How Do I Love Thee? (30 page)

What was on for tonight? Was he a teenager too broke—or too tight—to pay for a can of cola, or a decoy to distract me in the shop while his mate nicked a gas bottle or a container of oil? Maybe he was a junkie desperate enough to stick a bloodied syringe in my face for the paltry slow-night takings in the till. Paltry takings that might mean the difference between paying the rent and not paying the rent this week.

In the mirror mounted in the corner of the shop, I could see him coming slowly up the aisle towards me, head down, shoulders hunched. His head swivelled. Did he know Dan was in the storeroom? I considered the panic button, tucked under the edge of the counter, inches from my right knee.

The stranger shot a fast and hard look at the empty driveway.

I clenched my suddenly trembling fists in an effort to maintain a politely inquiring expression on my face. He took another look out through the plate window, and turned his shoulder to the camera mounted on the wall behind me. He obviously didn’t know the thing was a hollow box, up there for show.

He stepped up to the counter.

I licked suddenly dry lips.

‘Can I help you?’ I asked, as Dan liked me to. Friendly to the customers, oh yes.

The man grinned at me, showing beautifully straight, whitened teeth. Close up, I saw the scruffy appearance was false. Not a junkie, then. Not that it made him any less dangerous, probably more so. I knew what addicts wanted. What did he want?

‘Hand it over,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You heard me.’

‘Yes.’

He frowned, and the engaging grin slipped. Apparently I wasn’t saying the right lines.

‘So hand it over.’

‘I don’t think so.’

He stared at me. No sign of the happy face now.

‘Are you stupid?’ he demanded.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then hand over the money!’ The inevitable weapon appeared—a gun—and death’s hollow eye held me in its unblinking regard. I lifted my hands, and the eye lunged to within a few inches of my face, distorted to funhouse proportions by the damned glasses. Again, my mind skipped over the thought of Dan, counting boxes of potato chips in the back of the building, and the local cops, just a button away.

‘Don’t even think about it!’ He warned me, the gun
looming without wavering, magnified in my specs. ‘Don’t you even think about going for a panic button.’

‘I wasn’t,’ I said. It was true. Pressing the button wasn’t high on my list of priorities. Dan was.

Slowly, I removed my glasses and death’s eye receded to reasonable proportions. I set the glasses carefully down on the counter and kept my hands in front of me, where he could see them. We couldn’t afford to replace my specs. I didn’t want to risk them.

‘Give me the money. What do you care? It isn’t your money, is it?’

I swallowed, the muscles in my limbs hot and heavy, prickling beneath crawling skin. Did I look afraid? Was the adrenaline surging through my blood making me seem nervous? Could he tell?

All the fight or flight mechanisms in my body were coming into play, the blood rushing into my muscles. I squeezed my fingers together, needing to contain myself. Always, this bitter struggle with my instincts, my fear and doubt. It could go bad so easily. I’d learned that, if nothing else.

‘Come on, get moving.’ At this stage they usually waved the gun around, getting anxious, getting angry. He didn’t. The barrel remained steady, almost perfectly horizontal, just the smoky-steel ‘O’ aimed at me.

Despite myself—despite the rising anxiety and the indignity of a gun pointed at me for the fifteenth time in five years—I had a grudging admiration for the guy’s nerve. Most of them are amateurs, more terrified at the time than I am.

‘You are a bold one,’ I said.

He grinned at me. Audacious.

‘All right, sweetheart, enough flirting. Get your pert little butt out of that chair and get me the money. The money from the safe, I mean. Not the small change you keep in the till.’

‘Stupid,’ I said, dread swarming my scalp, hair rising. He meant to go through with it.

‘Whatever. Get up, we haven’t got all night.’

‘No.’

‘No? What do you mean, no?’

‘What does “no” usually mean?’

‘Listen, smart-mouth. I don’t want to hurt you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. Now get me the money.’

‘Go away.’ I said. I looked up at him, and shook my hair back. ‘Before someone does get hurt.’

He stared at me. ‘You really are crazy.’

‘I’m not crazy,’ I said softly, rising from my seat, ‘but I am hungry.’

He stared at me, wondering what I meant, and still there was no fear in his eyes. I don’t know if he would have figured it out, if he’d have taken the chance I offered him to flee,
because right then the thing I’d been truly worried about happened. Dan opened the door and came into the shop, feet stuttering to a halt as the gun—the filthy gun—swung in his direction.

Muscles bunching, I launched myself over the counter, ignoring Dan’s cry of protest, ignoring the way this dirty bastard instinctively stepped back and jerked the gun towards me.

He tried to aim, tried to pull the trigger and shoot me, but of course he was too slow. They were always too slow.

I slammed into his body, hands reaching for his throat—oh, a beautiful, muscular neck with a delicious bounding pulse—and he didn’t have time to shoot, he didn’t have time to cry out, he just fell under my plummeting weight and the intrusion of my teeth into his carotid. He fell and I fell with him, almost swooning at the rush of blood into my mouth and the blossoming, answering heat in my loins. Oh yes.

I always prefer the handsome ones to the dirty druggies. Rare treats. So sweet.

I sucked it down, delicious heat swarming through my perpetually cold body, fingers kneading his rumpled shirt as I straddled his chest and drank. And drank.

‘Sylvie!’

Startled, I released the man’s throat and sat up, blood running down my chin. I chased it with my tongue, anxious not to waste it. Dazed, satiated, thighs beginning to quiver
with the rush of energy as the blood filtered through my system, I took a moment to register Dan’s presence.

The shock in his pale eyes.

He stood frozen, horror contorting his beautiful, familiar face. Darling Dan, with his incongruously neat work clothes and the orange clipboard clamped, forgotten, in his hand.

Darling, human, Dan.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I licked blood from my lip. ‘I couldn’t help it.’

‘Yes, you could.’ He put his hand to his face, and I knew he was trying to mask the smell. Humans can’t abide the sweet reek of blood.

I rubbed at a drying spot on my cheek with the back of my hand. I don’t much care for the stuff once it’s less than fresh, either.

‘I asked you not to do this ever again, Sylvie.’

‘He was going to shoot you.’

‘Sophistry,’ Dan muttered. Face dark with disgust, he ran his hand through his hair, leaving it standing up in dark-blond spikes.

Senses peaking with the fresh injection of blood, I could almost see the scales nestling like little armour plates along each hair shaft. I closed my eyes and shuddered. Nobody should see the things he’d seen me do. It wasn’t natural.

But neither was I.

As always, the high of feeding was spiralling with frightening speed down into the crash that inevitably followed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said again. ‘I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t let him shoot you.’

Dan glanced at me, his gaze unutterably weary in his craggy face. He looked suddenly old, much older than his forty years, and love for him wracked the heart that no longer beat in my chest. Fear rushed in its wake. No. He wasn’t old.

I couldn’t bear it.

I pushed my hair back from my face, careful to use the back of my wrists. Mustn’t get blood in my hair.

Dan shook himself, pressed his hand briefly to his nose again, and turned away. ‘You can’t leave him like that.’

Obediently, I stretched my hands towards the husked-out corpse on the tiled floor, harnessing the magic now humming through my body and using it to dissolve the scant remains into nothingness. As the evidence of my crime swirled away, the last dust motes dissipating, I was conscious of the guilt and anguish lingering in the air. Dan had retreated to the storeroom; he didn’t like to see me using any of my blood-magic. We’d been through this more than a dozen times before.

But it was only after the last few times that Dan seemed unable to meet my eyes.

We closed early after all.

By the time we got home to the old weatherboard cottage, Dan’s shock had morphed into anger. The worst kind of anger, underwritten by disillusionment.

I hugged my arms to my chest as I waited for him to unlock the front door, but not because I was cold. Oh, no, I wasn’t cold at all. Decidedly warm, heading towards hot. I wanted to get inside and get the argument over so we could make love and make up. A live feeding cranked up my instincts. All of them.

As soon as he tugged the key free of the lock—and ignoring any symbolism my devious mind imposed on that—I made a determined line for the second bathroom. I wanted to wash away the scents of my meal and make myself fresh for my man, and I didn’t want to give Dan a chance to start in on me first. If that happened I’d never get a shower and I certainly wouldn’t get any loving. My senses still hyper-attuned, I could hear faint mental mumblings as his own urge to be clean won against his desire to reproach me for my lapse.

I couldn’t help a little wriggle as I turned on the taps in the shower. Anticipation fizzed in my blood, pooled as heat between my legs.

Standing under the needling stream of hot water, I
shampooed my hair and blessed modern plumbing for about the millionth time. When I was a girl—when I was still strictly human—on the rare occasions you cleaned your entire body, you used a rag and ice-cold water from the stream, or you hauled endless buckets and boiled pots if you wanted the luxury of a real wash.

Now, more than three centuries after my birth in a Scottish fishing village, I stood beneath an endless stream of hot water delivered with no more effort than a flick of the wrist.

I ducked my head under the water to rinse off the shampoo, scowling. This reminder of my origins cast a dampener on my rising ardour. Best not to let my thoughts roam unfettered. I’d need my wits about me to placate Dan, and I’d be unable to refute his arguments if I was struggling under the weight of all my years and memories.

After drying myself, I grabbed my kimono off the back of the door and slipped into it, the silk a cool caress against my skin. I finger-combed my still-damp hair, smoothing it with the palms of my hands. As the steam dissipated, I avoided the mirror.

Oh, I can see myself; it’s just an old wives’ tale that vampires don’t cast a reflection or show up in photographs. I just don’t like to look.

Tying the sash around my waist, I flicked the light switch off and left the bathroom. Dan was waiting in the lounge room and I went to join him, my bare feet making tiny wick-wick noises on the carpet in the hall.

‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ I asked him, pausing in the doorway. The hall light would shine through the delicate robe and outline the silhouette of my body, naked beneath the flimsy fabric. I’d been young and strong when I was turned, and now I was perpetually lovely, limbs clean and unmarked, good teeth, my hair falling in thick lustrous inky waves to the rising curve of my bottom. This bounty had always seemed a curse, until Dan. Sometimes I could almost see myself through his eyes. Almost.

He looked at me now, his eyes in shadow, and I caught a fleeting mental impression of his emotions, a jumble of desire and anger and despair. The blood still filled me, lifted my already heightened senses to an obscene degree, and I tried not to hear his thoughts as I moved across the rug, made sure I waited for him to decline the offer of tea with his voice, and not just in his mind.

I sat in the armchair, facing him. The kimono slithered off my knee, baring my thigh. Nice. I didn’t replace it, just kept my eyes on him. He didn’t look.

Not a promising start.

‘Sylvie, you have to stop killing.’

‘He was a bad person.’

‘That isn’t relevant.’

‘Yes it is.’ If I didn’t rid the world of scum like that gunman, and all the others down the years before him, then what’s the point?

‘It isn’t up to you to decide who dies.’

‘If not me, then who? How many people might he have hurt if I hadn’t put a stop to him?’

‘You usurp another’s role,’ Dan said carefully. I bristled anyway. This was a well-trodden path for us.

‘Don’t you bring God into this, Dan. That carries no weight with me and you know it.’

‘Sylvie, I’ve told you a hundred times, God has not forsaken you.’

‘The hell he hasn’t.’ And the hell with my carefully calculated seductive pose. It sure wasn’t working. I surged up out of the armchair, and by the way Dan jerked back I realised I’d forgotten to moderate my movements. I held a hand out in apology and he shrugged an acknowledgement. Couple shorthand. Even in such an odd couple as we.

I spun away from him, but carefully, and paced across the carpet, took the matches from the mantelpiece and lit the candles. Once the wicks had quickened I drew some air into my little-used lungs and blew out the match.