundays, Dick would sit and, surrounded by the magnificent Austra windows Stephen had created a century ago, he would pray for her. She had moved beyond them all and praying was all he could do.

Helen’s days were as frenzied as her nights. She painted with an urgency Van Gogh would have admired and by the end of her second month in Chaves had completed a dozen major paintings.

She worked to a disciplined creative schedule. Rising in late morning, she would drink a glass of water and set to work. Hours later, she would break for a single meal.

Most any food would do though she preferred cold simple things the best. She might not have eaten at all but habit, and fear, required it. To not eat would mean one more break with her human past and an end to the unique symbiosis she had with Stephen. Though they hunted together, he could as easily live on her. She enjoyed his dependency and she didn’t want to end the bond. She had lost enough of it already.

On cloudy days, she sometimes walked down the mountain to the AustraGlass offices. If Stephen were free, she would eat lunch in his office, though it seemed he was not entirely pleased with her interruption, the merging of his public and private lives. At other times, she would visit Laurence. He made her more welcome as they sat and shared their mutual concerns about the new lives each of them had so recently acquired.