The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror (25 page)

“Yes, Juno,” I said.

“Do you have everything you need?” she asked me indifferently, forced to be polite to some visitor now finally about to leave.

“Yes, thank you. Kousu helped me pack.”

“You know you have only to call the house, and anything else can be sent on to you? Of course,” she added, off-handedly, “you’ll want for nothing,
there.
”

I did not reply. What was there to say? I’ve ‘wanted’ for so much
here
and never got it—at least, my mother, from
you.

“I wish you very well,” she coldly said, “in your new home. I hope everything will be pleasant. The marriage is important, as you’re aware, and they’ll treat you fairly.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll say goodbye then. At least for a while.”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye, Daisha.” She drew out the
ay
sound: and foolishly through my mind skipped words that rhymed—fray, say . . . prey.

I said, “So long, Juno. Good luck making it up with Tyfa. Have a nice life.”

Then I turned my back, crossed the terrace and the drive, and got into the car. I’d signed off with all the others before. They had loaded me with good wishes and sobbed, or tried to cheer me by mentioning images we had seen of my intended husband, and saying how handsome and talented he was, and I must write to them soon, email or call—not lose touch—come back next year—sooner—Probably they’d forget me in a couple of days or nights.

To me, they already seemed miles off.

The cream limousine of the full moon had parked over the estate as we drove away. In its blank blanched rays I could watch, during the hour it took to cross the whole place and reach the outer gates, all the nocturnal industry, in fields and orchards, in vegetable gardens, pens and horse-yards, garages and work-shops—a black horse cantering, lamps, and red sparks flying—and people coming out to see us go by, humans saluting the family car, appraising in curiosity, envy, pity or scorn, the girl driven off to become a Wife-of-Alliance.

In the distance the low mountains shone blue from the moon. The lake across the busy grasslands was like a gigantic vinyl disk dropped from the sky, an old record the moon had played, and played tonight on the spinning turn-table of the earth. This was the last I saw of my home.

The journey took just on four days.

Sometimes we passed through whitewashed towns, or cities whose tall concrete and glass fingers reached to scratch the clouds. Sometimes we were on motorways, wide and streaming with traffic in spate. Or there was open countryside, mountains coming or going, glowing under hard icing-sugar tops. In the afternoons we’d stop, for Casperon to rest, at hotels. About six or seven in the evening we drove on. I slept in the car by night. Or sat staring from the windows.

I was, inevitably, uneasy. I was resentful and bitter and full of a dull and hopeless rage.

I shall get free of it all
—I had told myself this endlessly since midsummer, when first I had been informed that, to cement ties of friendship with the Duvalles, I was to marry their new heir. Naturally it was not only friendship that this match entailed. I had sun-born genes. And the Duvalle heir, it seemed, hadn’t. My superior light-endurance would be necessary to breed a stronger line. A bad joke, to our kind—they needed my
blood.
I was
blood
stock. I was Daisha Severin, a young female life only seventeen years, and able to live day-long in sunlight. I was incredibly valuable. I would be, everyone had said, so
welcome.
And I was
lovely,
they said, with my brunette hair and dark eyes, my cinnamon skin. The heir—Zeev Duvalle—was very taken with the photos he had seen of me. And didn’t I think
he
was fine—
cool,
Musette had said: “He’s so
cool
—I wish it could have been me. You’re so lucky, Daisha.”

Zeev was blond, almost snow-blizzard white, though his eyebrows and lashes were dark. His eyes were like some pale shining metal. His skin was pale too, if not so colorless as with some of us, or so I’d thought when I watched him in the house movie I’d been sent. My pale-skinned mother had some light-tolerance, though far less than my dead father. I had inherited all
his
strength that way, and more. But Zeev Duvalle had none, or so it seemed. To me he looked like what he was, a man who lived only by night. In appearance he seemed nineteen or twenty, but he wasn’t so much older in actual years. Like me, a new
young
life. So much in common. So very little.

And by now
I shall get free of it all,
which I’d repeated so often, had become my mantra, and also meaningless. How could I
ever
get free? Among my own kind I would be an outcast and criminal if I ran away from this marriage, now or ever, without a “valid” reason. While able to pass as human, I could hardly live safely among them. I can eat and drink a little in their way, but I need blood. Without blood I would die.

So, escape the families and their alliance, I would become not only traitor and thief—but a
murderer.
A human-slaughtering monster humanity doesn’t believe in, or
does
believe in—something either way that, if discovered amongst them, they will kill.

That other house, my former home on the Severin estate, was long and quite low, two storeyed, but with high ceilings mostly on the ground floor. Its first architecture, gardens, and farm had been made in the early nineteenth century.

Their
mansion—castle—whatever one has to call it—was colossal. Duvalle had built high.

It rose, this
pile,
like a cliff, with outcrops of slate-capped towers. Courtyards and enclosed gardens encircled it. Beyond and around lay deep pine woods with infiltrations of other trees, some maples, already flaming in the last of summer and the sunset. I spotted none of the usual workplaces, houses, or barns.

We had taken almost three hours to wend through their land, along the tree-rooted and stone-littered, upward-tending track. Once Casperon had to pull up, get out and examine a tire. But it was all right. On we went.

At one point, just before we reached the house, I saw a waterfall cascading from a tall rocky hill, plunging into a ravine below. In the ghostly dusk it looked beautiful, and melodramatic. Setting the tone?

When the car at last drew up, a few windows were burning amber in the house-cliff. Over the wide door itself glowed a single electric light inside a round pane like a worn-out planet.

No one had come to greet us.

We got out and stood at a loss. The car’s headlamps fired the brickwork, but still nobody emerged. At the lit windows no silhouette appeared gazing down.

Casperon marched to the door and rang some sort of bell that hung there.

All across the grounds crickets chirruped, hesitated, and went on.

The night was warm, and so empty; nothing seemed to be really alive anywhere, despite the crickets, the windows. Nothing, I mean, of
my
kind, our people. For a strange moment I wondered if something ominous had happened here, if everyone had died, and if so would that release me? But then one leaf of the door was opened. A man looked out. Casperon spoke to him, and the man nodded. A few minutes later I had to go up the steps and into the house.

There was a sort of vestibule, vaguely lighted by old ornate lanterns. Beyond that was a big paved court, with pruned trees and raised flowerbeds, and then more steps. Casperon had gone for my luggage. I followed the wretched sallow man who had let me in.

“What’s your name?” I asked him as we reached the next portion of the house, a blank wall lined only with blank black windows.

“Anton.”

“Where is the family?” I asked him.

“Above,” was all he said.

I said, halting, “Why was there no one to welcome me?”

He didn’t reply. Feeling a fool, angry now, I stalked after him.

There was another vast hall or vestibule. No lights, until he touched the switch and grayish weary side-lamps came on, giving little color to the stony towering space.

“Where,” I said, in Juno’s voice, “
is
he? He at least should be here. Zeev Duvalle, my husband-to-be.” I spoke formally. “I am insulted. Go at once and tell him—”

“He does not rise yet,” said Anton, as if to somebody invisible but tiresome. “He doesn’t rise until eight o’clock.”

Day in night. Night was Zeev’s day, yet the sun had been gone over an hour now. Damn him, I thought.
Damn
him.

It was useless to protest further. And when Casperon returned with the bags, I could say nothing to him, because this wasn’t his fault. And besides he would soon be gone. I was alone. As per usual.

I met Zeev Duvalle at dinner. It was definitely a dinner, not a breakfast, despite their day-for-night policy. It was served in an upstairs conservatory, the glass panes open to the air. A long table draped in white, tall old greenish glasses, plates of some red china, probably Victorian. Only five or six other people came to the meal, and each introduced themself in a formal, chilly way. Only one woman, who looked about fifty and so probably was into her several hundreds, said she regretted not being there at my arrival. No excuse was offered however. They made me feel like what I was to them, a new house computer that could talk. A doll that would be able to have babies . . . yes. Horrible.

By the time we sat down, in high-backed chairs, with huge orange trees standing around behind them like guards—a scene on a film set—I was boiling with cold anger. Part of me was afraid, too. I can’t really explain the fear, or of what. It was like being washed up out of the night ocean on an unknown shore, and all you can see are stones and emptiness, and no light to show the way.

At Severin there were always types of ordinary food to be had—steaks, apples—we drank a little wine, took coffee or tea. But a lot of us were sun-born. Even Juno was. She hated daylight, but still tucked into the occasional croissant. Of course there was Proper Sustenance too. The blood of those animals we kept for that purpose, always collected with economy, care and gentleness from living beasts, which continued to live, well-fed and tended and never over-used, until their natural deaths. For special days there was special blood. This being drawn, also with respectful care, from among the human families who lived on the estate. They had no fear of giving blood, any more than the animals did. In return, their rewards were many and lavish. The same arrangement, so far as I knew, was similar among all the scattered families of our kind.

Here at Duvalle, we were served with a black pitcher of blood, a white pitcher of white wine. Fresh bread, still warm, lay on the red dishes.

That was all.

I had taken proper Sustenance at the last hotel, drinking from my flask. I’d drunk a Coke on the road, too.

Now I took a piece of bread, and filled my glass with an inch of wine.

They all looked at me. Then away. Every other glass by then gleamed scarlet. One of the men said, “But, young lady, this is the best, this is
human.
We always take it at dinner. Come now.”

“No,” I said, “thank you.”

“Oh, but clearly you don’t know your own mind—”

And then
he
spoke. From the doorway. He had only just come in, after his long rest or whatever else he had been doing for the past two and a half hours, as I was in my allotted apartment, showering, getting changed for this appalling night.

What I saw first about him, Zeev Duvalle, was inevitable. The blondness, the
whiteness
of him, almost incandescent against the candlelit room and the dark beyond the glass. His hair was like molten platinum, just sombering down a bit to a kind of white gold in the shadow. His eyes weren’t gray, but green—gray-green like the crystal goblets. His skin after all wasn’t that pale. It had a sort of tawny look to it—not in any way like a tan. More as if it fed on darkness and had drawn some into itself. He was handsome, but I knew that. He looked now about nineteen. He had a perfect body, slim and strong; most vampires do. We eat the perfect food and very few extra calories—nothing too much or too little. But he was tall. Taller than anyone I’d ever met. About six and a half feet, I thought.

Unlike the others, even me, he hadn’t smartened up for dinner. He wore un-new black jeans and a scruffy T-shirt with long torn sleeves. I could smell the outdoors on him, pine needles, smoke and night. He had been out in the grounds. There was . . . there was a little brown-red stain on one sleeve. Was it
blood
? From
what
?

It came to me with a lurch what he really most resembled. A white wolf. And had this
bloody
wolf been out hunting in his vast forested park? What had he killed so mercilessly—some squirrel or hare—or a deer—that would be bad enough—or was it worse?

I knew
nothing
about these people I’d been given to. I’d been too offended and allergic to the whole idea to do any research, ask any real questions. I had frowned at the brief movie they sent of him, thought: so, he’s cute and almost albino. I hadn’t even got that right. He was a
wolf.
He was a feral animal that preyed in the old way, by night, on things defenseless and afraid.

This was when he said again, “Let her alone, Constantine.” Then, “Let her eat what she wants. She knows what she likes.”
Then
: “Hi, Daisha. I’m Zeev. If only you’d got here a little later, I’d have been here to welcome you.”

I met his eyes, which was difficult. That glacial green, I slipped from its surface. I said quietly, “Don’t worry. Who cares.”

He sat down at the table’s head. Though the youngest among them, he was the heir and therefore, supposedly, their leader now. His father died two years before, when his car left an upland road miles away. Luckily his companion, a woman from the Clays family, had called the house. The wreck of the car and his body had been retrieved by Duvalle before the sun could make a mess of both the living and the dead. All of us know, we survive largely through the wealth longevity enables us to gather, and the privacy it buys.