The Last Vampire (23 page)

Leo’s bowels let go.

“Clean it up,” Miriam snapped, and Sarah went to work with towel, sponges, and bedpan.

Leo cried and moaned. Sarah had to hold her arms so that she wouldn’t tear the needle out. She arched her back and writhed; she shook her head from side to side.

Sweat, blushed pink, began to bead on her upper lip and forehead. Her epidermal capillaries were hemorrhaging.

Sarah took her blood pressure — 270 over 140. Pulse rate 132. Temperature 106 degrees. She had perhaps half an hour to live, fifteen minutes before brain damage or a stroke. Sarah got more ice, put a pack behind her neck, another between her legs. The temperature dropped to 104 degrees.

Over ten slow minutes, Miriam pumped five more times. Leo came to and looked from one of them to the other out of agonized eyes.

“How do you feel?” Sarah asked.

“Water, please . . .”

Miriam withdrew the needles. Sarah took alcohol and iodine and cleaned Leo’s wound and stopped the leakage of blood with a small pressure bandage. She didn’t need to do anything for Miriam. Her wound healed itself inside of a minute.

“How did you know when to stop?”

“Her skin told me.”

Miriam’s people could diagnose practically anything in human beings by merely observing their skin tone. It was quite remarkable.

“What would have happened if you’d kept on?”

“I would have wasted blood. She would have died.”

Miriam took Leo in her arms and went out with her, saying nothing to Sarah. She was more alien right now, less human, than Sarah had ever seen her. She realized that Miriam’s whole personality was a sort of act. Seeing her like this, you realized that she was light years away from being human.

Sarah followed Miriam up to their bedroom. Miriam laid the girl, whose whole body was now flaming red, in the center of their bed. The Sleep was coming heavily onto Sarah, and she longed to lie down, too. But Miriam went to bed with Leo, enclosing her in her arms.

Sarah was left to the daybed. As she drifted into the dreams she would share with the victim whose life flowed yet within her, she heard her Miri singing to her new captive,

“Sleep my child and peace attend thee,
All through the night.
Guardian angels God will send thee,
All through the night ”

She cried herself to sleep, Sarah did, but when sleep came, it took her into a golden ship that sailed a windswept sea. In the purest blue sky she had ever seen, white seagulls wheeled and dove and cried. They came down and flew among the sails of her ship, and called to her with their harsh, haunting voices.

She knew that they were the birds of God’s careless and unquenchable love, calling to her and to Leo, and even to Miri, as indeed they do to all.

S
arah awoke when the afternoon sun, glaring in the tall bedroom windows, turned the inside of her eyelids bloodred. Leo was there instantly, kissing her, embracing her. “Oh, Sarah, I’m so glad you’re awake! I’ve been missing you like crazy!” “You — you’re not sick?” She should have been hanging between life and death.

“Oh, I was,” Leo said. “I was
so sick.
”

“You slept for two days,” Miriam said. She came down out of the light like a descending angel. She was dressed in bright white silk. Her hair was nearly grown back, and flowing golden blond across her milky shoulders. She was perfectly made up, looking absolutely ravishing. Her eyes were their usual ashy gray.

“We’re going to play this afternoon,” she said. “You’ll want to call your musical friends.”

Sarah took Leo’s hands. “Leonore, do you know what’s happened to you? Do you understand anything about this at all?”

“Look at my skin!”

How well Sarah remembered that miraculous discovery. A woman loves a pure skin, more than most realize — until she suddenly has something she never dreamed possible.

Leo shook her head. “And my hair!”

It was as pretty as Sarah’s, almost as pretty as Miri’s.

Perfection had transformed a pretty girl into a shockingly beautiful one. Leo smiled down at her. “I threw up all yesterday, but I’m better.”

“I used up all the antinausea stuff,” Miriam said. “She took to it more easily than you.”

“But now I feel — ” Leo shivered her shoulders. “I feel
fabulous
!”

As Sarah went about the duties of her life, showering and washing her hair, Leo chattered away about herself. When should she feed? Should they hunt together or was that wise? On and on. It was utterly grotesque.

“Leo,” she finally said when she was dressing, “I usually take this time in my office.”

It was a lie and Leo knew it. But she understood and withdrew at last.

When Sarah arrived downstairs, Leo was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the library looking at Keeper books she’d never been allowed to so much as touch. She tossed one of the ancient volumes aside and rushed up to kiss Sarah, chattering about yet more sensations and symptoms.

Sarah picked up the book and replaced it in its box. “These are very fragile,” she said.

“Yeah, they’re in Egyptian! Are they from Egypt?”

“They aren’t in Egyptian. They’re in the Keeper language, which is called Prime. The book you were paging through is thirty thousand years old. It is made entirely of human parchment and is also the finest illustrated medical text on the planet. If it had a value, Leo, it would be, very simply, the most costly artifact in the world.”

Leo had the hangdog expression of a surprised hound. But then she tossed her coltish hair and asked, “What are the first signs of hunger? I don’t actually know.”

“You feel cold. Your skin starts to get cold. Then you become a bit less energetic. That’s how it begins.”

“Should I get my own fleam?”

She sounded very like a bride planning her trousseau, or a pregnant girl deciding the furnishings of the nursery.

“Use a fishhook.”

“A
fishhook!
”

“A shark hook works quite well. I used one for years. The fleam belonged to my predecessor. Miriam just gave it to me recently.”

“Your . . . what do you mean, ‘predecessor’?”

“Oh, didn’t Miri tell you? We last about two hundred years. Unless there’s an accident, of course.”

“We die?”

“Oh, no. That we cannot do. We end up in the attic.” She smiled. “Like cast-off overcoats.”

Leo glanced toward the stairs.

“Miri didn’t tell you?”

“No, she didn’t.”

She took Leo’s hand and led her upstairs.

Miriam was at the head of the stairs. “I thought you were going to make an arrangement, Sarah.”

“An arrangement?”

“Flowers. For our guests.”

“I — yes. I was.”

“Miri, do we die?”

“You do not die.”

“But she said — ”

“The contents of the attic are my affair. As are those books. You girls do not
ever
touch Keeper things without my permission!”

“I thought — ”

“You thought you had the run of my house just because you’re blooded? You go downstairs and get things ready, both of you. And, Sarah?”

“Yes, Miri?”

“Be careful. Be very careful.”

As Sarah was arranging the flowers that would stand on the piano during the musicale, Leo chattered away about the kinds of people she preferred to “do.”

Finally Sarah snarled at her, “You’ve become a serial killer.”

Leo went silent.

Sarah turned on her. “You have! During the hundreds of years you now have before you, you’ll take thousands of lives! Men, women, children, every one of them wanting life and deserving life, and you will take their lives — steal their lives — because you’re a greedy, self-involved little monster!”

“Sa-
rah
!”

“You’re not worth the warts on one of their fingers! Not one! But in your arrogance, you think you’ve gained some natural right to kill them! Miriam has such a right — maybe! But you certainly do not.”

“Then neither do you!”

“I had this done to me. I didn’t ask for it. You did, Leo. You knew what it meant and yet you asked for it!”

Miriam strode in. “Miri,” Leo wailed, “she’s — ”

“I can hear,” Miriam growled. She looked from one to the other. “Two canaries in the same cage,” she said. “You’d better learn to get along, because you won’t be let out. I’m in trouble and I need you, both of you. Hell, I need ten of you! Fifty! But I do
not
need any bickering or moralizing or bitching. You’ll work together as a team or suffer the consequences.” She glared at Sarah. “Severe consequences.” She looked at the flowers. “That’s quite nice,” she said. Then, to Leo, “You are not her equal. You will learn from her and take her advice and, in my absence, her orders. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Miri.”

“Miriam to you, child.” She went out.

“Wow,” Leo said.

As the sun slanted across the floor, Sarah got out their violas da gamba, and she and Leo set the chairs. Among musical circles in New York, Miriam’s talent was well known. Far more had heard descriptions of her playing than had actually been privileged to listen, however, for she never gave public concerts. In fact, she didn’t perform at all. This would be, as far as she was concerned, merely an hour’s casual entertainment.

Leo greeted the guests, watching to see if they noticed how beautiful she looked. They noticed, all right — especially the women, who were always more aware than men of the details of beauty, the grace of the hands, the taper of the neck.

Sarah and Miriam had been working together on LeSieur de Malchy’s splendid “Fifth Suite for Two Violas da Gamba” for a few weeks before Miriam went to Thailand.

Maria Sturdevandt came and said hello to Sarah and Miriam. She would sing Madama Butterfly tonight at the Metropolitan Opera. With her was her companion Charlie Gorman. Bootsie Ferguson, the wife of Henry Ferguson, CEO of Goldman, Sachs was there.

Miriam could play most instruments simply by picking them up, but she had practiced on the piano, the viola, and the flute, and on these she was masterful. Sarah had not been much involved in music before meeting her. But her own viola was now one of the loves of her life.

As she played, she gazed from one member of their small audience to another. She watched Falstaff Rosenkrantz, editor of
Vanity Fair,
searching his pockets for what turned out to be a Chap Stick. His powerful shoulders and narrow waist suggested good-sucking veins. She imagined how he would taste, all salt and wine.

As she watched Miriam’s long, splendid hands manipulate her bow with the lightness of a breeze, she drew her own notes as best she could.

Sarah felt rotten about feeding and about Leo, and Miriam was distracted by her crisis, but the listeners, by their expressions, obviously felt as if they were in the presence not simply of musicians, but of masters of music. The suite proceeded from its dancing allemande to the saraband and finally the subtle, generous minuet. They sat side by side, Miriam in a summer dress of the lightest blue silk, Sarah in jeans and a black turtle-neck.

Standing open on the piano was a bottle of claret, a Latour nearly a hundred years old. There were glasses about and another, identical bottle beside it. A half-filled crystal carafe, shaped for use in ice, stood on an extraordinary little table. This wine was a white, but its color — a pale, rich gold — suggested that it, also, must be very fine. In fact, it was a freezing cold, exquisitely sweet Yquem, just now, at forty years, coming into its maturity. When guests sipped these wines, they would close their eyes.

The furnishings, also, were extraordinary. The chairs upon which the guests sat were Directoire pieces, some of them. It is to be remembered, though, that the designs of that period were inspired by classical models, and some of the other chairs were originals, carried from hearth to hearth in Miriam’s baggage for millennia. Their wood, having been lovingly cared for by Sarah and all of her predecessors, was as rich as when it had been cut in the now-vanished forests of Greece and Italy and the Levant.

Miriam remembered when this piece had first been played. It fit the moment so well because it had been composed out of pain, and this was a time of pain.

LeSieur de Malchy had fallen in love with Lamia, and Lamia had amused herself by leading him on, letting him kiss her alabaster limbs and gaze into her proud and laughing eyes. She had drawn him into deep, true love, as she was so very expert at doing, with the intention of then abandoning him to his music. She didn’t want a man. She wanted a composition.

Out of his anguish had emerged music fit to satisfy the ancient heart of the Keeper. Among humans, it had never been all that popular, but when Keepers joined to play, LeSieur was inevitably among the choices.

The instruments that Miriam and Sarah used had belonged to LeSieur, made by Barak Norman, of London, for him.

Miriam, as she played, well recalled LeSieur and her mother playing the piece together.

The room had been small and close with candle smoke, but finished in gold, with scenes of forest walks painted on its walls. The music, Miriam remembered, had captured, as if in a living amber, the passion that this man felt for the woman who sat with him in her tall wig and splendid white gown.

Only Miriam had been their audience, as she was audience to every moment of her adored mother’s life. As Sarah served her now, she had once served Lamia.

The music came to its end. There was no applause. They had learned long ago, her friends, that such displays were not wanted. She poured herself some wine. It was the least refined alcohol she could tolerate, wine. But the soul of the grape, captured, gave her spirit enough pleasure that she had collected wine through the years. She’d drunk Falernian in Rome, for she had been intimately involved with the lives of the old emperors.

Most of these men had not died by assassination as history recorded, but as vestal sacrifices. Rome had been secretly ruled by a concealed religion. The emperors were only seasonal kings, doomed to serve the state until the priestesses of Vesta decreed that it was time for them to die. They learned of this little condition only after they achieved the purple. It was no wonder that so many of them went mad.

Some had been throat-slit or smothered or strangled, but others had been delivered to certain dark villas, rich, strange places whose graceful inhabitants spoke a tongue like thunder. The Vestas were a conclave of Keepers.

She put the glass down and walked out, never thinking to excuse herself from her guests. This house was run according to very ancient principles. It was an extremely exclusive place but, like an ancient palace, wide open to all who had the right to enter.

Whatever happened in here, they were free to come and watch . . . or at least, so it was meant to appear. They did so, full of nervous excitement over their attendance at what they perceived as extremely private moments — Miriam at her toilette, Miriam making love.

This was the way the aristocrats of history had conducted their lives. Their privacy consisted of being surrounded by their people, and Miriam could be comfortable no other way.

Or so it seemed. Miriam’s ancient life was, of course, far more complex than it appeared. There were secrets within secrets. For, as Sarah and now Leo knew, this splendid house was also a place of murder, where innocent blood was guzzled like cheap champagne.

Paul was pushing a cockroach to the edge of the shower stall with his toe when he noticed something very odd about his feet.

He squatted, then got out of the shower and looked more closely.

It was the vampire blood that had made his skin so pale and smooth. Back in the ossuary, his shoes had been flooded with it. He rubbed his shoulder. Had it also sped his healing even more than usual?

He went back into the shower and washed and washed, using the cheap sliver of soap that had come with this cheap sliver of a hotel room. He stood in the small oblivion of the drumming water, watching the suds go down the drain.