Teeth: Vampire Tales

By then of course I too was frightened. I was crying, and I think I wet myself, though I hadn’t done anything like that since babyhood.

Then the passage turned, and there was a tall iron gate — I know it’s iron, now. At the time it only looked like a burned-out coal.

“Oh, God,” said my mother.

But she thrust out one hand and pushed at the gate, and it grudged open with a rusty scraping, just wide enough to let us through.

I would have seen the vast garden outside the house, played there. But this wasn’t the garden. It was a high place, held in only by a low stone wall and a curving break of poplar trees. They looked very black, not green the way the house lamps made trees in the garden. Something was happening to the sky; that was what made the poplars so black. I thought it was moonrise, but I knew the moon was quite new, and only a full moon could dilute the darkness so much. The stars were watery and blue, weak, like dying gas flames.

My mother stood there, just outside the iron gate, holding me, shaking. “It’s all right. just a minute. only one. ”

Suddenly something happened.

It was like a storm — a lightning flash maybe, but in slow motion, that swelled up out of the dark. It was pale, then silver, and then like gold. It was like a high trumpet note, or the opening chords of some great concerto.

I sat bolt upright in my mother’s arms, even as she shook ever more violently. I think her teeth were chattering.

But I could only open my eyes wide. Even my mouth opened, as if to drink the sudden light.

It was the color of a golden flower and it seemed to boil, and enormous clouds poured slowly upward out of it, brass and wine and rose. And a huge noise came from everywhere, rustling and rushing — and weird flutings and squeakings and trills — birdsong — only I didn’t recognize it.

My mother now hoarsely wept. I don’t know how she never dropped me.

Next they came out and drew us in again, and Tyfa scooped me quickly away as my mother collapsed on the ground. So I was frightened again, and screamed.

They closed the gate and shut us back in darkness. The one minute was over. But I had seen a dawn.

PART TWO

Fourteen and a half years later, and I stood on the drive, looking at the big black limousine. Marten was loading my bags into the boot. Musette and Kousu were crying quietly. One or two others lingered about; nobody seemed to grasp what exactly was the correct way to behave. My mother hadn’t yet come out of the house.

By that evening my father was dead over a decade — he had died when I was six, my mother a hundred and seventy. They had lived together a century anyway, were already tired of each other, and had taken other lovers from our community. But that made his death worse, apparently. Ever since, every seventh evening, she would go into the little shrine she had made to him, cut one of her fingers, and let go a drop of blood in the vase below his photograph. Her name is Juno, my mother, after a Roman goddess, and I’d called her by her name since I was an adult.

“She should be here,” snapped Tyfa, irritated. He too was Juno’s occasional lover, but generally he seemed exasperated by her. “Locked in that damn room,” he added sourly. He meant the shrine.

I said nothing, and Tyfa stalked off along the terrace and started pacing about, a tall, strong man of around two hundred or so, no one was sure — dark haired as most of us were at Severin. His skin had a light brownness from a long summer of sun exposure. He had always been able to take the sun, often for several hours in one day. I too have black hair, and my skin, even in winter, is pale brown. I can endure daylight all day long, day after day. I can live by day.

Marten had closed the boot. Casperon had gotten into the driver’s seat, leaving the car door open, and was trying the engine. Its loud purring would no doubt penetrate the house’s upper story, and the end rooms that comprised Juno’s apartment.

Abruptly she came sweeping out from the house.

Juno has dark red hair. Her skin is white. Her slanting eyes are the dark bleak blue of a northern sea, seen in a foreign movie with subtitles. When I was a child I adored her. She was my goddess. I’d have died for her, but that stopped. It stopped forever.

She walked straight past the others, as if no one else were there. She stood in front of me. She was still an inch or so taller than I, though I’m tall.

“Well,” she said. She stared into my face, hers cold as marble, and all of her stone still — this, the woman who trembled and clutched me to her, whispering that all would be well, when I was three years old.

“Yes, Juno,” I said.

“Do you have everything you need?” she asked me indifferently, forced to be polite to some visitor now finally about to leave.

“Yes, thank you. Kousu helped me pack.”

“You know you have only to call the house, and anything else can be sent on to you? Of course,” she added offhandedly, “you’ll want for nothing, there.”

I did not reply. What was there to say? I’ve “wanted” for so much here and never gotten it — at least, my mother, from you.

“I wish you very well,” she coldly said, “in your new home. I hope everything will be pleasant. The marriage is important, as you’re aware, and they’ll treat you fairly.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll say good-bye then. At least for a while.”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye, Daisha.” She drew out the ay sound; and foolishly through my mind skipped words that rhymed — fray, say. prey.

I said, “So long, Juno. Good luck making it up with Tyfa. Have a nice life.”

Then I turned my back, crossed the terrace and the drive, and got into the car. I’d signed off with all the others before. They had loaded me with good wishes and sobbed, or tried to cheer me by mentioning images we had seen of my intended husband, and saying how handsome and talented he was, and I must write to them soon, email or call — not lose touch — come back next year — sooner — Probably they’d forget me in a couple of days or nights.

To me, they already seemed miles off.

The cream limousine of the full moon had parked over the estate as we drove away. In its blank blanched rays I could watch, during the hour it took to cross the whole place and reach the outer gates, all the nocturnal industry, in fields and orchards, in vegetable gardens, pens, and horse yards, garages and workshops — a black horse cantering, lamps, and red sparks flying — and people coming out to see us go by, humans saluting the family car, appraising in curiosity, envy, pity, or scorn, the girl driven off to become a Wife of Alliance.

In the distance the low mountains shone blue from the moon. The lake across the busy grasslands was like a gigantic vinyl disk dropped from the sky, an old record the moon had played, and played tonight on the spinning turntable of the Earth. This was the last I saw of my home.

The journey took just on four days.

Sometimes we passed through whitewashed towns, or cities whose tall concrete-and-glass fingers reached to scratch the clouds. Sometimes we were on motorways, wide and streaming with traffic in spate. Or there was open countryside, mountains coming or going, glowing under hard icing-sugar tops. In the afternoons we’d stop, for Casperon to rest, at hotels. About six or seven in the evening we drove on. I slept in the car by night. Or sat staring from the windows.

I was, inevitably, uneasy. I was resentful and bitter and full of a dull and hopeless rage.

I shall get free of it all — I had told myself this endlessly since midsummer, when first I had been informed that, to cement ties of friendship with the Duvalles, I was to marry their new heir. Naturally it was not only friendship that this match entailed. I had sun-born genes. And the Duvalle heir, it seemed, hadn’t. My superior light endurance would be necessary to breed a stronger line. A bad joke, to our kind — they needed my blood. I was bloodstock. I was Daisha Severin, a