Teeth: Vampire Tales

warmth, smell the scents of it, or properly hear the sounds, except on a screen, off a CD — never? When I saw you, you’re like that, like real daylight. Do you know what I said to my father when I started to recover, after those ten months, those thirty seconds of dawn? Why, I said to him, why is light my enemy, why does it want to kill me? Why light?”

Zeev turned away. He said to the sunny bright hearth, “And you’re the daylight, too, Daisha. And you’ve become my enemy. Daisha,” he said, “I release you. We won’t marry. I’ll make it clear to all of them, Severin first, that any fault is all with me. There’ll be no bad thing they can level at you. So, you’re free. I regret so much the torment I’ve unwillingly, selfishly put you through. I’m sorry, Daisha. And now, God knows, it’s late and I have to go out. It’s not rudeness, I hope you’ll accept that now. Please trust me. Go upstairs and sleep well. Tomorrow you can go home.”

I sat like a block of concrete. Inside I felt shattered by what he had said. He pulled on his jacket and started toward the door, and only then I stood up. “Wait.”

“I can’t.” He didn’t look at me. “I’m sorry. Someone. needs me. Please believe me. It’s true.”

And I heard myself say, “Some human girl?”

That checked him. He looked at me, face a blank. “What?”

“The human family you seem to have to be with — by the fall? Is that it? You want a human woman, not me.”

Then he laughed. It was raw, and real, that laughter. He came back and caught my hands. “Daisha — my Day — you’re insane. All right. Come with me and see. We’ll have to race.”

But my hands tingled; my heart was in a race already.

I looked up into his face, he down into mine. The night hesitated, shifted. He let go my hands, and I flew out and up the stairs. Dragging off that dress, I tore the sleeve at the shoulder, but I left it lying with the shoes. Inside fifteen more minutes we were sprinting, side by side, along the track. There was no excuse for this, no rational reason. But I had seen him, seen, as if sunlight had streamed through the black lid of the night and shown him to me for the first time, light that was his enemy, and my mother’s, never mine.

The moon was low by then, and stroked the edges of the waterfall. It was like liquid aluminum, and its roar packed the air full as a sort of deafness. The human house was about a mile off, tucked in among the dense black columns of the pines.

A youngish, fair-haired woman opened the door. Her face lit up the instant she saw him, no one could miss that. “Oh, Zeev,” she said, “he’s so much better. Our doctor says he’s mending fantastically well. But come in.”

It was a pleasing room, low ceilinged, with a dancing fire. A smart black cat with a white vest and mittens sat upright in an armchair, giving the visitors a thoughtful frowning scrutiny.

“Will you go up?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Zeev said. He smiled at her, and added, “This is Daisha Severin.”

“Oh, are you Daisha? It’s good of you to come out too,” she told me. Zeev had already gone upstairs. The human woman returned to folding towels at a long table.

“Isn’t it very late for you?” I questioned.

“We keep late hours. We like the nighttime.”

I had been aware that this was often the case at Severin. But I’d hardly ever spoken much to humans — I wasn’t sure now what I should say. But she continued to talk to me, and overhead I heard a floorboard creak; Zeev would not have caused that. The man was there, evidently, the one who was “mending.”

“It happened just after sunset,” the woman said, folding a blue towel over a green one. “Crazy accident — the chain broke. Oh, God, when they brought him home, my poor Emil — ” Her voice faltered and grew hushed. Above also a hushed voice was speaking, barely audible even to me. But she raised her face and it had stayed still rosy and glad, and her voice was fine again. “We telephoned up to the house, and Zeev came out at once. He did the wonderful thing. It worked. It always works when he does it.”

I stared at her. I was breathing quickly, frightened. “What,” I said, “what did he do?”

“Oh, but he’ll have told you,” she strangely reminded me. “The same as he did for Joel — and poor Arresh when he was sick with meningitis — ”

“You tell me,” I said. She blinked. “Please.”

“The blood,” she said, gazing at me a little apologetically, regretful to have confused me in some way she couldn’t fathom. “He gave them his blood to drink. It’s the blood that heals, of course. I remember when Zeev said to Joel, it’s all right, forget the stories — this won’t change you, only make you well. Zeev was only sixteen then himself. He’s saved five lives here. But no doubt he was too modest to tell you that. And with Emil, the same. It was shocking” — now she didn’t falter — “Zeev had to be here so quick — and he cut straight through his own sleeve to the vein, so it would be fast enough.” Blood on his sleeve, I thought. Vampires heal so rapidly. all done, only that little rusty mark. “And my Emil, my lovely man, he’s safe and alive, Daisha. Thanks to your husband.”

His voice called to me out of the dim roar of the waterfalling firelight, “Daisha, come up a minute.”

The woman folded an orange towel over a white one, and I numbly, speechlessly, climbed the stair, and Zeev said, “I have asked Emil, and he says, very kindly, he doesn’t object if you see how this is done.” So I stood in the doorway and watched as Zeev, with the help of a thin, clean knife, decanted and poured out a measure of his life blood into a mug, which had a picture on it of a cat, just like the smart black cat in the room below. And the smiling man, sitting on the bed in his dressing gown, raised the mug, and toasted Zeev, and drank the wild medicine down.

* * *

“We’re young,” he said to me, “we are both of us genuinely young. You’re seventeen, aren’t you? I’m twenty-seven. We are the only actual young here. And the rest of them, as I said, switched off. But we can do something, not only for ourselves, Day, but for our people. Or my people, if you prefer. Or any people. Humans. Don’t you think that’s fair, given what they do, knowingly or not, for us?”

We had walked back, slowly, along the upper terraces by the black abyss of the ravine, sure-footed, omnipotent. Then we sat together on the forest’s edge and watched the silver tumble of the fall. It had no choice. It had to fall, and go on falling forever, in love with the unknown darkness below, unable and not wanting to stop.

I kept thinking of the little blood mark on his sleeve that night, what I’d guessed, and what instead was true. And I thought of Juno, with her obsessive wasted tiny blood-drop offerings in the “shrine,” to a man she had no longer loved. As she no longer loved me.

She hates me because I have successful sun-born genes and can live in daylight. But Zeev, who can’t take even thirty seconds of the sun, doesn’t hate me for that. He. he doesn’t hate me at all.

“So will you go back to Severin tomorrow?” he said to me as we sat at the brink of the night.

“No.”

“Daisha, even when they’ve married us, please believe this: If you still want to go away, I won’t put obstacles in your path. I will back you up.”

“You care so little.”

“So much.”

His eyes glowed in the dark. They put the waterfall to shame.

When he touched me, touches me, I know him. From long ago, I remember this incredible joy, this heat and burning, this refinding rightness — and I fall down into the abyss forever, willing as the shining water. I never loved before. Except Juno, but she cured me of that.

He is a healer. His blood can heal, its vampiric vitality transmissible — but noninvasive. From his gift come no substandard replicants of our kind. They only — live.

Much, much later, when we parted just before the dawn inside the house — parted till the next night, our wedding day — it came to me that if he can heal by letting humans drink his blood, perhaps I might offer him some of my own. Because my blood might help him to survive