Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (40 page)

“Paul,
no!”

“In a couple of minutes, Leo is going to get out. There’s going to be a lot of confusion. And you’re going to use that confusion. You’re going to use it to stage your own escape. You’ll run for dear life. Cross the street and go along the far side. You see that building with the shadow—the narrow shadow just beside the spice shop?”

Becky saw nothing. The wall beside the spice shop appeared to be blank.

“Yeah,” Ian said, “I see it.”

“I’ve been watching your girlfriend. She’s right there.”

“She’s not my girlfriend!”

“During the ruckus, you get out of the car and you go in that direction. Not straight there. Make it look good. She’ll call you. When she does, go to her.”

“Dad, no way!”

“He’s right, Paul. No way.”

“You’ll be relieved to see her. Throw yourself in her arms.”

He was still testing, and it was a monstrously clever test.

“Okay,” Ian said. “What does this get us?”

“It gets us Lilith.” Paul drew a leader from his pocket.

Becky looked at the small silver object the size of a credit card. “Don’t ask him to do this!”

“Son, your mother is right. This is dangerous. But that creature out there is also dangerous. It’s the most dangerous vampire I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve been doing this for twenty years. You take this leader, you put it in your pocket.”

Ian took the instrument.

“It’ll enable us to follow you. At some point, we’ll get a shot.”

“You’ll shoot her?”

“Just like that.”

He put the transmission device in his pocket. “What if she finds it?”

“Lie. Tell her it’s an amulet. They’re not technological. It’s one of their vulnerabilities.”

At that moment, there was a shout from ahead. Through the windshield, Paul saw Leo rise up beside the limo, then jump fully ten feet into traffic. Moving like a gazelle, she avoided two trucks, a bus, and about four taxicabs.

Chased by a dozen officers, she raced off down the street.

Lilith had considered returning home, but she couldn’t risk that now, not with Leo and Ian both captured. She realized that they would inevitably give her cave away. A place hidden from human eyes for centuries would soon be invaded.

As she watched the movements in front of the police station, she considered her alternatives. Leo was in the first car, guarded by two police. Ian was two cars back with his parents. Probably he was feeling very loyal to them right now. Probably, he was still in ecstasy from his feeding. But that would wear off, to be replaced by the hunger. She’d lived with the hunger all of her life. Bearing it, feeding it, facing it again—this was nothing to her. But to him, caught up in it for the first time, it was going to be an agony beyond hell, a relentless, unstoppable craving that nothing but more blood could relieve.

He was also a devotee of the senses. His desires were fiery, his lusts fierce. No matter how angry he might be at her, or how afraid, there was still a chance that she could seduce him.

She stood in a darkened corner, visible from the street only by her own kind. She doubted that these people would be able to see her. Certainly they showed no sign. Nobody so much as glanced in this direction.

Behind her, a stair led steeply down, a very worn stair. Below was the ancient labyrinth of the Keepers, known as the Prime Keep, where all the records were kept and the truths were known.

Now, very suddenly, there came an eruption from the first car. Leo leaped out of it and began racing off. Lilith did not move. Let Leo try. Let Leo get shot. It would save trouble.

She watched the car with the boy, her body tense, her breath shallow. She was trembling, counting the seconds.

And then it happened, and she almost laughed, she almost clapped. He came dashing out—oh, what a grand spectacle of a boy! And look, he was speeding through traffic with wonderful grace. What a specimen he was, what a perfect, amazing creature: a blend of two species, more powerful, she suspected, than either by itself.

He was what they had tried and failed to create in the deep past, a new being. Time and nature, though, had worked their silent wisdom, and here he was—and she reached out as quick as a darting hornet, grabbed his wrist, and drew him in.

They would all see him disappear, of course they would. So speed was of the essence.

He struggled against her like a lively little fish on a line. She hardly felt his resistance, dragging him along, hearing him bump and bounce against the stairs.

Then, suddenly, she did feel it. With a roar of anger, he broke away from her. She stopped, looked back and up at him.

“My, my, blood makes my boy strong.”

“Just cool it. Nobody drags me anywhere.”

“I’ll have to remember that phrase, ‘Cool it.’ Cool my intensity?”

“That’s right. You fed me blood.”

“Come on, we’ll talk later.”

“I feel incredible.”

Happiness tingled at the edges of her heart. He’d sounded angry a moment ago. Now he sounded different, less so.

Was this an act, then? She reached up, took his hand. “I’ll be gentle.”

His palm was dry, hot from the blood he’d consumed. That was normal. But also, there was no tension, and under these circumstances, that was not. She laughed a little. “Come on,” she trilled, “I have miracles to show you.”

Leo was running hard when she heard Ian’s shout, and turned to see something that surprised her and disturbed her enough even to slow her down. He was disappearing into a vampire hole. She had not understood that he would still want to be with Lilith, not after how he’d reacted before.

Then she thought, No. She just thought, Absolutely not, no. She turned up an alley, easily leaving the cops behind. Being that she’d just fed, she was at her physical and mental best. What Miri had said was so true; the blood did indeed take care of itself. That was why she’d made this escape, and why she now thought she’d be able to follow vampire sign, at least for the next few hours. She could follow them into the tunnels, and her superacute senses would enable her to find them.

She found a crack, pushed at it, then noticed something. There were no cops behind her. They hadn’t even turned up the alley. Had she been so fast that they’d already lost her? She slid her fingers along the crack, feeling for the right spot. Lilith could have done this in an instant, so fast she would seem to literally disappear before your eyes, but Leo was not nearly as skilled, not even at her peak.

Finally, though, she found the single loose place in the masonry and shook it. The crack widened, and she stepped through.

Behind her, the masonry silently slid closed. For hundreds of years, vampires had been carrying their victims down the steep stairway that she now descended, into the dark depths.

This must not be a repeat of her blundering failure in New York. She had to save this boy. It felt like the most important thing she’d ever done—maybe the only important thing she’d ever done.

She listened—off in one direction, dripping. She scraped at the wall, was rewarded with a single strip of faint green light. It was enough, though. She took a few steps deeper into the tunnel. She could not get lost here, because if she did, she would sure as hell not end up blundering out into any men’s departments.

Paul and Kari could both, as it turned out, enter the vampire’s hidden world. Paul wondered how much vampire blood ran in Kari’s veins, and what his history was. But there was no time to discuss that now, not as they dropped down the steep, curving steps of a vampire hole.

He and Becky, Kari and Jean—at least this was true: this was probably the best damn team that had ever been assembled.

Becky was following the signal from Ian’s transmitter on one of the modified PalmPilots provided by Jean. “Over there,” she whispered. “Twenty yards.”

They pulled on night-vision equipment, got out their guns. They moved fast, Kari at the lead. In these tunnels, it would be all too easy for the telltale to go out of range, which would be an unthinkable disaster.

From now on, nothing would be said. The least sound could spell disaster. A vampire that was aware it was being chased was a dangerous creature indeed, and Paul would never assume that this one would be so stupid as to imagine they wouldn’t be trying.

The telltale’s signal indicated that Ian had suddenly slowed.

The tunnel, which had been dropping steeply, began to become wet. Soon, they were treading six inches of water. Paul knew that they were passing under the Nile, heading toward the Giza Plateau, where the pyramids stood.

Then the green dot on the telltale began going faster, then much faster. Ian had gotten through the water and was running. The group sped up as much as they could. It seemed like ages before they were finally out of the water.

As they were going up the far side, a sound came back to them, a long, echoing cry. Becky gasped. She was behind Paul, and he could feel her pressing against him. Another cry, and this time there was a responsive sound in her throat. Paul knew what he himself was going through. A mother’s pain had to be worse.

They were running now, and Paul became aware of his heart, which was laboring noticeably. The tunnel was too narrow for him to drop to the back, so he had to keep up Kari’s pace. “You need a heart cath,” his doctor had said. “Within a year, for sure.” Pain started, a band around his chest. It rose into his jaw. He did not slacken his pace.

Suddenly Leo came into a gleaming, shimmering wonderland. She did not at first know what she was seeing…and when she did realize that they were pictures, then she didn’t understand. They were shining like mirrors that reflected the day. Each one was huge, forty or fifty feet long, twenty feet high. In them, figures drifted slowly along, flags waved as if underwater, the sun flared down on temples and palaces and long-walled cities.

She saw the Pyramid of Cheops flaring white and new, on its pinnacle a huge golden stone with what looked like an eye carved in it. On the Nile stood graceful ships, their sails painted with the images of gods.

It was the past, captured in some sort of frozen mirrors.

Then she heard a cry, just a short distance away.

“Ian!”

“Leo?”

“Over here!”

He came out from behind one of them. “It’s incredible, Leo. Look at it all. Look at it!”

The whole of man’s past was here, preserved in wonderful detail by a mind that collected things and obsessively kept them, even things as ephemeral as the light of other days.

“Ian, I’m here to—”

One of the mirrors exploded, crashing to a million pieces as Lilith came flying through it, leaping like a maddened panther straight at Leo’s throat.

Leo took the blow against her upper chest and head and went down like a rock, smashing into another of the mirrors as she fell. Then Lilith was astride her.

“Ian, run, get away from her!”

“My folks are coming! It’s okay!”

When she heard that, Lilith began shaking Leo by the shoulders, slamming her head again and again into the stone floor. Shards of mirror, still blazing with the light of the past, flew up around her like a multicolored halo and then were stained with pink, then with thick red.

Leo felt her skull being shattered, her brains growing loose in her head, then splashing out in chunks. She tried to stop Lilith, but she couldn’t even begin.

“You did it, you ruined it all,” Lilith wailed as she smashed Leo again and again into the floor.

Then Leo saw Ian behind her with a large piece of mirror. As a stately procession moved across it, he lifted it high and smashed it downward, crushing it into Lilith’s back.

Lilith grunted but didn’t even slow down. The vampire could take far more punishment than that. But not the human being, and the agony of the blows began to seem to Leo to be farther and farther away. Then she felt sphincters give way, felt warm liquid flowing out of her down below, heard Ian’s cries as he strove to pull Lilith off her.

Lilith stood up. Leo felt a curious, electrical tingling all over her body. She lifted herself, confused that Lilith had let her live—and then realized that she had not risen, had not moved at all. Lilith had let her live, all right, but like this, in the undead state, lying here amid the stars of the mirrors, in this great hall of the human past.

“Why did you kill her? Why did you have to do that?”

“She’s dangerous, Ian. She’s dangerous to us.”

In her helpless mind, she called out to Ian—
get away, run, do it now!

There was no sound.

“Come with me, Ian, come here.”

Run, Ian!

He turned away. But Lilith had him, snap, her hand around his right arm. He tugged, but it was no use. In a moment, Ian’s face was thrust down into Leo’s. She was looking straight into his terrified eyes. Then his face was being pressed past hers into her neck. For a long moment, he did not breathe. Longer. Longer still. He squirmed, he tried to twist his head away.