Authors: Clare Willis
“So you’re a vampire?” she whispered.
“Of course.”
“But,” she paused, sifting through a cacophony of thoughts. “I’ve seen you during the day.”
He chuckled. “Yes, you have. Sunlight only affects the young. By the time you’re my age it’s just a nuisance.” His gaze fell on her neck and he licked his lips very delicately. “But the part about drinking blood, that is true.”
She shuddered, but didn’t move away. This must have been what Jacob was talking about, this special nature of hers. But in Jacob’s version Richard was dangerous, he had “targeted” her, although for what she wasn’t sure. But now here was Richard himself, sitting on her bed like a girlfriend at a sleepover, freely offering information that Jacob had been loath to provide. If he was a threat why wasn’t he acting like one?
Breathing shallowly, Sunni stroked the quilt that lay over her lap. It was an antique, soft and velvety from countless launderings, hand stitched by a loving woman to keep a family member warm. Although she’d bought it at an estate sale, Sunni liked to imagine that her own mother had made it for her. It conjured up a childhood of stability and protection that Sunni could only dream about.
“So why am I so valuable to vampires? ”
“Because you are one of the only things that can kill us.” He pinned her with his gaze. “What has Jacob Eddington told you about me, Sunni?”
Her first impulse was to protect Jacob. “Nothing,” she said.
Richard clicked his tongue. “Nonsense. He told you that I meant you harm, didn’t he? That you needed to escape from me?”
Sunni didn’t nod, but she could tell that Richard knew what she was thinking.
“It’s him you need to escape from, my dear. Do you know why he’s been watching you all these years?”
“You know about that?”
“I didn’t, but when I saw him at the restaurant I figured it out. He works for an organization that keeps track of people like you.”
“He said they keep track of people like
you.”
“Well, that is true, too. They are afraid of me, and of you, for that matter. He is watching you to make sure that you don’t learn to use your powers, because if you do you might use it against them.” He ran one hand lightly down her arm, causing her to shiver. “If that happens he has orders to kill you.”
“You’re lying.”
He gripped her arm, just hard enough to make her wince. “Look into my eyes.”
She did. They were dark, fathomless, revealing nothing. “Trust, so hard to come by. Why should you trust me? He has protected you all these years, or so you think. But isn’t that part of what jailors do, keep their prisoners from harm?”
She couldn’t argue with his impeccable logic, not now, in the dark, when she felt so vulnerable and he seemed to know so much about her. “I guess so.”
“Tell me about your mother, Sunni. ”
Sunni’s hand crept to her chest, inadvertently drawing his eye to her rose tattoo, with its thorny vine and three tear-shaped drops of blood.
“Her name was Rose?” Richard asked.
“Good guess,” Sunni muttered. “What was your first clue?”
“What kind of a mother was she?” His gentle voice invited her to confide in him.
“Sometimes wonderful, sometimes a nightmare.” Sunni was surprised to find herself answering him so candidly. Maybe this was how Isabel gave away the information about the Ashwood Institute. “She had drug problems, depression. But I felt like she was the only person who ever understood me.”
“How did she die? ”
“She had left me alone one Saturday, probably to go score. At that time we were living in Redfield, a little town in Marin County. There was a yard, surrounded by a picket fence, and I was playing under a tree. A black limousine drove up, with two men in it.” A tear dripped out of Sunni’s eye.
“Let me guess what happened next,” Richard said. “You liked these men. You felt at home with them. They knew all about you, knew your name and your mother’s name. When they asked you to get in the car you said yes.”
“That’s right. But my mother arrived then. She fought them.” Tears flowed freely down Sunni’s face now. “It was horrible. I’d never seen anyone fight like they did. For years I was sure I imagined it. One of them had a rope and he started to strangle her …”
Richard nodded. “But then someone else arrived, right?”
She stared at him in surprise. “How do you know that?”
He ignored her question. “This other man saved you from the two men, pulled you out of the car?”
“Yes. How can you possibly know these things?”
“I was that man. ”
Shock rendered her incapable of speech, so she simply stared at him.
“Do you want to know who the men in the car were? They were vampires, Sunni, working for the Council, the organization Jacob Eddington belongs to. You’re contraband, and they came to take you away.”
“If they wanted me so badly, why didn’t they try again later?”
Richard shrugged eloquently. “Your mother was dead, your father gone. As long as you thought you were merely human you were no threat. So they just kept an eye on you.” His hand snaked out and smoothed her hair behind her ear, then dropped down to cup her chin. He turned her face to look at him.
“Come to London with me, Sunni. I believe we could be very happy together. ”
Her breathing sounded strangely loud in the quiet, night-wrapped room. At first the proposition made perfect sense. Richard and she were kindred beings: they shared not just a personal history, but also a cultural and biological history that went back thousands of years. Richard could teach her about herself, he could show her how to love and accept everything she was.
She turned so that her chin would be released from his grip. All these things might be true about Richard, but if they were, they were also true of Jacob. As strange as he had been acting toward her, she was not going to give up on him yet. She might feel a strange affinity for Richard, but what she felt for Jacob ran much deeper.
“I’m sorry. That’s not going to happen.”
She felt the change that came over Richard as a certain heaviness in the air, as if a thunderstorm was coming. His eyes, already a deep brown, became so dark that they appeared to have no pupils and the lamplight glinted off them like they were made of polished granite. Instead of sitting next to her he suddenly seemed to be looming over her, and the expression on his face was that of a hawk who had just sighted a rabbit.
“You dare defy me?” He wasn’t shouting, but his normally pleasant voice now had an edge that could cut glass.
Sunni’s voice failed her. She clutched the soft quilt and pulled it up to her shoulders.
Richard grabbed her chin again and yanked her head up and to the side, exposing the tender expanse of her neck. He bared his teeth, grimacing like an angry dog, exposing long white fangs that almost pierced his lower lip.
“I could kill you so easily, drink your blood, and take your strength into my body. ”
A whimper escaped from her throat.
He dragged his fangs along her neck, pressing just hard enough to break the skin, and then licked the blood that he had released. Sunni squeezed her eyes shut. She was not a religious person, but she began to pray silently. A moment later she felt his weight lift off the bed. She opened her eyes to see him buttoning his suit jacket. The anger was gone. He was back to being cool, composed, and utterly self-possessed.
“But I will not kill you. That would defeat my purpose. I shall simply have to move on to Plan B.” He shot his cuffs and checked the fastenings on his gold cuff links.
“Plan B?” Her heart was starting to beat more slowly, reassured by his distance from her.
He gave a small snort of annoyance. “Do you not understand this colloquialism?”
“I understand it. What is your Plan B?”
“You’ll find out in good time. But now, my dear, you are tired. We’ve talked enough. You should sleep.”
“But I still need to know …”
There was a rustle and a rush of air, and Richard was gone. It was only a few minutes later, when the room grew cold, that Sunni realized he had left the window open.
When Sunni woke up on Wednesday morning, after tossing and turning for hours and then finally sleeping a bit once dawn broke, she sat up in bed and scanned the room for evidence that the previous night wasn’t a dream. Everything looked exactly as it had when she went to bed, from the glass of water on her nightstand to the trail of clothes she’d dropped on the floor. The key to her desk drawer was in the nightstand, right where it always was. She jumped out of bed and went over to her desk. The journal was in the locked drawer, buried under three years’ worth of tax forms and credit card statements. She put her head down on her arms and breathed slowly and evenly, trying to think rationally.
Richard and Jacob were vampires. Just that statement was enough to send her back to the Ashwood Institute. And yet she didn’t feel crazy when she contemplated it. The myth of vampires had been around as long as human civilization. Why shouldn’t the myth be based in fact? If it was true, it actually made her feel less crazy, because the cognitive dissonance she’d been feeling all her life was based on something real.
She straightened up and looked at her desk. What else had she learned? Both of them were old, old enough that the sun didn’t bother them anymore. They drank human blood. Did they kill people? Richard hadn’t answered that one. Was Richard dangerous to her? The jury was still out on that one as well. But if he was, was he also dangerous to Isabel? She grabbed her cell phone and hit one of her speed dial numbers.
“LaForge residence.” It was Earl, the house manager.
“Hi, Earl, it’s Sunni. Can I speak to Isabel?”
“She’s still asleep. She came in quite late last night. Can I give her a message?”
Sunni heaved a sigh of relief. “It’s nothing urgent. Just tell her to call me later. ”
She padded into the kitchen and made coffee, then settled on the couch in the living room with her laptop and a steaming cup. After pondering the spelling for a moment, she Googled
dampire.
“Do you mean
dhampir?”
the helpful engineers at Goggle suggested, and Sunni clicked on the word. A Wikipedia entry came up first, followed by a site called Monsterpedia. She surfed over to the Wikipedia Web site and read the entry.
A dhampir in Balkan folklore and in vampire fiction is the offspring of a vampire and a human. Dhampirs are powerful creatures, equipped with a vampire’s powers but none of the weaknesses. A dhampir is believed to be unusually adept at killing vampires.
“Great,” Sunni muttered. “Now I’m a fictional character. Maybe they’ll make a movie about me.”
She sipped her coffee, staring out the window at the concrete expanse of the Moscone Convention Center, thinking about Rose and their short time together. If Rose knew what Sunni’s father was, she never told Sunni about it. But how could she? Would Sunni, at age seven or eight, have understood what her mother was trying to tell her? Of course not, it would only have made Sunni feel crazier than she already did. It must have been a horrible burden for her mother to bear. Maybe it was what drove her to use drugs.
Sunni shook her head roughly and slapped her laptop closed. What was she doing, thinking about Richard’s statements as if they were facts? It was madness to even consider it. And yet it was the only thing that had ever made sense in all the years she’d been trying to figure it out.
She took her coffee over to the window and looked across the street. There was an office building directly across from her, with workers racing around like hamsters on a wheel, oblivious to spectators. On each side of that was a new condo building. If Jacob had been telling her the truth, he lived in one of those two buildings. She ran to her bedroom and dressed in the simplest outfit she could find: jeans and a T-shirt, with a fleece jacket on top. For once she eschewed high heels in favor of sneakers, so she had to roll her pants up at the ankles. Then she pulled the Brazil Room coaster out of her purse and dialed the number scrawled on it.
Jacob’s living room gave the impression that someone had just moved in, or was in the process of moving out. The creamy white walls bore no decoration. A black leather sofa stood at a right angle to the window that overlooked Sunni’s building. There was no TV, no table or chairs in the dining alcove. The tile counters in the galley kitchen were empty and gleaming. There was a coffee table in front of the sofa, piled high with thick, serious-looking hardcover books. Sunni moved so that she could read some of the titles. They were all history: The subjects included the American presidents, slavery, colonialism, and the monarchy in England.
“Are you writing a thesis?” Sunni asked.
“Just trying to figure some things out,” he answered. “Please sit down. Would you like a drink?”
Sunni sat on the sofa. “I’d love some coffee.”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t drink coffee. I could run downstairs to the café …”
“No, don’t worry. What do you have?”
“Whiskey. ”
“It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t expecting company.”
“Never mind.” Sunni eyed him, towering over her, all six feet several inches of him. His body seemed to thrum with tension. “Why don’t you sit down as well? You’re making me nervous.”
There was nowhere else to sit but the couch. He dropped down next to her, letting his long legs slide under the coffee table. Sunni tried not to let herself be distracted by his scent, by the ropy muscles in his arms, by his gleaming jaw. Especially not by his eyes, which in this light were blue-gray, lighter by several shades than the last time she’d been close to him.
“Richard Lazarus came to see me last night,” she began.
He jumped off the couch as if he’d been stung. “That’s impossible,” he shouted.
She held up both hands. “Calm down, Jacob. He was very pleasant, I assure you.”
Jacob paced over to the window and looked down. “He was in your apartment?”
“Yes. He just appeared in my bedroom. I have no idea how he got in.”