The Color of Light (31 page)

It wasn’t the shape of his eyes, she thought, or their size, or the shifting color behind the fringe of dark lashes. He looked like he could see right through her, into the darkest corners, her squirmiest secrets, and whatever those might be, he accepted it, took her side, understood completely.

“Um. Well, he taught me a lot of things.”

“Really.” He was circling the small room, his back to her. “Like what?”

He smelled of sandalwood. It wafted through the studio as he moved, a sweet counterpoint to the odor of turpentine.
Concentrate.
“Like how to talk to someone at a gallery,” she replied, with some difficulty. “How to present my work. How to come off like a professional.”
How to make tea the British way, steeping the leaves in a brown ceramic pot. That Kona coffee beans from Balducci’s are the best and need to be ground just so. How to twirl a whisk in the Cadbury’s drinking chocolate so that it gets all foamy at the top, just the way he likes it. How to hold hands with someone who’s dying. How to pretend that everything is fine when the whole world is falling down around my head.

He turned, smiled at her. “Those
are
useful things to know. Maybe I’ve been wrong about these post-modernist blokes.”

He had purposely stayed away from her since Thanksgiving. It was just too risky. Being near her made him throb with all kinds of hunger, made him want to throw her on the tufted couch and pull off her clothes. He filled his nights with balls and benefits, and the women who attended them.

He caught a glimpse of her outside CBGB’s late Saturday night, where he had come after one thing or another at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He melted into a doorway before she could get a good look, but she saw him, he knew it; she stared his way for a long moment before turning
back to her friends. He’d drawn deeper into the shadows until she moved on, his hand over the mouth of a pink-haired girl who was dozing off to a drug-enhanced sleep on his shoulder, just to be safe.

With the night growing colder, and a sharp wind biting through the flaps of his overcoat, he had tried to puzzle it out. Over the decades, he’d known hundreds of women. Women more beautiful than Tessa, more educated, more experienced, more accomplished, more exotic. And yet she was all he could think of, all he could see when he closed his eyes. Making mindless small talk at endless cocktail parties, he smiled down at poised and polished faces and wondered if she was working late in her studio. He couldn’t explain it; something about the girl felt like home.

She was frowning at her own face in the mirror, her head tipped to one side. He glanced at her drawing. On paper, she was unsmiling, her expression apprehensive, doubtful.

“You’re prettier than that,” he said.

She smiled politely. He could tell she thought that he was trying to be nice. She turned the charcoal stick lengthways to lay in a shadow for the side of her face.

“We saw you in the
Post,”
she said. “There were pictures of you on Page Six. The opening of the Matisse Exhibition. You were with a girl in a white dress.”

“Oh, yes. Oleander Haier.”

“She’s beautiful.” Meaning.
Is she your girlfriend?

“She’s a big donor.”

She erased a smudge. “Oh, I see,” she said.

“Tessa,” he said.

She turned, looked up at him. He leaned down and kissed her pink lips, her raspberry mouth, his hand resting lightly on the side of her face, and it was just as he knew it would be, a blurry rush of warmth and light. The part of him that had once been an ordinary man, with ordinary hopes of coming home at night to a pretty girl who looked at him as if he could change the world stirred, came roaring back to life.

He pulled away, retreated to a safe distance. She was staring at him, her mouth slightly ajar.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

“I,” she said shakily, then lapsed into mortified silence. Not because he had kissed her, but because she had liked it, she wanted it to go on and on, she wanted to take his face in her hands and kiss him back.

“I’m
—
it’s just that…”

“I know,” he put his hands up, stopped her. “I know. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“No, you don’t know,” she said helplessly, her eyes wide and stunned. “I wanted you to. I liked it. I liked it a lot. Too much. It’s just that I…Lucian…”

He nodded vigorously. So good, so devoted, so loyal. If only Lucian Swain deserved it. “I understand. Really. You don’t have to explain yourself. I don’t know what came over me.”

“I should go home,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” he said automatically. “Let me put you in a cab.”

He held her coat for her, a ratty, tatty heathered thing that smelled like a goat and looked like she had gotten it off a dead man. As she raised her hair up over the collar, there was a flash of white neck, a whiff of her blackberry scent, and he closed his eyes, shuddering with the wanting of her.

She reached up, turned off the reflector lamps. “Oh, Mr. Sinclair. I meant to tell you. I asked my grandmother whether she ever knew a Sofia Wizotsky.”

“What did she say?”

“That was when my grandfather had his heart attack.”

“God. I’m sorry to have had any part in that.”

She shouldered her backpack. “Turns out my grandfather is not Abe Moss, after all. He changed his name during the war to escape being drafted into the Russian army. His real name is Wizotsky.”

Rafe stood rooted to the spot. “I’m sorry,” he said, very slowly, and very deliberately. “Could you repeat that, please?”

“My grandfather’s last name is Wizotsky,” she said, staring at him.

“That can’t be,” he protested. “It can’t be. They all died in the war. I checked the lists for years. There were no survivors.” Suddenly, he needed a smoke. Panicking, he patted himself down, ransacking his pockets until he found a stale cigarette jammed in a lining. Clenching it between his lips, he put an arm out to steady himself.

“Let me get you a chair,” she said quickly, turning to grab her shabby office chair.

With the lights off, the floor-to-ceiling windows became mirrors, reflecting the objects in the room in their black depths like some evil alternate reality. She frowned at the reflection in the window. Something wasn’t right. True, the hour was late, the lighting was poor, and she was very tired. She closed her eyes, then looked again.
Trick of the light,
she told herself.
I’m in the wrong spot. It’s the angle.

She could see herself as clearly as if she were looking into a mirror, shadows under her eyes, hair frizzed out to there. She could make out Gracie’s drawings, the lamps, the couch, the new table. But Raphael Sinclair, standing right behind her
—
well
, he just wasn’t there.

The truth came to her all at once. As she backed away from him, she knocked her shin against the chair. It rotated in lazy circles behind her.

“What
are
you?” she whispered.

Rafe snapped back to the present. Tessa’s eyes were darting from his face to the window, then back again, and with a sickening swiftness, he understood.
The windows. I forgot about the bleeding windows.
With a dizzying sensation of overwhelming inevitability, he understood that the game was up, the part of the story where he was a harmless visiting benefactor was over, and the next chapter already begun.

“I think you know exactly what I am,” he said, crushing the cigarette beneath his shoe. “Come on, Tessa. You must have heard the rumors.”

He walked slowly towards her, feeling the rising tide of her fear as she backed away. “Is that what this has been about all along? You just want to…” She blanched a deathly white.

He stopped a safe distance away. “To drink your blood? No. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m a wealthy man. This is New York. I can buy anything I need.”

She drew a ragged breath, not believing him.

“Come on, Tessa. If I was going to harm you, it would have already happened by now. God knows, I’ve had plenty of opportunity.”

She mulled that over. Curiously, now. “So…you’re really a vampire?”

“Yes,” he said.

“And you have to drink blood to live.”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’m going to give away your secret?”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

“Why not? Aren’t you afraid of what people would say? Of what people would do?”

“This is New York City. Here, you can be anyone you want to be.”

She thought about that for a while. “Does anyone else know?”

“A few people.”

“Is Levon one of them?”

“No.”

“Whit?”

“I don’t think so. Though he has his suspicions.”

She scoured her memory for all the vampire lore she had ever heard. “Are you really afraid of the cross?”

“No, not particularly.”

“What about garlic?”

“A mild deterrent.”

“Holy water?”

He rolled his eyes.

A thought occurred to her. “Are you really immortal?”

“Yes. Well, to a point. I can still die. Stake through the heart, sunlight and all that.”

“I don’t like sunlight either,” she confessed. “If I’m in the sun for more than thirty seconds, I burn.”

He smiled. The color was returning to her face. She was already accepting it.

“Do you have to sleep in a coffin filled with dirt from your homeland?”

“I sleep on a very nice, very thick, extra-soft pillow-top Stearns and Foster mattress, thank you very much.”

“Do you have demon brides and evil minions? Clayton wanted to know.”

“No. At least, none that I know of.”

“Have you ever hurt anyone?”

He hesitated, nodded.

“Killed anyone?”

He nodded again, slower this time. That shook her. She went white again.

“But I don’t do that anymore,” he added hastily. “I have to drink blood. I don’t have to be a killer.”

“Oh,” she said.

Her eyes were wide and terrified. Terrified of
him.
It made him ache to see it. He wished things could be back the way they were five minutes ago, when he was the mysterious and very sexy founder of the school paying her a private late night visit instead of a vicious killer promising not to hurt her. The thrall. He would use the thrall.

“Look at me, Tessa,” he said softly. “Look in my eyes.”
Forget everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve heard.

But she was watching him closely, her eyebrows knitting together, flying apart, alive with questions, afraid of the answers. With a sigh, he gave up. It went that way once in a while; some people were just immune to it.

Well,
he thought grimly.
In for a penny, in for a pound. No way out but through.

“You must have more questions,” he said. “Go on.”

“Is it true that you don’t have a heartbeat?”

He reached for her hand. She didn’t try to pull away. He peeled off the glove, slipped her fingers under his jacket, laid her hand over his heart and held it there. Her eyes clouded with horrified wonder, then, affectingly, tears.

“How did you… when did you become a…”

He fixed his gaze on her, so full of unrelenting sorrow, that despite her worst fears, her heart fluttered, just a little.

“I was in art school in Paris,” he said. “There was this marvelous girl. She was kind and gifted and beautiful, from a town on the far eastern border of Poland, where her family had a tea importing company. On the night she married another man, I went out to drown my sorrows. I picked up the wrong girl. She left me dead on the cobblestones outside a bloody bucket called The Lamb and Jackal in the center of London. The date was August 23, 1939.”

“Which one was she?” she asked. “Sofia, I mean. The marvelous girl or the vampire?”

“The marvelous girl,” he said.

“What happened to her?” she said. “To Sofia.”

Somehow, he had not been prepared for this. He turned his head away; she saw him swallow hard, saw a muscle in his jaw jump. “She died, I think. In Auschwitz. In the winter of 1943.”

“Oh my God,” she whispered.

“You remind me of her,” he said to her reflection in the window. “Every day. Since the first time I saw you.”

Across the street, the lights at the Astor Theatre advertising Blue Man Group flickered and went out. Four storeys below, the metal shutters clanked and rattled as the Korean deli closed down for the night. Goth girls in high heels laughed together as they clacked past the school and on down Lafayette Street towards the clubs. On the fourth floor of the American Academy of Classical Art, it was quiet enough to hear the ticking of a clock on the wall in the sculptors’ studio, quiet enough to hear the creaks of the old factory building settling further into the bedrock underlying Manhattan.

She picked up her drawing board and tucked it under her arm, bringing him with a wrench back to the present. He glanced at his watch. One o’clock. “Let me put you in a taxi,” he said.

He followed behind her to the end of the floor, her bright curls bouncing with every step. In the elevator, he was careful not to crowd her. When they reached the ground floor, she scurried though the lobby and out to the street, hungry for the safety of public spaces. The whorls of her hair whipped and churned as if they were in torment, making her look like an anguished Medusa.

He could see that her tatty coat was no defense against the sharp wind, and it made him want to put his arms around her. Instead, he stepped out into the street, put out his hand. A taxi crossed three lanes, screeched to a stop beside them.

He turned to her. He had not stopped to close his coat, and it flapped and billowed in the icy wind. His arms opened wide, in unconscious imitation of the marble angel that stood at the foot of the double staircase in his townhouse. “Tessa,” he said. “It doesn’t define me. It’s not who I am.”

She nodded, her face half-hidden in her scarf.

He opened the cab door for her. She slid onto the leather seat. He knocked on the driver’s window, handed him some bills, told him where to go. Then he closed the door and stepped back onto the curb.

She rolled down her window. “Say,” she said abruptly. “Are you going to the April Huffman opening on Thursday night?”