tantalizing.
He licked his lower lip without being conscious of the fact, considering me. “No more questions?”
“Dozens. How did you . . . live?”
“Animal blood repelled me. I soon realized I needed a large supply of victims who wouldn’t be missed. I’d chosen God as a master because I knew my temperament wouldn’t bow long to any temporal lord, but I’d shown a knack for swordplay. Can you guess? We’re talking the fourteenth century here.”
“
“That breed has changed the least of all, Delilah. What did I do with myself for the next seven or eight hundred years?”
“I have no idea.”
“You’re an inquiring reporter. You pride yourself on putting two and two together. You tell me. Psych me out.”
He leaned back, narrowed eyes challenging me to “undress” his mind-set, even his soul, to dissect his vampire nature overlaid on a young, naive, obedient, chaste monk of an unthinkably alien time to modern me.
Kinda like me a few months ago. I’d let Sansouci unnerve me. It was time to reverse the situation.
“The Irish then were disenfranchised in their own land,” I said. “First by the Normans, then by the English. They became wanderers, like the Jews. Bards and . . . mercenaries roaming all lands even into the nineteenth and twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even today, a lot of the freelance journalists braving the Mideast wars and meltdowns to report for the American news networks are Irish. Still, you didn’t crave pay or treasures to live, but blood. Do you play an instrument?” I asked, hunting clues.
He considered, then said, “Only women now.”
His voice, the tone, the implications were meant to distract me. They did.
How did a monk learn to be so sexy?
Paging back to my Our Lady of the Lake convent school classes allowed me to access a lot of religious history.
I closed my eyes and recited. “It was the end of four of five hundred years of rabid Viking butchery and terrorism in the British Isles and Europe, but the developing nations were seething with war, even to sending knights on crusade to the Holy Land, the Middle East.”
My fingers tapped on the table.
“What instrument are
I studied their dark reflection as my fingers pantomimed a riff on the black glass.
“Castanets,” I said, realizing what my unconscious was telling me. “Spain was under siege by Moors in that period. Wait.” I sat up straight. “Yours isn’t a
“Because . . . ?”
“Battle was butchery then. Blood was everywhere. Your liquid diet would go unnoticed.”
“More than that, we battled for the cause of heaven. Our foes deserved to die.”
“Maybe their leaders did, not the foot soldiers.”
“It was warrior to warrior then, knight to Saracen. Drinking their blood only further eradicated them from the face of the earth.”
“You didn’t turn any?”
“Never. Why? A vampire turns a human only from desperation.”
“What makes a vampire desperate except lack of blood?”
“Utter hatred or revenge . . . or establishing a link with a mortal he or she can’t bear to lose. It’s always beauty that destroys the beast, Delilah.”
“Then you never had any human connection in all those centuries?”
“Only brothers at arms, and they came and went, as the wars came and went.”
“Why were you turned in the first place? You were already dead and out of the way.”
“The most common of the seven deadly sins. Greed.”
“Greed? You were a penniless monk.’
“I recognized my assailant after I staked him, a trusted retainer of my elder brother’s. Apparently Gowan feared I’d tire of the abbey and take what mere happenstance had earned him. I was his superior in everything but order of birth.”
“I don’t doubt it. He’s long moldering in the grave and you’ve lasted.” I sipped again. “How did you . . . convert from battlefield to bedroom?”
“The times did it for me. I ran out of ‘holy’ wars sometime in the eighteenth century. Then I looked for ‘just’ wars on the side of the foot soldiers, not the rulers, and finally I realized by the mid-nineteenth century that war was just war, no ‘justice for all’ in them at all. I hadn’t chosen to be a vampire but I could choose to dine from humanity’s enemies until the modern age made it clear they weren’t to be found on a battlefield.”
“So you turned to literally living off women.”
“No. I still honored my vows of poverty and chastity.”
“You?”
“You’re not the only aging virgin to hit Las Vegas, Delilah.”
“Oh, come on! Your harem?”
“By the earlier twentieth century it was harder to find anyone deserving to die in war, certainly not enough to keep me going. Women, however, were starting to discover what they wanted, including passion that included a controlled bit of danger. I discovered I could survive on multiple small doses of blood.”
“That doesn’t make you a virgin.”
“I’ve never had sex without blood, without involuntary need. For that reason, I consider myself true to my vows of celibacy to this day. I’ve never really made love to a woman, just for the sake of it. I have never loved. I think you might know what I mean now.”
“And, in your eyes, that makes you a virgin?”
“A virtual virgin, anyway,” he said, with a wry twist to his smile and a raise of his glass. “Just as you still are, really.”
“So in your mind virginity has to do with innocence despite experience. Or experience despite innocence.”
He nodded. “All you are now, Delilah, is an experienced virgin, in my expert opinion of the same state.”
That reminded me of the Silver Zombie, who combined the extremes of innocence and experience through the actress and split personalities of the saintly and salacious Maria character. I wondered if that’s why she disturbed me so deeply, along with her obvious dependence on Ric.
Sansouci’s head lolled back against the red velvet upholstery. He did look like a knight, a Technicolor effigy of a stone knight in some aged graveyard forever England or Ireland.
“Now,” he asked. “What did you really want from me other than a very long life story?”
“The doctors wouldn’t let me donate blood to Ric when he was drained at the Karnak. I want to know what’s wrong with it.”
“Your blood? You want an in-the-field analysis? You want me to make it?”
“I know you can . . . control yourself.”
“Maybe not. You’re obviously worried that something is up with your blood. I might go berserk. I do scare you, don’t I?”
“Sometimes.”
“Good.”
“If you were to take a sample . . . a tiny sample, where would it be?”
“On my tongue.”
“I meant on me.”
“Oh.” Sansouci obviously relished the chance to inspect me again. “Any erotic zone will do.” His eyes made a leisurely Grand Tour. “Lips. Neck.” They followed my snowy ruffles halfway down. “Breasts.”
I was shocked enough to show it. Blood as mother’s milk.
