Variations Three (4 page)

She dreams the most poignant piece of wood
she has ever held. In her mind, she shapes it, with the strength of
her will, into subtlety beyond mere beauty. Sula dreams with
intensity, with pure savage power, and I stand over her, one hand
above her heart, one hand cradling her forehead, drinking,
drinking, drinking, as much a captive of her passion as she, of my
trance.

Feeding of Sula can span objective hours,
such is her vitality. Often, it is I who pull away, sated, and she
who clings to trance and the dream-thing she is making. Tonight, I
barely touched my peak, her lust coursing and lighting my veins,
when I felt her-- falter.

Shiver.

Against me, as never before, she ... moaned,
vitality spent, heart pounding, but with something other than
passion.

Full, but not yet satisfied, I stepped
aside. She slumped against her work table, braced against her
flattened palms, breathing in great gulps, as if she had been
running, hard and long.

Alarmed that she might be sickening--that
she might, indeed, have already passed her sickness to one or more
of the others--I let the glamour go, extended a gentle hand and
touched her shoulder.

"Sula?"

She started, the remains of trance
shattering, shook herself and with an effort straightened.

"Hey, Jimmy." Her usual greeting, but
without her usual verve.

"Are you well, Sula?" I asked and she smiled
a dazed smile and shook her head, pulling at the loose collar of
her shirt.

"Tired," she said. "Hope I ain’t caught that
flu’s going round."

I smiled and said I hoped so, too. She
nodded and turned away, toward the candlelight, and it was then
that I saw the cause of Sula’s illness.

Just above her collar, dark against the dark
skin, just over the luscious vein that runs from heart to throat,
nestled two tiny, neat scars of a kind I had reason to know
well.

I placed the Sleep upon her, which was a
risk. Should the interloper return, Sula would be helpless to ward
off the Kiss. But human defenses against us are paltry in any case,
and she might actually take benefit from the trance, if the thief
did not return.

Having done what I might for this one of my
own, I went to check on the others.

Michael was locking his door as I came by;
he waved cheerily and jangled his keys. "Hot date tonight, man!
Don’t wait up." He slapped me on the shoulder and would have gone
on by, had I not Spoken.

"Michael." Humans are particularly
vulnerable to the Speaking of their names. He paused, grin fading,
eyes fogged; I pulled his collar wide.

Michael’s skin is ivory, shadowed with
indigo along the sweetly defined muscles, absolutely without
blemish. Whoever had drunk of Sula had not tasted Michael. I
straightened his collar and stepped back.

"Hot date tonight, Michael?"

Pale blue eyes blinked, focused. The grin
flicked on like a blare of demon sunshine. "Hot is not the word,"
he said with a laugh and strode on past, wiggling his fingers at me
as he went. "Don’t wait up!"

"I won’t," I murmured, and continued down
the hall.

Amy and Chris were in Amy’s studio, a tangle
of sweat-gilded limbs atop the spring-shot day bed. I Spoke their
names, stroked them apart to search, then released them to their
exercise.

Quill was before his easel, so concentrated
upon the work that I need do nothing but part his collar, search,
and leave.

I met Fortnay on my way upstairs and lay the
trance upon him before he had a chance to speak. No marks of the
Kiss here.

It would begin to seem that Sula had met her
misfortune during one of her frequent trips away. This did not mean
my herd was secure, given the ability of my kind to trace any human
one has tasted. However, I might not be in such immediate peril as
I had at first feared.

I stepped away from Fortnay, who smiled in
his vague way and pushed his glasses up his nose.

"Going for something to eat," he said,
looking just beyond my shoulder, which is Fortnay’s way with his
fellow humans, also. "Want to come along?"

"Another time," I said softly. "I’ve just
now eaten."

"Right." He nodded at the wall behind my
shoulder and continued downstairs, walking heavily in his spattered
tennis shoes.

In the hallway upstairs, I found Nikita’s
door locked, the studio beyond dark. I stood just inside, breathing
in the smell of turpentine, oils and Nikita’s own scent, then went
to the end of the hall and into Jon’s studio.

He was lying in the center of the floor, the
slab of dressed granite that had been his latest project a
wonderworks of stone shrapnel, scattered all about.

He had been dead a very little while; I
could smell the effluvia of fresh blood over the dust in the
air.

Jon himself was dry as dust, white as dust.
Drunk dry and with casual violence thrown away, much as a human boy
will smash a soda bottle when he’s finished his treat, and for the
same joy of wanton destruction.

I looked at him, my sculptor, dead and
drained among the broken bits of his passion, and I was angry. How
dare some--interloper--some new-made, blood-crazed Visigoth--come
into my place, take food from me, destroy what was mine?

The thief would pay for this outrage. I have
not existed for more than two centuries without knowing how to
answer impertinence.

I searched the room and found what I
expected to find--no sign of an intruder. Vampires are subtle, our
powers many. Jon may never have seen his doom; he doubtless died in
a dream of such rapture he barely noticed his own passing.

There were mundane tasks to attend to, then.
I have found that the death of one distresses the balance of the
herd, even if the one who has died was not especially beloved of
his fellows. It were best that all trace of Jon be gone before the
morrow, which bit of housecleaning consumed most of my nighttime
hours.

I then visited my remaining artists and lay
briefly with each, whispering into their dream-minds until I was
satisfied that Jon was shrouded in the fog of far-away memory.
Likewise, I persuaded each to believe that the studio at the end of
the top hallway was a storeroom. That it had never been anything
else.

Each, I should say, but Nikita, who did not
return to her rooms until sunrise forced me back to mine.

* * *

IT WAS TO her door I went first, when
twilight released me: It was locked, the room dim, the enormous
window Nikita prized so highly muffled in yards of sable fleece. I
fingered the soft stuff, then stepped ’round to the easel.

A painting was in progress--a sweep of
orange bisecting a dagger of sea-glass green against the stark
white canvas ground. The oils were dry, the swirls upon the palette
board blots of crusty color. Nikita had not painted today. It
seemed that she had not painted yesterday. And Nikita painted every
day. It was not unusual for her to paint through the night and into
the next day, when the passion was upon her.

I searched the rest of the studio, but found
nothing further to alarm me: Her clothes, her completed works, her
meager cash were all in place. The tiny refrigerator held a quart
of milk, four eggs, half a loaf of bread, a depleted bottle of red
wine. All precisely as it should be, lacking only Nikita
herself.

On the point of quitting her apartment, I
paused, frowning at a blank space on the cluttered wall.

Nikita had done a self-portrait at the
beginning of the summer--a radical departure from her modernistic
style. It had hung in this spot, now vacant, among the other
paintings she considered worthy of being framed.

A short search discovered it, stashed behind
six much-despised abstracts, near the edge of the shrouded window.
Framed in stark stainless, the canvas showed a wire-thin woman in
paint-spangled jeans, wearing a man’s white shirt, untucked, like a
smock, the sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her face was a study in
the simple power of line and shadow, her eyes great and dark
beneath thick eyebrows. She stood at an easel, of course,
paintbrush in hand, poised on the balls of her feet. The impression
of the whole was of power, of intensely focused, living
passion.

Carefully, I lifted the painting, carried it
across the room and hung it in its place.

Then I went to tend the others.

Michael’s door was ajar, but Michael was not
within. Chris and Amy were with Quill, coaxing him to call it a day
and lend his enthusiasm to a threesome destined for Amy’s day bed.
As I left, he allowed himself to be convinced, and began hurriedly
to put his brushes by.

As last evening, I met Fortnay on his way to
dine. As last evening, I refused an invitation to join him and
turned the corner, on my way to Sula’s studio.

Michael knelt in the center of the hallway,
blond head thrown back, a rigor of ecstasy upon his features. The
ivory column of his throat glowed in the silver dimness; his naked
chest ran sweat.

The figure standing behind his right
shoulder, jeweled and painted fingers stroking his sweat-slick skin
while pressing its lips to that place where the sweet blood ran
swiftest, raised its head and snarled.

It was an admirable face for
snarling--pinched and paper-white, a bare stain of claret across
the stark cheekbones, the lips glistening dark.

"That human is mine," I said, and stood
forward. The other licked her lips, slowly and with
satisfaction.

"He showed no mark. He came willing." She
ran her skinny fingers along the sweet curve of his ribcage.
"Didn’t you, Michael?"

"Yes," he gasped, hoarse and trance-locked.
"Oh, God, yes!"

She smiled and bent her head to tongue the
place, tantalizing herself.

"Have you no more for me, Michael? Shall I
stop?" Her voice was velvet, warm and suffocating, resonant with
power. A human could no more stand against it than a dog against
his master’s command.

"No!" Michael gasped. "Take me. I’m yours
...all yours..." He was groaning, back arched in passion, his
manhood straining against the prison of his jeans.

She smiled. "All mine," she murmured and
fastened again upon the heart vein. Michael cried out, sobbing in
his frenzy, the passion roiling off of him in sweet, delicious
waves...

In my desire to ensure the safety of my
household, I had not yet taken nourishment. Here before me lay a
feast. I went forward and wrapped him in my embrace, drinking his
rapture as the other drank his heart’s blood, riding the rising
tide of his passion until, at the pinnacle, while I clung, drunk
with him and able to do nothing else, save drink more--at the peak
of this ecstatic experience, Michael--was gone.

Besotted, bewildered, I staggered upright
and stood staring at the other, the drained, white body between us,
quiet, as dead to passion as we are.

"You did not have to drink him dry," I said
then, the words thick on my tongue.

She shrugged, rosy-faced now, and plump with
blood. "There are more," she replied, and waved a ringed hand
casually toward the wall. "So many more that all of us together
couldn’t drink them dry, if we drank three times each evening." She
smiled, slyly.

"Why blame me, when you fed, too?"

But my feeding had not slain him. Michael
had been very good: satisfying, resilient, strong. I had hopes of a
breeding pair, between himself and Nikita, but had put the project
off--too late, now. I frowned at the other and raised my hand.

"This is my place," I said, and the words
were not thick now, but laden with full power. "These are my
humans. If I find you here again, I shall break you into bits and
bury the bits at four separate crossroads."

A potent enough threat, though she met it
with a stare. But I am old and she, I considered, had not yet seen
her first hundred years. Her eyes dropped first.

"All right," she agreed sulkily and moved
her foot to touch that which had been Michael before she looked to
me again. "He was sweet."

"So he was," I said. "Did you find the other
sweet, as well?"

She frowned, puzzlement plain. "Other?"

"Were you not here last night to feed?"

"Oh." She smiled, showing malice. "That
wasn’t me. That was the new one."

"Which new -- " I began, but she was done
with questions and simply turned and walked away.

After a moment, I entered Sula’s room.

It was no real surprise to find she was
dead.

* * *

IT WAS NEARLY dawn when I returned to her
room, having used the hours between to set a different order of
frenzy upon those remaining, so that they packed their belongings
in panic and fled into the fading night, scattered and thereby,
safe.

I did not know where they ran to--I had no
need. When the present crisis was retired, I would Call. And they
would come.

Nikita, now.

Nikita.

She stood before her easel, jeans spattered
with the jewels of past passions, wearing a man’s white shirt
untucked, like a smock, sleeves rolled to her elbows. She held a
paintbrush in one hand, but she was not painting.

She was weeping.

Weeping is a human thing. I have not wept in
two hundred years.

She looked up as I entered, eyes brilliant,
cheeks rosy red. Suffused with blood.

"He said I would live forever," she said,
with the air of answering a question. "He said I would always be
just as I was at the moment of--change."

Superficially true--one looks precisely as
one looked at the moment of one’s making--for as long as one
remains undead. But change is--change. We sacrifice to embrace
evolution.

"I thought," Nikita said, rather
breathlessly. "I thought that if I lived forever--kept painting,
learning, growing--that one day I would be the--the world’s
greatest painter." She groped on the table beside her, located a
rag and carefully wiped her brush.