By Blood We Live (54 page)

"It's not a betrayal," Odette murmured, brushing his mouth with hers. "They would have wanted us to go on, to thrive, and not merely survive. If we exist tortured, then the others have also won."

A gasp escaped him as Odette's slick sheath tightened around him. He studied her face as he loved her slowly, kissing her throat, then her breasts, paying delicate homage to her erect Hershey nipples with tiny suckles until she moaned. Satiny legs encircled his waist as she arched and offered him her throat. The strike into her jugular was swift but tender, her gasp sending a shudder through him that made him cry out.

The night wore on, their lovemaking an anthem, to survival, to renewal, that took them from the floor of the vast bathroom to the sprawl of her king-sized bed. He watched semi-dazed as the steel door to the basement sanctuary closed and pure darkness surrounded them, but yet he could still see.

"Rest," she whispered. "Later tonight will be ours. We have the benefit now of time, power, and stealth."

He pulled her against his chest in the darkness, finding it new that no heartbeats meshed and only cool skin now touched. The heat was gone, but not his loyalty to the one who'd saved him. The seeds of a long-time love had been planted. One that wouldn't grow old, one that understood him more than the former love of his life ever had, one that shared his altruism and even his dark side.

"I'm glad you found me," he said quietly. "I didn't want to die."

She nodded and kissed his chest. "I am glad, too. This is rare. . . it is magic."

"Finders keepers." For the first time in years, he closed his eyes with a smile.

They entered the casino just as they had left, but no monitors could perceive them. Old Stan looked at Tony and then glanced away.

"Wait here," he said to Odette. "I have to clear this up."

She nodded and perused the floor watching as her lover tried to make an old man understand. But that was pointless, people believed what they wanted to. Finally, she saw Tony hail her with a slight lift of his jaw.

"Ask Odette," he said calmly, placing a hand on Stan's shoulder.

She already knew the direction of the conversation. "He didn't kill the young dealer, they did. Tony used to work for the feds."

Stan straightened. "Then get the fuck away from me, would ya!" He spoke through his teeth. "I don't wanna wind up like that kid, and I don't wanna know what's going on—but I don't want them to see me ever talking to you."

Tony nodded. "No problem, you live well."

Odette took his arm. "There is much I have to teach you about the use of your power."

"Just get me up into the security area without them seeing me."

"Vapor?" she said with a wide grin. "Follow me to the shadows. You just don't do that on an open casino floor in polite company."

She took his hand and then pulled him into an alcove, kissing him passionately as passersby glanced at them once, and then they were gone.

Drifting replaced body weight, and then vents became passageways. Silence echoed all around him until Odette's voice entered his head.

Bullets will hurt but not kill you. However, the rage is controlling you right now, you must control the rage. Decide before you go in there whether or not you want to rip them to shreds with your bare hands and start an entirely crazy investigation, or if you want to just shoot them all so that it looks like a human-on-human crime.

Before he could answer her, he was standing inside the room and could feel her presence invisibly monitoring his first foray as a vampire.

They were eating take-out from the restaurants below. Laughter filled the room, total entitlement to joy surrounded them like his life and death and that of an innocent kid's never matter, never happened. They didn't even see him.

"I told you I would haunt you," Tony said in a low growl.

"Oh, shit!" Lou jumped up and grabbed his gun.

Four henchmen cursed and scrambled for weapons.

"I thought you whacked this bastard!" Fat Joe shouted.

In that moment, Tony decided. He didn't want to shoot them. Hand-to-hand combat just felt too good. Ripping Lou's arm out of its socket and then shooting him in the head, just felt like the right thing to do. But wisdom and vampire speed prevailed, as he unloaded his clip.

"Feed before you leave," Odette said, materializing behind him. "Or else, it's a waste."

They sat hand in hand under the stars on a bench watching the surf. A thousand questions pummeled his mind but he was grateful he didn't have to verbalize any of them for her to understand.

"It is a sexy, glorious emotion, revenge, but just like sex with a lover you don't love, once you climax, it all feels so hollow."

He nodded. Leave it to a woman to so eloquently define what was raging within him. "Now what?" he whispered. "There are so many more of them, so many I could go after, and will. . . but it all seems so pointless."

She laid her head on his shoulder. "This is why I haven't destabilized the coven. After I repaid Gustav for what he'd done to Alfonse, I sadly realized, it would never bring him back." Her soft palm stroked his chest as she looked out to the moon. "Alfonse and I decimated the town back in Haiti before we left that fateful night of my
making
. We settled all old debts, but in the end, none of that made us feel better beyond the moment of the blood-letting."

"Sorta like a crack high. . . for the moment it's an adrenaline rush like you cannot believe, and then. . ."

"And then you crash."

He stared at her. "So how do you go on living now?"

"As time passes you'll realize that the greatest thing you have is someone to share that passage of time with. . . for what felt like eons I focused on the ugliness so much that I could never see the beauty of life. Once I died I forgot how to do that."

"I had forgotten that while I was still living," he said in a sad murmur.

"I have seen the dawn of so much, though. . . cars, telephones, airplanes; I could go on and on. But also wars."

He smiled, and then chuckled sadly. "So, what do we do, become philanthropists?"

She smiled and shrugged. "Why not. We can be whatever we want to be, can right wrongs, can help or hurt. What do you want to be?"

"I don't want to hurt people," he said quietly, his voice so sad that it drew her.

She stared into his eyes and nodded, touching his lips with one finger. "Enough lessons for one night. Enough vengeance for one era. Let us focus on beauty."

He took her mouth in a slow dissolve of pleasure. He was her greatest find, something precious that she would vow to keep, and she knew that she was that for him. The irony of that truth not lost on either of them.

Brian Stableford's latest novels, all new this year, include
Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of Eternity, The Dragon Man
, and
The Moment of Truth
. He is well-known in vampire circles for his novels
The Hunger
and
Ecstasy of Vampires, The Empire of Fear
, and
Young Blood
, and for his translations of French author Paul Féval, père's nineteenth-century works of vampire fiction (which pre-date Bram Stoker's
Dracula
). He has also authored many other novels and French translations, as well as numerous works of non-fiction about science fiction.
 
About vampire fiction, Stableford says: "It's probably popular because it imagines a kind of charisma, a subspecies of angst and an insidious variety of violence of which humans are incapable, thus providing a temporary distraction from the charismatic void, ineffably tedious angst and mere brutality that constitute the quotidian human condition. I became interested in it when the history of the subgenre took an interesting turn in the 1970s, when assumptions of monstrosity formerly taken more-or-less for granted were challenged and interrogated in various quirky ways, presumably reflecting—albeit in a distorting mirror—contemporary sociological shifts in attitudes to sexuality."
 
This tale, which first appeared in the BBC's
Cult Vampire Magazine
, is about the potential utility of vampirism as a "natural" substitute for liposuction.

Mina had tried them all: WeightWatchers, Conley, grapefruit, Atkins, hypnotherapy and pumping iron. On the day she decided, after three grueling months, that the Stone Age diet was doing her more harm than good—just like all the rest—she felt that she had hit rock bottom in the abyss of despair. She clocked in at sixteen stone five pounds, just six pounds lighter than the day she had embarked on the Stone Age with such steely determination. By the end of March she would doubtless crack the seventeen stone barrier, going in the wrong direction.

Younger people, she supposed, calculated in kilograms but she had never contrived to adjust. Mercifully, she was in public finance rather than the commercial sector, so she rarely had to audit accounts that were connected, even in the remotest degree, with the EU. She never traveled abroad, because she couldn't bear the thought of an airplane seat, let alone stripping down to a bikini on a beach in Marbella. She had never lost the habits of embarrassment gained in childhood, and now she had the prospect of middle-age spread looming before her.

Mina hadn't an atom of proof that she had been passed over for promotion because of the way she looked. The fact that her newly imported line manager, Lucy Stanwere, had a figure like Paula Radcliffe as well as being ten years younger might have been coincidence. The fact that Lucy was able to wear four-inch heels, thus allowing her to tower over those condemned by gravity to flat soles, might also be irrelevant to her rapid ascent of the status ladder. The fact that Mina was due to see Lucy for her annual appraisal the morning after she fell off the Stone Age wagon and gorged herself on Welsh rarebit and chocolate milk was, however, definitely not a coincidence. Anxiety had always been a key factor in Mina's comfort eating.

Lucy's office was, of course, incredibly neat. It wasn't just that the cleaners made more effort there than in the open-plan, but that Lucy's own personal neatness radiated out from her size-ten suit to bathe her entire environment with a kind of bloodless perfection. Simply being there made Mina feel even more like a rubbish-heap than usual; from the moment she stepped through the door her one ambition was to escape as soon as possible, no matter how much criticism she had to absorb and acknowledge in order to do it.

She didn't, of course, dare to entertain the ambition that she might accomplish that escape without some slighting reference being made to her appearance—in fact, the first thing Lucy said, after "Please sit down, Miss Mint," was "Are you unwell?" That, in health-fascist-ese, meant: "How can you even breathe when you're carrying so much excess baggage, you disgusting calorie-addict?"

"I've had a little tummy trouble recently," Mina admitted, "but it's sure to clear up now."

"Coming off the Stone Age?" Lucy asked, in a tone that sounded almost sympathetic.

Mina had never talked to Lucy in a non-work context, so she couldn't claim to know her well, but she certainly hadn't expected sympathy. She decided that it must be an illusion.

"Yes, actually," Mina admitted.

"I thought so," Lucy said. "The trouble with all these theories about what evolution shaped our digestive systems to do is that humans are so exceedingly adaptable. We grow up on grains and dairy products, and our bodies learn to love them. If there's one thing that separates humans from all the other animals, it's the ability to learn to love. Don't you agree?"

The chance would be a fine thing
, Mina thought. What she said aloud was: "Yes, Miss Stanwere."

"It's Lucy. Look, Mina, I don't want to seem presumptuous, and I'll understand if you want to confine our discussion to the nerves and sinews of auditing practice and Gordon Brown's latest wrinkles, but there's a better way to lose weight, if you really want to. It's about time that you were let in on the secret."

Mina had long suspected that there must be a vast conspiracy of the fit and thin whose precious secrets were sternly withheld from people like her, but she had never expected to be let into it. She said nothing.

"I know what you're thinking," Lucy Stanwere said, when the pause had passed from pregnant to eggbound. "How would I know? Well, I do." She took up her handbag. Any normal person would have had to root about for at least thirty seconds to find what she wanted, but Lucy only required a mere moment to pluck the desired item from its innermost depths. She handed Mina a photograph.

Mina stared at the snapshot in frank disbelief. It wasn't so much the sixteen stone version of Lucy Stanwere that startled and appalled her so much as the expression the teenager was wearing: an expression of profound shame and terror of exposure that Mina had only ever seen at WeightWatchers—or in a mirror.

When she looked up again, Mina saw her superior with entirely new eyes. She could find but one word: "How?"

Lucy's perfectly manicured fingers dipped into the mysterious bag for a second time, and produced another slim item. At first, Mina judged from its size that it was a business-card, but it was glossy and black, and bore an image of two magnificently athletic individuals dancing what appeared to be the tango, above the red-lettered inscription: THE AFTER DARK CLUB. The postcode attached to the address was suggestive of Mayfair.

"Meet me there at ten-thirty," Lucy said. "I'll tell the desk to expect you, and I'll take you in."

"A night club?" Mina said, aghast. "I can't go to a night club."

"Ten-thirty," Lucy Stanwere repeated, insistently. "Be on time."

Mina had nothing suitable to wear, but the situation was so surreal that it didn't seem to matter. She was usually curled up in bed with a Mills and Boon not long after ten-thirty, once she'd watched the news on the BBC, so she went to catch the Central Line tube at Ealing Broadway with the kind of disturbed feeling that changes in a familiar routine always bring on.