Unbitten (2 page)

“How in the world did you land a job like
that?” the man asked.

Jo grinned. “I won the National Championships in
Jumping last year,” she said. “I can’t
act all modest about it because even this much later I get
so thrilled thinking about it, I can hardly stand it. I had
a great day. My horse had a great day. Have you ever had
that–a moment when everything you’ve been
working for finally comes together?” She tore open
the packet of cookies, all that was left of her meal, and
began munching on one.

The man just smiled. He was thinking of his granddaughter,
the one who loved horses and was as irrepressible as Jo.

“These cookies are not bad,” she said.
“Really! So anyway…yes, I was out of work and
trying to organize a job giving lessons at a couple of
barns where I know people, and I got contacted by someone
at this Château. I had a couple of interviews by
skype with the woman who runs the place, but you
know–I had the feeling it was my job to lose at that
point, I just had to avoid making a fool of myself for a
half hour or so and I was hired.”

“I’m talking too much, aren’t I?”
said Jo, laughing. “It’s just that I am so
excited about getting there–the whole thing is
something I never ever dreamed of, you know?”

But the kindly man was asleep.

Well, she had seen him take a sleeping pill, so she
didn’t have to take all the blame. It’s not
that Jo was an oversharer, usually, but this was an
extraordinary moment in her life–even at the time,
still on the airplane, it seemed that way. Even before
everything that came after, the unimaginable that came
after.

Jo got out her tablet and started an email to her best pal,
Marianne. She wanted to have it all ready so she could hit
SEND
the minute she was on French
soil. Their last meeting had been hurried, with Jo barely
able to tell her about the new job before having to rush
off to the Consulate to pick up her expedited passport. And
Marianne…well, she had not taken the news well. She
had looked at the website of the château where Jo was
headed, pronounced it “creepy”, and then pursed
her lips and not said much else.

Even when Jo had shown her the picture of David de la
Motte, and
come. on.
that is one good-looking
dude, Marianne had to at least admit that–nope,
Marianne would not admit that. Muttered something about
good hair not being all she wanted in a boyfriend.

But Jo was broke and out of work, so no matter what
misgivings her friend had–and admittedly, wisecracks
aside, Marianne’s instincts were usually
dead-on–Jo was going to go for it. She didn’t
have much choice.

She had been showing horses for a rich family in New
Jersey, but when the owner had a stroke while riding, his
wife sold every last one of their horses and burned down
the barn. That was the end of that job. But David de la
Motte–and she loved saying it the way he said it,
Dah-
veed
–was giving her another opportunity
to do what she loved and was so good at, and in France no
less.

Maybe it did seem too good to be true. But good things
happen to some people, don’t they? Sometimes?

After seeing Marianne’s reaction, Jo realized that
some alarms had been ringing in her head too, right from
the very beginning, and she had been ignoring them. Because
the thought of riding in France–and getting paid for
it–seemed so perfect that she did not want anything
to derail the plan. So in a sneaky bit of business she had
waited for Marianne to object instead of realizing it was
her own inner voice she was failing to heed.

And she was going to keep on failing to pay attention to
it, for as long as possible.

The kindly man had thrust his legs straight out, lolled his
head to one side, and begun to snore. Loud enough that a
flight attendant had come to offer Jo some disposable ear
plugs, which she gratefully accepted.

France. A wildly expensive show horse. Living at a
château
.

Her thoughts bounced from one to the other, around and
around that circle of excitement, until she too fell
asleep, for the few hours until the plane met up with the
sun over the Atlantic, just before the coast of France came
into view.

After missing a bus at the airport and struggling to make
herself understood at various ticket booths, Jo was finally
getting off the train, in the village of Mourency,
jet-lagged, apprehensive, and wanting some coffee. It was
dusk. Mourency, with its ancient granite buildings, looked
rather forbidding. Jo wondered, not for the first time,
whether she was making a mistake by coming here.

She tried to remember the travel
arrangements–wasn’t she going to be picked up
at the station by one of the staff of the Château?
She dug in her bag, a rather worn bag now that she looked
at it critically, a bag that had never aspired to be chic
even when it was new, hunting for the instructions she had
printed out back in her apartment, which felt like a
lifetime ago already.

Jo shouldered her duffel and left the station, and stood by
the street in the darkening evening. She could faintly hear
a television murmuring in the house nearby; she could see
swallows swooping through the sky looking for dinner. It
was quiet. Deadly quiet.

The instructions said to wait at the small parking lot next
to the train station, where she would be met by
Angélique, driving a Citroën.

Jo glanced at her watch, but she had failed to set it to
French time and in her jet-lagged state it made no sense.
The clouds over the village rooftops were glowing red, the
air was clean and pure–she tried to pay attention to
the beauty of the place to allay her misgivings. It was the
quiet that felt so strange. The part of New Jersey she was
from–you could describe it a thousand ways, but
quiet
would never be part of it.

She waited. One car went past, a dusty battered model she
didn’t recognize, with a man at the wheel who looked
like he wanted to hit somebody. Jo stepped back a bit into
the parking lot, murmuring,
Come on,
Angélique
.

Because of the quiet, the sound of the footsteps was
magnified. It sounded like the footsteps of
somebody–or something–immense, inhuman. Jo
wanted not to look. But she had to. Slowly she turned to
the left, and saw a man walking slowly towards her. He was
not tall, but he was built like a fortress, like he was
carved out of granite, like…someone who could do
anything he wanted with her.

He came closer, walking with slow deliberation. Jo imagined
she could hear every single particle of gravel as they
crunched under his boots. She prepared herself to fight,
tensing her legs, ready to run or kick where it counted.
Come
on
, Angélique.

And then, just like that, the man passed her without
looking in her direction. Jo realized that the sound of his
footsteps must have been magnified by the stone walls
surrounding the small lot where she waited. She watched him
until he disappeared at the curve in the road, and he was
gone.

Jo laughed out loud. Since when do I act like such a scared
little rabbit? she thought.

She was shaking her head at her fears, baffled at how she
had so quickly fallen back to being that fearful child she
had been so many years ago, when her unstable parents had
given her plenty of reasons to be fearful.

Jo was not good at waiting. She fidgeted. She put on lip
gloss. She looked one way down the street and then the
other. She considered going back into the station in search
of coffee but didn’t want to miss Angélique.
She hopped from one foot to the other, counted her breaths,
thought about the magnificent horse she would be riding
tomorrow morning.

Drogo. Great name for a horse, she thought.

She got so deep into thoughts of Drogo and their prospects
for show ribbons, that she did not see or hear anything
when the man sidled around the last house next to the
parking lot, watching her.

He pulled back out of sight. Then slowly his head appeared
again, and he licked his lips. Slowly, he crept around the
building and then, once around the corner, he moved with
his back against the wall, circling behind Jo, out of her
peripheral vision. He never for a instant took his eyes off
of her. His eyes were very intent. So intent, so piercing,
they seemed to change as he moved closer–to glow
around the edges, as though lit from inside. He was able to
move so quietly. With such physical assurance. With hunger.

Jo was digging around in her purse again, hoping to uncover
something that could amuse her for a few minutes. A cough
drop would do, something to fiddle with, anything! In her
jet-lagged, impatient state, she was completely unaware of
her surroundings, and of the man coming up behind her.

He was close now. He stopped for a few seconds, opened his
mouth very wide and stretched his long, muscular arms out,
and sank into a crouch. Something about the way he moved
looked unhuman, reptilian.

His powerful legs tensed; he was ready to spring.

But of course, the man was no reptile. He was the only
remaining vampire out of a small number of village
vampires, most of whom were descended from a serf who had
lived around year 1362 and had been turned to vampirism by
David and Henri’s great-great-great-OK, a
lot
of greats-grandfather, when he had cut himself
and forced the serf to drink his tainted blood. Through the
generations, the sons drank from the fathers and became
vampires themselves, or some perhaps had their first drink
outside of the family, but either way, Mourency had been
home to vampires since about 874, deep in the Dark Ages.

His name was Pierre, and he looked in every way like the
quintessential Frenchman he was, even wearing a blue beret
when the weather was chilly, and smoking Gauloises. Pierre
was a walking cliché–except for the part about
the retracting fangs and the thirst for warm blood. Human
blood. Skinny young women’s blood, if you wanted to
get down to Pierre’s personal specifics.

Mourency did not get hordes of tourists, the way the
villages on the coast did. So for Pierre to come across
this American girl, such a delicious little morsel, a
little waifish really but he liked them that way, not all
strapping and tough like some of the Scandinavians and
Germans–it was a bit of luck, coming around the
corner at that moment, having just gotten up to greet the
evening, barely even begun the night’s hunting, and
there she was, waiting for him.

Like she was meant for me, thought Pierre, not springing
after all but instead walking right up behind her and
sniffing her hair. Like all he had to do was unwrap her
like a bon-bon, and suck her, and suck her, and suck her.

He opened his mouth very wide, as wide as he possibly
could–it felt better that way–and his fangs
shot down, at the ready. Pierre leaned towards the neck,
the pale neck, faintly sweaty; he closed his eyes and
started to reach for her as he lowered his teeth towards
her flesh, his brain already starting to melt with
pleasure.

A car horn suddenly started blaring like mad. Screeching,
horrible noise! Pierre went limp. He scrambled away from Jo
as the car, a navy Citroën, careened into the parking
lot. He clapped his hands over his ears and ran down the
road, absurdly fast, around the corner, and disappeared
into the village.

Jo had barely realized he was behind her and he was gone.
She jerked, startled, even though the man was already out
of sight. Where had he come from? And what kind of town was
this, anyway? She smoothed down her skirt and tried to
compose herself, pushing the thought away that maybe she
could just go back in the station and arrange to go home.
When the woman leapt from the car and ran up to her, she
smiled faintly. “Angélique?” she said.

Angélique put her arm around Jo. “Are you all
right? Did he hurt you?”