The room was dark, illuminated only by a circle of light from the spidery black lamp on the desk and the fait grey gleam of the monitor screens banked behind it. Ardeth’s eyes flickered around the room, seeking threat and shelter in the same moment.
Heavy wooden bookcases lined the walls beside her, leatherbound texts mingling with garish paperbacks. The right wall was swathed in heavy velvet curtains, keeping the waning moonlight at bay. In the left wall there was another door, neatly closed.
Behind the desk, a shadowed figure looked up. Ardeth saw a flash of movement and darted forward instinctively. Her hand closed on a wrist so thin her fingers wrapped it easily, stalling it on its path to the phone. “No,” she said softly and looked down into the white, upturned face.
It was almost a skull, sharp cheekbones and hook nose slicing through skin as dry as chalk. Her eyes were sunken, the skin around them bruised. Her hair, caught in a thick braid of mahogany, was threaded with grey. But she was younger than the death’s-head face suggested, Ardeth decided, no more than forty. She was wearing a man’s dressing gown, faded from scarlet velvet into patchy rose.
Then Rozokov was beside them, his hand on the woman’s shoulder as he pulled the chair away from whatever other weapons she might have concealed in the desk. “You are Althea Dale, I assume.”
“Yes.”
“You know who I am.”
“Yes. I thought you might try to come here.”
“And you let me?” Rozokov’s voice sounded skeptical and amused.
“The guards are watching the doors downstairs. I thought that would be enough. How did you get in?”
“Through the attic.” Althea’s eyes closed for a moment.
“I never should have trusted Rooke with that,” she said after a moment.
“But it is better that we talk, you and I. Without Rooke, without outsiders.” Her gaze moved across them, dismissing Sara and Mickey where they stood against the closed door, lingering for a moment on Ardeth before returning to Rozokov, apparently satisfied.
He settled back against the desk and Ardeth moved to lean against the bank of monitors. She spared a glance at them as she did so; two showed the empty hallway corridor outside the laboratory and the other two revealed only static and snow.
“How did you find out about me?” Rozokov asked at last.
“Great-great-grandfather’s diaries. They were in the attic with all his other books. He gave me everything but your name.” The answer was prompt, edged with confidence and triumph. She wants to tell us, Ardeth realized. She’s proud of it . . . she wants us to know what she has done.
And I do know. I know she killed Tony and Conrad and me. I know she would kill anyone who stood between her and whatever she wanted. The rage ripped through her again, jagged daggers turning in her heart, and she jerked away from the proud head balanced so precariously on the long, fragile neck. She had to move away, stay where she could control the murderous urge that swept her, so she walked to stand behind the old love-seat on the other side of the room, and looked at the bookcases.
Her eyes slid over the assembled library, catching titles in faded gold on brittle leather—Malleus Maleficarum, The Vampire Myth and History, Dracula—and garish paperbacks in red and black. All of them were on vampires and the occult. She pulled one out at random and flicked it open; Latin words crawled across the page.
“And Havendale?” she heard Rozokov prompt gently, inquisitively, giving her the chance to fill his silence with a celebration of her own cleverness.
“When daddy died,” she said, her voice bitterly amused, as though she were laughing at some secret joke, “it became mine. I do a better job of running it than he ever did.”
A set of narrow booklets on the bottom shelf caught Ardeth’s eye and she bent to look more closely. They were exercise books, she realized, the pale buff ones given to every public-school student. Curious, she took the first one out carefully and flipped it open.
The childish scrawl covered the pages, intense and dark, pressed deep into the page in places, legible to her nightsight even in the dim light. She paused to read occasionally, caught by a word or a date.
September 5, 1962
Mother took me to tea in the big store today. It was supposed to be a special treat for my eighth birthday but Daddy was mad when he found out and made me take two extra baths.
October 15, 1963
Mother caught me in the attic playing with great-great-grandfather Dale’s trunks. She scolded me (as usual) and told me to get downstairs. I suppose I’ll have to stay out of them for now but I don’t know why they care. It will all belong to me someday anyway. And lots of the books are in a funny language—so all I can do is look at the pictures. I like the one of the man with the horns and the sharp teeth best, though it scares me a bit, when it’s dark.
April 14, 1964
I can hardly write, my hands shake so much. But I have to. Mother died today. She got hit by a car when she was shopping. Everyone is crying (me too, you can see the tears on the page if you look). Even Daddy. But then he got angry and yelled about how she shouldn’t have gone out and that’s what happens when you go out there. Then Nurse came and made me come up here. . . .
April 17, 1964
They buried Mother today. Daddy’s right. I don’t want to go out there any more.
“So you made Havendale search for me?”
“Of course.” Her voice held a trace of contempt.
“How did you know I was still in the city?”
“I didn’t. But everything I knew about you dated from 1898, so that’s where I had to start.”
“And when you found me, you had Rooke kill the men who did it and the researchers who had done the work for you.”
“I told Rooke to eliminate the loose ends. That was his job. What you are was too important to risk.” There was calm certainty in the cool voice and Ardeth clenched her teeth, forced herself to crouch by the bookcase and endure the casual dismissal of her life, her self as a “loose end.” To distract herself, she snatched out another exercise book, staring resolutely at the pages. The writing was adult now, a smooth, practiced script.
Dec. 24/83
Daddy spent tonight in his room. I was very angry at him and yelled at him for missing Christmas Eve. He just laughed and said he wasn’t feeling well. He thinks I don’t see. He thinks I don’t know about the cars that come at midnight and the women in them. He thinks I don’t know what dirty things he does with them, the filthy games he plays. There are times I’d like to kill him.
May 15/84
Daddy has finally agreed to stop bringing the women to the house. We’ve fought about it for weeks but then, when he got sick last week, he finally realized that they’re bad for him, that they bring in all kinds of germs and filth and danger.
Things are going to be good again.
For the first time, Ardeth felt sympathy for the woman, trapped in the strange household her diary described.
June 3/84
Daddy’s in a foul mood. He’s drinking, yelling for Carl to get him some girls. Carl won’t, because I’ve told him I’ll tell Daddy about his advances to me if he does. Must go calm Daddy down. . . .
There was a brief break in pages and Ardeth flipped through the blank sheets to find the next entry.
“And what was I?” she heard Rozokov say behind her.
“Immortality,” Althea said quietly. There was a long silence.
“Mickey, Sara, go out and keep watching the hallway.” His voice was quietly implacable and Ardeth glanced over to see her sister and Mickey protest. “There are still two guards out there, as well as whatever servants this household has. Go out and keep watch.”
She heard the door open and shut, then her attention was dragged back to the words in front of her.
I just read my last words. Calm Daddy down. And I did. He was angry, banging with his cane on the wall as he rampaged about the library. I told Carl and the others to go back to their quarters.
The writing grew fainter, as if its author was afraid to press too hard and make her story visible, make it real.
I didn’t have any choice. He might have gone out! He might have ruined everything. He said he would do it since I had taken his women away and given him nothing in return. So I had to do it. It was just as disgusting as I thought it would be but it seemed to calm him down.
Maybe he will forget all about it. Maybe I will. I pray I do.
June 5/84
Daddy called me into the library tonight. He said that I’m a poor substitute for his whores but if I don’t want to go out I’ll have to do.
I can’t let him go out. He’ll die like Mother did. The whores have already made him sick. As long as he stays inside, I can make sure that everything is under control. I can make sure everything is right. I can make sure he does what he’s supposed to do.
He said he’d have to teach me what to do, starting tonight.
I still hurt and there are bruises I’ll have to hide from the servants. But I won’t let him go out. I won’t let him get away. I won’t.
Ardeth closed her eyes, fought the unexpected invasion of tears. This woman killed you, killed your friends, would have killed Sara. She left Rozokov to be tortured by Roias, she let—she ordered—Rooke and Roias to hurt people in the name of profit. What is on these pages doesn’t make any difference to that.
“Do you want to live forever?” The question was quiet, doubting.
“Of course. Everyone does. And they’d pay for it. They’d give their souls for it.” Althea Dale’s voice was fierce and defiant.
“But it is not the world’s soul you want to ransom, though I can see you’d take every coin the world had to offer and it would not be enough. It is your own, is it not? You are dying.”
Ardeth turned and saw Althea Dale’s burning eyes widen in pain, saw her pull back helplessly, trying to get away as the truth in his words broke through her composure. “I won’t! I won’t die. Your blood can cure me. With your blood, I won’t die.” The words came out in a harsh rush, a snarled mantra of irrational belief.
With your blood . . . the words echoed in Ardeth’s mind and then she knew what Althea Dale was dying of, what had killed Arthur Dale. His daughter had been more right than she ever knew, when she blamed the prostitutes her father had brought into the house in the middle years of the 1980s. Against the odds, the unknown virus had passed into him. Against the odds, he had given it like a legacy to his daughter/lover.
With that realization came an understanding of what the laboratory had been set up to do. If there was something in their blood that could cure her disease, she could make the world pay twice—billions for the answer to the AIDS crisis, billions more for the secret of immortality. Though no doubt, she’d reserve the second secret only for the highest bidders. For something like that, killing a few whores and graduate students would seem like a small price to pay. At least to men like Roias and Rooke.
“So I should save you then. Let you drink my blood?”
“Yes, if that’s the way it works. Don’t you see, I can give you everything you need. A safe place to stay, all the blood you need, whenever you want it. Whatever price you have, whatever you want, I’ll pay it, I’ll do it.” She had regained control of herself, finding strength in the mechanics of bargaining and the certainty that everything could be bought.
“You would, I do believe. If you cannot have me by force, you would do it by money. If I asked you for a dungeon full of victims, if I asked you for skulls to drink my pleasure from, you would give it to me, yes?”
Before she could answer, the door opened and Mickey leaned in. “I hate to interrupt but I think the other end of the house is burning,” he said, his voice surprisingly calm. “Probably the computers in the lab.”
“It can’t be the laboratory,” Althea replied. “The halon gas system would kill any fire.” Along with any scientists still trapped there, Ardeth thought. Althea turned her head to look at the static-smeared screen and suddenly laughed bitterly. “Rooke. The stupid bastard put in sprinklers.”
“You and Sara leave if you think it necessary. We will not be long.” Mickey shrugged and vanished. This time, he left the door open. Ardeth put her hands on the back of the loveseat and felt them tighten on the wood as she tried not to imagine how fast the fire could be spreading. Rozokov moved to crouch beside Althea’s chair, looking up into her face.
“You have not answered my question.”
“I’ll give whatever you want, whatever you ask,” Althea agreed, her body hunching forward, eager, hungry. She had forgotten about the fire already, Ardeth suspected. She saw Rozokov’s hand go out and touch one chalky cheek.
“Poor mad one, you truly believe that might buy me.”
“But . . .”
“Should I let you live forever, so that you can gain more wealth, more power and grind more lives under the wheels of your progress? Should I sacrifice another Ardeth to your fear of dying?”
“What are you talking about? You’re a vampire. You prey on people, you feed off them. You preyed on her.” The dark head gestured savagely, the fevered eyes met Ardeth’s with hot envy. “You made her like you. Why not me? I can give you everything.”
“That is what you do not understand. I do not want everything. I want only peace from your pursuit. Can you give me that?”
“If you made me like you, yes, yes, I would leave you alone.”
“Would you? With the secret that we held, could you risk it? With the ransom of the world to be ripped from our blood, without a drop of yours being spilled, would you let us go? Have you done a single thing in the last months to make me believe that?” After a long moment, Althea shook her head. “You do not need my help to be a monster, Althea Dale. You have been that all along. And now you know what I must do.”
“But . . .”
“Shh. You knew the stakes in this game when you started it. But do not fear, I will be quick. That is more than you gave the women who died for Roias’s films, more than you gave Ardeth when you made her a tool to be used and destroyed. But I will give it to you nonetheless.” His voice was still gentle and reasonable but the will behind it was inflexible. He rose and walked around behind her.
Ardeth opened her mouth to tell him what she had discovered about Althea’s past and the things that had reduced her reality to herself and her own desire, turning the rest of humanity into unreal objects that either did her will or were destroyed without a single thought. Then she saw his eyes, and the pain burning through them like fire through parchment, and she closed her mouth.
No matter what she said, he had to kill Althea Dale. There was no point in making it harder for him.
I wanted this, she thought. I imagined this in gleeful detail a hundred times. I almost broke her neck myself five minutes ago. I should be ecstatic, triumphant. But all I feel is empty.
Rozokov’s hands settled on Althea’s hair, shifted gently around her skull. The woman’s eyes were wide and frightened but she did not move. “Do not fear,” Ardeth saw his body go suddenly still, his shoulders tense, “it will be over . . .” His arms moved, snapped hard to the left, “in a moment.”
When he let her go, her head dropped forward. His own dropped in echo, shoulders slumping.
When Ardeth put her hand on his arm, he turned and pulled her close, face against her throat. For the first time, she felt the truth that he had tried to tell her all along, that every death they caused, no matter how necessary, was murder and whatever curse or mutation made them different from the rest of humanity did not absolve them of it, any more than Althea Dale’s tragic life absolved her of guilt.
She thought of Rick and the boy in the sewer and Philip and wanted to weep, to scream, to flee back into the glorious, insulating madness that had sustained her. Her old anger at Rozokov rose, anger that he had left her to commit those crimes, even irrational fury at his seduction of her in the asylum.
She pulled from his arms, trembling, and said, “We’d better go.” Her voice sounded harsh and hateful but he only nodded.
Mickey and Sara were waiting at the top of the stairs, pacing edgily. For the first time, Ardeth could smell smoke and in the distance she thought she could hear the faint wail of sirens.
There were no guards at the door and they left unnoticed. When they reached the woods, the laboratory side of the house was being eaten by flames. Rozokov stared up at them for a moment, face drawn and empty, then Ardeth caught his arm and pulled him away into the dark of the forest.
He guided them to the edge of the estate, near the place where he and Mickey had climbed over the wall eighteen hours earlier. Ardeth followed him silently, grateful that the mechanics of winding her way through the darkness, Sara and Mickey strung behind her with hands linked like blind children, required her full attention. She did not want to think about the rage and guilt twisting inside her, waiting impatiently to explode.
But when they reached the fence, she caught Rozokov’s arm. He studied her face for a moment, then glanced at Mickey. “Wait for us at the van.” Ardeth didn’t watch as they went over the wall.
“Ardeth . . .”
“We’re free. No more Havendale. We can start again.” There was a plea in her voice she couldn’t hide, couldn’t articulate. “This is the new world. No Havendale, no ending like in Paris. No rules.” She wanted him to agree, to repudiate the weary pain she’d seen in his eyes, to give her back the sweetness of the night and the hunt.
“There are always rules, child. Althea Dale lived by the ones that her father taught her. Jean-Pierre lived by the rules of his day, that said all things were allowed to the powerful and the wealthy and the beautiful. And you, my dark daughter, what rules did you follow in re-creating yourself?” The criticism in his voice stung, despite his gentle tone, and she stepped away from him.
“You left me. How was I supposed to know what to do? How was I supposed to know how to be a vampire? I did the best I could.”
“I know. And you are everything a vampire is supposed to be—you are beautiful, seductive, deadly. Were I mortal, I would fall at your feet and let you drink me dry.”
“Don’t laugh at me!” Her heart was torn by the thought that he found her laughable, that he mocked her for trying to pretend she could be any of the things he had said. She was at the wall when he caught her.
“I do not laugh at you, oh love, believe me. You are right in all your accusations. I drained your life from you and left you alone to survive the most dangerous months of our kind’s existence. You have done so magnificently. But I wonder, when you look in the mirror, what do you see?”
“I see what I am.” She couldn’t look at him, remembering her moments of pain in the church tower a night ago, Sara’s horrified expression, her own fear of losing the armour of her new self.
“You see a vampire. Only a vampire. Ardeth, do you love me?” The suddenness of the question took her breath away, shocked her eyes back up to his.
“Yes.”
“Do you love my teeth, my dead flesh, my red eyes, my hunger for blood?”
“No . . . yes . . . I don’t know what you mean. Those things are part of you.”
“Part of me, yes. Not all of me. I have struggled for five centuries to keep that true.” He took her face in his hands. “In Paris I was a vampire. I drowned in it, in all it meant to me. Jean-Pierre, for all his charm, had never been anything but a vampire, even when he was alive. In Toronto, a century ago, I was just a vampire, too fearful to let myself hope to be anything else. In the asylum I was a vampire. They forced me to be that . . . and only that. Until you. And now . . . now I am going to try very hard to be Dimitri Rozokov again. Who loved Bach and hates Liszt, who wonders what made the stars, who misses the sun and vodka, who needs blood only the way other men need food. That is what I want you to learn to love. That is what I want you to be.”
“It’s not easy.”
“No. It is the hardest thing we can do. But if we do not try, what has immortality made us but undying beasts in an eternal jungle? What then is the difference between Althea Dale and us?”
“What I’ve done . . .” she began, her voice shaking, thinking again of the dead she had left in gutters and sewers and broken on decaying floors.
“Is done. Just as the women I killed in the asylum. Our guilt will not bring them back, nor will our grief. All we can do is go on and try to find some way to survive that does not drive us mad.”
She sighed and rested her forehead against his, his hands in her hair. Ardeth drew a long breath. “Maybe . . . it was hard to be . . . so vampiric . . . all the time. But I thought I had to. I thought I wanted to.” She was surprised to find herself chuckling softly. She put her hands in his hair, and tilted her head to look at him. “You won’t leave me.”
“No promises. But I won’t leave you now.” Then he kissed her and something inside her cracked open, just as it had the last night in the asylum. At last, he pulled away. “We had better go.”
Ardeth smiled and followed him over the wall.
When they came around the side of the van, they found Sara and Mickey sitting between the open doors, untangling themselves from an embrace. Ardeth met her sister’s eyes and smiled, wanting to laugh at the guilty look on Sara’s face. Go on, little sister, you deserve him—you deserve a man who would brave vampires and killers and nightmares for your sake.
“All done?” Mickey asked.
“Yes,” Rozokov replied, and for the moment, Ardeth was content to believe him.