Blood Rites (42 page)

When he woke, he felt sharper than he had in days. The storm he encountered when he’d neared Detroit didn’t phase him. He’d been prepared for trouble at the border but the guards were sluggish, their rain-soaked shirts sticking to their backs as they ran outside and motioned him through with no more than a glance at his forged license.

It should always be this easy, he thought. Maybe, now that Helen’s other lover was gone, it could be. Maybe she’d need him the way every creature in hiding needs its front.

He ought to stop for food, he thought. He ought to get a bottle. A carton of cigarettes.

Later. Later. The urgency of her held him. He drove straight to her—his love, his last home.

The warehouse doors were still locked. Russ thought it an encouraging sign, but when he swung them open, and swept a flashlight over the place she had lain, he saw that his prize had vanished, leaving cracked trapdoors beside their frames, a pile of bloody ropes, and a pair of broken handcuffs on the floor.

She had gone! Russ screamed his rage, the long wail of a hungry predator deprived its meat.

Where? He backed out of the dark building. He had money. A car. Domie’s men might already be on his trail. He had to go-

“—Russ Lowell.—”

“What?” He heard her voice, felt her in his mind, soft and weak and inviting.

“—Come to me.—”

She could have run. Instead she’d waited for him!

But he was no fool. When he faced her he had better be prepared. He rushed to the car for his gun and went back inside. Playing the flashlight beam across the dark corners, he finally found her.

“Look at me, Russ Lowell. Am I beautiful?”

Beautiful? The word applied to other women, not to her. The beam revealed a naked body paler than he remembered, leaner and more delicate. As shameless as she had been in his dreams, she held out her arms.

He responded with an involuntary step forward, then another. He raised the gun, but though he knew he should fire it, he only stood grinning stupidly while she closed the distance between them and lifted it from his hands.

“Lock the doors, Russ Lowell. I need you and I’ve waited too long already.”

He rushed to do as she asked, then turned wanting to touch her, to kiss her, but she was no longer behind him. He scanned the room with the flashlight beam, saw a pale shadow, and aimed the light at Donna Crawford’s face. The beam wavered from his sudden fear and he focused it again, this time on Mary Evans, the short stiff braids and skintight jeans, the cigarette dangling from her pouted lips.

Tricks. His mind was playing tricks. Not enough sleep. Not enough for days. That must be it. He aimed the beam where the figure had been standing a moment before but it had vanished like the first dream of night.

“Russ Lowell.”

Her voice. He swung the light across the room—Beverly Fields, her blue parka open, the yellow angora sweater tight across her breasts. He blinked. Nancy Potts. He bellowed and started running toward the vision, his feet slipping on the blood-soaked floor, his body falling over the pile of ropes.

Rolling over, he started to stand.

A board creaked. He aimed the light up at the approaching shadow.

Maria Truzzi in her eggshell satin wedding dress hovered a dozen feet away, her eyes dark and understanding, filled with tears for the life he had stolen.

Russ was the one trembling now as her ghost moved toward him. He tried to slide back but his feet no longer obeyed. “I’m sorry,” he said without conviction, as if the words would make her specter vanish. “I’m sorry!” he said it louder now, the apology of a brutish child caught trying to flee. “I’m sorry,” he said a third time, almost contrite now. He would have lowered the light and hoped she would vanish but his hands would not move.

The face shifted as it had in his dreams, the hair lightening, the white satin dress slowly dissolving.

Helen Wells.

She knelt beside him, running a hand down the side of his face. “We’ve waited too long already,” she repeated. The light was only inches from her face when she smiled and he saw the long upper fangs, sharp and ready for their first kill.

“Do you like them?” she asked. “I willed them for you.”

He began to laugh, the quick hysterical sound of the doomed, as she slowly unbuttoned his shirt.

The sun was just rising when her teeth finally found their mark. Though she’d been famished, she’d taken her time.

A light fell over the warehouse floor. Helen looked up and saw Patrick standing beside the door, watching her, adult enough now to know he must not disturb her.

“Papa said . . .” the boy began, then halted, unable to explain how his father had made him wait in the car until she had claimed her enemy and would be free to allow Patrick to stay or leave.

She touched Patrick’s mind and could not discern even the hint of a suggestion there. This decision was hers alone to make.

The world held such barbaric uncertainty. Human, immortal, she stretched out her hand and motioned for her son to come and feast.

His doctor had given Dick three weeks to make a decision.

Two days past deadline, his ankle in a cast, his face still in bandages, Dick sat beside Judy in the doctor’s office and said that he’d be willing to do whatever was necessary to hold on to life. His doctor began with a simple blood test, then a hurried series of X rays. What he saw astonished him.

“The growths have shrunk. Spontaneous remissions are rare in cases like this but it appears that your body is fighting the cancer on its own. I would like to redo the bloodwork, though. There’s something else we want to check out. Not anything to be concerned about, so don’t worry. Now if you’ll sign a consent form . . .” Then the doctor stopped speaking because Dick was hugging Judy and Judy was hugging Dick and no one was listening to him at all. When he had his patient’s attention, the doctor repeated his request.

“Hell, no,” Dick said, and as Judy grabbed the lab report from his file, he limped out of the office.

Judy waited until Dick had gone to bed to call Elizabeth and share the good news. Last week’s near tragedy had dulled Judy’s unease around Stephen, and as she talked to Elizabeth they began making tentative plans for a joint trip north. She had to visit her husband’s namesake, she told Elizabeth, and see if he was as beautiful as his brother.

Elizabeth laughed as she hung up the phone. If Judy thought Patrick was beautiful, Dickey would steal her heart. She felt a spreading warmth inside as she thought of her young cousins, considering them in a manner she would have found terrifying even a few months ago.

Paul had already gone to bed. Elizabeth undressed and looked down at him thinking that what she had suspected had been true all along—the ancient taboo against sharing blood with a human lover, like so many of the Old One’s other prohibitions, had been little more than a lie. Tomorrow she would write Ann and Rachel, both of them caught in doomed affairs, and convey the wonderful news.

But tonight she would give a gift to Paul—a full human lifetime, perhaps more. She would form a new bond between them and begin to teach him to control his pain, to monitor his body and stave off those diseases that were already taking root in him.

She sensed her time to conceive was approaching, and though the end of her life still seemed vague and distant, she hoped death would seek her soon. She had said good-bye to too many lovers. Paul would be the last. With luck, she would not live without him very long.

As the weeks passed, Dick continued to feel better than he had in twenty years. Then gradually, so gradually at first that he didn’t even realize it was happening, the fatigue returned bringing with it the heavy nagging pain. He made a second trip to Canada at Christmastime; three more the following year. Each time, he would feed on Stephen, taking as much blood as Stephen dared give him. Then he would lay in the bed that had once been Hillary’s, listening to his heart work overtime, trying to pump blood that flowed thick as molasses in his veins. When its throbbing subsided, he would fly home to a few more months of health before he needed to make the trip again.

One evening he came home from work and discovered Elizabeth and Paul had come for a visit. Paul looked younger than Dick had recalled, and as the architect stood to shake his hand, Dick noted that he moved with greater ease. “I can visit whenever you like and help you just as well as Stephen,“ Elizabeth told him.

“Stephen already made the sacrifice. I can’t ask the same of you.”

Elizabeth stood, taking both his hands. Her warmth filled him as she silently shared her gratitude. “No sacrifice I make can equal what I owe you for what you have shown to my family. I want to help you, do you see?“

Dick understood Paul’s sudden health but he didn’t want Elizabeth’s help. He wanted Stephen; the call of blood.

He lived five extra years. He lived them well.

He died in his sleep. The family sensed how hard he struggled at the end.

I still keep chocolate creams in the cold box. I eat two a day, at night and in the morning, letting them dissolve in my mouth before I swallow. Small luxuries are the hardest to abandon.

Other changes are wonderful. I no longer feel the nagging pain of a human body. It is in harmony now with my mind and my soul. I think that if I had not been prepared for the sudden physical changes, I would have thought I died. Then as now, my body hardly seems to surround my soul at all.

My skin is paler and smoother. And when the winter winds are silent, I climb to the open ridge above the cabin where I can look down on it and up to the stars. The twins are asleep, the children growing inside me rest. I sense Stephen moving silently up the ridge looking for me. I open my mind and call him to me. The shadows of the moon turn my hair silver and our naked bodies to liquid marble. I need not will my body to feel for it feels so perfectly—his hands, his lips.

I no longer regret the human life I have lost.

I would take it from everyone I love.