The Last Vampire (8 page)

When she realized that there was no escape, she let out an involuntary growl that made the woman standing ahead of her whip round, her face pale, her eyes practically popping out. Miriam’s whole instinct now was to kill. Had she not applied her powerful will, she might have torn the creature’s throat out.

Quelling her damned instincts, she forced a smile onto her face. She’d play her last card — give them her emergency Cheryl Blackmore driver’s license and claim to have lost her passport. Maybe before they discovered that Cheryl Blackmore was a long-dead resident of Nebraska and most certainly did not rate a passport, she would have found some means of escape.

The three policemen arrived — and began chatting together. They were laughing, completely at their ease, taking no notice whatsoever of her. They’d been talking on their radios merely to arrange their coffee break.

Now, she thought, laughing to herself, there was the old mankind, the gentle, sloppy, genial humanity that the Keepers had so carefully bred.

As she slipped into her taxi, she was filled with a sort of glee. It was delicious to have escaped, delicious and lovely and joyous. And damn, damn lucky.

Her mouth began to dry out, her muscles to relax. The waves of hate stopped crashing in her heart. The taxi moved up a long ramp into the sunlight, and Miriam relaxed back against the seat.

“Votre destination, madame?”

“The Ritz,” she said. She’d take a huge suite. The Ritz would mean silk sheets like the ones at home, and a long call to Sarah to say how lonely she was and how far away she felt . . . and to tell her to get that new passport over here fast.

In the cab, she pressed her shoe together as best she could, rearranged her hair, freshened her face, and tried to smooth the wrinkles in her suit. Her suitcase was gone forever, of course, and so she would have to buy new clothes, and there would be no time for proper tailoring at Chanel. That would make Sarah happy. They were both extremely fashionable, of course, but Sarah thought Miriam much too conservative.

So much of the Paris whizzing past was unfamiliar. The huge roads, the endless blocks of buildings that had grown like monstrous cliffs beyond the Périphérique distressed and confused her.

It was remade, entirely remade, and in just these few years! But then the taxi swung off the flying roadway and went down into territory that was, thankfully, more familiar. They were on the Rue de Vaugirard, where Philippe Vendôme had lived. She’d been fascinated by his alchemical studies, had stayed with him a few years while she was recovering from the grief of her mother’s destruction. She’d adored him, with his wonderful, sophisticated manner and his passable skill at whist. Miriam loved games, but finding humans who could be effective opponents was not easy.

She had given Philippe of her blood, and turned back the years for him. He had become a searcher after the secrets of the Keepers. Useless, that, in the early eighteenth century. But he had been a pleasant companion, her entire pleasure for a while, until she’d met Lord Hadley’s son John.

“Philippe,” she murmured, thinking of that lovely house of his. In 1956 it had been something of a ruin. She had walked silent halls where she had laughed and loved with him, and reflected on the brief lives of men. Now she could only glimpse it, the once-proud estate little more than a front on a huge building. The street the taxi bounced along had been laid over part of the elegant park. Here, she and he had come and fed his swans.

Now they went underground, into a roaring tunnel full of autos and lorries, speeding along at a deadly clip. And here, quite suddenly, was the Champs Élysées. They had come by a new high-speed route.

It was all so familiar and all so dear. She remembered it from fifty years ago, even a hundred — the same marvelous width, the same trees, the same grand ambiance. Yes, this was just as it had been since Louis Philippe had commissioned Haussmann to reconstruct the intricate, ancient spaghetti-bowl that had been the Paris of the last age.

They were soon passing along the Rue St. Honoré, lined with luscious shops, in the windows of which she glimpsed the strangely simple clothing of this era, clothing that increasingly emphasized anything that was male about the female. The ideal form for human women was becoming that of the boy. She preferred elegance.

Then, here was the Place Vendôme. The Ritz was
exact
. Lovely and beloved! She had first come to this place on a rainswept evening back before the motor. What trip had that been? Perhaps 1900, when she and John Blaylock had come here in search of the luxury that was just then gaining the hotel its grand reputation.

Getting down from the taxi — or up, actually, out of this tiny modern sardine tin — she found herself face-to-face with a doorman in the hotel’s familiar green livery, even his coat reminiscent of more gentle days.

She went into the lobby, passing across the thick carpet to reception. No face was familiar, of course. Fifty years and all the humans would have changed. They came and went like so much foam on a restless wave. Well, at least she had Sarah free and clear for another century, perhaps two . . . unless, of course, the dear found some clever scientific way to last longer. Sarah knew the ugly secret of her own artificial longevity. Such knowledge would have driven a lesser human mad, but Sarah was often at her test tubes, poor thing.

“I’m afraid I have no reservation,” Miriam said to the clerk, who managed to appear affable and also a little concerned at the same time. A blink of his eyes as she approached had told her that he knew exactly how old her suit was. She was travel-weary and hobbling from the broken shoe. Altogether, she could not look to him as if she belonged here. She dared not throw the names of fifty years ago around to impress him, either. Coming from what appeared to be a girl of twenty-five dressed in her grandmother’s old clothes, such an attempt to impress would instead seem like the babbling of a madwoman.

“I am so sorry,” he began.

“I would like a suite. I prefer the fourth floor front, if you don’t mind.” These were among the best rooms in the hotel, and the only ones she would even consider using.

He asked for her credit card. She gave him Sarah’s Visa. It annoyed Sarah for her to use this card, but there was at present no choice. Using her own card was a serious risk, and Marie Tallman was retired forever. She waited while he made a phone call.

“I’m sorry, madame, this is declined.”

Must be crowding its credit limit, she thought. Just like Sarah to have a card like this. Too bad she didn’t have a copy of Sarah’s American Express card, but the only one of those in her possession was her own.

“Perhaps it’s defective, madame. If you have another —”

She turned and faced the doors. She had no desire to push this, even to remain here for another minute. She had to call Sarah. She started to open her cell phone, then hesitated. The call would not be secure.

“Is there a public telephone?”

“But of course, madame.” He directed her to a call box. She took out her AT&T card, which was in Sarah’s name, and dialed the call straight through to their emergency number. This only rang if it was absolutely urgent, so she could be sure that Sarah would pick up right away.

She did not pick up. It was five hours earlier in New York, making it eight o’clock in the morning. Sarah would be home, surely. She tried the other number, the regular one. Only the answering machine came on.

She tried the club. No answer there, not at this hour. Damn the woman, where was she when she was needed?

Maybe she’d fed. Maybe she was in Sleep. Yes, that was it. Of course, that must be it . . . must be. She put the phone down.

She thought matters over. She was effectively broke. But she was never broke; she’d had scads of money, always.

Perhaps she could try another hotel, some lesser place. There must be some credit left on the Visa card. Then she thought — how could she get into any hotel, this one included, without giving them a passport? The answer was that she couldn’t, and the smaller and sleazier the hotel, the more obsessive it would be about identification. The Tallman passport needed to be burned; that’s all it was good for.

She saw that she was still in mortal danger. They would have a description of her, and she hadn’t even a change of clothes. They’d be searching the hotels, of course. It was logical.

She had to go to the Castle of the White Queen. Fifty years ago, Martin had been there. Maybe he still was, and maybe he could help her. Of course he could. He’d been a more worldly sort than Lamia, or even Miriam herself.

She began walking, soon coming into the Place de l’Opéra. She headed for the Métro. On the way, she stopped at a small
bureau de change
and turned her Thai baht into euros. She got forty of them. As well, she had two hundred U.S. dollars in cash. Not much, not much at all. But she never traveled with cash; she didn’t need to. Being limitlessly wealthy made her sudden poverty especially difficult. She didn’t know how to function.

She went down the steps into the clanging world of the Métro. She remembered it from her last visit, but she’d only used it once, and that was to get around a traffic accident when she’d been hurrying to the opera. There was difficulty with the change booth, then confusion about which
direction
she wanted. The hurrying crowds made it no easier. But, in the end, she found herself primly seated in a car going in the correct direction.

The Castle of the White Queen had been built on land that the Keepers had reserved for themselves from time immemorial. It was on the Rue des Gobelins, and parts of it had been rented to the Gobelins family and fitted out by them as a tannery. At night, after Gobelins and his people went home; the hides tanned there were not necessarily bovine. The Keepers lived in the upper reaches of the building.

Locally, there were many legends about why it was called the Castle of the White Queen. Some said that Blanche de Castille had built it, others that it had belonged to Blanche de Navarre. The real builder was Miriam’s dear mother, who had been known among her peers as the White Queen, for her grandeur, her splendid pallor, and the fact that their family had come out of the white sands of the North African desert.

The scent of man that filled the Métro did not make Miriam’s jaws spread, let alone fill. As troubling as all this was, at least she was full, and very satisfactorily so. That had been a healthy little thing she’d eaten. She could easily bear this swim in a sea of food.

An accordionist began to play, and Miriam closed her eyes to listen. Certain things about Paris were almost timeless, it seemed. When she and her mother had been here, the humans had been making similar music, but with different instruments. The music was rougher and wilder then, but they were wilder also, the humans, in times past.

In those days, feeding in a place like Paris had been so easy that some Keepers had overfed, gorging until they bled out through their pores, and their orifices ran with the blood of their victims. The human population had been a seething, helpless, ignorant mass, living in the streets, under the bridges, anywhere there was a bit of shelter. The old cities had been full of nameless, aimless wanderers who could be plucked up like fruits fallen to the ground.

She missed Gobelins and left the Métro at d’Italie instead. Coming up to the street, she looked around her. She experienced a sense of satisfaction: things were really unchanged here.

She quickened her step, eager to get a sight of the castle. If the Keepers had been driven off — well, she’d deal with that problem when she had to.

Ahead was the tiny Rue des Gobelins, hardly an alleyway running off the much wider avenue. She turned into it — and stopped, staring struck with wonder. The Castle of the White Queen was
exact,
just like the Ritz. Worn, but so precisely the same that she thought it must still be in the hands of Keepers.

Until this moment, she had not realized how afraid she had actually been. She needed her kind now. And she needed, also, to warn them. In the hurly-burly of the past few hours, she had all but lost sight of why she was here and not back in New York.

Ironic indeed that the strongest, most intelligent species on the planet, the very pinnacle of the food chain, was in the same predicament as the frog and the gorilla.

It had crept up on them so easily, the result of a long series of what had, at the time, seemed like brilliant breeding maneuvers.

Back thirty thousand years ago, they had almost lost the entire human stock to a plague. They’d rotted where they stood, the poor things. It had been determined that overeager breeding had been the culprit. Generations of them had been bred for their nutritional value, which meant an imbalance of red over white blood cells. The result? They’d become prone to all sorts of diseases.

To ensure that they would survive and still remain the delicious food source that they’d been made to be, the Keepers had decided in conclave to increase the human population. To accomplish this, sexual seasonality had been bred out of the species entirely. This had been done by breeding for high levels of sexual hormones. As a result, the creatures had bloomed into bizarre sexual parodies of normal animals. Their genitals had moved to the front of their bodies, the penises and mammaries becoming huge. Their body hair had disappeared. They had become sexually obsessed, the females much more retiring than other mammals, and the males far more aggressive.

She moved toward the old castle. The last time she had entered this portal, it had been hand-in-hand with her mom. The building had been new then, smelling of beeswax and freshly hewn stone. Inside, the great rooms had glowed with candlelight. Lovely bedchambers had been built high in the structure, behind small windows so that Keepers could linger over their kills, and the cries of pleasure and anguish could not be heard from the streets below.