Teeth: Vampire Tales

And then he spoke. From the doorway. He had only just come in, after his long rest or whatever else he had been doing for the past two and a half hours, as I was in my allotted apartment, showering, getting changed for this appalling night.

What I saw first about him, Zeev Duvalle, was inevitable. The blondness, the whiteness of him, almost incandescent against the candlelit room and the dark beyond the glass. His hair was like molten platinum, just sombering down a bit to a kind of white gold in the shadow. His eyes weren’t gray, but green — gray-green like the crystal goblets. His skin, after all, wasn’t that pale. It had a sort of tawny look to it — not in any way like a tan. More as if it fed on darkness and had drawn some into itself. He was handsome, but I knew that. He looked now about nineteen. He had a perfect body, slim and strong; most vampires do. We eat the perfect food and very few extra calories — nothing too much or too little. But he was tall. Taller than anyone I’d ever met. About six and a half feet, I thought.

Unlike the others, even me, he hadn’t smartened up for dinner. He wore un-new black jeans and a scruffy T- shirt with long, torn sleeves. I could smell the outdoors on him, pine needles, smoke, and night. He had been out in the grounds. There was. there was a little brown-red stain on one sleeve. Was it blood? From what?

It came to me with a lurch what he really most resembled. A white wolf. And had this bloody wolf been out hunting in his vast forested park? What had he killed so mercilessly — some squirrel or hare — or a deer — that would be bad enough — or was it worse?

I knew nothing about these people I’d been given to. I’d been too offended and allergic to the whole idea to do any research, ask any real questions. I had frowned at the brief movie they sent of him, thought: So, he’s cute and almost albino. I hadn’t even gotten that right. He was a wolf. He was a feral animal that preyed in the old way, by night, on things defenseless and afraid.

This was when he said again, “Let her alone, Constantine.” Then, “Let her eat what she wants. She knows what she likes.” Then: “Hi, Daisha. I’m Zeev. If only you’d gotten here a little later, I’d have been here to welcome you.”

I met his eyes, which was difficult. That glacial green, I slipped from its surface. I said quietly, “Don’t worry. Who cares.”

He sat down at the table’s head. Though the youngest among them, he was the heir and therefore, supposedly, their leader now. His father had died two years before, when his car left an upland road miles away. Luckily his companion, a woman from the Clays family, had called the house. The wreck of the car and his body had been retrieved by Duvalle before the sun could make a mess of both the living and the dead. All of us know we survive largely through the wealth longevity enables us to gather, and the privacy it buys.

The others started to drink their dinner again, passing the black jug. Only one of them took any bread, and that was to sop up the last red elements from inside his glass. He wiped the bread around like a cloth, then stuffed it into his mouth. I sipped my wine. Zeev, seen from the side of my left eye, seemed to touch nothing. He merely sat there. He didn’t seem to look at me. I was glad of that.

Then the man called Constantine said loudly, “Better get on with your supper, Wolf, or she’ll think you already found it in the woods. And among her clan that just isn’t done.”

And some of them sniggered a little, softly. I wanted to hurl my glass at the wall — or at all their individual heads.

But Zeev said, “What, you mean this on my T-shirt?” He too sounded amused.

I put down my unfinished bread and got up. I glanced around at them, at him last of all.

“I hope you’ll excuse me. I’ve been traveling and I’m tired.” Then I looked straight at him. Somehow it was shocking to do so. “And good night, Zeev. Now we’ve finally met.”

He said nothing. None of them did.

I walked out of the conservatory, crossed the large room beyond, and headed for the staircase.

Wolf. They even called him that.

Wolf.

“Wait,” he said, just behind me.

I can move almost noiselessly and very fast, but not as noiseless and sudden as he apparently could. Before I could prevent it, I spun around wide-eyed. There he stood, less than three feet from me. He was expressionless, but when he spoke now his voice, actor trained, I thought, was very musical. “Daisha Severin, I’m sorry. I’ve made a bad start with you.”

“You noticed.”

“Will you come with me — just upstairs — to the library? We can talk there without the rest of them making up an audience.”

“Why do we want to? Talk, I mean.”

“We should, I think. And maybe you’ll be gracious enough to humor me.”

“Maybe I’ll just tell you to go to hell.”

“Oh, there,” he said. He smiled. “No. I’d never go there. Too bright, too hot.”

“Fuck off,” I said.

I was seven steps up the stairs when I found him beside me. I stopped again.

“Give me,” he said, “one minute.”

“I’ve been told I have to give you my entire life,” I said. “And then I have to give you children, too, I nearly forgot. Kids who can survive in full daylight, just like me. I think that’s enough, isn’t it, Zeev Duvalle? You don’t need a silly little minute from me when I have to give you all the rest.”

He let me go then.

I ran up the stairs.

When I reached the upper landing, I looked back down, between a kind of elation and a sort of horror. But he had vanished. The part-lit spaces of the house again seemed void of anything alive, except for me.

Juno. I dreamed about her that night. I dreamed she was in a jet-black cave where water dripped, and she held a dead child in her arms and wept.

The child was me, I suppose. What she had feared the most when they, my house of Severin, made her carry me out into the oncoming dawn, to see how much, if anything, I could stand. Just one minute. What he had asked for, too, Zeev. I hadn’t granted it to him. But she — and I — had had no choice.

When I survived sunrise, she was at first very glad. But then, when I began to keep asking, “When can I see the light again?” Then, oh then. Then she began to lose me, and I her, my tall, red-haired, blue-eyed mother.

She never told me, but it’s simple to work out. The more I took to daylight, the more I proved I was a true sun-born, the more she lost me, and I lost her. She herself could stand two or three hours, every week or so. But she hated the light, the sun. They terrified her, and when I turned out so able to withstand them, even to like and. want them, then the doors of her heart shut fast against me.

Juno hated me just as she hated the light of the sun. She hated me, loathed me, loathes me, my mother.

PART THREE

About three weeks went by. The pines darkened and the other trees turned to copper and bronze and shed like tall cats their fur of leaves. I went on walks about the estate. No one either encouraged or dissuaded me. They had then nothing they wanted to hide from me? But I don’t drive, and so there was a limit to how far I could go and get back again in the increasingly chilly evenings. By day, anyway, there seemed little activity, in the house or outside it. I started sleeping later in the mornings so I could stay up at night fully alert, sometimes until four or five. It was less that I was checking on what went on in the house castle of Duvalle than that I was uncomfortable so many of them were around, and active, when I lay asleep. There was a lock on my door. I always used it. I put a chair against it, too, with the back under the door handle. It wasn’t Zeev I was worried about. No one, in particular. Just the complete feel and atmosphere of that place. At Severin there had been several