Blood and Chrysanthemums (9 page)

The woman had not wanted to pick her up. Ardeth could tell by the careful glances in the rearview mirror, the subtle stiffness in her shoulders.

She had been walking for hours along the side of the highway. The prairies were well behind her and the road was now lined with a curtain of pines. She had slept the previous day sheltered in their fragrant shadows, guarded by sharp-needled branches. Even now, the scent of sap and needles seemed to cling to her. At least it hides any other odours, Ardeth thought with wry amusement. Vampires did not seem to sweat much, but it had been two days since her last bath and her clothing had gone without cleaning longer than that. She was feeling distinctly grubby.

Since the incident with Gord, she had tried to be more choosy about her rides. Most of the time, if the driver was not a woman like Kate Butler, an old man or accompanied by a family, she sent them away with a polite “no thank you” and a firm mental command to stay away. Not that she was afraid, she reminded herself. At least not of them. But it would be boring to battle a succession of seductions, subtle or otherwise. And if one of them pushed her too hard . . . it would be easy to fall, to succumb to the lure of blood and vengeance. There was no reason not to taste mortal blood again, not now, but it had to be the right time, the right person. She was not sure why it mattered so much to her, but it did. When she did it, it would be everything her encounter with Mark had promised to be—and everything Rozokov’s anonymous feeding had not been.

Whatever her reasons, her resolution had resulted in a shortage of rides—for the very people she deemed safe were the least likely to consider her so. Now she was tired, hungry and, vampire or no, her feet hurt. She had been walking for so long without even the possibility of a ride that when the couple’s car had passed her she had not even bothered to put out her thumb. To her surprise, the brake-lights had flared and the car had drifted to a stop on the shoulder ahead of her.

Now ensconced in the back seat, she could see the woman’s irritation and the man’s curiosity. They were in their late fifties, she decided. The woman’s grey hair must have once been red; there were traces of the colour still in her brows and a scattering of freckles visible on the softly lined cheeks. The man was balding and bespectacled, with an anonymously friendly face. He introduced himself as Doug Robinson; his wife was Linda.

“Ardeth.” She used her real name, mostly because a pseudonym seemed unnecessary . . . and keeping them straight had always been difficult.

“Where are you going?”

“Toronto.”

“We can drop you at Sudbury but that’s as far south as we’re going.”

“Sudbury would be great.” The ritual identification and destination exchange done, Ardeth turned her gaze back to the passing wall of trees, hoping the gesture would dispel further conversation.

“Do you live in Toronto?”

“I used to.”

“Where do you live now?”

“No place in particular. I’ve been travelling for a while.”

“Do you have family in the city?”

“Yes,” she answered, resigning herself to the necessary ordeal of constructing a fiction she could remember. “My sister lives there so I’m going to visit her for a while.” It was always safest to stick with the truth, at least to start with.

“And your parents?”

“In Ottawa.” At least they had lived there, before the car crash five years ago. “How far is it to Sudbury?”

“About three hours yet,” he answered and she caught his quick glance at her in the mirror. To her surprise, he looked more concerned than curious. “You can sleep back there, if you like. You must have been walking for a while.”

“Yes, I was,” Ardeth answered with a careful yawn and decided to take the offered opportunity to at least pretend to sleep, if only to avoid any more conversation. She bundled her knapsack against the window, put her head against it, and closed her eyes.

After twenty minutes, the man said softly, “Forgiven me yet?”

“For what?” The woman’s whisper was full of injured dignity.

“We could hardly have let the poor thing walk all the way to Sudbury. It isn’t safe out there.”

“And picking up hitchhikers is, I suppose?”

“Whatsoever you do . . .”

“I know, I know.” For the first time, there was a thread of amusement in the woman’s whisper. “I suppose I should be grateful she’s not a six-foot-two ex-convict.”

“But he turned out to be a good man, after all,” There was silence, then the soft rustle of cloth. Ardeth opened her eyes carefully and say the woman’s hand reach out to touch her husband’s as it rested on the steering wheel. The dim dashboard light glowed off the gold band on her finger. The man turned his head a little and smiled. Ardeth shut her eyes very tight.

The rocking motion of the car must have lulled her to sleep at last. When she awoke again, the car was gliding beneath a bank of bright lights at a roadside truck stop. She straightened up slowly, slitting her eyes against the glare. “Where are we?”

“Just outside of Sudbury. This is as far as we go on the highway.” Doug replied. Ardeth opened her eyes a little wider and saw the small huddle of cars nuzzling up to the wide bright window of the restaurant, as if afraid of the dark. Beyond them, she thought she could see a small motel. She glanced at her watch. It was three o’clock in the morning.

“Thanks for the ride.”

“We were going to stop for a coffee—we’ve got a bit of a drive still ahead of us. Let us buy you a cup,” Linda said and Ardeth glanced at her curiously. The miles seemed to have melted the woman’s animosity. Or her husband’s quiet joking had.

She didn’t need coffee, not really. But the cup would feel warm in her hands and, in the restaurant, she might find another ride under the benevolent sanction of these undeniably upright people. She accepted and followed them into the bright glow of the restaurant.

Inside, the place faded from a beacon in the darkness to a slightly dingy, nearly empty truck stop identical to a thousand more across the continent. They wandered through the cafeteria line, past plastic barriers shielding hot food that had simmered too long, cellophane wrapped sandwiches that all looked the same, and glutinous looking pies and pastries.

The coffee wasn’t bad, Ardeth decided, as it warmed her stomach. It didn’t nourish her, and drinking an entire cup of it was out of the question, but a sip or two felt very nice. She wrapped her cold fingers around the ceramic mug and glanced around the room.

Two truckers, a longhaired young man in a flannel shirt, a tired-looking group of teenagers, a young couple in polar fleece jackets. If they weren’t hitching too, they might be her best bet. Even if she couldn’t get a ride, she could take one of the motel rooms for the day. Toronto was only four or five hours away; with luck, she could be there by the next midnight.

After drinking half her coffee, Linda rose and excused herself, heading for the back of the restaurant; Ardeth looked at Doug. He smiled, an expression that somehow transformed his bland, forgettable features into something else, something sweet yet strong, promising kindness underpinned with iron. She looked down into her cup hastily, unnerved. “Does your sister know you’re coming?” he asked.

She opened her mouth to say yes and was vaguely surprised when she heard her voice say “no.”

“What are you running away from?” She looked up sharply then, into brown eyes that suddenly seemed shrewd and knowing, despite the warm crinkle of lines around them.

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe not. Something to do with a man, I’d guess.” He smiled again, at her surprise. “It usually is.”

“Did you ever cheat on your wife?” Ardeth asked abruptly, unsure whether she was just trying to shock him into silence or if she genuinely wanted to know.

“No.”

“Didn’t you ever think about it?”

“Of course I did. Not that I’d tell her that, mind you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I swore in my marriage vow that I wouldn’t. Because when I thought about it, she was worth more to me than a transitory pleasure.”

“Was it easy? Resisting temptation?”

“No. It was no easier for me than for any other man.”

“You did a better job of it than most then,” Ardeth observed bitterly.

“Is that what you’re running away from? An unfaithful husband?” Doug asked her and Ardeth lifted her left hand to show him her bare fingers. “A boyfriend then.”

The thought of describing Rozokov as her “boyfriend” dragged a small, choked laugh from her throat. “It’s not that simple. And we never made any promises . . .”

“Not out loud. But you think he betrayed one.” His voice seemed suddenly far away, just a distant part of her own thoughts.

“He made me believe in what we were together. That despite all the stories and myths, we could be anything we wanted to be. I knew, somewhere inside me, that it couldn’t last forever. We couldn’t change the rules, not the ones that really matter. But I didn’t think it would be so soon. I didn’t think he would just . . .” She stopped suddenly, appalled at the words she had let pour out of her. She stared across the table at the sympathetic eyes, the dangerously trustworthy face. “It’s not something you could understand,” she said at last.

“Perhaps not. You might be surprised.” His eyes shifted past her, towards the back of the restaurant. “Linda’s coming. We’ll be on our way.” He slid awkwardly out of the booth then paused. “The things that matter in this world rarely come without sacrifice. That lesson is thousands of years old and still every one of us seems to have to relearn it. That and the oldest lesson of all . . . forgiveness. I hope things work out for you. If they don’t, and you need someone to talk to, I left my card by my cup. Goodbye.”

She struggled for polite words of gratitude and farewell but by the time she managed to open her mouth he was gone. She watched him go, a balding man in his late fifties, wrapped in a brown cardigan. At the door of the restaurant, he took his wife’s arm.

Ardeth looked away, staring into her cup until she heard an engine start and then fade away. She was still watching the brown liquid, feeling it cooling through the cup, when a waitress wandered by and collected the empty dish across from her.

“What . . . ?” The waitress’s voice made her look up. The woman was turning a white business card in her hand. “He must have left this for you, honey. It sure ain’t for me.” She set the paper down with a grin and disappeared.

Ardeth stared at the card for a moment. I wonder what he was? A psychiatrist? Finally, she picked it up and turned it over.

Reverend Douglas Robinson.

Ardeth put her head down on her arms and started to laugh.

Something was knocking.

The sound burrowed into her mind, dragging her up from the depths of a dream that faded even as she tried to integrate the noise into it. She rolled over, registered the still body and steady breathing beside her, and squinted beyond it at the clock radio on the nightstand. It was two o’clock.

Something next door, she decided groggily, then it came again.

Not from the apartment’s front door. From the sliding door of the balcony.

Dread hollowed out a hole beneath her ribcage. She slid out of bed, shivering in the cool air, and went to the door. Pulling aside the curtains, she stared for a moment at her own reflection before she realized it was crowned by wind-tossed black hair, not tangled red.

Behind her, she heard a rustle of cloth.

“Oh, shit,” Mickey Edmunds said as Sara Alexander began to unlock the door.

Five minutes later, Sara sat in the living room, looking at the black-clad figure of her older sister huddled on the couch. Mickey leaned against the wall of the kitchen, hands in the pockets of his hastily donned jeans. Behind him, the kettle was beginning to boil.

They had managed an awkward embrace and uneasy pleasantries. She could see Ardeth’s eyes registering the changes in her condominium: new posters on the walls, the guitars propped in the corner, the boom-box stereo and tapes scattered on the emptied shelf of the bookcase.

Her sister had changed as well, though not as dramatically as she had the last time, after her disappearance six months earlier. Her hair was still black, cut in a rough approximation of the Louise Brooks helmet bob, though her bangs had definite signs of having been self-trimmed. And she was still dressed in black, though the red polar fleece sweater was a surprising touch and she was wearing pants and sturdy shoes rather than the short skirt Sara had seen her in last. But her face seemed thinner, and there were faint lines around her mouth and eyes that made her look worn and worried.

“Have you had any problems with the place?” Ardeth asked suddenly.

“Not yet. We’ll see what happens when your post-dated cheques run out in December. But nobody from the building has said anything yet.” The condominium was Ardeth’s; Sarah had moved in after her sister’s disappearance and Mickey had joined her after the final night of revelation and destruction on the Dale estate. Because Ardeth had provided post-dated cheques for the maintenance fees and the mortgage payments came automatically from her savings account, still propped up by her half of the money from their parents’ estate, moving in had been an easy solution to Sara’s own ongoing housing problems. And her money problems, as well. Her own inheritance was long gone, spent supporting her band, Black Sun, through times that seemed perpetually lean. As long as Ardeth’s money paid the mortgage, she and Mickey could come up with the maintenance money, making the condominium a perfect, and much more comfortable, home base for touring with the band than her other, usually temporary, accommodations had been.

“I talked to the bank about your accounts, by the way. Unless you’d like to publicly reappear, your money isn’t going anywhere without someone declaring you dead. And we can’t do that for seven years anyway.”

The kettle began to whine and Mickey disappeared into the kitchen. Ardeth laughed, an unsteady, bitter sound. “I suppose I could come back from the dead now, couldn’t I?”

Sara felt a twinge of disappointment, then a stronger stab of guilt. If Ardeth was safe, she should be happy. If Ardeth could come home, she should be grateful. Never mind what it did to her own plans. “Where did you go?” she asked, to deflect both the conversation and her own thoughts.

“Out west.” Ardeth glanced at Mickey as he reemerged from the kitchen carrying a tray with a teapot and cups. “We made it to Banff before your friend’s car died.”

“That’s about a province farther than he predicted,” Mickey replied. “So where’s the old man?”

“Back in Banff, probably.” Her voice was casual but Sara didn’t miss the undercurrent of pain there. It sounded familiar somehow, like an echo of her own voice. So that was the reason for the thin face, the haunted eyes. Something had happened between Ardeth and Dimitri Rozokov. Ardeth glanced around the room again. “I hoped I could stay here for a couple of days. Just until I work out something else.”

“Of course you can.” Sara avoided Mickey’s glance. It is her place, after all, she thought to herself. And god knows you crashed here often enough when she still lived in it. “What are you planning to do?”

“I’m not sure. I might go back to school.”

“Go back to school?” Sara echoed in disbelief, hearing Mickey choke on his tea.

“Why not? If no one has been around looking for me then it’s probably safe. All I have to do is think up some believable explanation for why I disappeared. And,” she managed a smile, “make sure all my courses have night classes.”

It sounded plausible enough—as long as Sara didn’t think about Mickey’s accusations that she had killed his roommate or about the feelings of her sister’s mouth drinking the blood from her wrist. And those thoughts wouldn’t go away.

“I suppose it might work . . . though I don’t know if it’s safe to assume Havendale has forgotten about you. We don’t know what information might have survived the fire. The Japanese doctor did, you know. I read about it in the paper.”

“She didn’t tell anyone the truth, did she?”

“Hardly,” Mickey answered. “She wouldn’t be that stupid. Besides, Rozokov trusted her.” Sara saw Ardeth’s eyes shift, her mouth tighten.

“If she did tell, it didn’t make the news,” she said hastily. “All I’m saying is be careful.”

“I thought that was my line,” Ardeth countered, smiling, and for a moment she wasn’t the dark-haired stranger, but Sara’s older sister, recalling the rituals of their relationship, warnings and rebellions that had sprung from affection and envy on both sides. “So how are things with you?”

Sara didn’t miss the glance at Mickey. “Good. We’re close to a record deal. Things are going well.”

“I’m glad.” Silence settled in again. Sara took a sip of her tea.

“Why don’t you go back to bed, Mickey? No point in both of us being up.”

“I’m fine . . .” he started, then set his mug down. “Oh. I get it. Girl talk and all that.”

“You don’t have to . . .” Ardeth started but he was already on his feet.

“No problem. I’ll see you,” he paused, trying to work out the correspondence of their sleeping schedule, “whenever.” As the bedroom door closed, Sara went to sit down on the couch.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“About what?”

“About whatever happened between you and him that made you run back here?”

“What makes you think something happened?”

“Come on, Ardy, give me a little credit. Besides, when you said he was in Banff, you sounded just like me when I used to talk about my unfaithful, unlamented lover, Tyler, back before his screwing around finally made me leave.”

Sara did not know what she had expected, what personal problems she had thought vampires might have. But the tangled tale of moonlight climbs, temptation, frustration, arguments and final betrayal left her more confused than before.

“You left Rozokov because he drank blood from a woman?” she asked when Ardeth finished her halting but dry-eyed recital. Her sister nodded. “And you were tempted by this guy, Mark?”

“Yes.”

“Ardy, I hate to sound dense about this, but you’re vampires. You’re supposed to drink blood.”

“But it doesn’t have to be human blood. Not unless we want it to be.”

“But other blood doesn’t . . . work as well.”

“No.” Ardeth swallowed convulsively. “And that’s the trap. If we drink human blood and don’t care about the people we prey on, we become monsters. But if we do care . . .”

“Then it would be easy to do more than just drink blood. And then you think you’d be cheating on each other,” Sara finished. “I wouldn’t think vampires had the same definition of fidelity humans do.”

“You keep talking about vampires as if there were hundreds of us, as if there were rules and precedents and Miss Manners columns,” Ardeth said angrily. “You don’t understand. We’re the only ones—or we might as well be. I don’t know how ‘vampires’ are supposed to think or feel. I thought Dimitri did—he made it sound like he did when we were in Toronto. But after we got to Banff, it all seemed to change. I didn’t understand him anymore. So I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel—I only know what I
do
feel.”

“And you think he betrayed you.” She nodded. “You almost did the same thing to him.”

“I know.” For a moment, Ardeth was silent, head bent, then she looked up. “But I didn’t. I didn’t.”

Sara looked at her for a moment, fighting a losing battle with the absurd laughter bubbling inside her. Ardeth’s expression, wounded and indignant, only made her chuckle harder. “I’m sorry, Ardy,” she managed at last. “But do you know what this sounds like?”

“What?”

“It sounds like real life.”

“I don’t want real life!” Ardeth cried suddenly, rising to pace across the room. “If I have to have real life, I want my old one back.”

“What if you can’t?”

“I can try. That’s all I want to do, Sara. I’ve thought about this a lot on the way here. I want to try to get my life back, whatever way I can. Will you help me?”

Sara stood up, looking at the dark figure of her sister, aching at the desperation in her voice and the painful hope in her eyes. All the amusement she had felt died. Not trusting her own voice, she opened her arms and embraced her sister. With her eyes closed, it could be the old Ardeth back again, warm and living. So she kept her eyes closed for as long as she could.