Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (6 page)

A kidnapping in Buffalo merited a little attention, but not much. Leo Patterson was not in Buffalo. According to Joe Leong, Leo had left her suite wearing a black turtleneck and slacks at 2:17 A.M. She had returned at 3:22. It wasn’t enough to get him any support, not in the absence of hard evidence.

There were no missing persons reports from Midtown North. Midtown South, however, had three: a girl of seventeen with a history of runaways, an elderly man with Alzheimer’s, and a Catholic priest.

This third case Paul went into more carefully. A Father of the Holy Rosary called Joachim Prester had walked out of his rectory on Eleventh Street and never returned. But the case was three days old. They’d waited quite a while before they reported him. Then he saw why: Father Prester was a binge alcoholic and had last been seen wandering the South Street Seaport. Probably lost with the tides by now, a victim of the unforgiving waters that surged around Manhattan.

So, once again, there was nothing solid to pin on Leo. Once again, he would put in a request to allow him to detain her and obtain a blood sample for analysis. Once again, he would be denied.

Leo was not a vampire, she was a human being who’d been “blooded,” that is to say, had vampire blood infused into her veins by a real vampire. A creature that called itself Miriam Blaylock had done it to her, then died in a hail of bullets a few weeks later. After that, Leo had disappeared into the world, another trashy bit of flotsam on the nightclub and cruise ship circuit, singing tired old ballads for tired old people. She’d appeared to sink without a trace.

But then, to his growing amazement and horror, Paul had watched her resurfacing. When he actually saw her again, a couple of years after Miriam’s death, she looked eighteen but sounded—well, she sounded like an ancient child, wise and knowing and infinitely wounded. Her voice broke your heart, just shattered you.

And then her albums began appearing on charts. And then people started talking about her. Her concerts became large, then huge. Her fame exploded like some kind of out-of-control tumor.

A year ago, the first Leo Patterson poster had appeared in Ian’s room.

Long before that, Paul had begun fighting the CIA bureaucracy to get some of his old team reactivated and assigned to her surveillance. CIA didn’t like him, and they feared that his work, if it was ever revealed, would lead to all kinds of unwanted repercussions. He’d killed hundreds of highly intelligent beings, who’d had names and a language and writing. It would be easy to see this as a gross violation of the prohibition against assassination that the agency had been working under at the time. Worse, they were genetically similar to man, so much so that their blood could damn well run in our veins. So CIA kept him under deep, deep cover, and wished that all of his work and his tremendous accomplishment of freeing mankind from a great curse would just disappear.

In the end, he’d been given one guy. They’d had Joe Leong doing close-range intercepts in China—setting devices that were designed to pick up conversations in private apartments and offices. Joe was good at tunnels and basements. He was good in the dark.

Thumbs dug into Paul’s neck. He leaned back into Becky’s eyes. “You’re acting weak,” she said, “and that makes me mad, because I know you’re strong.”

“I’m down here working.”

“You’re down here obsessing. Paul, you go up and be with him.”

“Leo fed.”

The hands disappeared. He could feel a change in Becky as she stood behind him. The careful professional replaced the worried mother. “You have evidence?”

“Joe followed her to Sutton Place. She went in with a victim, came out alone. During this time, the furnace was fired.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

“Any missing persons report fit? Did Joe get a look at the guy?”

“Mid forties, stocky, not real pretty. Short brown hair, carried a briefcase. Came out of a bar on Third Avenue. Went into the roach motel with America’s Sweetie, did not return.”

Becky dropped down into her own chair. “You want to go in and see Jack Binion?”

He thought about that. The chief of detectives was fairly cooperative, but real careful around a Central Intelligence Agency official with a secret brief. Had he known just how much of an outsider within the company Paul actually was, he wouldn’t have given him any time at all. But he didn’t know that, so fifteen minutes in the man’s office might be productive.

Paul picked up the phone, dialed.

“Chief Binion’s office.”

“This is Paul Ward. I’d like to meet with the chief today. Tell him it’ll take about fifteen minutes, and I can do it anytime from ten on.”

There was a short silence. “You want me to tell him, like, right now?”

“Yeah.”

“Call him at home and wake him up?”

Paul muttered that he’d call back, and hung up the phone. “I get up too early,” he said.

“And you go to bed too late. When you do sleep, you look like somebody waiting to be executed. You have nightmares that you never remember, like last night.”

“I had nightmares?”

“You cried.”

“Christ, that again.”

“And you woke up mean, just like you always do when you cry in the night.”

“None of this is news. Anyway, I’m working.”

“Look, you’re also down here hiding from Ian, which he knows perfectly well.”

“I have an urgent case, for chrissakes!”

“Paul, the Leo evidence you’ve just presented to me is absolutely worthless, as you know. And even if it isn’t, whatever you’re doing now can wait half an hour.”

“A man died last night.”

“Maybe, but a father’s relationship with his son is dying right now. Why not go up and sit with him while he eats? Talk to him, be with him.”

He was silent.

“Dammit, Paul, then don’t talk. Just
be.
There’s something important happening here. Right now, today, you two either build a wall or you don’t, and dammit, I say you don’t.”

He met her eyes, found he could not bear that, and looked away. Why had he ever, ever picked that little baby up out of its exquisite antique cradle? But how could he not? You couldn’t just leave a baby, and especially not your own damn son. Ian was pure vampire on his mother’s side, about a third on Paul’s. That made him more than half vampire. And it made his future a huge unknown. He had never fed, never wanted to feed, had no idea that vampires were anything real. As far as Ian was concerned, Becky was Mom and Paul was Dad, and that was that.

The question was, would puberty bring with it an urge to feed? It was already bringing an affinity for vampire blood, Paul felt sure. That was the origin of the Leo fixation. So would he also, one day—

Paul pushed the thought out of his mind with a fury that almost made him groan aloud. The rage that had invaded him told him the hardest truth there was about himself: he loved this son of his more than his own damn life, but if he turned vampire, then he would have to kill him.

How far will she go to protect Ian, if it comes to that? he wondered. Becky was an extremely effective operative, quick and ruthless and as sharp as a knife. She might not be Ian’s natural mother, but she was more loyal to him than she was to her own soul.

“More coffee,” she said, a false lilt in her voice. “Shall I bring it down?”

“No, no, I’ll go up.” There was no other choice. In a family this close to exploding into blood and death, he had to do everything he could to keep things going.

“Well, good,” she said. “That’s good. Come on.”

He followed her up the stairs, trying not to think about gallows. He was an adult. He could handle this.

Ian was in the kitchen, his blond hair glowing in a shaft of morning light. As a little boy he had been so beautiful that he unsettled people. Men and women alike found themselves wanting to hold him and touch him, to the point that it frightened some of them, made them uneasy. But that was Ian’s nature, to draw, from deep within all whom he encountered, things that they did not even know were there.

“Hey, Ian.”

“Hey, Dad.”

The boy’s knife slithered in his breakfast steak, his fork worked the eggs with busy clinks. The sound that came when he guzzled his milk revolted Paul beyond words. Then he glanced up, and his eyes were the blue of morning. “Sorry about the music.”

His heart said, All is forgiven, O my son! His voice said, “No big deal.”

“You’d think they would’ve made thicker walls back in the old days.”

Translation: I heard you fucking Mom and it embarrassed me so bad I’m still congealed inside. Paul’s heart opened to his boy. “Yeah,” he said. “But look at it this way, Ian. Your olds are tight. Better than a lot of kids, where the olds hate each other. You want the olds to be tight.”

“For sure, Dad. Melissa Smith’s parents go final today. We’re celebrating.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Why?” He swept the air with a closed fist, innocently showing off his smooth, gracefully muscled arm. “No more bruises for Missy.”

“Her dad hit her?”

“Slapped, mostly.”

He tried to call up a picture of Dick Smith, but could recall only a pallid executive with beat-up old glasses. “That Mr. Peepers guy?”

“Get him drunk and he’s deadly. Especially to girls. He left Dickie pretty much alone, except when he tried to get him off Missy. Then he’d come after him with a belt.”

What was it he was hearing in Ian’s voice? Was it curiosity or compassion? Ian had never been hit. In fact, he lived in a home where a raised voice was a rarity, and punishments consisted of expressions of disappointment.

For Becky and Paul, ultra-violence was work. Their private lives had to be as peaceful as a Trappist oratory.

“So,” Ian said, “you no like Leo?”

“No like Leo.”

“She’s redefining the feminine, Dad. She’s politically, like, important. She’s going beyond feminism into grrl power. I mean, she’s this incredibly sweet, vulnerable girl who’s totally tough at the same time. Athene, goddess of wisdom and war, Lilith, mother of demons. Leo’s reempowering the myth of the feminine. Good-bye, Tinkerbelle.”

“It’s just that…it was kinda loud.”

“My loudness is mine, not hers. Let it sink into your soul, man, let it—” He laughed, suddenly, a brief, embarrassed chuckle. Ian was remembering why he’d turned it up so loud. He shut his mouth so hard his teeth clicked, as if he’d felt pain in the laugh and was trying to bite it off.

“I’m sorry we disturbed you,” Paul murmured.

Ian smiled a little. What son cannot see past the masks of his father? It struck Paul unexpectedly this time, the depth and power of his love for his boy. He’d been astonished to hear a baby crying, in the moments after the battle with Miri. Then he’d found the crib behind a curtain in the bedroom of the lavish San Francisco apartment they’d tracked her to. Paul had known instantly that this was his son, and why Miri had seduced him: to get this child.

Paul had lifted the wriggling life from its bed and had instantly and completely loved the baby he knew he should kill. He had tightened his hands around the tiny chest until the kid squirmed, until he could feel the heart fluttering like a captured moth. He had remained like that, his own sweat dripping down onto the squalling thing, his fingers trembling, his jaw clenching.

The baby had seemed so vulnerable, so tiny, at once more deeply a part of Paul Ward than anyone else could ever be—and more alien and more dangerous.

“I’ll take him,” Becky had said, and swept him up in her arms. Paul had raised his head and seen in his sweating, tough fighting companion something so deeply true, and so unexpectedly soft and just very damn appealing, that it had made him cover his weapon with the blood-spattered edge of his jacket and say, “Marry me.” To which she had replied, “Yeah, right.”

Thus are born romances, and father and motherhoods, and the journeys of children. Tentatively, he reached across to Ian, who did not react. He immediately withdrew. “Look,” he said, “I’m gonna drive down to the city. You want I should drop you at school?”

“I drive?” Ian asked.

“Go for it.”

They headed out. “Seriously,” Ian said, “she’s making a statement. That’s why kids like her. This is the postfeminist era. You and Mom—you don’t see that. It’s not enough for women to get the boardroom. There’s a level of psychological and cultural empowerment that they have not yet captured. Leo is about a whole new way of looking at what women are.”

Given what he knew about Leo, it was all Paul could do not to spit his contempt. Women were soft and good, not dangerous.

But Becky—his sweet, soft Becky—was one of the most dangerous human beings he’d ever known, dammit!

When Paul said nothing, Ian spoke again: “Women will never become all they can be until we respect their danger. I love Momma, but sweet is not what women need to be right now.”

Paul smiled to himself. What would you think, little boy, if you’d seen your mommy as I have seen her, filthy in a black cave, face to face with a monster that can throw a goddamn knife faster than a bullet, pounding away with a pistol as big as your head?

But he said—could say—not one damn word. The dark power of women has a good side and a bad side, though, and this innocent boy was being attracted to the bad side.