Microsoft Word - The Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance.doc (5 page)

Luke held his hands out to his sides. He wouldn’t try to

pressure me.

Connor closed  the distance between us and stroked my cheek. “You should know who you are before you seek a way to eliminate that part of you.”

“But Luke’s research is important.”

Luke smiled, just a little too boldly for Connor’s taste.

“Luke’s research,” Connor scoffed. “Did he tell you what

his research did to his daughter, Kelly?”

“Don’t speak of her. You don’t deserve to speak her name.”  Luke was on Connor in seconds, holding him up by the throat.  “Kelly was the daughter of my heart, my wife’s child from a  previous marriage. He convinced her to run off with him. He  turned her.” Luke let Connor drop to the sand. There was no  longer any question who could prevail in a fight.

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My eyes went wide as the moon. “
You
 
turned her?”

“She wanted to know what it was like.” Connor sat up,  propped on his elbow. He didn’t stand. “I did her a favour. WE  would have lived forever, together. But he found us. He  poisoned her against me. And then he killed her,”

Luke’s eyes darkened to black. He ran his hand through his hair, turned  away as if gaining control of his emotions, then turned back to me. “I did. It was a mistake. I was trying to save her.”

“To turn her back.” Connor stood up. “But he ended up

killing her with a virus of his own.”

“A mutation,” Luke clarified. “It should  have cured her

but…” His voice broke off.

I felt for him, went to him, took his hand and filled in what

was left unsaid. “It didn’t work. Luke, I’m sorry.”

“Miranda.” His eyes held that mysterious golden light as he  met my gaze. “Please stay. We can find  out so much more, save  more of us.”

I stepped back, “I’m not ready, Luke. I don’t want to be

cured. Not now.”

I wasn’t sure how or why I’d come to such a conclusion, but  I knew that Connor was right about me. I needed to explore what it was I had before  I cut that part of me away. “I’m going with Connor. Just for a while. But I’ll be back. If you let me go.  Don’t try to stop us or force me to come back before I’m ready.  Promise me.”

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Luke sighed, then took me in his arms and held me tight.

“Please come back. Come back soon.”

“I will,” I said, and reached up to stroke his stubble-dotted

cheek. “Goldbeard.”

“My fair Miranda.” He bowed his head and kissed my hand,

very gallant and old-fashioned but so sweet.

A shiver ran up my spine but I tore my gaze from him and

turned to Connor. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”

Connor smiled wide, triumphant and dazzling in the moonlight. “Let’s go.”

Luke left us while Connor readied the boat, a small motor-powered skiff that he assured me would get us away safely. I believed him. I trusted him.

I belonged with him.

But somehow, as I got into the boat beside him and took one last look at the sun coming up behind the magnificent house, I wondered if I wasn’t about to make the biggest mistake of my life.

37

Ode t o Edvard

Munch

Caitlin R. Kiernan

I
 
find her, always, sitting on the same park bench. She’s there, no matter whether I’m coming through the park late on a Thursday evening or early on a  Monday evening or in the first grey moments of a Friday morning. I play piano in a Martini bar at Columbus and 89
th
, or I play
 
at
 
the piano, mostly for tips or free drinks.  And when I feel like the long walk or can’t bear the thought of the subway or can’t afford cab fare, whenever I should happen to pass that way alone in  the darkness and the interruptions in the darkness made by the lamp posts, she’s there. Always on the same bench, not far from the Ramble and the Bow Bridge, just across the lake.  They call that part of the park Cherry hill. The truth is that I haven’t lived in Manhattan long enough to know these things and, anyway, I’m not the sort of man who memorizes the geography of Central Park, but she
 
told
 
me it’s called Cherry  Hill, because of all the cherry trees growing there. And when I looked at a map in a guide book, it said the same thing. You might mistake her for a runaway, 16 or maybe 17; she dresses all in rags, or clothes so threadbare and dirty that they may as well be rags, and I’ve never seen her wearing shoes, no matter

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the season or the weather. I’ve  seen her barefoot in snow. I

asked her about that once, if she would wear shoes if I bought  her a pair, and she said no, thank you, but no, because shoes  make her claustrophobic. I find her sitting there alone on the  park bench near the old fountain, and  I always ask before I sit  down next to her. And always she smiles and says of course, of  course you can sit with me. You always sit with me. Her  shoulder-length hair  has been died the colour of pomegranates  and her skin is dark. I never asked, but I think  she may be  Indian. India Indian, I mean. Not Native American. I once  waited tables with a girl from Calcutta and her skin was the  same colour, and she had the same dusky brown-black eyes. But  if she is Indian, the girl on Cherry Hill, she has no trace of an  accent when she talks to me about the fountain in her favourite  paintings in the Met or the exhibits she likes best at the Museum  of Natural History. The first time she smiles . . .

“You’re a vampire?” I asked, as though it was the sort of  thing you might ask any girl sitting on a park bench in the  middle of the night.

“That’s an ugly word,” she said and scowled at me. “That’s

a silly, ugly word.”

And then she was silent for a long moment, and I tried to think of anything except those long incisors,  like the teeth of a rat filed down to points. It was a freezing night near the end of  January, but I was sweating, nonetheless. And I had an erection.  And I realized, then,  that her breath didn’t fog in the cold air.

“I’m a daughter of Lilith,” she said

Which is as close as she’s ever come to telling me her name, or where she’s from, or anything else of the sort.
 
I’m a daughter of Lilith
, and the
 
way
 
she said it, with not even a trace of affection or humour or deceit, I knew that it was true. Even if I had no idea what she meant, I knew that she was telling me the

39

truth. That was also the first night that I let her kiss me. I sat  with her on the bench, and she licked eagerly at the back of my  neck. Her tongue was rough, like a cat’s tongue. She smelled of  fallen leaves, that dry and oddly spicy odour that I have always  associated with late October and jack-o’ -lanterns. Yes, she  smelled of fallen leaves, and her own sweat and, more faintly,  something that I took to be wood smoke. Her breath was like  frost  against my skin, colder even than the long winter night.  She licked at the nape of my neck until it was raw and bleeding,  and she whispered soothing words in a language I could neither  understand nor recognise.

“It was designed in 1860,” she said, some other night,  meaning the fountain with its bluestone basin and eight frosted  globes.  “They built this place as a turnaround for the carriages.  It was originally meant to be a drinking fountain for the horses.  A place for thirsty things.”

“Like an oasis,” I  suggested, and she smiled and nodded her

head and wiped my blood from her lips and chin.

“Sometimes it seems all the wide world is a desert,” she  said. “There are too few places left where one may freely drink.  Even the horses are no longer allowed to drink here, even  though it was built for them.”

“Times change,” I told her and gently touched the abraded  place on my neck, trying not to wince, not wanting to show any  sign of pain in her presence. “Horses and carriages don’t much  matter any more.”

“But horses still get thirsty. They still need a place to

drink.”

“Do you like horses?” I asked and she blinked back at me  and didn’t answer my question. It reminds me of an owl,  sometimes, that slow, considering way she blinks her eyes.

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“It will feel better in the morning,” she said and pointed at

my throat. “Wash it when you get home.”

And then I sat with her a while longer, but neither of us said

any more.

She takes my blood, but never more than a mouthful at a time, and she’s left me these strange dreams in return. I have begun to think of them as a sort of gift, though I know that others might think them more a curse. Because they are not entirely pleasant dreams. Some people would even call them nightmares, but things never seem so cut and dried to me. Yes, there is terror and horror in them, but there is beauty and wonder, too, in equal measure  –  a perfect balance that seems never to tip one way or the other. I believe the dreams have flowed into me on her rough cat’s  tongue, that they’ve infected my  blood and my mind like a bacillus carried on her saliva. I don’t know if the gift was intentional, and I admit that I’m afraid to ask. I’m too afraid that I might pass through the park late on night or early on morning and she wouldn’t be waiting for me there on her bench on Cherry Hill, that asking would break the brittle spell that I can only just begin to comprehend.  She has made me superstitious and given to what psychiatrists call “magical thinking”, misapprehending cause and effect, when I was never  that way before we met.

I play piano in a Martini bar, and until now, there’s never been anything in my life that I might mistake for magic. But there are many things in her wide burnt sienna eyes that I might mistake for many
 
other
 
things, and now that uncertainty seems to cloud my every waking thought. Yet, I believe that it’s a small price to pay for her company, smaller even than the blood she takes. I thought that I should write down one of the dreams,

41

that I should try to make mere words of it. From  the window  beside my bed, I can see Roosevelt Island beyond the rooftops,  and the East River and Brooklyn and the hazy blue-white sky  that can mean either summer or winter in this city. It makes me  think of her, that sky, though I’m at a loss to explain why. At  first, I thought that I would write  it down and then read it to her  the next time I saw her. But then I started to worry that she  might not take it the way I’d intended, simply as reciprocation,  my gift to repay hers. She might be offended, instead,  and I  don’t think I could bear the world without her. Not after all  these nights and mornings and all these dreams. I’m stalling.  Yes, I am.

There’s the silhouette of a city, far off, past the sand and smoke that seem to stretch away in all directions  except that one which would lead to the city. I know I’ll never go that far, that going as far as that, I’d never again find my way home. The city is for other beings. I know that she’s seen the city, that she’s walked in streets and spoken all its dialects and visited its brothels and opium dens. She knows the stink of its sewers and the delicious aromas of its markets. She knows all the high places and all the low places. And I follow her across the sand, up one dune and down another, these great waves of  wind-sculpted sand that tower over me, which I climb and then descend. In this place, the jackals and the vultures and the spiny black scorpions are her court, and there is no place here for thirsty horses. Sometimes I can see her, through stinging veils of sand. And other times it seems I am entirely alone with the wailing sirocco gale, and the voice of that wind is 1,000 women crying for their men cut down on some Arabian battlefield 1,000 years before my birth. And it is also the slow creep of the dunes across the face of the wasteland, and it is my heart pounding loudly in my ears, I’m lost in the wild, and I think I’ll never see her again, but then I catch a glimpse of her through the storm,

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crouched in the lee of ruins etched and defaced by countless

millennia of sand and wind and time. She might almost be any  animal, anything out looking for its supper or some way to  quench its thirst. She waits there for me in the entrance to that  crumbling temple, and I can smell her impatience, like dashes of  turmeric. I can smell her thirst and her appetite, and the wind  drives me forwards. She leads me down into the earth, her lips  pressed to my ear, whispering so I can hear her over the storm.  She tells me the name of the architect who built the fountain on