Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (29 page)

Somebody yelled something. A flower was thrown, then something heavier.

Ian went to her. Becky had not seen him naked in years, and the perfection of his body—the gleaming muscles, the graceful proportions, shocked her and then embarrassed her, for she found herself looking upon his member with a woman’s evaluative interest, not a mother’s clinical concern. Then the vampire joined them.

Becky was absolutely fascinated, she could not help but be. In all these years, she had never seen an intact female vampire naked in light. And it was a sight, easily three shades whiter than Leo, who was already pale. Its skin was so completely without the slightest blemish or wrinkle, it looked more like a white latex suit than a body. The mound of Venus was graced by—of all things—blond ringlets. She had her hands over her breasts.

The spectacle of the three naked people on the stage was unforgettable, especially with Leo now doing a limbo beneath an invisible pole, flashing her dark-infested cunt.

They were the most naked, most exposed people Becky had ever seen.

Cameras clicked and clicked, videotape rolled. There was going to be a fantastic sensation because of this. The tabloids were going to go wild. Every TV show in the country would be clamoring for Ian Ward.

How pitiful, and how unimaginably terrible.

Paul stood. He began to slide toward the aisle. Becky followed him. She was glad, because something obviously had to be done, and she didn’t know what that would be. She just wanted to save her boy, because one thing was very, very clear: he was in awful trouble.

Paul’s heart had been ripped to pieces inside his chest. His soul was plunging down a black shaft of despair. He had known that one day his son might turn, but there had been no sign, no damn sign.

He had to fix what was happening here. No matter what, he had to fix it, and that meant getting Ian off that stage and away from those creatures right now.

The decision made, he began pushing his way toward the aisle. When he reached it, he leaped down the steps from one balcony to the next. Behind him, Becky called in a loud whisper, “Paul, Paul.” He couldn’t wait, though, because if they got his son, then whatever last chance he might have was over. If Ian had never tasted blood—and Paul suspected from his body language on the stage that he was still totally clueless—then they were going to feed it to him, and if that happened, it was going to be over for Ian. He’d be more than addicted, in Paul’s opinion. His body would change, would turn against him, would become unable to live without the food of the vampire.

“What’s the plan, dammit!”

He turned on her, almost flared at her. But when he saw that terrified, brave face, the lips tight, the eyes hollow with a mother’s fear, he could not help but love her, and the hand that had wanted to push her away instead drew her to him.

“The plan is, we’re going down there and getting our kid off that stage, and we are going to do that right now.” He started toward one of the doors into the main floor—doors that were each guarded by two armed security personnel. But he stopped, and not because of the guards.

Misinterpreting his hesitation, Becky said, “We can take them.”

On the way down the stairs, Paul had experienced something that was totally unexpected, that had never touched him before, not like this. As he had turned away from the nightmare on the stage, he had felt what had to be among the deepest, sweetest emotions he had ever known. He wanted the woman on the stage, and badly, so badly that he felt as if a sort of electrical arc had blasted through him, shorting out his good sense, his morality, everything—except, of course, the duty that kept him hunting down the thieves of human life.

He charged straight toward the guards who stood before the nearest door into the lobby, ignoring their guns. He was a big man and an efficient, well-trained fighter, and he doubled one of them over with a piston-hard blow to his stomach as the other one fumbled for his weapon. The man dropped his head enough for Paul to shove it downward as he slammed a knee into his jaw. The guard, a heavy man with a jiggling pot, dropped like a bag of sand.

Throwing the doors wide, Paul burst through into the auditorium. The music was screaming, Leo was prancing, the vampire standing behind her as still and careful as a snake. Ian had crept to the edge of the stage, was struggling with his pants.

There were no aisles here, just this sea of little tables with arrogant pricks sitting at them in tuxedos, eyeing each other’s trophy girls or salivating over the burlesque parody unfolding on the stage.

The music sounded like something from another planet—a bad planet. He couldn’t understand the words, but the whole effect was vaguely familiar. He’d heard it a thousand times, in fact, blasting out of the coffin-sized speakers that covered one wall of Ian’s room.

Pushing tables over, tossing people aside like so many rag dolls, Paul made his way toward the stage. He was a hundred feet away when somebody tackled him from behind. Hunching his shoulders, whipping his torso forward, he flipped him up and over his head. It was another guard, who went crashing into five or six of the little tables, then disappeared into a heap of dresses, diamonds, and lurching tuxedos.

Leo was staring out into the lights, obviously aware that there was a disturbance out there. But she kept up her performance, still naked, still prancing around, moving like she was on speed. Another body slammed into him from behind, tackling him NFL style. Crunching down on somebody with his left foot, he yanked himself away from the clawing hands. He was within fifty feet of the stage now, and panic was spreading like a tidal wave out from the point where he was crashing through the audience.

Women screamed, men cursed, and Leo finally stopped dancing when she saw guards vaulting up onto the stage. Paul roared his son’s name, roared it with all his might, but he could see no reaction from Ian, who was standing about two feet from the band’s speakers, which were still blasting away. A guy appeared in front of Paul. He grabbed the tux’s lapels, lifted, and dropped the flouncing, squirming man into the heap behind him.

“Ian! Ian!”

Two, then three, guards slammed into him, each shock staggering him. A pistol came out, crashed into the side of his head, making sparks in his eyes and causing the room to take wing and go racing crazily off to the left. He knew what this meant: it meant that he was falling. If he did, he felt that he would not see his son again.

His arms clawed air, as, despite being festooned with at least six strong men, he kept moving toward that stage. “Ian! Ian!”

He reached the edge of the proscenium, grabbed onto its lip—and watched a door close back in the shadows behind the band, and knew that Ian had been ushered through that door with the others. “Ian!”

He went down, then, a huge, roaring grizzly overwhelmed by wolves. Fists smashed into his face again and again, shoes crunched into his ribs, and he ended up compressed under a good thousand pounds of male bone and muscle, his mouth forced open, his tongue pressed against the filthy floor.

Next, his arms were pulled back, cuffs were jammed on his wrists, and the weight on him lessened. When they turned him over, he found himself looking up into twenty angry, scared faces.

Twenty, he thought, isn’t bad. He said, “That’s my son up there.”

One or two of the guards glanced at the empty stage, but nobody reacted. He repeated it, screaming at the top of his lungs, yelling until his voice was the only sound in the room.

The problem was, there was nobody up there—nobody except Becky, whom he saw going into the backstage area.

They dragged him to his feet and started manhandling him out of the theater. Behind him, the audience settled down. The audience began to clap. They wanted their baby back.

“What the fuck was that?” Leo demanded as George dropped a sable around her.

“A nut,” George said. “It happens.”

“Ian!” A female voice echoed from behind them.

“Mom?”

As Leo looked toward the sound, a frown crossing her face, Lilith heard and knew instantly what was happening. She took the boy by his arm and drew him to her. He grabbed a feather boa that Leo had used in her act and held it in front of Lilith, seeking to shield her breasts from view. Being unaware of the notion of privacy herself, she did not respond. For her, clothing had to do with ritual, not concealment. But she understood the boy’s desire to cover her. She knew the mind of man, after all, in great detail.

Drawing the feathers around herself, she took him in her arms and kissed him. He sprang up between his legs so quickly that she broke away and laughed.

“Ian!” The mother called again.

“Mom?”

“We gotta take a powder,” Lilith told Leo.

“I—who’s the kid, anyway?”

“His moniker is Ian. Look, get a move on.”

“My mother—” the boy pleaded.

“She cannot be your mother!” Lilith said. “Your mother is a Keeper.”

“Oh, my God,” Leo said.

He tried to break away. “Mom!”

“Ian, where are you?”

Lilith kissed him again, this time with all the depth of passion that she possessed. In the kiss, her loneliness washed away, disappearing as easily as dew on the fronds of morning. She held him to her nakedness, covering them both with the feathered shawl, drawing him into the softness and warmth of her. For a long moment he resisted her, but then his muscles seemed to tremble as if from some deep upheaval, and his arms grew tight around her.

“This way,” Leo whispered, and Lilith went, drawing Ian with a gentle but insistent hand. As he had come onto the stage, he came with them now.

“Don’t look back,” she said when the woman called Ian again, her voice sharp in the gloom and silence of the backstage. Far away, as if on another world, the audience was clamoring for their darling Leo.

“Where are we going?” Ian asked.

“Someplace close by, to get to know each other,” Leo said.

Ian regarded Lilith. “Who are you? What’s your name?”

That was better. That was very much better. “Lilith,” she said.

Leo stopped, stumbled, then recovered herself. “That’s the name of the mother of them all.”

Lilith smiled, watching cheerfully as a pallor spread over the sweet creature’s face. So she knew the meaning of the name. Lilith gave her as warm a smile as it was in her power to give. Leo rushed to her and threw her arms around her, weeping.

“There’s no time for this now.”

But she couldn’t stop, she was clearly beside herself. It was the wrong place: they had not escaped. The human woman would soon appear again.

“Ian!”

“I have to go to my mom!”

“Ian, this chance will not come again. Spend an hour with us.”

“An hour?”

She drew him on.

“Ian!”

“Mom, it’s only an hour.”

“Ian!”

A metal door opened. Beyond it was a magnificent black equipage like the one that had brought her here.

They threw themselves into the back of the thing, and Lilith found herself in a very plush little chamber. Immediately, it began to move. In the front sat a driver, never looking back. He was isolated by a glass window.

“Hey, this is all right,” Lilith said.

Leo shuffled a white stick out of a small package, put it to her lips, and lit one end. She shook as she did it. When she exhaled, a ghastly odor filled the small room. Lilith had noticed other humans doing this—Ibrahim, for example, among the men—but she had not seen it up close, not until this moment.

“What is that?”

“You don’t know what a cigarette is?” Ian asked.

“You better believe I do, buddy.”

“Okay. Because you’d have to be some kind of a—look, Miss Patterson, uh, where are we going?”

Leo smiled. “Ask her.”

“So where are we going?”

“A little hideaway somewhere. We gotta talk.”

“You sound like Joan Crawford imitating James Cagney. Who are you?”

“English isn’t my lingo, bud. I learned it from…perhaps from bums.”

Leo laughed. “Let me ask you this. Would you like to go home to Momma, or to one of the most beautiful places in the world with us?”

“Leo, my name is Ian Ward, and I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Leo Patterson smoked hard. So, the name had told her something, something that she did not wish to hear. It had left, judging from the steadiness and inlooking of her eyes, a residue of suspicion, and more than a little fear.

“We’ll go to my place on St. Barts,” Leo said.

“St. Barts! I can’t go to St. Barts!”

“You can go,” Lilith said. “Think of it. Us. Together. For just a little while.”

“Five hours there, we’ll be on the ground by two.”

“My parents—”

“You’ll be back tomorrow before midnight. I guarantee it.”

Lilith saw that Leo was cold toward the boy, cold and suspicious. In fact, she seemed a little unbalanced, so suspicious was she. Lilith would not pass judgment, though. It was obvious that much about this situation remained hidden from her. Whatever this St. Bart’s was, it must be a pleasant place. Perhaps there would be pools in which to swim, and maids to anoint her with oil, and some fresh-blooded humans to satisfy what hunger she might feel.