Blood Hunt

17

Lane’s question had a simple answer…San Francisco, so she could stand trial. But he found himself saying, “That’s an interesting makeup job.”

She sniffed. “Well, I can hardly come home looking eighteen, can I. The old-face prosthetics used for movies don’t look real in everyday light. Faking a bad facelift works, though. People don’t want to look too closely. I didn’t recognize you, either, until Mama introduced you. I could hardly believe it when she told me about you showing up in Baumen, let alone her bombshell that you had joined the local police. I had to come home and see for myself. How did you find Baumen?”

“I’ll tell you all about it on the way back to San Francisco.”

Her forehead twitched in a movement that without the restricting prosthetic might have been raised brows. “Are we going back to San Francisco?”

He made his voice flat. “I’m arresting you for the murders of Mossman and Adair, and my attempted murder.”

She laughed. “Really? Point one, I did not try to kill you.”

“Yes you did.”

She considered…shrugged. “Well, yes, I did…but then chose to let you live.”

“You left me bleeding to death.”

“Not to a permanent death.”

Anger flared in him. “You knew what would happen to me!”

“Of course. Point two, Inspector…how will you take me back?”

He frowned. How did she think? “There’s a warrant for your arrest. Extradition will be arranged and you’ll — “

She hissed, interrupting him. “Are you that dense? I mean, by what means will you force me to accompany you and how will you imprison me: rose stem handcuffs? A cell with garlic on the bars? May I remind you that anything used against me hurts you equally, if you can even convince your law enforcement colleagues to agree to such nonsense.”

He stared at her. What an idiot he was…so focused on finding her he never considered the problems afterward! He could not just let her walk away, though. There must be a way to handle her.

That fish symbol torn from Mossman’s neck suggested an answer. “Maybe I can wrap your wrists in a rosary.”

She snorted. “Superstition.”

Superstition? Before she snorted, Garreth caught the beginning of a flinch. The crucifix Anna wore, another on the wall of her livingroom wall, and that picture of the Virgin Mary in the diningroom told him Lane had been brought up Catholic…and her involuntary flinch said its symbols affected her.

“Open your eyes, Inspector. You can’t arrest or try me. Our kind are beyond the reach of mere human laws.”

“No.” He shook his head. No one could be beyond the law. Without law there was only chaos.

Opposing feelings warred in him…his belief in justice against the obvious impossibility of following proper procedure. He must violate the latter to accomplish the former, and that itself violated what his badge said he stood for. He would not be acting with proper authority.

His radio crackled. “Baumen Seven,” Doris said, “see Mr. John Haffener, 723 Prairie Circle, about vandalism.”

Reflex made him respond… “10-4.”…but he hesitated with his hand on the ignition key. How could he take the call and still deal with Lane?

“I believe you’re being paged,” she said. “Since I’m sure you don’t want me out of your sight, why don’t I ride along.” She buckled her seat belt.

I Ching echoed in his head. The maiden is powerful. Beware.

She obviously saw his uncertainty. Her lip curled. “How paranoid of you. Do you really think I’m stupid enough to try something in my hometown, where everyone sees everything? Where my mother would know about it? I won’t foul her nest. I don’t even hunt here.”

He started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. “How do you eat?”

“In Hays. Even during the holidays there are young men around the college campus eager to pick up an attractive girl and demonstrate what superstuds they are. I wear my own face there, of course.”

“Do you kill any of them?”

Her eyes went cold. “You can be so tediously one-track. No, I don’t kill them. Hays isn’t that far from home. Now, let’s talk about something more interesting…like the senses.” She leaned her head out her open window and blew. The steam of it swept away behind them. “Fairy wreaths my cousin Vicky used to call this. I think the temperature’s near freezing.”

He thought so, too, feeling the tires want to slide at a stop sign.

“I used to hate cold. Now it doesn’t bother me. I’m not crazy about heat, but can certainly bear it better than before. Don’t you find that true? And doesn’t the world have so many more odors since crossing over? Isn’t it also wonderful being able to see in the dark?”

Questions he truthfully had to answer yes, but admitting it aloud felt like a trap. He drove in silence past the stadium to Prairie Circle.

The vandalism became immediately obvious…a smashed jack-o-lantern halfway up the driveway with a dark substance spreading from it toward the street. He got out. “Are you going to wait in the car?”

Lane smiled…more a grimace with that face. “Of course. We have so much yet to talk about.”

Her amiability raised the hair on his neck. She must have something in mind for him. The maiden is powerful.

Trying to guess her plan, Garreth barely listened to the victim while they surveyed the driveway. His flashlight showed the substance as red; his nose identified it as paint. Latex, he thought, squatting down and picking at one edge. It might just peel off, especially with damp concrete under it.

Then a name Haffener said rang a bell in his brain, Marvin Jacobs. He stood. “Two weeks ago Mr. Jacobs was the victim of vandalism, too. Someone scratched ‘bastard’ on the hood of his car outside the Cowboy Palace.”

“I don’t know anything about that.” An answer that came too quickly.

Garreth caught Haffener’s gaze and violated his freedom from self-incrimination. “Why did you key Jacobs’ car?”

“There was a set of golf clubs at an estate auction I wanted to bid on. One was supposedly signed by Jackie Gleason. They were scheduled to sell about two o’clock…only Jacobs talked the auctioneer into putting them up an hour earlier, before I got there, and bought them himself. And bragged about it at the Cowboy Palace.”

It sounded like their beef went back farther than the golf clubs. Whatever the origin, it needed to stop before escalating any farther. “I’ll talk to Mr. Jacobs and see if he will admit to painting your driveway. If so, I could arrest you both for vandalism but do you really want the embarrassment of going to court? I think you should offer to pay for repairing his paint job, and I will have him come tomorrow and clean your driveway. Then I want this…feud done with. I don’t want to see either of your names on this type of complaint again, understood, or I won’t hesitate to haul you downtown…in handcuffs…in full view of your neighbors.”

Haffener winced.

So did Jacobs when Garreth obtained an admission of guilt there, too, and presented him with the same threat of public humiliation.

“I see you employ our very useful hypnotic ability,” Lane said after Garreth returned to the car and sat writing up his preliminary report…the final one to be typed at the office.

He wrote on without replying.

“How about sex?” she said. “Ah, I see you have discovered the joy of vampire sex. Isn’t it interesting we still blush. We’re honey for flies, and what sex as humans ever compared to what it’s like when we’re hungry?”

The purr in her voice rasped at him. He laid down his clipboard and slapped the car in gear, pulling away from the curb with a jerk. “Your point?”

“Isn’t that obvious? Look at all we are…our superiority, our abilities. Why would anyone want to be a mere human when they can be…us.”

“Because family and friends are worth more.” He made no attempt to hide his bitterness. “Now I’ve lost them. Every moment with them is a lie. Which isn’t a problem for you, is it, since you never cared about anyone except your mother.”

“None of them except her ever cared about me,” she said coldly.

“So you probably asked to come across.”

She snapped, “Yes!”

“How did you find a vampire?”

Lane smiled. “Irina found me…Vienna, July, 1934. It really wasn’t the place to be that month with Hitler’s putsch and Dollfuss’s killing, but Matthew said as long as the cafes and museums stayed open what were politics to us. This exquisite woman sat down sat at a table next to us that evening and started flirting with Matthew. Naturally I went over to tear her face off.”

That sounded familiar. “Like you attacked Claudia Darling?”

In his peripheral vision she blinked. “Who?”

“Your 1942 assault victim.”

Lane sniffed. “Oh, that slut. I should have killed her. You know what she did after getting me arrested?”

“Got you fired and then blackballed around North Beach. She told me.”

“You’ve seen her? Well…how is the little bitch these days?”

“Matronly and rich.”

Lane laughed. “Whereas I am anything but matronly and am very rich.”

His skepticism must have shown on his face.

Her forehead twitched. “Oh, yes, I am. You can learn a lot during pillow talk about making your money grow, especially with a little vampire encouragement. Which brings me back to Irina. Garreth, park somewhere so we can talk face to face.”

“Eye to eye?”

She sighed. “You are paranoid. We’ll sit back to back if that makes you feel — no, not here! Turn right.”

Into the cemetery, not St. Thomas More’s parking lot. So she disliked being even in the vicinity of a church?

“Let’s go to the War Memorial,” she said.

A tall granite obelisk in the middle of the cemetery with cannons on its left and right pointed at the obelisk. Erected in 1920 to commemorate the Great War, which everyone optimistically assumed would be the Last War.

He steered into the cemetery, radioing Doris his location, and parked at the Memorial’s island. Swinging out of the car, Lane strolled through the mist toward the obelisk. He climbed out, too, but remained beside the car.

Her voice came back to him. “Irina looked up at me with big violet eyes and said don’t be angry, join her for tea. Suddenly I wasn’t angry. Matthew and I did join her. Later she came back to our hotel with us and suggested we have a threesome…which Matthew accepted eagerly, of course. I don’t have to tell you how fantastic it was. But the most amazing part came after she told me to go to sleep and she and Matthew went at it again by themselves. I didn’t sleep — maybe she was in too much hurry to be sure of me — so I watched them…and I saw what she did. She doesn’t bite the neck, where the marks show. She prefers — let’s just say she gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘cocksucker.’”

Garreth cringed.

As though seeing him, Lane laughed. “I’m joking. That would be like drinking from a sponge with a soda straw. She goes for the femoral artery. The moment those fangs came out, I knew what I’d been born for! She tried sneaking away, thinking we were both asleep, but I ran after her and asked her to bring me across. She refused, then said she could help me be a happier human if I would agree to be her companion and run her daylight errands. I accepted though I didn’t believe I could be happy as a human. She said don’t regret you’re not cuddly; think of yourself as an Amazon queen. She taught me how to move, how to dress, bought singing lessons. I appreciated it all, but it wasn’t enough and I kept begging to be brought across. Finally I wore her down. Then, suddenly…” Lane’s tone went acid. “…she turned into this old lady, acting every bit her four hundred plus years. Nagging me just to drink, not kill, because that attracts attention.”

“It does.”

“Not if you make the kills look the work of a psycho or wild animal or cult, which I did. But she got so angry she threatened me, and might have tried destroying me if we hadn’t gotten separated in Warsaw when Hitler invaded.” She paused. “Blitzkrieg isn’t just a word when you’ve lived through it.”

“I can imagine it was terrible.”

“Not really.” She ran her hand down the engraved names on the obelisk. “You know what this represents?”

“Bravery. Grief. Lives cut short. Wives widowed. Children orphaned.”

She snorted. “No…it represents a feast! Think of all the blood. I took my time leaving Europe. With so much death, no one noticed a few more bodies.”

Bile rose in Garreth’s throat. “All you see in humans is prey?”

“Of course. That’s all they are to us; that’s all they can ever be.”

“Not to me! I’ve never drunk a drop of their blood!”

“You drink only animal blood?” She came back to stand on the far side of the car, staring mockingly across it at him. “That’s bad nutrition.” She ticked her tongue. “If you’re injured, it affects your recuperative powers.”

He carefully focused beyond, not meeting her eyes. “I refuse to prey on people!”

“How righteous!” Her lip curled. “I notice you have no scruples, however, about cozying up to my mother to get to me.”

That stung. Heat crawled up his neck and face.

“My mother!” Her voice flattened to a hiss. “It almost makes me sorry I didn’t break your neck in that alley.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“You bit me.”

He blinked. She sounded as though that explained everything. Then he remembered his thoughts while reading Dracula, noting the difference between Dracula and Miss Lucy and how Dracula gave Mina his blood in return, but not Miss Lucy. “You mean receiving vampire blood does make a different kind of vampire than someone who’s just bitten?”

She applauded. “Very good. You’ve got a functional brain after all.”

“Why does it matter?”

“My research leads me to conclude it involves a virus.”

He remembered the medical books on her shelves. “There’s a vampire virus? Like rabies.”

She rolled her eyes. “Not like rabies. Yes it’s carried in the blood and saliva and passed on through a bite. That’s the only similarity. Ours is a retrovirus. A healthy immune system destroys the amount of virus in a single bite, but if some survives, because of repeated bites or a weak immune system, it invades the cells and waits until the immune system collapses due to extreme weakness or death.” Lane’s eyes gleamed as she warmed to her subject. “Then the virus activates…takes command of the host and modifies it to serve the virus’s needs, which of course are those of all life forms: survival and reproduction. Mere reanimation appears to need very little virus, because biting a subject long enough to drain him provides enough for that. When a subject receives a massive infusion of virus, though, higher brain functions are restored. Creating the likes of you and me.

“That’s the mystery I’ve yet to solve…why we’re created. All the virus needs for reproduction is zombies. We’re actually counter-productive because we tend not to reproduce. I’ve been thinking that originally the virus intended us to be caretakers, looking after the zombies and — ”

“Blood provides the massive infusion.” The one pertinent fact in her lecture.

She frowned. “You have no intellectual curiosity about your origin? Fine. Because you bit me, I knew you would rise again fully functional…and I decided to see what would come of that.”

He gave her a sardonic smile. “Now you know; what’s coming of it is your arrest for murder.”

Lane sighed. “I’ve told you, you can’t arrest me. There’s no way to force me back to San Francisco and no jail that can confine me. Accept it.”

“No!” There had to be a solution, a way to make her answer for Adair and Mossman’s deaths.

She sighed again. “All right. Suppose you do manage to arrest, try, and imprison me. Having accomplished the purpose for which you’ve insinuated yourself into Baumen and my mother’s life, what are your future plans?”

“I have none. I don’t expect to be around. There’ll be no reason for it.”

She eyed him thoughtfully. “You mean you plan to destroy yourself?”

If it did not occur naturally. “My life is already destroyed. I detest what you’ve made me. Once I’ve seen you face judgement I want out of this existence.”

Lane’s breath wrapped white around her and melted away into the mist. “Do you? When there’s such a wide and wondrous world out there? A world I’m betting you’ve never seen.” Her voice turned musical, floating across to him along with the light spicy-musky scent of her perfume. “You lived in a seaport, but did you ever think of boarding one of the ships docking there and sailing away on her? Wouldn’t you like to see wonders like the Himalayas above Kathmandu or climb to the temples of Tibet? Or walk the Great Wall of China and explore the ancient ruins of Karnak and Zimbabwe? Poling through the Okavanga Delta in Africa at flood time there is such richness of life that it makes your throat ache, and there’s nothing more awesome than the migrations in the Serengeti, when the plains stretch like a sea of grass and herds of wildebeest and zebra stretch as far as the eye can see. Even the Sahara has raw, stunning beauty…dunes, rock outcroppings, wildlife where you’d think none could exist. In the heat waves you can almost see the cities of ancient civilizations that existed before the sand buried them.”

In movement almost too fast to follow, she came over the car and down beside him, voice dropping to a whisper. “There’s a city in northern China with a winter festival every year that fills the city with ice sculpture, not snowmen but pure, clear ice chiseled into a wonderland of heroes and mythical animals and castles, and ice arbors with ice benches to sit on. Vienna, Rome, and Copenhagen aren’t like they were before the war, but they’re still beautiful, and Beijing, Mecca, and Sri Lanka. You shouldn’t miss Venice, where all greatest glass craftsmen work. There’s so much out there a human life span isn’t enough to explore it all…but ours is.”

The vision dazzled Garreth…places that had always been just names, that he never dreamed of visiting. He and Marti talked about a trip to Hawaii, but listening to Lane made him realize how foreshortened his horizons were. To see all those places…to have time enough for it -

Reality cut the thought short. “One problem. Travel takes money, which I don’t have.”

“I do, blood of my blood,” Lane crooned in his ear.

He felt as if someone jabbed him with an electric prod. It jumped him sideways away from her. “Is that what you expected by letting me live…a companion? There is no way in hell that is ever going to happen!”

“What a pity.” She smiled at him. “Or maybe not. You want two things, you say: justice and death. I can give you one…you dumb mick!” Fast as a striking snake, she grabbed the front of his jacket and drove her knee into his crotch with a force that lifted him off his feet, then hurled him to the ground to lie curled in blinding agony. “I’d kill you right now except people have seen me with you and I won’t shame my mother. But you’ll have that death you want before the night is out.” She ripped his radio off his belt and strode away, calling back from the mist, “Consider yourself a walking dead man.”