The Last Vampire (34 page)

“Hey,” he said.

As she unlocked first the ankle cuffs, then the wrists, he watched her. She did not like his eyes, hadn’t liked them from the beginning.

“Well,” he said as he rubbed his wrists, “that feels a whole lot better.”

She backed away from him as she would from a spreading cobra, with care and sick fear.

He smiled.

She had been made what she was by Miriam. She was thus weak and vulnerable, the victim of inevitable imperfections. But he had been made by nature, and there was something she did not trust about nature. Perhaps it was because of something she had seen in her scientific work, that nature did not appear to be blind. The wildness of nature, the ruthlessness, was the outcome of thought.

Because of this, no matter how tame he seemed, how compliant, how much at ease, she would fear him and hate him. She knew a secret about nature, and she sensed that Paul Ward was an outcome of this secret. Nature, she knew, had a great and terrible mind.

T
he vampire was partial to him, so he would use that. Every hour that passed, he was closer to the moment when he could kill them all.

She loved him, but they were damn careful anyway. They watched him on video cameras, every move he made, and they kept the infirmary locked. His approach was to go along with it. He didn’t even try to get out. He sat up in his bed reading
War and Peace
and listening to endless opera CDs.

He ate lots of rare steak, which had always been his comfort food. Sometimes he asked for Thai cuisine. Everything he was given was beautifully cooked. He wondered if it was also drugged. With the steaks would routinely come bottles of wine worth thousands of dollars. Château Lafite-Rothschild 1945, Château Latour 1936.

He smiled at his captors. He was affable. When Miriam came in, shining and beautiful, he let her kiss him, as much as he could bear. When she put his hand on her belly, which she imagined even now to be a little distended, he would smile at her.

“As much as he hates the Keepers,” Sarah said to Miriam, “when he found out what he was, you’d think there would have been more of a reaction.”

“Sarah, the man is in love. He’s realized that he’s one of us. He sees the moral situation. Even his agency sees it. His hate is dying. That’s why he’s so quiet. It’s a very thoughtful time in his life.”

“I just think you need to be very damn cautious when you let him out of there.”

“Oh, come on. You’re too careful.”

“I thought you were the one who was too careful, Miri.”

“He’s my husband and I want him in my bed. I want to have him in me again, Sarah.”

“That’s unwise. This whole thing is unwise.”

“What do you think, Leo?”

“I think he’s a really cool looking guy.”

On the afternoon of the release, they came down with a cake. They made a party of it with a thirty-year-old Yquem and the Lane cake, made after a sumptuous eighteenth-century recipe, with macerated fruits and cognac. Miriam joked by carrying a cherry to Paul in her mouth. He took it with his teeth and chewed it sensuously.

Miriam gave him the run of the house, all except the attic.

Sarah waited and watched. She tried to enlist Leo, but Leo was little more concerned than Miriam. Leo was a young fool, in Sarah’s opinion. Sarah noticed a subtle change in her own personality. A certain realization came upon Sarah that was similar, she thought, to the kind of assumption that comes to dominate a man’s mind in a terrible battle. It was the assumption that there would be no escape, that what Miriam was doing was so foolish that it could not lead to anything but destruction.

How could it be, though, that somebody who had clawed their way through so much life and so much danger to have a baby would, upon becoming pregnant, put at risk both her own life and that of the child?

Miri was a dear and familiar friend. Sarah knew her every mood, the meaning of every expression that flickered in her eyes, had lived with her in deepest intimacy for two decades and more. She knew Miri’s fears and her joys, had drawn her to extremes of sexual intensity and observed her with a lover’s fascinated dispassion as she lost herself in pleasures. She provided friendship and love and loyalty. But Sarah thought now that they had come to an extreme edge, a strange country of the Keeper mind into which her understanding could not penetrate.

There was only one conclusion to be drawn from her actions: Deeply, profoundly, Miriam wanted to be destroyed as much as the rest of her race did. They had a death wish, otherwise why would beings so brilliant and wise be so easy to kill? The Keepers might not know human science, but they knew the human soul, and that was the key knowledge, what was required to defend yourself.

That they did not defend themselves was, as far as Sarah was concerned, an act of willful self-immolation. They must have recognized this in themselves eons ago, probably as soon as man became intelligent. This was when they began to experiment with melding the two species. They had been trying to escape from their own nature.

Miriam looked forward to feeding, though. She relished her kills, especially the ones that put up an interesting fight.

Every time Miriam stood close to Paul, Sarah waited, her insides cringing, for the end to come. Didn’t she see what he was — a loaded gun, a trap ready to spring?

Eventually, Sarah and Miriam had to feed, and nothing she said could convince Miriam to make her meal of Paul Ward.

So they did it at the Veils. There must be absolutely no chance that Paul would see. At least Miriam agreed to that. So far she had not allowed him back to the club. That, also, meant that she had not yet become a complete fool.

They left Leo with him. Privately, Sarah instructed her to carry the gun, and to never get closer than twenty-five feet to him. If she saw the least sign of his trying to leave the house, or if he tried to come too close to her, or even to use the telephone, she was to blow his brains out.

Sarah hoped that it would happen. They would deal with Miriam’s fury. But Miriam threatened Leo — if you kill him, I will kill you. Wound him if you must, but do not kill.

When they came back after taking two Korean businessmen, they had to sleep their deep and helpless sleep.

Sarah told Leo, “If he makes the slightest move toward our bedroom, kill him. No matter what she says.”

“But — ” “I’ll deal with her! You’ll be in no danger.” “Sarah, can you think of any reason
not
to kill him?” “No.”

“What about the fact that Miri loves him?”

“She doesn’t know her own mind right now — and her name is Miriam, not Miri.”

“You call her Miri.”

“And you don’t.”

Despite the many tensions, life in the household had returned to something approaching its normal pattern, at least on the surface.

Sarah and Leo managed the Veils. Miriam went occasionally. Paul kept asking to go, and every time he did, Miri was a little more tempted, and Sarah trusted him even less.

She and Miri played their music. Miri began teaching Leo piano, then took her on as a student in a way Sarah had always wanted but had never gotten.

Leo began to receive a classical Keeper education. It began with the Ennead of Ra, the first tier of the Egyptian pantheon of Gods. She started to learn spoken Prime. Sarah doubted Leo’s ability to learn the written language, but Miriam was optimistic.

Sarah was surprised that Leo was such a good student. If Miri had wanted a tabula rasa who did not need reeducation because she had nothing to unlearn, she had chosen well. What was amazing to Sarah was that Leo turned out to be a very quick learner. She was actually quite brilliant.

Miriam had picked her out one night at the club with a mere glance. They had been looking for somebody else to blood. They needed more personnel to keep ahead of the burgeoning of their business affairs. Sarah had assumed that they would take a man. But then, almost as an afterthought, Miriam said, “That one.” Leo had been in the Japanese garden with some friends, calling on Rudi’s skills to get them really, really high.

Slowly, Leo had left her old life behind. Now, all that remained of it was an occasional nervous visit to her parents, and soon even that would end.

Sarah knew that she was being prepared for something, and she came to think that it probably involved her own eventual removal from grace.

So Sarah was waiting for the coming of Leo. She was also waiting for Paul Ward to take whatever action he was planning. She was waiting, in other words, for the end of her world.

*    *    *

When she had been with Eumenes, Miriam had been too young to understand the rarity of happiness. She treasured it now. The overriding reality was that she had a baby in her, her very own baby after all these long years. The trouble was, her husband was turned against himself — a Keeper who had come to hate his own kind. True, he didn’t have life eternal and he didn’t feed on blood, but he was still a Keeper, and she was still working on him. She longed to draw him into the magic ring of her joy, and she thought that she could. What she was planning was a seduction. Back in the old days, Keeper men had found her hard to resist. She had lost none of her ability to seduce.

But that was all for later. First, there was a door she had to pass through, an essential door. As the days had passed, she had grown steadily more uneasy about it. She’d wanted to roll back the days, to prevent them from dawning. But they did dawn, one and then another, and her baby grew.

Now, Sarah told her, the baby would be sufficiently developed to see. In the way of Keeper mothers, she already knew that she had a son. But what was his condition? It could be that he was deformed. Nobody could be sure what would happen when a Keeper was fertilized by one of these exotics like Paul.

At noon on the appointed day, Sarah came to her. She was in the library teaching Leo. Sarah said, “It’s ready.” She smiled down at her. These days Sarah was very warm and very grave. There was about her a sadness that Miriam found distressing to be near. Sarah thought that their life together had come to its burnt-out end.

She thought wrong, of course. She must midwife, then become a pediatrician and gynecologist for another species. Sarah thought that Leo was replacing her. She could not understand that Miriam’s needs were expanding.

The group of them went down to the infirmary together.

Sarah had bought the very finest new ultrasound machine, so the baby would appear almost as clear as a photograph.

Miriam got up on the examination table. Sarah started the machine, which made a high, whining sound.

“Is it radioactive?” Miriam asked nervously.

“Not at all. It sends out sound waves, then reads the reflections. It’s entirely benign, but just to be safe, we’ll only use it for a couple of minutes.”

Miriam lay waiting, her eyes closed, her body trembling. If it was bad news, she did not think that she had the emotional reserves to bear it. She did not think she could live past the loss of this child, but she didn’t know how to die.

She felt the cool instrument sliding on her stomach, which was ever so slightly larger now . . . or was that her imagination?

She put her hand out and Paul took it. They had kissed a few times recently, but he was still being very cool. He wasn’t dangerous to her, though, not since he’d understood that he was partly a Keeper. At least, this was her opinion.

“Miri, look.”

There on the screen was a ghost. It had a small mouth and tiny, still-unformed hands.

She opened her eyes. She stared at the image on the screen. She always had trouble decoding pictures generated by machines, and at first all she saw were red smears.

“There are the hands,” Sarah said, pointing to a slightly less smeary part of the screen.

“Oh, hey,” Paul said, “that’s my boy.”

Miriam still didn’t see . . . and then she did. A tiny face swam into focus. “He’s — oh, he’s
beautiful
.”

Paul asked, “Does he have teeth?”

“His mouth is human,” Sarah said.

Miriam felt a tingle of concern. “How will he feed, Sarah?”

“Not like you do.” Sarah had tested the blood of the fetus. He was ninety percent Keeper.

“Won’t he starve?”

“Miri, he has what look like normal human organs and something close to pure Keeper blood. He’s going to live — well, maybe forever.”

“As a predator,” Paul said.

“I don’t see any evidence of that,” Sarah replied. “This child has an entirely human mouth and organs.”

“How can you tell? It’s a tiny embryo.”

“I can tell because I’m trained to tell.”

“You’re a gynecologist?”

“I’m a gerontologist. But you’re talking basic medicine.”

Paul’s face went white. He sucked his cheeks in, a sign in a human being of great rage. Miriam watched him, her heart on a shivering edge. She wanted so to love him, but if he threatened her baby, well, she would have to do what she had to do.

When he spoke, his words were knives. “It’s important to me, Sarah.”

“I see a human embryo.”

“Damned, damned
important!
” Miriam tried to conceal her smile. In that instant, she had understood something new about Paul Ward.

Leo, fearing his tone, dragged her ever-present pistol out of her belt. “Okay,” she said, her gum cracking. She didn’t like Paul any more than Sarah did. She wasn’t afraid for Miriam, though, not like Sarah was. Her concern was that Paul was a rival for Miriam’s interest and affection.

Paul looked at the gun. “Thank you,” he said.

Sarah, who had been examining the embryo, was the first to see an extraordinary phenomenon. For some moments, she watched, her attention captured by what she was seeing. She moved her hand back and forth in front of the monitor. She found it difficult to believe what she was seeing.

Sarah was a scientist. She didn’t believe in the supernatural. She only half believed in the human soul that Miri was always talking about. “You have souls, we don’t.” Uh-huh. “You humans are the true immortals.” Okay.

But this was something very extraordinary. This was a genuine miracle, unfolding before her scientist’s eyes. “Look,” she said, her voice gone soft with awe.