By Blood We Live (50 page)

I'm stalling. Yes, I am.

There's the silhouette of a city, far off, past the sand and smoke that seem to stretch away in all directions except that one which would lead to the city. I know I'll never go that far, that going as far as that, I'd never again find my way home. The city is for other beings. I know that she's seen the city, that she's walked its streets and spoken all its dialects and visited its brothels and opium dens. She knows the stink of its sewers and the delicious aromas of its markets. She knows all the high places and all the low places. And I follow her across the sand, up one dune and down another, these great waves of wind-sculpted sand which tower above me, which I climb and then descend. In this place, the jackals and the vultures and the spiny black scorpions are her court, and there is no place here for thirsty horses.

Sometimes I can see her, through stinging veils of sand. And other times it seems I am entirely alone with the wailing Sirocco gale, and the voice of that wind is a thousand women crying for their men cut down on some Arabian battlefield a thousand years before my birth. And it is also the slow creep of the dunes across the face of the wasteland, and it is my heart pounding loudly in my ears. I'm lost in the wild, and I think I'll never see her again, but then I catch a glimpse of her through the storm, crouched in the lee of ruins etched and defaced by countless millennia of sand and wind and time. She might almost be any animal, anything out looking for its supper or some way to quench its thirst.

She waits there for me in the entrance to that crumbling temple, and I can smell her impatience, like dashes of turmeric. I can smell her thirst and her appetite, and the wind drives me forward.

She leads me down into the earth, her lips pressed to my ear, whispering so I can hear her over the storm. She tells me the name of the architect who built the fountain on Cherry Hill, that his name was Jacob Wrey Mould, and he came to New York in 1853, or 1854, or 1855, to design and build All Soul's Church. He was a pious man, she tells me, and he illustrated Thomas Grey's "Elegy in a Country Church-Yard" and "Book of Common Prayer." She says he died in 1886, and that he too was in love with a daughter of Lilith, that he died with no other thought but her. I want to ask where she learned all these things, if, perhaps, she spends her days in libraries, and I also want to ask if she means that she believes that I'm in love with her. But then the narrow corridor we've been following turns left and opens abruptly on a vast torch-lit chamber.

"Listen," she whispers. "This is one of my secrets. I've guarded this place for all my life."

The walls are built from great blocks of reddish limestone carved and set firmly in place without the aid of mortar, locking somehow perfectly together by a forgotten masonic art. The air reeks of frankincense, and there is thick cinnamon-colored dust covering everything; I follow her down a short flight of steps to the floor. It occurs to me that we've gone so deep underground that the roar of the wind should not still be so loud, but it is, and I wonder if maybe the wind has found its way
inside
me, if it's entered through one of the wounds she leaves on my throat.

"This was the hall of my mother," she says.

And now I see the corpses, heaped high between the smoky braziers. They are nude, or they are half-dressed, or they've been torn apart so completely, or are now so badly decomposed, that it's difficult to tell whether they're clothed or not. Some are men, and others are women, and not a few are children. I can smell them even through the incense, and I might cover my nose and mouth. I might begin to gag. I might take a step back towards the stairs leading up to the long corridor and the bloodless desert night beyond. And she blinks at me like a hungry, watchful owl.

"I cannot expect you to understand," she says.

And there are other rooms, other chambers, endless atrocities that I can now only half recall. There are other secrets which she keeps for her mother in the deep places beneath shifting sands. There are the ghosts of innumerable butcheries. There are demons held in prisons of crystal and iron, chained until some eventual apocalypse; their voices are almost indistinguishable from the voice of the wind.

And then we have descended into some still greater abyss, a cavern of sparkling stalactite and stalagmite formations, travertine and calcite glinting in the soft glow of phosphorescent vegetation which has never seen and will never have need of sunlight. We're standing together at the muddy edge of a subterranean pool, water so still and perfectly smooth, an ebony mirror, and she's already undressed and is waiting impatiently for me to do the same.

"I can't swim," I tell her and earn another owl blink.

If I
could
swim, I cannot imagine setting foot in that water, that lake at the bottom of the world.

"No one has asked you to swim," she replies and smiles, showing me those long incisors. "At this well, men only have to drown. You can do that well enough, I suspect." And then I'm falling, as the depths of that terrible lake rise up around me like the hood of some black desert cobra and rush over me, bearing me down and down and down into the chasm, driving the air from my lungs. Stones placed one by one upon my chest until my lungs collapse, constricting coils drawing tighter and tighter about me, and I try to scream. I open my mouth, and her sandpaper tongue slips past my lips and teeth. She tastes of silt and dying and loss. She tastes of cherry blossoms and summer nights in Central Park. She wraps herself about me, and the grey-white wings sprouting from her shoulders open wider than the wings of any earthly bird. Those wings have become the sky, and her feathers brush aside the fire of a hundred trillion stars.

Her teeth tear at my lower lip, and I taste my own blood.

This wind howling in my ears is the serpent flood risen from out that black pool, and is also icy solar winds, and the futile cries of bottled demons.

"Don't be afraid," she whispers in my ear, and her hand closes around my penis. "One must only take very small drinks. One must not be greedy in these dry times."

I gasp and open my eyes, unable to remember having shut them, and now we're lying together on the floor of the abattoir at the end of the long corridor below the temple ruins. This is the only one of her secrets she's shown me, and anything else must have been my imagination, my shock at the sight of so much death. There is rain, rain as red and sticky as blood, but still something to cool my fever, and I wrap my legs around her brown thighs and slide inside her. She's not made like other women, my raggedy girl from Cherry Hill, and she begins to devour me so slowly that I will still be dying in a thousand years.

She tells me she loves me.

There are no revelations here.

My eyes look for the night sky somewhere beyond the gore and limestone and sand, but there are only her wings, like Heaven and Hell and whatever might lie in between, and I listen to the raw and bitter laughter of the wind. . .

Some nights, I tell myself that I will walk around the park, and never mind the distance and inconvenience. Some nights, I pretend I hope that she
won't
be there, waiting by the fountain. But I'm not even as good a liar as I am a pianist, and it hardly matters, because she's always there.

Last night, for instance.

I brought her an old sweater I never wear, a birthday present from an ex-girlfriend, and she thanked me for it. I told her that I can bring her other things, whatever she might need, that she only has to ask, and she smiled and told me I'm very kind. My needs are few, she said, and pulled the old sweater on over whatever tatters she was already wearing.

"I worry about you," I said. "I worry about you all the time these days."

"That's sweet of you," she replied. "But I'm strong, stronger than I might seem." And I wondered if she knows about my dreams, and if our conversations were merely a private joke. I wonder if she only accepted the sweater because she feels sorry for me.

We talked, and she told me a very funny story about her first night in the park, almost a decade before I was born. And then, when there were no more words, when there was no longer the
need
for words, I leaned forward and offered her my throat. Thank you, she said, and I shut my eyes and waited for the scratch of her tongue against my skin, for the prick of those sharp teeth. She was gentle, because she is always gentle, lapping at the hole she's made and pausing from time to time to murmur reassurances I can understand without grasping the coarser, literal meaning of what she's said. I get the gist of it, and I know that's all that matters. When she was done, when she'd wiped her mouth clean and thanked me again for the sweater, when we'd said our usual good-byes for the evening, I sat alone on the bench and watched as she slipped away into the maze of cherry trees and azaleas and forsythia bushes.

I don't know what will become of these pages.

I may never print them. Or I may print them out and hide them from myself.

I could slip them between the pages of a book in the stacks at NYU and leave them there for anyone to find. I could do that. I could place them in an empty wine bottle and drop them from the Queensboro Bridge, so that the river would carry them down to the sea. The sea must be filled with bottles. . .

L. A. Banks is the bestselling author of the Vampire Huntress Legend series, which consists of twelve volumes. She is currently working on a graphic novel and manga scripts based on the series, and a young adult trilogy set in the same milieu is due out in 2010. Earlier this year, the latest in her Crimson Moon werewolf series,
Undead on Arrival
, was released. In 2008, Banks was named the
Essence Magazine
Storyteller of the Year.
 
Having thoroughly explored the hip-hop, urban vampires in the Vampire Huntress Legends, with this story Banks wanted to try her hand at a historical vampire tale, in the vein of the classic vampire sagas. "'Finders Keepers' is about a centuries-old vampire who finds herself alone in the modern world," Banks said. "It was fun going back in time and dealing with the prejudices against women, minorities, as well as a lot of the social power paradigms that existed then (and now). There's always a thread of social justice that runs through my work, wanting to see those who probably will never (in real life) be brought to justice get their due."

She kissed his forehead, tasting the thin sheen of salty moisture that still lingered on his skin, considering him before she gently closed his eyes. He had a handsome face, that of a Roman; dark lashes that rested against his now porcelain-pale skin; a strong, aristocratic nose; rugged square jaw. But he wasn't a keeper.

Slightly forlorn, she peeled herself away from his nude, lifeless body with a sigh, studying the tall, athletic form in repose on the bed as she took her time to dress. A thread-width finger of crimson seeped from his wound, the scarlet beacon drawing her back to his side to taste the last of him. His body twitched from the invasion; she kissed his lips as a goodbye and a thank you, leaving a red print of his essence against his mouth. But he wasn't a keeper.

Death was like delicious prose when delivered with elegance and style. It had a prologue, a body, and then an epilogue, no less than fine dining replete with an appetizer, entrée, followed by dessert. The composition of it all was quiet, pleasurable, and perfect. She felt no guilt as she turned toward the terrace doors and faced the moon. She would shower later, back at her lair. This man's death was an elegant kill, as always. Society was the better for it, she was the better for it, and if there was an Ultimate Maker, then the drained man on the bed could hash out the particulars with the judge of creation regarding whether or not his life had been lived in vain.

It was always a philosophical question that niggled her—would a so-called victim dare ask the Divine for recompense, after having killed so many men himself for blood money? One less mob enforcer lost at a casino would not imperil the world. Perhaps she provided a true service to mankind. The man her feed would have killed tonight had been given a night of reprieve. . . an honest man would therefore get one more night to live—she just hoped he'd made the most of the time.

A slight smile graced her lips, exposing a hint of fang as she retracted them. Her logic was sound in her own mind as she leaped up on the terrace railing, balancing on it for a moment before allowing the night to pull her into its dark folds of freedom.

Wind rushed through her hair and buffeted her face. Plummeting helped her remember being alive, the joy, the fear, the pain.

But after a few moments, she finally allowed the fierceness of the wind to abate so she could hover on the gentleness of the evening breeze. Floating high above the Atlantic City boardwalk, her thoughts drifted to her human days. Back then, it was the humans who were beasts. Things were not so different now, she reasoned, spying the antlike creatures that dotted the boardwalk and streets below. Humans killed more of their own than her kind did, and for much more senseless reasons. Men who'd wanted her called her a witch—when she denied their advances; women who'd envied her beauty joined in their persecution. Murderous group thinking prevailed over logic, as was the human way.

The verdict was simple and heartless. It was in everyone's best interest that she be exterminated, everyone's best interest but hers. Mysterious deaths had been blamed on her sorcery, when all she'd had was the gift, or curse, of second sight. No one had given a single thought to the nobleman stranger that had recently come ashore with his ship and largess. He was above the law and above their suspicion or contempt. They had been elegantly glamoured.

People
. She hated that she even needed them for blood.

The midnight blue horizon drew her attention. Moonlight sent shards of opalescence to ripple against the blue-black water. It was so beautiful. If she could stay airborne all night, she would.