The next night, Roias was too preoccupied to play out his tormenting games. He and Wilkens arrived later than usual and did not bother to unlock her cell.
“Get over there, bitch. You know the routine,” Roias snapped. Ardeth stood up slowly, glancing from the men by the door to the silent vampire. When Roias put his hand on the door of her cell, she moved to crouch by the cell bars. Rozokov stalked over and stood waiting, until she put her arm through. He drank from her inner elbow. Ardeth turned her face away from Roias, pressing it against the cold bars, and closed her eyes. The act had a terrible impersonality about it, as if she were no more than a vessel containing blood, a glass to be drained dry. She would have preferred even the unsettling pleasure of the previous night to this silent, dreadful feeling.
Roias stopped it far sooner than usual, without a word. The cattle prod caught Rozokov on the side of the head, sent him snarling back from the bars. Roias laughed and jabbed at him again, driving him back to the far side of the cell, where he stood beyond the prod’s range, watching Roias with burning eyes.
Ardeth sat back from the bars, cradling her arm against her. She kept her head down. “Jesus!” Roias swore, in anger or disgust, and she heard the rattle as he tossed the cattle prod to the far side of the room. She waited for the door upstairs to close before she lifted her head.
Rozokov had risen and was staring up at the door, body tight and terribly still. Ardeth reached out to the bars to pull herself up again and he looked at her. She almost jerked her hand away when she saw the hatred in his eyes. “Are you all right?” she ventured carefully.
“Do not ask me that!” Rozokov snapped. “I am not ‘all right.’ I cannot be ‘all right’ here.” His voice was icy with contempt.
“Who can?” she asked, her own voice rising as anger overwhelmed her fear of him and threatened to swamp the calm rationality with which she maintained the fragile bridge she had built between them. “Do you suppose I am all right? You should know the answer to that best of all.”
“I cannot help what I am, what I need to survive. I have not lived for four hundred years to let them starve me to death down here.” There was no apology in his tone.
“I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that I want to survive too. They’re not going to starve you to death. If you get too hungry, they’ll just give you another junkie to kill for the camera,” she said bitterly. “What do you suppose they mean to do with me, eh? What are they going to do with me?”
She was crying before she knew it, shattered by the sudden onslaught of all the pain and fear she had kept so carefully controlled over the last days, distracting it with her hopeless flirtation with the thing that would destroy her. Ardeth bent her head against the bars and let the sobs shudder through her. It seemed so much easier to surrender than to go on fighting against the darkness that was all around her.
When his hand brushed her hair, she was too tired to move away, though she knew she should. He could kill you, the voice inside her warned. Let him, she thought and for the moment that seemed the best way out.
The hand settled on her head, and gently smoothed her hair. “Child.” The word was a whisper. “I am sorry. I am selfish—it is my nature—but I am sorry. You have been kind, far kinder than I deserve.”
“I’m not kind,” Ardeth muttered, though she didn’t raise her head. He did not stop stroking her hair.
“I know. You think that you are clever, that you are making an ally of me against them.” Her head moved beneath his hand, the only sign of her surprise. “I would have done the same, had I been sane enough. Now I am . . . almost returned to myself. But I am afraid I am a poor ally. They have kept me too weak to do anything against them.”
For a moment, she wondered if it was all a lie, his remorse, his gentleness, all to persuade her to yield up what he truly wanted. But she didn’t care; hollow or not, his sorrow moved her, and his touch was the only thing of warmth in the coldness of her prison. “You need more.” It was not a question, but she lifted her head to catch his nod. “You could take it. I couldn’t stop you.”
“I could. There might be a time when I would. But now . . .” He paused, watching her, his hand still on her hair, inches from her cheek.
“All right.” She let go of the bars and put her right arm through. Rozokov took her hand, uncurled her fingers gently. He bent his head and kissed her palm. The sudden, unexpected sensuality of it took her breath away. She felt her fingers curl again, to brush one high cheekbone and touch the loose strands of grey silk hair that obscured his face.
“What is it like?” Ardeth asked breathlessly, struggling to be detached, analytical. To be safe.
“It is like food,” he said, pausing to glance up at her, “or love. Some meals are sustenance, some feasts of delight.” He leaned over to put his lips against her wrist, to run his tongue along her vein. “Some acts of love are mere biology, some a sacrament.” She felt his breath against her skin as he spoke.
“What is this?”
“Whatever you want it to be,” he replied before his mouth fastened on the soft inner curve of her arm. Ardeth closed her eyes at the irony in his answer. I don’t want it to be so good, she thought in despair. But it is, oh God, it is.
Ardeth woke up on her cot, with no memory of how she got there. She turned over groggily and opened her eyes. The dim light above her seemed to be glowing through a dense fog and she struggled to blink the haziness from her mind.
What had happened? she wondered. There had been those moments of terrible pleasure while Rozokov drank her blood (even now, the memory left her with a queasy sense of excitement deep inside), then his voice urging her to sleep. She must have crawled back to her cot, though her memory of it was uncertain.
She closed her eyes again, drifting in the lassitude that cocooned her. Everything seemed very far away; the harsh chill of her prison, her life outside, her friends, her thesis. They all seemed light years in the past, fading quickly down the tunnel through which she moved towards the future. There was no light there, at the end.
After a while, she sat up, brushing her hair out of her eyes, and looked into the next cell. Rozokov was on his cot, leaning back against the wall, one leg up, elbow propped on knee. For the first time, the remote stiffness was gone; he looked lazily graceful. When he glanced over at her, she saw that the lines in his face had smoothed out.
“How long have I been asleep?” Ardeth asked, then wondered why she supposed that he would be able to tell time down here any better than she.
“A few hours. How do you feel?”
“I’ve felt better,” she admitted with a shaky laugh. She shifted into a more comfortable position, trying not to notice how the simple movement made her head spin. When she looked up, he was still watching her. She could sense the words of gratitude waiting on his lips. Don’t say it, she thought suddenly. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to remember what it was like.
“So,” she began awkwardly, to deflect him, then shivered in the silence as her train of thought failed and left her with nothing to fill the gap. She caught a question and flung it out, to distract him. “How did you become a vampire? I assume you weren’t born that way.”
“That would have been a grave shock to my mother,” Rozokov agreed seriously, rising to wander over to the bars. He leaned against them and looked past her into the darkness. “No, I was, as I recall, a perfectly ordinary child. I was born in 1459, in what you now call Russia. I went to Germany to study and stayed there, in the hills where I could pursue my work. In truth, I was more a dabbler than a scholar. Astronomy, philosophy, medicine. I tried out each of them.” He laughed softly, but it was not a sound of joy. “We were so innocent then, so eager to believe that all the world lay before our hungry minds. I also dabbled, sometimes, in necromancy, but no great success. Then one night I called and something came. She knocked on my door and stood on the snow like a shadow, and when she came in it was as if a sliver of night had entered, the same way the sun would come through the high windows in the Great Hall.” His eyes were far away, mist over the ice. “I did not know what she was until she smiled, but then it was too late. I woke with the next dusk and for two nights we ran the hills like wolves. Then I told the parish priest where her coffin lay. He drove a stake through her heart and cut off her head, then filled her mouth with garlic.”
“Why did you do that?” His shrug was eloquently, elegantly cynical.
“I tired of her. And . . .” he paused, “there was still enough human in me to hate what she had done. Or perhaps it was the first inhuman act I was to commit.” Bitterness edged the calm voice, the shadows of a darker and, she guessed, more recent sorrow.
“What did you do then?”
“I fled. There was a whole world waiting for me, at least at night, and I fled into it. That was the first law of my new state—keep moving or die. I dared not stay in one place long enough for them to realize I did not age. Of course, I gradually learned the lies to tell, the shells within shells of reality to create, so that I could be myself, then my cousin, then my nephew and on down the years. There are places, I suppose, that are still empty and waiting for a Rozokov to return. Though, from what you have told me of the world, I may not recognize them anymore.”
“They might not recognize you. Things are much more—organized—these days. You need a Social Insurance Number and three kinds of identification to open a bank account. You need a passport to travel. Almost everything you do nowadays leaves a paper trail—or a computer trail. Which will be very convenient for historians two hundred years from now, but I imagine it would make things rather difficult for vampires.”
He hesitated for a moment, and she wondered if she had lost him in the flurry of unfamiliar words and concepts. But if he had questions, he didn’t ask them. He just said, “It does seem so. I suspect that now, more than ever, existence would be much easier if all the myths about my state were true.”
“Yes. I noticed you hadn’t turned into a bat and flown away yet.”
“I cannot transform myself into mist either, more’s the pity. Still, I suppose I should be grateful I do not require a coffin to sleep in. They had one here, put in here with me. When I ignored it, they took it away again.”
Ardeth laughed. “It’s probably a prop. For the movies.” That thought started the terrifying flicker of the snuff movie rolling in her head again, and she forced it from her mind. “Is any of it true? The stories about sunlight, and garlic and crosses?”
“As with most myths, there is a small nugget of truth in the dross of invention. The sunlight will not melt me with a single ray, but I prefer not to move about in it. Garlic is unpleasant, but hardly a deterrent. As for crosses, I am no demon, else on so far below God’s notice that he does not bother with me. I have prayed in the Cathedral of Notre Dame and walked through the Vatican without harm. A stake through the heart would probably kill me, as would fire, or beheading, but under normal circumstances, I am much stronger and more agile than a mortal man.”
“Under normal circumstances,” Ardeth began hesitantly, weighing how much she wanted an answer to her next question. But curiosity won out and she continued. “How often do you have to . . .?”
“How often must I feed? After my long sleep, I needed nourishment desperately. That is why they have been able to use that need against me. Normally, I need sustenance once or twice a week. It can be less, but then,” he paused for a moment as if searching for a word, “I must do lasting harm. And that would leave a trail of corpses like breadcrumbs behind me.” Ardeth tried not to laugh at the image, but failed.
“I did wonder about that,” she confessed.
“When I first changed, the hunger was as it is now. If I had not been very lucky, I would probably have been caught and destroyed. That is no doubt the root of the stories that are so prevalent in my old lands. A newly made vampire abandons all caution in the search for blood, often returning to his own family in blind need. Most were caught and given a true death soon after they awoke.
“Are there many vampires?”
“Not to my knowledge. I have only known two—she who created me and . . . one other. But there may be more.”
“Can you make someone a vampire? Or does it happen automatically?”
“It is a conscious thing. A choice, at least on my part. I have never done it.”
“Why not?”
“It is not something to do lightly. Every new vampire would increase my own danger of exposure and I would prefer not to perish for another’s carelessness. And those I met who did long for my state were hardly the type of person with whom I cared to share eternity. The truth is, we are a solitary lot. It does not do for us to forget that.” She heard irony in his tone and the bitter pain gliding, sharklike, beneath it. Ardeth felt the sudden pang of sympathetic sorrow, wondering for the first time what it was like to have almost a century pass in a moment’s rest, to face a life that could go on forever, if only under the pale light of the moon. But to live it always alone. She had always thought of herself as a solitary person, who enjoyed the quiet of the library, the peace of her own apartment. But there had been friends, and Sara, and the expectation of love someday.
“How did you end up in Toronto? Was it just next on the map?” she asked, to keep away both their sorrows.
“I suppose so. I had never been to North America . . . a month-long sea voyage was not something to be contemplated lightly. But Europe had grown . . . hard for me to bear . . . and I needed to put it far behind me.”
“I imagine Toronto must have seemed very provincial to you.”
“Oh yes. But I needed its routine, its simplicity. It was very easy to survive here. It was a good place for careful men—it bred them, rewarded them. So it and I suited well.”
“Toronto the Good. We still call it that, with a kind of embarrassed pride, I think. All our politicians wish we were New York, but without the crime and the garbage,” Ardeth said and caught the edge of his half-smile.
“New York. I have never been there. I remember when the Dutch bought it from the Indians however.” The reality of his age hit her, the fact that all the things she had read of and studied he had touched and felt, that the worlds she had so carefully reconstructed for essays and exams had been the ones in which he lived and breathed.
“Tell me,” she said suddenly, as eagerly, as desperately, as he had once commanded her. Rozokov glanced at her curiously. “Tell me what the world was like, what you’ve seen. God, do you realize that half the historians in the world would kill for a chance to talk to you.” She stopped suddenly, her stomach dropping sickeningly as she realized what she had said. Would they die for it? Would you? a voice asked mockingly in her mind. Will you?
“Ardeth . . .” Rozokov’s voice caught her, dragged her back to look at him. “Eyewitness accounts from vampires do not hold much academic weight, I am afraid. I have received more than one lecture from a learned professor for presuming to question his version of the truth.”
“It doesn’t matter. I just want to know,” she said, the sudden terror over. I do want to know, she told herself fiercely, to escape the suspicion that she clung to the irrational belief that their recited histories could somehow hold back the future, like Scheherazade holding back the executioner’s axe.
Deliberately, she drowned herself in his stories of the places he’d been—Europe, the East, Africa. He was an eloquent storyteller, patiently accommodating her interruptions of “but that isn’t what . . .” and “are you sure?” There were things he would not discuss, times and places dismissed in a manner that told her nothing except that those memories must hurt him. He had had his share of narrow escapes, such as the time he had been inadvertently stranded in the Spain of the Inquisition, and his share of pleasures, like hearing Bach’s Mass in B Minor for the first time ever.
“Was it easier being a vampire in the sixteenth century or the Victorian age?” Ardeth asked curiously.
“All ages have their own dangers. The world was larger, more unknown, in my youth, but it believed in my kind. In the 1800s, the world was far more organized, but the belief in rational science was so strong that I would surely have had to turn myself into a bat in order to convince anyone that I was not merely some lunatic who believed he was a vampire. Of course,” he mused, with a faint smile, “there was a brief, difficult period when vampires seemed all the rage in penny dreadfuls and the like. That infernal book by that Irish author was the worst of them all.”
“You mean Dracula?”
“Exactly. Suddenly to be Eastern European and of noble birth was enough to make you the object of considerable suspicion, or, at least, considerable interest.”
“That’s still very popular. I read it for Victorian fiction class. The professor explained that vampirism was a metaphor,” Ardeth said, with a sudden, giddy smile.
“A metaphor,” Rozokov echoed with quiet amusement.
“For . . . oh yeah, ‘dangerous unfettered sexuality,’” she explained, then regretted it, for it called up the image of his head bent over her outstretched arm, the memory of his mouth on her palm.
“Ah.” There was a long pause. “Then it seems I should be right at home in this new age. From your description, it seems to be rather more liberal than the last time in which I lived.”
“Well, it was, I suppose. AIDS has changed a lot of that.” At his curious glance, she continued. “It’s a disease that’s transmitted by bodily fluids, usually through sex, or by sharing needles for drugs. It’s fatal.”
“I am immune to most diseases now, however I shall keep that in mind,” Rozokov said seriously and Ardeth eyed him for a moment, certain that he was teasing her in some manner, though his face remained solemn. She started to yawn, then tried to catch and cover it. “You should sleep,” he said.
She thought of protesting that she was not tired, then yawned again and abandoned that idea. It was easier to just lie back down and close her eyes, to surrender to the bone-deep weariness that claimed her. The darkness was warm and gentle, enfolding her so softly she barely noticed when it wiped all thought from her mind.