Unbitten (9 page)

Pierre sent a thoughtburst to the man’s head, but it
seemed to do nothing. He sent a burst of three, quick and
hard, and the man simply shook his head a bit as though
bothered by a mosquito.

What the hell?

And there were two of them?

He hadn’t seen the other guy at first, who stepped
out of the shadows now, his eyes narrowed, observing.
Pierre circled, keeping his center of gravity low, getting
ready for whatever the brute tried next, keeping his eye on
the second man, who was looking bored and a little
impatient.

“Maloney!” he yelled. “The whipster, you
idiot!”

Pierre threw a punch and knocked the man’s jaw, hard.
The man didn’t seem to particularly mind. They kept
circling, and circling.

It was two against one. Pierre considered making a run for
it. If the second guy joined in, it could get ugly.

The thought of escape broke his concentration just a
little, but Maloney felt it and took advantage. He sprang
at Pierre and threw him to the ground and pressed his body
on top of him.

“Got him!” Maloney yelled. “Now
what?”

Pierre struggled but Maloney had his knee between his legs
and was pressing into his balls. His balls were one of the
only two things Pierre had in the world that meant
something to him. So he kept still.

“What do you want?” he said, trying to find the
right tone of not too weak and also not pissing anybody
off.

The second guy walked over holding a greenish loop over his
shoulder and handed it to Maloney who was sitting on top of
Pierre. Maloney shook the loop, and the end whipped against
Pierre’s legs, lashed them, then gripped them tight.

“Whipster is the best,” the man said, talking
to Pierre as though expecting him to agree.

“Whipster rules,” said Maloney.

“Shut up, Maloney,” said the man.

Pierre was immobilized now, completely wrapped up in the
greenish cords. Duct tape went across his mouth. Then,
slowly, he was lifted up by those giant hands to face his
attacker.

“Good evening, Pierre,” said the second man,
circling around him. Pierre was all wrapped up like a fly
who’s had attention from a spider. “No need to
greet me, I understand, sorry about the tape,” he
said, laughing.

The man’s eyes were…wait a minute! Those
pupils–

Pierre would bet his last euro this smaller dude was a
vampire.

Maloney stood behind him, or loomed rather, because he was
immense, an actual giant. He was grinning his head off,
chattering excitedly and hopping from one foot to the other
like a five year old about to get an ice cream cone, his
lank hair falling into his face.

They talk funny, thought Pierre. Not French. Not British.
Even though vampires have incredible language facility and
can speak the language of wherever they are, they can still
get hung up on regional accents. He supposed they must be
American, and not from the South, which was the only
American accent Pierre was familiar with.

“We’ve come a long way to find you,” said
the vampire. “My name’s Dominic,” he
said, and let out an enormous cackle while grabbing Pierre
and swinging him up and over his shoulder. “All the
way from Chicago. Ever been to Chicago, Pierre?” he
said. “Oh right, never mind,” and cackled
again.

Dominic cracked himself up, that was clear. But he was not
in Mourency to entertain himself.

“mMMMmmmff,” said Pierre.

“Is that so?” Dominic said. “I’m
just taking you to my car. Rented a Mercedes. Love it. Ever
driven one?
CLS
-class. I really
wanted the SL-class roadster, but then we wouldn’t
have room for you, would we?”

The car was parked on the sidewalk across from a footbridge
crossing the river. Dominic waited for Maloney to unlock
the trunk, and slid Pierre in, leaving the trunk-door open.
He grabbed Maloney by the arm and walked him out on the
footbridge. The river slid quietly underneath them, the
green surface impassive, showing nothing of the life
underneath. The night-birds were singing, and there was a
hum of insects down by the water even this far into
October.

“I want you to calm yourself down,” Dominic
said. “We need him alive because we have a long list
of questions to ask him and we need. those. answers. If we
don’t get the answers, You-Know-Who is not going to
be happy.”

The big man looked like he might cry.

“Cheer up, Maloney! When we’re done with this,
we’ll almost be ready to go home. Where our reward
awaits us.” Dominic looked a little misty-eyed just
thinking about it. It was important to focus on the reward,
or else he would be tempted to toss Maloney in the river to
be done with him.

Henri had spent the evening combing over every square
centimeter of his lab, and at long last, had solved at
least part of the mystery of the break-in. His lab was an
old building–old if you consider 17th century
old–and the walls were two feet thick, made of
irregular flint stones roughly half a meter across. He was
unsure what the building’s original use had been, but
it was not designed in a simple rectangle as so many
outbuildings were. There were indentations and extrusions,
which on the inside were handy for making closets and
bookshelves. The outside of the building was largely
surrounded by bushes simply to make the mowing easier on
the landscaping staff.

In any case, it was a building of nooks and crannies. And
Henri discovered, in the back of a closet full of broken
umbrellas and worn-out boots that he had intended to take
care of, someday–he discovered a fine layer of dust
and some tiny crumbles of stone and mortar. Looking
carefully at the wall with a strong flashlight, he saw that
someone, or someones, had managed to break up the four
hundred-year-old masonry and ease a few of the big pieces
of flint out of the wall, without causing the whole thing
to tumble down, and then put them back again.

The hole would easily have been big enough for a man to
crawl through.

Those pieces of stone were
heavy
. It must have
been very difficult to do without machinery. And risky.

When he went around outside and crawled beneath the bushes,
he saw bigger crumbles of stone and more of a mess, with
the perpetrator likely figuring no one was going to be
tidying up deep in a bank of viburnums.

The thing that made Henri the angriest was that the
break-in was successful in spite of his iris recognition
device. All that work, and he ends up with a hole in the
wall and his valuable stuff stolen! At least it looked as
though Hemo-Yum was safe.

He expected Hemo-Yum to do very, very well, once it was in
wide distribution and word had gotten out. But that word
was going to take some time to develop. Vampires had been
drinking from living humans for centuries, and a switch to
synthetic blood wasn’t going to happen overnight,
Henri didn’t kid himself about that. It didn’t
help that the American synthetics already on the market
were pretty much the equivalent of fast food–it all
tasted the same, was sort of addictive, and made you feel
like crap after you drank it. But luckily, those products
had not yet made it to France, and Henri hoped that being
first in his home country, with a truly good product, would
mean he would gain an advantage that would be hard to take
from him.

The bandages were less complicated. Henri believed the
bandages would be an immediate bestseller. Claudine and her
team had better come up with a terrific name for them,
because it was unquestionably a terrific product, something
every vampire needs. It was obvious, and simple, like many
wonderful things we can’t imagine how we lived
without now that we have them.

A basic bandage, like an ordinary Band-Aid–it covers
a bite mark completely, melts into the skin as it heals the
wound, so that once the bandage is applied, there is no
evidence of any bite at all. You can’t see the
bandage, you can’t see the bite. That plus a
brainwipe will get a vampire a quick and safe drink any old
time. No risk of the brainwipe not fully working and the
woman blabbing to the cops with the evidence right on her
neck.

Every vampire will carry them in their back pocket. The
teen market alone was going to be explosive, and all
vampire parents would insist their offspring carry them,
since it would make the teens and their sometimes reckless
biting much less detectable.

For Henri himself, whose darkest vampire urges were fairly
successfully repressed, the prospect of centuries of
existence drinking only Hemo-Yum was a fine one. But he
understood that for every vampire like him, there was one
like David, who was extremely unlikely to give up human
blood entirely. Not the blood–or the biting. So to
reduce the risk for his brother and others like him, he had
developed the bandage.

The one problem, thought Henri, for the millionth time, is
that no one had any idea how many vampires there were. Not
as many as before, is all anyone knew. He hoped his
inventions would have an invigorating effect–and that
there were still enough vampires left that the species
could be saved.

There were still a few hours left until dawn. David had
walked Jo back to her tower, and like a gentleman had only
given her a kiss on each cheek and said goodnight.

But he was no gentleman, and he knew it.

He had wanted nothing more than to bed her and bite her.
She had looked so lovely in that blue silk dress with her
strong arms and long legs bare. He couldn’t shake the
thought of her wrapping those limbs around him and holding
him tight, so tight he couldn’t move, vampire
strength and all.

But even as he was thinking of her, wanting her, he was
walking towards the row of guest cottages beside the
Château, thinking also of that older woman he had
just drunk from last night. She had been…feisty. Her
flavor was a distinctive sort of herbal thing, he
couldn’t put his finger on it, but he wanted more.

David always, always, always wanted more.

He let himself into her cottage, expecting the woman to be
sound asleep. But as he closed the door softly behind him,
he heard a rustling.

“I hoped you would come,” the woman said, with
a broad smile. “We had such fun last night,
didn’t we?”

David became very still. Had he forgotten to brainwipe her?
Does she…remember?

“Has it been a pleasant evening so far?” he
said smoothly. “I wondered–the stars are
magnificent tonight. Would you like to take a stroll around
the grounds and look at them?”

The older woman, whose name was Katarina, had kept smiling
during David’s invitation, and now she nodded and
stood up.

“A stroll sounds lovely,” she said, and
somehow, she made that plain sentence sound salacious.

Oh, she remembers all right, thought David.

He tried to think seriously about the situation because
obviously something had gone wrong with the brainwipe, and
that could mean a nuisance for him and the Château.
But it was difficult to think rationally when
Katarina’s suggestive tone had made him instantly
hard, when his fangs were tingling like mad, and all he
could think about was possessing her.

He held out his arm and she slipped hers around it. At
first there was no sound but the crunching of their shoes
on the gravel path, and the strange churring song of a
nightjar on the edge of the forest.

David did not bother to trot out his speech on
constellations. He and Katarina had advanced beyond that
now. Once they had gotten out of sight of the
Château, on the other side of the lake and in a copse
of birches, he stopped, and held her arms firmly in his
hands. He looked her all over, at her dark hair with
handsome silver streaks, at her cashmere sweater, her long
skirt, her scuffed boots. To him, she wasn’t a dowdy
older woman–she was a different flavor, even a bit
exotic. She had a beautiful face, even if it was not young;
in fact, some of its beauty was in the history of her life
that was finely etched around her mouth and eyes.