Wolf Moon Rising (23 page)

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ness in her eyes. He was dismayed because he had believed that

when he made her his companian, she would grow to love him.

But since he had taken her blood she had become even more

indiff erent, and she possessed none of the humorous vitality of

the Antoinette he had so desired. He could bend her will, but

he could not sway her heart.

Each night when she lay with him, he searched her mind

for Angelique but did not fi nd her there, which was a deep dis-

appointment, only thoughts cluttered with the magazines she

read and the marijuana she smoked. She rolled a joint and tried

to share it with him, but he pushed her hand away. Th

en one

morning, just before dawn, she inhaled deeply, set the grass

aside, and lay beside him. Th

is time she came to life, her pas-

sions aroused as if she were trying to escape into another body,

and— arching, heaving, crying out in pleasure— she responded

with a savage hunger to his caresses.

He attempted to match her ardor, even in his weakened

state, but by now he no longer trusted her and thought it must

be another of her ways of manipulating him, hoping to win his

favor, since afterward, when he looked into her eyes, they clouded

over, and she refused to acknowledge their intimacy. And then he

thought that perhaps she had simply been bored. Most troubling

of all was his realization that he would have to decide her fate

soon. She was becoming pale and dark circles lingered under

her eyes. Should he turn her? He did not want to, and so he had

to take care not to drain her. Until he was healed, she was all he

had to fi ll his hours and his needs.

Th

at night he dreamed he saw Angelique, dressed all in

wind- blown white standing in the drifts beneath his bedroom

window. He knew he was caught up in a nightmare and that she

must be a ghost, a shape made of snow, but her smile unnerved

him. Reaching up her arms as if to embrace him, she whispered

something he could not make out, and all the time her lascivi-

ous smile blazed with deception. He felt he must hear what she

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was saying and he leaned further out of the casement, straining

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Lara Parker

until he caught the words,
At last! We are together at last!
And she uttered a high- pitched peal of laughter that echoed across the

snowy lawn. She tugged at him, as though with invisible wires,

dragging him across the window frame until he lost his grip

and pitched forward and plunged twenty feet onto the pave-

ment. He woke with his heart pounding.

Antoinette’s second attempt to do him harm came when he

was drowsing but not asleep and he heard a rustling beside his

coffi

n. Slowly, tediously, so as not to make a creaking sound, she

lifted the lid, and this time she had a metal spike and a steel

hammer. She did not hesitate, but slammed the spike quickly

with all her strength. His chest collapsed and all the air was

knocked out of him, but he was still able to grasp the stake be-

fore a second blow came, and his anger lifted him. Rising in the

air, he seized her struggling body and— with her screeching like

a cat— turned her over and threw her in his casket. He slammed

the lid down and held it shut while she wailed to be released.

“Never do that again,” he raged, and left her there for an hour,

until in a dull voice she begged for pity.

Th

e next night she played a mournful mountain ballad with

many verses about a young girl murdered by her lover.

Down by the rippling water, my love and I did meet.

And all while she was in my arms, my love dropped off to sleep
I had a bottle of fair moonshine, which my true love did not know
And there I poisoned that dear little girl down by the banks below.

All the songs seemed to be about men trying to escape from

the clutches of desperate women.

I stabbed her with a dagger that was a bloody knife

I threw her in the river, which was an awful sight,

My father had often told me that wedded I would be

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If I did not murder that poor little girl that would not set me free.

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She was even paler than before, and thinner, and her skin

took on a bluish tint. He was feeling less pain and he wondered

whether he was aff ected from drinking her blood so adulterated

with marijuana. She had become especially quiet sitting next to

him, and he said to her, “Do you despise me so much?”

Her eyes caught the light for a moment and she made a scoff -

ing sound. “Why? Am I supposed to love you along with every-

thing else?” She lifted up her head, reassuming her rude attitude.

“Do you love
me
?” she said, her voice hard. “I don’t think you care a bit.” When he didn’t respond she said, “I had a real lover before all this.”

He felt the familiar stab of jealousy. “Yes, and what has be-

come of Quentin?”

She turned her face to the side and said, “When he saw

what has happened to me, I mean, when he saw this”— and she

touched the puncture wounds on her neck—“he was repulsed.

Does that satisfy you? You have ruined me.”

“Still, if he had loved you, would he have abandoned you?”

“Th

ere was another reason.”

“And what was that?”

“Why should I tell you? Nothing matters to you but your

own needs.”

“Because, I think you want to.”

“It sounds ridiculous. Th

ere was a painting, one I never

saw, a portrait of him. He insisted that I had lost it and he be-

came furious with me. Over such a small thing. Some stupid

picture.”

He wanted to say, “But I know where it is,” and yet he kept

silent. He wanted to confess, “I was to blame. I stumbled across

his portrait in the basement of the Old House, and in a fi t of

jealousy, because of my infatuation with
you
, I took the painting and hid it in the Collins cemetery.” How well he remembered.

At fi rst he had thought to throw it into the sea! It had been the

feckless act of a human rather than a vampire, a human capable

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Lara Parker

of frivolous actions. He wanted to reveal everything, but instead

he said nothing. She began another song.

Oh I’ll tell you a little story about Omie Wise

And how she got deluded by John Lewis’s lies

Barnabas lay back and closed his eyes. Antoinette’s voice grew

shaky as though she was on the verge of tears. He was drifting

off , but once again he knew what was coming.

She threw her arms around him and trembled in fear

“How could you kill a one who was to you so dear?”

Another murder of an innocent maiden seduced and aban-

doned. He wondered whether she knew any songs about a girl

killing a vampire.

Each eve ning Barnabas tried, and failed, to climb from his

coffi

n and fl y into the night; he wanted to fi nd his way to the cem-

etery and recover the painting. But even a few steps toward the

door left him faint, and his cuts opened again. Even more tortured

by guilt, he thought of Julia and how much he needed her now if

he was to become whole. How diff erently Julia had cared for him,

giving him her heart and her love. How unselfi sh she had been,

and now his only link to the outside world was this wretched

woman who served him stubbornly and seemed only to be waiting

for her chance to escape. He began to realize that he must be vigi-

lant and never sleep deeply because, even though she was growing

weaker, he knew she was determined to destroy him.

As he lay waiting for his blackened wounds to heal, he tried

to piece together what he could remember of Quentin’s doomed

existence. One eve ning, in an eff ort to arouse Antoinette’s spir-

its, he spoke to her in a gruff voice.

“I remember the painting you spoke of. Th

e portrait was

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made by a well- known artist sometime near the end of the nine-

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teenth century.”

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She was reading the tarot, a desultory pastime she pursued

with only a modicum of passion, shuffl

ing the cards and dealing

them out in the pattern of a cross, then sighing as if they had told her something painful, and gathering them up again. She told

him she was reading his cards as well, but he considered the

tarot feeble witchcraft, even though he believed it was beyond

her talents.

“You remember it?” She appeared interested enough to look

up from her spread. “
When
did you say he painted it?” She was frowning at him now, her eyes narrowed.

“A long time ago. Quentin is much older than he seems. He

has lived more than a century.”

“What? Th

at’s crazy! Why would you say such a ridiculous

thing?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Th

at’s bullshit.” She lay out fi ve cards facedown, turned one

over, then stopped, her fi nger poised on the fi gure exposed.

“Look,” she said in a scornful voice. “I drew your card again. Th

e

Five of Cups. Here you are, Barnabas.”

She held up a card with a gloomy fi gure in a long black cape,

his back turned, his head bowed in despondency. “Okay, I’ll bite.

What was this paint er’s name?”

“Charles Delaware Tate. Th

e story was he slaved day and

night to capture Quentin’s handsome countenance, and—

in

pursuing his task with such tireless commitment— he drove

himself mad.”

“Hmmmm.” She did not seem at all interested.

“It became an obsession, an all- consuming quest for beauty

to be rendered on canvas as perfectly as it existed it in life. To create as God created. It is always the artist’s dilemma, I believe.”

She seemed distracted, turned over another card, then

laughed. “Of course, the Eight of Swords.” She placed it beside the caped fi gure and pointed to the woman surrounded by steel daggers. “Th

ere you are. Here am I. What a pair we are. Th

e tarot is

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always right on.”

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Barnabas grimaced at her hippy slang and made a dismis-

sive gesture with his hand. “Th

e tarot is a parlor game.”

“What? No. Wait a minute. Just look at her! Tied up, blind-

folded, separated from the world. All those knives like a . . . a

prison of swords.”

She threw down the deck and gave him a look of contempt.

“You’re right. It’s all shit.” She paused, then asked, “So, this painting. Did he make it?”

“Yes, somehow Tate moved over to the dark side, and the

portrait assumed magical properties. Th

e paint

er discovered

that objects materialized after he painted them and that he

could create life with his brush alone.”

Antoinette made a sound of derision, a smack of her lips.

“And you say the
tarot
is phony. What was this?” she said sarcastically. “Some kind of pact with the Dev il?”

“Perhaps, since when he fi nished the portrait of Quentin, it

was perfection; all who saw it were in awe of its lifelike appear-

ance, almost as if, when one looked at it, it seemed about to

speak. Th

e eyes glistened with life and the lips hesitated just be-

fore moving.”

“Th

at’s bizarre. But after what you’ve done to me I guess

anything is possible. No wonder he wanted it back,” she said.

“Where is it?”

He hesitated before he spoke. But bitterness kept him from

revealing the truth.

“I don’t know.”

She became unexpectedly lively. “Are you sure? Listen. Try

to remember. You don’t know how important it is. If you have

any idea where it could be . . .”

He lied. “I have none.”

She sighed and tried to return to her reading, but she

squirmed in her chair as she shuffl

ed the cards. Barnabas re-

membered how envious he had been of Quentin’s looks, his

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charm, and his easy conquests of women. He had longed for a

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curse as harmless as a painting that kept one young, instead of

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his own cruel sentence. Antoinette looked up again, her eyes

fl ooded.

“Now I wish I had seen it,” she said. “It might help me to

understand.”

“Th

ere’s more to his story if you are interested.”

“Sure . . .” When she turned over another card she became

very still staring at it, and Barnabas thought she must be listen-