Teeth: Vampire Tales

who were mostly or totally nocturnal — my mother, for one. But also quite a few like me who, even if they couldn’t take much direct sunlight, as I could, still preferred to be about by day.

A couple of times during my outdoor excursions in daylight, I did find clearings in the woods, with small houses, vines, orchards, fields with a harvest already collected. I even once saw some men with a flock of sheep. Neither sheep nor men took any notice of me. No doubt they had been warned a new Wife of Alliance was here, and shown what she looked like.

The marriage had been set for the first night of the following month. The ceremony would be brief, unadorned, simply a legalization. Marriages in most of the houses were like this. Nothing especially celebratory, let alone religious, came into them.

I thought I’d resigned myself. But of course, I hadn’t. As for him, Zeev Duvalle, I’d been “meeting” him generally only at dinner — those barren awful dinners where good manners seemed to demand I attend. Sometimes I was served meat — I alone. A crystal bowl of fruit had appeared — for me. I ate with difficulty amid their “fastidious” contempt. I began a habit of removing pieces of fruit to eat later in my rooms. He was only ever polite. He would unsmilingly and bleakly offer me bread and wine, water. Sometimes I did drink the blood. I needed to. To me it had a strange taste, which maybe I imagined.

During the night, now and then, I might see him about the house, playing chess with one of the others, listening to music or reading in the library, talking softly on a telephone. Three or four times I saw him from an upper window, outside and running in long wolflike bounds between the trees, the paleness of his hair like a beam blown off the face of the moon.

Hunting?

I intended to get married in black. Like the girl in the Chekhov play, I too was in mourning for my life. That night I hung the dress outside the closet and put the black pumps below, ready for tomorrow. No jewelry.

Also I made a resolve not to go down to their dire dinner. To the older woman who read novels at the table and laughed smugly, secretively at things in them; the vile man with his bread cloth in the glass. The handful of others, some of whom never turned up regularly anyhow, their low voices murmuring to one another about past times and people known only to them. And him. Zeev. Him. He drank from his glass very couthly, unlike certain others. Sometimes a glass of water, or some wine — for him usually red, as if it must pretend to be blood. He had dressed more elegantly since the first night, but always his clothes were quiet. There was one dark white shirt, made of some sort of velvety material, with bone-color buttons. He looked beautiful. I could have killed him. We’re easy to kill — car crashes, bullets — though we can live, Tyfa had once said, even a thousand years. But that’s probably one more lie.

However, tonight I wouldn’t go down there. I’d eat up here, the last apple and the dried cherries.

About ten thirty, a knock on my door.

I jumped, more because I expected it than because I was startled. I put down the book I’d been reading, the Chekhov plays, and said, “Who is it?” Knowing who it was.

“May I come in?” he asked, formal and musical, alien.

“I’d rather you left me alone,” I said.

He said, without emphasis, “All right, Daisha. I’ll go down to the library. No one else will be there. There’ll be fresh coffee. I’ll wait for you until midnight. Then I have things I have to do.”

I’d gotten up and crossed to the door. I said through it, with a crackling venom that surprised me, I’d thought I had it leashed, “Things to do? Oh, when you go out hunting animals and rip them apart in the woods for proper fresh blood, that kind of thing, do you mean?”

There was silence. Then, “I’ll wait till midnight,” he flatly said.

Then he was gone, I knew, though I never heard him leave.

When I walked into the library it was after eleven, and I was wearing my wedding dress and shoes. I told him what they were.

“It’s supposed to be unlucky, isn’t it,” I said, “for the groom to see the bride in her dress before the wedding. But there’s no luck to spoil, is there?”

He was sitting in one of the chairs by the fire, his long legs stretched out. He’d put on jeans and a sweater and boots for the excursion later. A leather jacket hung from the chair.

The coffee was still waiting, but it would be cold by now. Even so, he got up, poured me a cup, brought it to me. He managed — he always managed this — to hand it to me without touching me.

Then he moved away and stood by the hearth, gazing across at the high walls of books.

“Daisha,” he said, “I think I understand how uncomfortable and angry you are — ”

“Do you?”

“ — but can I ask that you listen. Without interrupting or storming out of the room — ”

“Oh, for God’s — ”

“Daisha.” He turned his eyes on me. From glass green, they too had become almost white. He was flaming mad, anyone could see, but unlike me, he’d controlled it. He used it, like a cracking whip spattering electricity across the room. And at the same time — the pain in his face. The closed-in pain and. was it only frustration, or despair? That was what held me, or I’d have walked out, as he said. I stood there stunned, and thought, He hurts as I do. Why? Who did this to him? God, he hates the idea of marrying me as much as I hate it. Or — he hates the way he — we — are being used.

“Okay,” I said. I sat down on a chair. I put the cold coffee on the floor. “Talk. I’ll listen.”

“Thank you,” he said.

A huge old clock ticked on the mantelpiece above the fire. Tock-tock-tock. Each note a second. Sixty now. That minute he’d asked from me before. Or the minute when Juno held me in the sunrise, shaking.

“Daisha. I’m well aware you don’t want to be here, let alone with me. I hoped you wouldn’t feel that way, but I’m not amazed you do. You had to leave your own house, where you had familiar people, love, stability” — I had said I’d keep quiet; I didn’t argue — “and move into this fucking monument to a castle, and be ready to become the partner of some guy you never saw except in a scrap of a movie. I’ll be honest. The moment I saw the photos of you, I was drawn to you. I stupidly thought, This is a beautiful, strong woman who I’d like to know. Maybe we can make something of this prearranged mess. I meant make something for ourselves, you and me. Kids were — are — the last thing on my mind. We’d have a long time, after all, to reach a decision on that. But you. I was. looking forward to meeting you. And I would have been there, to meet you. Only something happened. No. Not some compulsion I have to go out and tear animals apart and drink them in the forest. Daisha,” he said, “have you been to look at the waterfall?”

I stared. “Only from the car. ”

“There’s one of our human families there. I had to go and — ” He broke off. He said, “The people in this house have switched right off, like computers without any electric current. I grew up here. It was hell. Yeah, that place you wanted me to go to. Only not bright or fiery, just — dead. They’re dead here. Living dead. Undead, just what they say in the legends, in that bloody book Dracula. But I am not dead. And nor are you. Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “your name, Daisha — the way it sounds. Day — sha. Beautiful. Just as you are.”

He had already invited me to speak, so perhaps I could offer another comment. I said, “But you can’t stand the light.”

“No, I can’t. Which doesn’t mean I don’t crave the light. When I was two years old, they took me out — my dad led me by the hand. He was fine with an hour or so of sunlight. I was so excited — looking forward to it. I remember the first colors — ” He shut his eyes, opened them. “Then the sun came up. I never saw it after all. The first true light — I went blind. My skin. I don’t remember properly. Just darkness and agony and terror. Just one minute. My body couldn’t take even that. I was ill for ten months. Then I started to see again. After ten months. But I’ve seen daylight since, of course I have, on film, in photographs. I’ve read about it. And music — Ravel’s ‘Sunrise,’ from that ballet. Can you guess what it’s like to long for daylight, to be. in love with daylight. and you can never see it for real, never feel the