Teeth: Vampire Tales

young female life only seventeen years, and able to live daylong in sunlight. I was incredibly valuable. I would be, everyone had said, so welcome. And I was lovely, they said, with my brunette hair and dark eyes, my cinnamon skin. The heir — Zeev Duvalle — was very taken with the photos he had seen of me. And didn’t I think he was fine — cool, Musette had said, “He’s so cool — I wish it could have been me. You’re so lucky, Daisha.”

Zeev was blond, almost snow-blizzard white, though his eyebrows and lashes were dark. His eyes were like some pale, shining metal. His skin was pale, too, if not so colorless as with some of us, or so I’d thought when I watched him in the house movie I’d been sent. My pale-skinned mother had some light tolerance, though far less than my dead father. I had inherited all his strength that way, and more. But Zeev Duvalle had none, or so it seemed. To me he looked like what he was, a man who lived only by night. In appearance he seemed nineteen or twenty, but he wasn’t so much older in actual years. Like me, a new young life. So much in common. So very little.

And by now “I shall get free of it all,” which I’d repeated so often, had become my mantra, and also meaningless. How could I ever get free? Among my own kind I would be an outcast and criminal if I ran away from this marriage, now or ever, without a “valid” reason. While able to pass as human, I could hardly live safely among them. I can eat and drink a little in their way, but I need blood. Without blood I would die.

So, escape the families and their alliance, I would become not only traitor and thief — but a murderer. A human-slaughtering monster humanity doesn’t believe in, or does believe in — something, either way, that, if discovered among them, they will kill.

That other house, my former home on the Severin estate, was long and quite low, two storied, but with high ceilings mostly on the ground floor. Its first architecture, gardens, and farm had been made in the early nineteenth century.

Their mansion — castle — whatever one has to call it — was colossal. Duvalle had built high.

It rose, this pile, like a cliff, with outcrops of slate-capped towers. Courtyards and enclosed gardens encircled it. Beyond and around lay deep pine woods with infiltrations of other trees, some maples, already flaming in the last of summer and the sunset. I spotted none of the usual workplaces, houses, or barns.

We had taken almost three hours to wend through their land, along the tree-rooted and stone-littered upward-tending track. Once Casperon had to pull up, get out, and examine a tire. But it was all right. On we went.

At one point, just before we reached the house, I saw a waterfall cascading from a tall, rocky hill, plunging into a ravine below. In the ghostly dusk it looked beautiful and melodramatic. Setting the tone?

When the car at last drew up, a few windows were burning amber in the house cliff. Over the wide door itself glowed a single electric light inside a round pane like a worn-out planet.

No one had come to greet us.

We got out and stood at a loss. The car’s headlamps fired the brickwork, but still nobody emerged. At the lit windows, no silhouette appeared gazing down.

Casperon marched to the door and rang some sort of bell that hung there.

All across the grounds crickets chirruped, hesitated, and went on.

The night was warm, and so empty; nothing seemed to be really alive anywhere, despite the crickets, the windows. Nothing, I mean, of my kind, our people. For a strange moment I wondered if something ominous had happened here, if everyone had died, and if so, would that release me? But then one leaf of the door was opened. A man looked out. Casperon spoke to him, and the man nodded. A few minutes later I had to go up the steps and into the house.

There was a sort of vestibule, vaguely lighted by old ornate lanterns. Beyond that was a big paved court, with pruned trees and raised flower beds, and then more steps. Casperon had gone for my luggage. I followed the wretched sallow man who had let me in.

“What’s your name?” I asked him as we reached the next portion of the house, a blank wall lined only with blank black windows.

“Anton.”

“Where is the family?” I asked him.

“Above” was all he said.

I said, halting, “Why was there no one to welcome me?”

He didn’t reply. Feeling a fool, angry now, I stalked after him.

There was another vast hall or vestibule. No lights, until he touched the switch and grayish, weary side lamps came on, giving little color to the stony, towering space.

“Where,” I said, in Juno’s voice, “is he? He at least should be here. Zeev Duvalle, my husband-to-be.” I spoke formally. “I am insulted. Go at once and tell him — ”

“He does not rise yet,” said Anton, as if to somebody invisible but tiresome. “He doesn’t rise until eight o’clock.”

Day in night. Night was Zeev’s day. Yet the sun had been gone over an hour now. Damn him, I thought. Damn him.

It was useless to protest further. And when Casperon returned with the bags, I could say nothing to him, because this wasn’t his fault. And besides, he would soon be gone. I was alone. As per usual.

I met Zeev Duvalle at dinner. It was definitely a dinner, not a breakfast, despite their day-for-night policy. It was served in an upstairs conservatory, the glass panes open to the air. A long table draped in white, tall old greenish glasses, plates of some red china, probably Victorian. Only five or six other people came to the meal, and they introduced themselves in a formal, chilly way. Only one woman, who looked about fifty and so probably was into her several hundreds, said she regretted not being there at my arrival. No excuse was offered, however. They made me feel like what I was to them, a new house computer that could talk. A doll that would be able to have babies. yes. Horrible.

By the time we sat down, in high-backed chairs, with huge orange trees standing around behind them like guards — a scene on a film set — I was boiling with cold anger. Part of me was afraid, too. I can’t really explain the fear, or of what. It was like being washed up out of the night ocean on an unknown shore, and all you can see are stones and emptiness, and no light to show the way.

At Severin there were always types of ordinary food to be had — steaks, apples — we drank a little wine, took coffee or tea. But a lot of us were sun born. Even Juno was. She hated daylight but still tucked into the occasional croissant. Of course there was Proper Sustenance, too. The blood of those animals we kept for that purpose, always collected with economy, care, and gentleness from living beasts, which continued to live, well fed and tended and never overused, until their natural deaths. For special days there was special blood. This being drawn, also with respectful care, from among the human families who lived on the estate. They had no fear of giving blood, any more than the animals did. In return, their rewards were many and lavish. The same arrangement, so far as I knew, was similar among all the scattered families of our kind.

Here at Duvalle, we were served a black pitcher of blood, a white pitcher of white wine. Fresh bread, still warm, lay on the red dishes.

That was all.

I had taken Proper Sustenance at the last hotel, drinking from my flask. I’d drunk a Coke on the road, too.

Now I took a piece of bread and filled my glass with an inch of wine.

They all looked at me. Then away. Every other glass by then gleamed scarlet. One of the men said, “But, young lady, this is the best, this is human. We always take it at dinner. Come now.”

“No,” I said, “thank you.”

“Oh, but clearly you don’t know your own mind — ”