Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (20 page)

All around her, she heard rustling. She knew what it was, exactly what it was—the tiny movements of the dismembered body of the Keeper whose ripped-off finger she had been holding. Sensing her presence, it had begun to stir. She scrambled to her feet, crying out in this hellhole, screaming her pain and her agony and her monstrous fear.

What she had seen in Cairo had been so horrible that she simply hadn’t made sense of it. It was possible for humans to hurt Keepers. Every few hundred years, some Keeper—usually one of the ones who disregarded warnings and lived too close to human society—was caught out and killed. But this—this was something worse than killing. This poor Keeper—man or woman, she could not tell—had been torn to pieces by someone who knew well how to torture her kind. Like the ones who had spiked Re-Atun to a door in Cairo, they had understood what you needed to do to leave a person in a hideous, lingering state of half-life.

“Oh, please, please be at rest,” she moaned. “I cannot help you, my love. I cannot even help myself!” She sobbed—then stopped. She shut her mouth tight. Listened. Nothing…except the hopeless, whispering struggle on the floor and in her heart. But humans had been in this place, for humans and only humans could do this. Had it been the man of Punt and his northern friend? No—if they knew how to cross the barrier, they’d be chasing her now.

In Cairo, then, and also in this colony, there were killer humans. She shook her head, trying to shake out the confusion that it was bringing her. The humans were so alive now, so conscious, and yet also so cruel. You wanted to despise them, needed to fear them, but even that poor Searcher she’d just eaten—even that wretched fisherman—seemed to be worth so much more than his food value that killing him was rather awful.

Man had grown up; that was the only way to think about it. After all these generations, there had been, in just the past few decades, this amazing, explosive change in the human world.

She closed her eyes. She could have been floating, the way she felt now, as if she was in some way detaching from the world. But this was no place for dreams. She wasn’t going to the home of her dreams, because there was no such place. Keepers had evolved on Earth just like the rest of her creatures. She hadn’t come from some pastoral garden in the sky. And she had always eaten blood, never damned wheat cakes or whatever it was she dreamed about. Wish fulfillment, that’s all it was.

“I must have light,” she said aloud. She felt the walls, touching hangings, stepping over what she hoped was furniture. There had to be a form of light here, had to be. They didn’t need much of it, but not even a Keeper could see in this maddening blackness. She slapped a wall and rubbed it, crying and begging, rubbed it and hammered at it—and, of a sudden, realized that she could see her hands.

The glow rose from the wall, just as it should. This painted chemical phosphorescence—it came from a lichen—was universally used by Keepers in their lairs. As the light increased, she saw why it had not worked in the front of the place: the walls were encrusted with so much lime from long abandonment that the paint was coated with it.

As the glow increased, she could hardly believe what she was seeing. Before her was a pile of body parts—torsos, legs, heads, arms, hands, fingers, strewn about, all seething with hopeless, mindless, tormented life. She gasped, gasped again, staggered back. Then she looked more—the hangings were of the finest materials, and there were lovely objects all covered with lime and rot, jades and dull, golden things, strange paintings of girls in sunlit gardens in some impossible heaven of a world.

Destroyed Keepers and their collection. It was the habit of her people to collect from earlier generations of humans and sell to later. Time made things rare among the humans. Their generations were so short and their lives so violent that treasures were quickly lost.

What kind of human beings would do something like this, though, and not also loot the place? Unless these were the things not worth taking. She raced around the miserable space, trying to think what to do to alleviate the suffering here. The only thing would be to burn them—to burn her own, dear creations, the almost-real beings she called her children—but she had not any fuel. Real, thorough killing was hard work. It took time, it took care. All she could do for them was to survive.

She scrambled to a chest, opened it. Herein were clothes. She grabbed a dress, held it against her, then another, until she’d found one that was the correct size, more or less. It was complicated and fragile, but she had to dress so that she could go among the humans. She had work to do, and there could be no delay.

Just now, in this horrible place, she faced the fact that a world catastrophe had overtaken the Keepers. Mankind had risen up against them and destroyed them with exceptional, savage cruelty, and that was why she had ceased to be attended: there was nobody left.

Shaking, her body roiling and heavy inside with the meal she’d eaten, she drew the dress over her head, struggling with the tangle of damnable petticoats and lace. Oh, she should never have just tossed that remnant back in the boat aside; what had she been thinking? They’d find it, and when they did, somebody who knew a lot about Keepers would know that there was one here, and they would hunt her down.

How did they do it? How
could
they? She had bred man to intelligence, but not that much intelligence.

She found sandals of a sort, odd things that closed with little hooks, completely encasing her foot. They weren’t comfortable, and they made her feel as if her legs were the stilts of a lotus gatherer, but never mind, they were what was here. She had learned enough in Cairo to know that she would need the paper the Egyptians called “pounds.” Gingerly, she probed into the clothing that hung on the torso of one of the victims. There was nothing there. Disgusted, her hands shaking so badly she could hardly control them, she went to another poor man. In his pocket was a leather case containing many greenish colored pounds, marked with various Arabic numerals.

She found something else there, a black tube, one end of which was fitted with a tiny version of the light balls used by the humans. It was not lit, though, and she could not think how that might be done. She turned it over in her hands. She could use the light it might make, if she was to learn more about the place in which she found herself. As far as she was concerned, she would be pleased never to go to the surface again except to eat. She well understood why the Keepers had retreated beneath the earth.

She turned away, stuffing the packet of pounds into the belt of the garment she was wearing. As she did so, there was a brief clatter and a flash of light. She turned. The glow from the wall revealed that the little tube was lying on the floor. It had dropped, and in doing so, had flashed. She picked it up, shook it. Again, it flickered. Again, she shook it and got the same result. What was to be made of this? Surely it wasn’t necessary to shake the light out of it. No, it rattled when it was shaken, meaning that there was something loose within. What might it be? Perhaps—well, she didn’t know. The fuel for the fire in the tiny globe, she supposed. Then she noticed that it had a raised bezel, and that this could be tightened.

Light came—not strong, but definitely usable. So, she had managed to prepare herself a little. She was dressed in human clothes, she had pounds, and she had portable light. Now she needed water to drink and bathe in, and a place of rest. The idea of making herself beautiful again, though, seemed very distant.

In the objective part of her mind, which was as cold and clear as a mind could be, she thought that this journey would soon be over, and it would conclude in the same way it had for those around her. Somewhere out there in those tunnels lurked her fatal end.

Becky ran the videotape again. Why would Leo have come out the alley door? Why not simply leave by the front? She’d almost missed her, had caught her only because of a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye.

It was time for her husband to discover that they were still very much partners. “Paul, could you come in the den, please?”

There was no response; then she realized that he was on the phone in the kitchen. As she went in, he was concluding his call. “Bocage,” he told her. “They’ve analyzed a cloak worn by the one in Cairo. It’s made of you know what kind of skin.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“That’s not all. There was something in a pocket. More human skin, Becky. Off somebody’s back.”

They made purses, wallets, you name it. So he had been right, just as she’d told Briggsie that he would be.

“Are they close to it?”

“According to Bocage, the trail’s gone cold.”

She looked into his eyes. When she had first begun loving him, she had also begun fearing for him. They had gone shoulder to shoulder in the Paris catacombs, sterilizing them of vampires in the company of some of the bravest people in the world. Again, here in New York, Paul had found a way into the lairs, which were laid in abandoned subway tunnels and cunningly disguised pipelines.

After New York, they had believed that the vampire was extinct. Leo—if she was really blooded—was a leftover. But now, with this new case, and with the vampire disappeared—well, everything had changed.

“I’ve been watching Leo,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows.

“I just did a stakeout at the Sutton Place address a couple of times.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“I am telling you. I’m telling you now.”

“Becky, it’s dangerous.”

She didn’t even bother to shrug. “I saw her once. She had a bag. She carried it into the house.”

“It is dangerous!”

“What was odd is that she came out through that alley that fronts on Sutton Place. Instead of the front.”

“Becky, goddammit, this is rule one we’re looking at. Nobody operates alone.”

“I’m an expert.”

“Becky, if anything happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Come on, Paul, it’s a dangerous business we’re in. Live with it. Anyway, I got her on tape.”

He sighed. “Good work,” he said after he’d watched it. “The bag was full on the way in?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s still full here. Either it has nothing to do with the house, or it’s equipment that she used in the house and took away with her.”

“Any way we can enter the house?”

“The tunnel in from the garden.”

Her gut tightened. That tunnel communicated with all the other tunnels.

“What’s on your mind?”

“Oh, Paul, I’m just remembering.”

“Yeah, it’s rough. I’ve been remembering ever since that bastard
thing
killed my dad.”

“I think we should go into that house.”

There was a silence.

“Paul?”

“I’ve already been in the house.”

“Why, Paul, we don’t operate alone. Remember rule one?”

“I’m a goddamn expert,” he rumbled.

They ran the videotape again. Leo came out the little door in the wall, looked up and down the street, then hurried off.

“Maybe she’s making it ready,” Paul said.

“The house?”

“Sure. There’s a vampire on the run, and Cairo to New York is twelve hours. They’ve got phones, e-mail, same as everybody else. Cairo was too hot for whatever’s out there, so it’s coming to New York.”

“Why not Beijing or Rio or Mexico City? Any one of them’d be a damn sight easier than New York.”

“Leo’s here, and she’s rich and she’s powerful.”

“What’s it like—the house?”

“Even that portrait of her—Miriam, I mean—it’s in the living room.” He looked away.

Becky knew that she could never replace Miriam in his heart. “She was a beautiful creature,” she said softly, “until she kissed you.”

He laughed a little. “What I want to do is wait and hang back, and keep our eye on Leo. Then, when the two of them meet up, we can do them both.”

“Leo is a citizen. She gets due process.”

“She’s a—God, I don’t know what to call her. Whatever the hell they made of her. But she’s not a human being, Becky, not anymore.”

“I said citizen.”

“We do with her what we did with the other ‘citizen.’ That Roberts had been a doctor, for God’s sake.”

The phone rang. Both of them moved toward it with the same thought: Ian. Becky picked it up. “This is George Fox,” the voice said. “Is this Mrs. Ward?”

“Hi, George.”

“I need to talk to Paul.”

What the hell was this about? Inspector Fox had provided lots of support during the sterilization of the city, all without knowing—or asking—exactly what a bunch of CIA officers were doing in concealed tunnels under the streets. “George Fox,” she told Paul.

He pressed the speaker-phone button so she’d be able to hear the call. “George, hello,” he said.

“He’s in custody.”

Becky’s heart froze.

“Okay.”

“He was apprehended in a raid on a rave in Chelsea. We have him in Central Holding. You gotta get down here, or he’s gonna go to Rikers. I can’t control it past booking.”

What the hell was this?