Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas
The other man shoved her forward, reeling away from him. Jess staggered to the opposite wall and turned, breathless and stupid with shock.
Two men struggled, gasping and grunting, one gripping the other in a bear hug and taking furious blows on his shoulders. He lifted his captive, who threshed wildly, and ran with him into the darker depths of the alley like a football player rushing an opponent. Jess heard a crash of impact, one muffled shout, a breathless murmur of unintelligible words, and silence.
It seemed to last for hours.
The man who had held the knife moaned on the alley floor near her. She tried to shout for help, but she couldn’t seem to get any air into her lungs to make sounds with.
She thought about running away, but her legs didn’t move.
The moaning man drew himself up into a huddle posture, sitting on the ground and hugging his hand to his belly as he rocked, whimpering. He didn’t look in Jess’s direction, but he was still between her and mouth of the alley.
She stayed where she was, trembling with shock, trying to think. A fire truck roared by somewhere in the streets, siren whooping, but not to her emergency. She might as well be on another planet for all the help she could expect.
One of the men emerged silently from the depths of the alley, ran three steps past her, and kicked the moaning man. She heard a terrible, ripe sound of impact.
The man on the ground cried out and fell over, curling tightly on his side, as the other stood over him.
Jess stared, paralyzed. She knew Ivo by the sweep of his thick hair and the swirl of his long coat as he stepped astride the whimpering man, destructive intent evident in every angle of his body.
Jess found her voice. “The lookout’s gone,” she gasped hoarsely. “She’ll bring someone.”
Ivo glanced up at her, a flash of tigerish teeth and eyes, and she saw the black stains on his face. That was blood on his mouth, unmistakably glistening in the streetlight that had just come on at the curb.
Her uncertainty vanished. He bent again over the would-be knife man, a vampire with astounding strength and savagery, intending to feed right there in front of her. She couldn’t turn away, so she looked on silently, her body still and her mind blank and uncritical, as this predator pulled the man partly upright by his coat collar.
But he only slapped the face of his captive with a wide, hard swing of his hand, and said harshly: “Who sent you against this lady? Tell me now, or I rip the face off your skull. Hurry up.”
Jess heard a whining reply, a plea, sobs.
“The name,” Ivo snarled. “Quick!”
More whimpering, faint sibilants in words Jess could not make out. She closed her eyes at last, feeling dizzy and sick, and almost fell, but someone caught her. Someone held her up. Shock, she thought, deeply disappointed in herself.
I’m still going to faint, damn it.
Maybe she did; the next thing she knew, she was stumbling, half carried by a companion, toward her own building. The vampire—that was what he was, with his bull-like strength, his bloody mouth—Ivo knew where she lived.
Sensations washed over her in rapid succession: headlights passing, a dog barking somewhere, her feet stumbled up concrete steps. Hands seized her purse and rummaged impatiently through it. She half fell through the doorway into the stale warm smell of the foyer, then steep, steep stairs. She thought the stairs would never end.
He fumbled at her apartment door, oddly clumsy.
She took the keys from his hand that was smeared, she saw, with dark blood, and unlocked her door. Someone was playing the piano on the floor above, a Joplin rag, as she stepped back to let the vampire in.
Without turning on the light he picked her up and carried her, held against his broad chest, over to fumble her into the armchair by the living room windows. He groaned a little, straightening up.
He must have wiped the blood from his face: she couldn’t see any now. Maybe he was still hungry, maybe he had brought her up here to finish his meal.
She blacked out.
When she woke, there were still no lights on in the apartment, but she knew he was there.
“Baron?”
“Yes.” He was on the couch against the far wall, by the direction of his voice. “Ivo, please.”
“Ivo. Did you kill those men?”
“I didn’t try to, so I think not.”
“They mugged me. Did they get my purse?”
“They weren’t after your purse. One of your colleagues has been trying to drive you away with stupid tricks, but you wouldn’t go. So he hired those ruffians to frighten you away.”
“A knife,” she gulped, shivering violently. “Jesus! They had a knife!”
“A straight razor, old fashioned, good for cutting throats.”
“No, no!” she cried, weeping with horror. “They meant to cut my face! They tried to cut my face!”
Silence.
“Who would do that?” She punched the arm of the chair in impotent rage and fear. “I don’t know people who would do a thing like that, I don’t work with people like that!”
A creaking sound came as he shifted his weight.
She scrabbled an old tissue out of her coat pocket and wiped at her eyes. “Someone who knows what scars mean to an actor—to an actress—they did this. It was someone I know. What time is it?”
“Late,” he murmured. “That bitch of theirs will be off saving herself, so I think I we’re secure here for now. Jessamyn, she hurt me. I must rest awhile.”
“Hurt you?” She squinted woozily, seeing more than she had before now that her eyes were used to the reflected illumination from cars passing below. “How could she hurt you?”
How could that skinny girl with rings in her face hurt the creature that he was (couldn’t be, of course, but she’d seen the bloody slick on his lips—). How could anyone hurt it—hurt him—
what did I really see? Not what I thought I saw, because that’s impossible. And you have to invite a vampire into your house, or he can’t come in.
Did I invite him in?
She couldn’t remember. She could hardly think at all . . . A beat of silence went by, two beats.
“She had an ice pick,” he whispered, “and she used it as I entered the alley, before she ran away.”
“Oh God,” Jess croaked, shoving herself up out the chair with fierce energy. He was just a man, of course, what else could he be? And he was wounded. She wondered if she was cut somewhere herself but too numb to know it.
She staggered, afraid she would vomit or pass out. Shock. Shock on top of shock.
Be like Eva: toughened by crises, able to press on beyond her own needs and even her limitations when necessary. No:
be
Eva.
She tottered closer and let him take her hand and guide it to a torn place on his shirt. A kind of thick welt throbbed on the hot skin beneath.
“Here,” he said.
There was no blood. His shirt was dry. How could there be no blood?
She tugged him up somehow, dragging his arm over her shoulder and using her hip as a kind of cantilever to move his sagging weight, helped him cover the few steps to her bedroom. He was dense with muscle, heavy with fatigue and pain. The bed creaked loudly when he fell onto it. She turned on the bedside lamp and helped him get out of his coat, jacket, and shirt. His torso was smooth-skinned, except for some puckered scars.
A fighter, she thought; barons led soldiers to war, in the days when the title meant something functional. No wonder he talks confidently about violence. Its stories are written on his body.
She ran her palms along the strapping of muscle encasing his ribs and down the plates of his belly, looking for other punctures from the ice pick. There weren’t any, but the feel of him was strange.
This was not the sculpted musculature of the gym or even the dojo, but the coiled, packed power of a body that had been tested and strained, fighting hard fights from an early age. It was beautiful the way the exaggerations of heroic statuary can be beautiful, but poignant, too, because it spoke of a life without childhood. In the modern world, he might be a man who had grown up in a street-gang, fighting savage skirmishes over urban turf from an early age.
What an insult it must be to him, to be hurt like this by a work-tool in the hand of a girl! But no; he had already forgotten, she thought. His body threw off an immediate heat that was life, now, fighting to persist—there was no time, and no purpose, in looking back at the struggle in the alley.
Where he had beaten back two other men, even though he himself was injured. This, not all the rest, this impossible thing made her wonder again, is it all true? Can he really be a man out of another time, preserved by some unthinkable dark magic?
Preserved till now, anyway.
“What can I do?” she said. She wasn’t Eva after all. She had never witnessed violence worse than a boy knocked off his bicycle by a delivery truck on Third Avenue.
And her own red hands, cut up by flying shards of Nick’s windshield, of course. Nick should be here, he knew more about such things. He had been on battlefields himself, an observer rather than a warrior, but still.
“I need more light,” she said, and when Ivo didn’t answer, she went to the wall switch and snapped on the overhead fixture.
His face looked bluish white. Dark stains of exhaustion had spread below his closed eyes. Exploring gingerly, she found again the ugly puncture wound under his lower left ribs, sealed now as if with swelling. And still, no blood.
“Ivo, what should I do?” she whispered, sitting beside him on the bed. “Does this need bandaging, or disinfectant? Something?”
He shielded his eyes with his forearm. “Make it dark again, please,” he said. “Just sit with me.”
She turned the overhead back off and clicked the three way bulb in the lamp to its lowest setting, and then sat there, her hands folded uselessly in her lap and tears sliding silently down her cheeks. “Can I get anything, bring anyone?”
“No.”
“Are you dying?”
“No.”
“But you should be,” she said in a strained voice. “There should be blood, you should be begging for a doctor, asking to go to a hospital—” Her voice died away. She heard only her own thin, distressed breathing. “Walter says Nick has met people in Europe who think you’re a vampire.”
He sighed, a shallow sigh with a catch in it. “Thank you. This makes things easier for me. What they say is true, although they’re mistaken about the details.”
“She really hurt you,” Jess said stupidly. She couldn’t free her thoughts from the slow, sludgy thickness of shock. “She really stabbed you, that girl with the rings. But you’re a vampire, so you can’t die?”
“I’ll heal. At least, I always have before. But the weakness—No one must come, no police, no little leather-armored vermin with razors and ice picks. So we can’t stay here.”
“But—”
He caught her wrist to quiet her, though his grip was weak. “You have an enemy at that theater, so the enemy knows where you live—but not where
I
live. We must find a taxicab and go to my apartment instead.”
She had an enemy. Ivo von Craggen admitted to being a vampire. One of these things she could face right now, but not both.
“What enemy?” she said. “That kid told you who sent him after me. Who was it?”
No answer.
“Ivo, they were going to cut my face, or maybe worse. My whole professional career, the use of whatever talent I have, it all would have been destroyed. I’ve got to know: who sent them?”
“Don’t ask me this.”
She was drowning in horrified confusion. Nick didn’t want her in his play, but Nick was in Europe. Nick was crazy, or not crazy, or half crazy and half sane—could it be him? Had he hired them? She couldn’t live another second without knowing, one way or the other.
“That bastard with the razor told you. Now tell me the name.”
After a long moment he said quietly, “Anthony Sinclair. I’m sorry.”
The knot of tension in Jess’s chest finally dissolved, and it felt as if her whole life melted away with it. Away drained all of the good, warm feeling of belonging where her talents fitted her to be, among people who understood and respected her work, people dedicated to the same cause; all selfless, at least while in service to the play itself.
Anthony. His flirting, his solicitude, his suggestions that she think about quitting the job. All those nasty tricks, most of them not really dangerous but designed to cut the ground from under her feet until she had no firm place left to stand. She could almost despise the man for the paltriness of the means he had chosen.
Why? If he had some reason of his own, not just a pay-off from Nick (could that be?), then
what
reason? And why not just murder her at the start and be done with it? All this time he’d been so sympathetic, so supportive, so full of concern! Taking her to his apartment that night after Whitely’s party—would he really have slept with her if she’d invited him, given what he was doing secretly to drive her out of the play?
An actor is someone capable of behaving very differently from the way he really feels, someone who can throw himself into any part. An actor can be two personalities at the same time. She’d been completely taken in by him.
How could he do that to a colleague?
Why
?
Though she couldn’t begin to piece together a motive for Sinclair’s attacks on her, it never occurred to her to doubt the truth of what Ivo said. Once the words were out, she saw that it was the right answer, the only answer: a monstrous answer from the mouth of a wounded monster.
How had her path veered into this eerie territory of shadowy plots and irrational betrayals? How would she ever make her way out again into the plain light of day? Worn to her limit and stretched too tight to bear, she began at last to sob and gasp, covering her face with her hands.
Retreat
H
is apartment was a studio over a carpet dealer’s on Madison Avenue, in a stolid building with a plain facade in clay-colored brick: no doorman, no awning, no marble-floored lobby. This was a commercial building on the ground floor, its unimposing entrance a locked plate glass door set between two shops. The foyer held a wall of mailboxes, a table for packages, a tiny elevator, and a fake marble urn next to the bottom flight of the stairs.
East side, yes; but East side basic, and it probably cost a small fortune instead of the usual huge one for this area.
God, I am such a New Yorker; I’m not even in the door, and I’m pricing the vampire’s apartment in my head.
They took the elevator up, crammed together at very close quarters. Jess was horrified by the trembling she could see now in his lips, his hands. She refused to think about the prospect of his collapse there in that coffin like space.
But he lurched out of the elevator under his own steam, and moved determinedly down the carpeted corridor to his door. Leaning on her shoulder, he got the assemblage of locks open.
“It came furnished,” he said. “I don’t spend much time here, or bring visitors.”
He was apologizing for the unexceptional breakfront and dining table, the sofa and the dully upholstered armchairs grouped near the street windows with a small glass-topped coffee table. The closet sized kitchen was spotless, clearly unused except for a wine rack in the corner and bottled water in the fridge. A thin layer of dust filmed the countertops.
Geraniums crowded in leggy clumps from two pots on the street side windowsills. The kitchen window, around the corner on a side street, framed a snake plant.
Plants. The vampire kept plants and flowers in his apartment.
This is crazy, crazy, crazy; I am dreaming or out of my mind.
“
Not what you expected,” he murmured, as he sank onto the couch in with a grateful groan. “Where are the dusty tapestries and glowering portraits, or at least a suit of armor in the corner? Don’t be embarrassed; you’re only a hundred years too late. It took that long to grow out of nostalgia, but I did. It’s better now. More free.”
“Oh,” she said. Someone had paid strangers to try to cut her face, and now she was listening to a vampire some unnumbered centuries old, talking about his psychological growth.
His journey, people now would say. She couldn’t help it; she giggled.
“I mean that,” he said. “I like this life, but only after I learned that I need only functional shelter, an occupation, and the appearance of a normal life. Why not live as others do?”
“Flowers?” she said, wandering into the kitchenette. The dirt in the geranium pots was satisfactorily moist. He took care of his plants. There was an odd little terrace outside the kitchen, built adjoining the fire escape landing. “Do you put them out on the terrace in the summer?”
“We had gardens in the old castle,” he said, “terraced gardens with cracked, mossy steps, dangerous steps. I spent time in those gardens, recovering from war, from wounds, fevers, bellyaches from eating bad food.”
Jess came back and perched on the arm of the sofa. “You had a castle? Of course, you had a castle, Baron. And spoiled food and raids and battles . . .”
“Jessamyn,” he said in a small voice, “I’m cold.”
She got up and drew his overcoat over him, tucking the collar around his neck. Eyes shut, he added faintly, “I don’t miss much from then any more. But I miss the sense of certainty. Can you understand? We knew who we were, and what God wanted us to do, and where we would go when life ended, depending on how we had lived and whether we died shriven or not. It wasn’t a bad life for people who for the most part didn’t live long enough to mature.”
She was quiet, considering the painful irony of his situation: a man who had enjoyed such a circumscribed, short-term existence in a time of knights and castles had been somehow drawn into a tremendously prolonged existence of constant shifts and expansions. He had already had more time than anybody could possibly need, to mature and grow old, very old indeed.
“How old were you?” she said. “When that life ended for you?”
“Oh, seventeen, eighteen,” he sighed. “I don’t remember. We went to war young in those days. It was shocking that I wasn’t long since married and a father of children! But we had broken with one family after endless negotiations, and another bride chosen for me died suddenly, so there was nothing to keep me at home. I went off to war when I could, while my parents went on looking for a suitable match for me.”
“Weren’t you lonely, if all your friends were already married and had families?”
“All my friends were soldiers. We shared the love life, as you call it now, of soldiers when we were in the field together. I’ll spare you the details. I’ll just say, there was plenty to be forgiven by a priest, when we could find one. Are you shocked?”
She hesitated, then admitted, “Yes, I am.”
“I was an arrogant roughneck in those days. But at least when I killed a man, it was hand-to-hand and for serious reasons.”
Jess stared at him. “What reasons? Better ones than ours?”
His long, thick lashes rested for a moment on his cheeks; then she saw the glint of his open eyes again. “The same ones: property, privilege, class, religion. Personal grudges. But it was not so—so calculated as now, so complex.
“In peacetime we farmed and hunted. When enemies left their own farming and hunting to threaten us, we fought them. Then all those who were left thanked God to be still alive and returned to farming and hunting, for the living must eat or die.”
She felt herself tearing up. “You must have been older. You don’t look seventeen, Ivo!”
He checked a motion that had been intended, she thought, for a shrug. “Well, I’ve lived a long time since. I’ve been—seasoned, if not exactly aged. You can’t see all that I’ve seen and show nothing in your face, I think.”
Her mouth was dry and she felt her muscles tense to flee, but her terror had a blunted edge. She was getting used to the idea of what he was, though her body still rang with fear. She intertwined her fingers and made herself sit still. “A vampire is supposed to be a—a revenant, someone who dies and comes back to life. Did you really die?”
“Yes, I died.”
“What was it like?”
“Not like what the priests said.” He laughed, coughed, groaned. “Do you know the effects of the anesthetic gas used by dentists? It was something like that: a tingling feeling, a sense of suspension, weightlessness, and distance, but at the same time a very close, sharp awareness of the throes of the body. But it just didn’t matter enough to try to do anything about it, even if there had been something to be done.
“And then some drifting, darkness, confusion—and waking again with the soreness in the limbs of having been trampled by warhorses, and the beginnings of a hunger that has been with me ever since.”
She sat mute, shivering.
“I saw no tunnel, no angels, no pure white light, if that’s what you’re asking,” he added, “but then, this was no normal death. I worry now and then about how it will be when I come to truly die. I pray sometimes still—in fact I’ve spent several periods since in monasteries. They’re restful. But I think religion is a fairy tale for the fearful.”
Jess got up and moved restlessly around the room, bending to read the titles of the books on the shelves by the false fireplace: auction catalogs, issues of collectors’ magazines, books on the history of gems and jewelry; a few volumes on arms, armor, and the history of warfare; a half-shelf on horsemanship. Several books on clocks.
She sat back down across from him, feeling weirdly normal. “How long have you had this apartment?”
“Under a year, and I travel.” He gazed unhappily at her smudged fingers. “I use a cleaning service, but they’re unreliable. I’ve been meaning to change them.”
She leaned forward, resting her forehead on her palm. “Ivo, what am I supposed to do now? Have this nice, insane conversation in your living room and then go home and forget it ever happened?”
A chessboard lay on the coffee table, set up for a game. His right hand fumbled weakly among the pieces, adjusting them to sit neatly in the centers of their squares,
“This a nice conversation, isn’t it?” he said. His voice had sunk to a thready whisper. “I hope we can keep it a nice conversation. I have trouble sometimes, calming when there has been violence. It shakes my—my balance. Hatred always disturbs me.”
Jess shook her head. “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble concentrating, myself. What were we talking about?”
“About Ivo the vampire, of course. Ivo the murderer, too. I think I might have killed one of those brutes. I hope so, and I’m not in the least sorry.”
Jess shuddered, shaken by a mixture of disgust, revulsion, and savage joy: maybe one of them was dead, and she hoped so too.
He watched her. “I was a soldier in a time when men were either slaves of the soil or slaves of the sword. I went first into battle when I was fourteen years old, and younger men fought under my command, or against me. I have no patience with these modern toughs. They have no discipline, no skills to speak of, and no reason beyond quick thrills for anything they do.”
“Maybe they don’t see it that way,” she murmured. “Or maybe you hate them so much because you were like them.”
“I saved your life,” he said in a shocked tone. “Are you trying to insult me?”
Jess took a breath and tried to think. Weak as he was, she was sure he could throttle her one-handed if he chose to. She remembered that she had something to say, and she meant to say it.
“Nick and Walter have told me about you, and then you told me yourself: the Ruby Tear. That’s your family’s story; and I know more than you think. You’ve spent centuries hunting down Nick’s family. That sounds like extended gang vengeance to me, Ivo: an eye for an eye, one drive-by shooting for another.”
“Not at all,” he said in a stronger, offended tone. “I watch the news on your television, and it’s not the same at all. My reasons are old and unchanging. I’ve caused the deaths of many men of the Griffin line, but I still haven’t found the treasure their ancestor robbed from my father’s castle. They’re a clever clan, which makes the hunting more interesting.”
“Maybe you haven’t cared as much about your lost treasure as you think,” she said. “Maybe you just like being a secret persecutor.”
“Then I am a lost soul indeed,” he murmured, tipping over the white bishop with his finger. “Nearly a devil of Hell already, irredeemable forever.”
Jess knew she was in over her head. How could she answer a man from a time when people believed in Hell? He seemed to believe and disbelieve at the same time, or alternately.
“I think,” he went on thoughtfully, “that it’s the crimson of fresh blood that I’m looking for now, not so much this cold red gem from ages ago. That would explain why I’ve hunted it so ineptly, don’t you think? I, who was a champion huntsman in my father’s woods.”
She saw the flash of his eyes in the light from the window: wide, gleaming eyes, slightly hooded, daydreaming of blood . . .lion eyes.
She had to bring his focus back from realms of speculation that were closed to her and down to now, to this life, this world, this real person sitting in his real apartment with him while he rested a real wound.
“You’re not a hunter or a soldier now,” she said strongly. “You’re a vampire, living on people’s blood. You drink from other people than Griffin men and their families, right? From Lily Anderson, for instance.”
“Yes.” His eyelids drooped, veiling that predatory stare.
She forced herself to continue. “Does she know? I mean, does she remember, afterward?”
“I hope not. I can put suggestible people into a sort of trance with my voice, my eyes—no, not you, Jessamyn. All your suggestibility is inward, from yourself to yourself, in the service of your art. You aren’t vulnerable to me in that way.”
“And Lily’s not—changed? Because you—” Her throat closed on the words:
bit her and sucked blood out of her veins.
“She’s not changed and won’t change. I’ve never had the power to pass my condition along to others; neither that, nor any illness in the blood of anyone I drink from.”
She shuddered. “You didn’t have time to take much from that man in the alley. You’ll need to drink again soon, won’t you? Everyone needs nourishment to heal.”
“Even me, yes,” he said. “And for something that isn’t going to kill me, this tiny wound hurts very much.”
There followed a short silence during which she watched helplessly while he dealt with his pain in his own way. Jess hugged her knees, thinking of the scars on his body, all the pain that must have come with each of them. Her own scars from the crash tingled with uneasy sympathy.
At length he said, “Don’t worry. When I can, I’ll go out and serve myself, as you say. You won’t be involved any further.”
“You’ll kill somebody.”
“Not by intention.” She heard the dangerous distance in his voice. In this territory she clearly was not welcome, let alone influential.
“You should have drunk one of those bastards dry on the spot,” she said fiercely. The flashing blade, the grip on her hair—her scalp, she realized, was still aching from it.
“God damn them!” she raged. “I didn’t go through all those operations and therapy and nightmares just so a pair of creeps could—could slice—Jesus! You know who cuts up women’s faces? Pimps. Crooks working for a mob do that, to prostitutes who give them trouble! I can’t believe—”
She blotted her nose on her sleeve. “Shit. I’m sorry, I can’t believe I’m raving like this. Surviving that car crash—you know about that, don’t you? Along with everything else, it’s just—”
“I know about it,” he answered.
“Living through that should have made me stronger, not hysterical and maybe crazy. God, suppose I’m still in the hospital, hallucinating you the way Nick hallucinated a woman on a white horse? No, no, never mind, that’s just the theatrical imagination running overtime. Isn’t it? Say something, damn it! Don’t just lie there listening to me snivel and swear!”
His hand hovered above the chess pieces. “He didn’t hallucinate. That visit of the Dark Lady is paid to each of the Griffin men when the time is coming for him to meet me.”