Greg’s car was parked in the main driveway, one last gesture of defiance to Roias. “It looks rather like something from a tale by Wells or Verne,” Rozokov commented and Ardeth remembered that the only cars he could have seen would have been the earliest prototypes.
“Well, they aren’t all quite like this,” she said, surveying the silver-grey BMW. She had thought that Greg would have gone for something small, European and expensive; a Porsche or Ferrari. Then she remembered the two women lying dead in the studio and realized that a pimp needed passenger room even more than image.
Settled into the plush grey upholstery, she ran her fingers hesitantly over the wheel. It had been at least five years since she’d driven a car back at her parents’ home in Ottawa. Thank God the BMW was automatic; she wouldn’t have had the first idea what to do in a standard. But the old reflexes were still there, she discovered, and felt a surge of pleasure as she swung the car out onto the circular drive.
She turned on the headlights to negotiate the long, tree-roofed laneway. This could not have been the road Roias and Wilkens had driven on the endless trip to the asylum; it was too smooth. Her suspicion was confirmed when she reached the end of the drive. Looming before her were the iron gates, patched with rust, held closed by a chain and padlock. They were flanked with high stone walls.
Ardeth cursed, and slammed the BMW into reverse, twisting to check the road in the tail-lights as she backed up. “You are going back?” Rozokov asked, as he turned in the seat to follow her gaze.
“Actually, I was thinking of going through,” she replied, turning to him and catching the edge of her own manic grin in the rear-view mirror. She didn’t give him time to process but hit the accelerator and aimed the car at the centre of the gates, adrenaline surging up through her. It washed away the voice that whispered warnings in her head, trying to remind her that this kind of thing only worked in the movies.
The car hit the gates at close to sixty miles per hour and while the force wasn’t enough to snap the gleaming chain, it was more than sufficient to break the rusted hinges. For a moment, Ardeth’s head was full of the sound of grinding metal, and the sight of black bars as they tumbled over the car. Then the BMW was free and she spun the wheel frantically to avoid the ditch.
In a spray of gravel and dirt, she brought the car to a shuddering halt, stretched diagonally across the road. She took a deep breath and looked at her hands on the wheel. They were steady. Her heart was pounding, a quick tattoo that echoed up through her, but she realized with quickly fading surprise that it was with excitement, not fear. She had not been afraid. She let herself savour that realization for a moment, then looked over at Rozokov.
He was sitting very still in the seat, one hand resting on the door handle. White was fading from his knuckles. “Well,” he said, after a moment. “That was quicker than going back.” He glanced at the gate hanging like a broken wing over the driveway. “We should put that back as best we can.”
“All right.” Outside the car, Ardeth glanced at the front bumper and decided the dents were not too noticeable.
“I gather this was not something for which these vehicles were precisely designed,” Rozokov observed carefully.
“Probably not,” she conceded and felt a trace of amusement at his casual manner of confirming that his white knuckles had been justified.
After a few moments of manoeuvring, they managed to realign the gate with the stone walls and prop it into a position that approximated its unwounded state. Ardeth stepped back and squinted at it critically for a moment. She guessed that traffic on this road was minimal, and limited mostly to locals. They probably no longer even looked at the gate; it was merely part of the scenery. Roias’s confederates had been trained to use only the back laneway. It might be weeks before anyone noticed the damage.
Ardeth glanced back at the car. She supposed that they could get in and just start driving, trusting that she’d recognize some town or sign that would orient them back to the city. She looked up at the sky, regretting that she’d never bothered to take any courses in astronomy. She wasn’t even sure where the Big Dipper was any more.
Rozokov followed her gaze and traced the discontent on her face back to its source. “That way is north,” he said, pointing back towards the asylum. “Is that of any use in solving your dilemma?”
“Well, I still don’t know where we are, but if we go south sooner or later we’ll hit something I recognize. Even if it’s just the lake.”
“You still wish to go back to the city, then?”
“You don’t?” she questioned in return. “Don’t you want to find out who knows about you, and how much?” She paused, stepping closer to him. “Don’t you want to make them pay?” He shook his head slightly then took one last look at the sky.
“Drive us south then, child,” he said, smiling, but even in the darkness she could see that it was fraying at the edges, “but try to avoid any more locked gates.”
Ardeth willed herself to see the smile and not the sadness, then led the way back to the car.
They drove in silence through the dark back roads. She started left, for no more reason than the car was pointed that way, then turned south on the first paved road she found. The BMW’s headlights marked the only movement on the landscape, and nearly the only light. The occasional porch light glowed faintly across the fields, and once they passed a house with all the windows bright, looking like an illuminated dollhouse set in the dark playground of the night.
Gradually the signs of road names, distances and populations yielded one she could use: Toronto, 100 kilometres. She turned right onto a four-lane road, then caught an exit-ramp and gunned the BMW out onto a near-deserted highway. In the west, the sky glowed like a false dawn. “What is that?” Rozokov asked.
“The city.” When the silence fell again, she could sense the great gap of years he faced, from a city lit with gaslights to a nuclear-powered sprawl whose lights were visible from space, banishing the purity of night.
Shaken, she reached for the radio dial, filling the emptiness with a burst of static, then the clamor of a heavy-metal song. “I hope that is not what this era calls music,” Rozokov said, in only partially feigned horror, and she laughed.
“Some people do. Usually long-haired, pimply-faced adolescent boys.” The description brought back memories of Peterson and his gloating death’s-head T-shirts. Ardeth spun the dials quickly, sliding through chatter, bass riffs and commercial jingles until she reached the relative comfort of Mozart. “Is that better?”
He nodded, but turned his head to stare out the window, and the silence, dispelled, now seemed twice as heavy. The music ended somewhere in the suburbs and the announcer’s voice came on with the perfunctory 2 A.M. Newscast. Ardeth let the latest from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the House of Commons wash over her. A lifetime had passed for her it seemed, but only a few days in the world. Very little had changed.
“Police continue to ask the public for help in locating Ardeth Alexander, reported missing Tuesday night. Anyone who may have seen the twenty-eight-year-old graduate student since last Thursday should contact police at 555-3636.”
Not much of a eulogy. “A twenty-eight-year-old graduate student.” She wondered who had reported her missing. Carla? Sara? It hardly mattered. They must have no idea what had happened to her; they weren’t even sure when she had disappeared. She felt a distant twinge of bitterness at the memory of her grand and hopeless schemes of rescue. To think she had clung to those hopes of salvation, when her saviours did not even know she needed saving.
Rozokov had returned his attention from the dark passage of trucks outside the window. “Ardeth,” he began and she shrugged, as if twitching off an unwanted hand on her shoulder.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m not missing.”
“You can’t go home. You know that. Wherever you take us tonight, it cannot be home.”
“I don’t want to go home,” she said, hands tight on the wheel. “Let them keep looking for Ardeth Alexander. Ardeth Alexander is dead.”
“Long live Ardeth Alexander,” Rozokov said with a smile, but under the humour she could sense the edges of mockery. Or warning.
“Long live Ardeth Alexander,” she echoed and then saw the turnoff to the Don Valley Parkway. The BMW slid across three empty lanes of highway and down the throat of the off-ramp.
She found a place to stop just north of Bloor Street; the burnt shell of an abandoned brick factory shaded by trees and shielded from the road by a decade’s worth of unchecked undergrowth. She pulled up behind the rusting remains of some ancient machinery and shut off the engine. Over the tick of its cooling, she thought she could hear the faint hiss of the sparse traffic on the highway, and the fainter whisper of the river as it swirled its slow, muddy way to the lake.
The car would be found sooner or later and traced to Greg. Could he ever be connected to them? She looked at her hands, pale fingers resting on the leather steering wheel. “Fingerprints . . . we have to get rid of my fingerprints.”
Rozokov nodded and hunted in his pockets, looking, she realized suddenly, for the cloth handkerchief that men always carried in his past. She was not surprised when he discovered only a tattered tissue secreted in the depths of his stolen clothing. Ardeth shrugged off her jacket, took one sleeve of her shirt and used teeth and nails to rip it off at the elbow. Carefully she rubbed the cloth across the steering wheel, turn signals, light switches and the clasp of her seat belt. When she left the car, she treated the door handles, locks and the edges of the window the same way.
She pulled the jacket on and looked at Rozokov standing on the other side of the car. “Now what do we do?”
“We must find some place to spend the day; it will be dawn in a few hours.”
“What kind of place?”
“An abandoned building, a tunnel. At the very least, some place deep in the trees, where no one goes.”
“I don’t know what’s in this ravine.” She frowned, trying to remember what she had seen from the subway as it ran beneath the bridge to the south. “There are abandoned houses and stores farther down. If we start walking now, it won’t take long.”
“Go then.” She looked at him sharply. “We cannot stay together.”
“Why not?”
“It would not be safe for you. You are right. This was not Roias’s scheme. Someone else has planned all this. They know of my existence but you . . . no doubt they believe you died a true death in the asylum. They will not be looking for you.”
“If they’re still after you, then that’s all the more reason we should stay together. You don’t know this city any more. You don’t even know this century.” The words came out more cruelly than she had intended, sharpened by her fear.
“I shall manage,” he replied drily. “I have some years’ experience with these things, if you recall.”
“What about me?”
“You shall manage as well. Only be careful. Do not go home; do not go any place where people might recognize you. No one must know that you still live.”
“What if I won’t go? You can’t stop me from following you,” she pointed out.
“But I can. You are very young, and you are my blood. I can force you—and I will, if I must.” His voice was hard and the grey eyes cold and remote. “We are solitary creatures. It does not do for us to forget that.”
“So now that you’ve got what you wanted, you remember that again,” Ardeth said bitterly.
“It was your choice. And I made you no promises.”
“No.” There was a moment of silence, as if he waited for her to say more. She clenched her teeth to keep the words inside her. At last, he turned away and began to walk towards the trees.
“Damn him,” she whispered. “Damn, damn, damn.” He had known all along he would leave her. You’ll see, you’ll see it’s not as easy as you think. You’ll wish I was there. She wondered if he could hear the venomous thoughts but the retreating figure did not stop. You’ll be sorry you left me.
She suddenly remembered the stolen money in her pocket. For a moment, she contemplated keeping it all, taking a bitter pleasure in imagining Rozokov fumbling through the labyrinth of the modern world with no resources at all. Then she remembered the cold, unforgiving dungeon, the colder, unforgiving future she’d seen there, and the pleasure melted into pain.
“Wait,” she called softly and ran towards him. He paused and turned, waiting as she caught up to him. “Roias’s money—take it.” She pushed the bills into his hands and he smoothed them out, staring curiously at the coloured bills with the face of a queen that he did not recognize.
“What about you?” For a moment, she thought she heard regret in his voice.
“I’ll get more.” Rozokov shook his head and carefully counted out five hundred dollars. It was the final severing and she protested, but at last took the bills and stuffed them back into her jacket pocket. He stepped away, passing into the dark edges of the wood. “Dmitri . . .” Her voice slid up from a whisper into a cry and caught in her throat.
Nothing is forever, something whispered in her mind, so softly she was not sure whether it was her thought or his. Not even for vampires.
“This will not be forever,” she said to the darkness. “You’ll see.”