vampire than someone who’s just bitten?”
She applauded. “Very good. You’ve got a functional brain after all.”
“Why does it matter?”
“My research leads me to conclude it involves a virus.”
He remembered the medical books on her shelves. “There’s a vampire virus? Like rabies.”
She rolled her eyes. “Not like rabies. Yes it’s carried in the blood and saliva and passed on through a bite. That’s the only similarity. Ours is a retrovirus. A healthy immune system destroys the amount of virus in a single bite, but if some survives, because of repeated bites or a weak immune system, it invades the cells and waits until the immune system collapses due to extreme weakness or death.” Lane’s eyes gleamed as she warmed to her subject. “Then the virus activates…takes command of the host and modifies it to serve the virus’s needs, which of course are those of all life forms: survival and reproduction. Mere reanimation appears to need very little virus, because biting a subject long enough to drain him provides enough for that. When a subject receives a massive infusion of virus, though, higher brain functions are restored. Creating the likes of you and me.
“That’s the mystery I’ve yet to solve…why we’re created. All the virus needs for reproduction is zombies. We’re actually counter-productive because we tend
“Blood provides the massive infusion.” The one pertinent fact in her lecture.
She frowned. “You have no intellectual curiosity about your origin? Fine. Because you bit me, I knew you would rise again fully functional…and I decided to see what would come of that.”
He gave her a sardonic smile. “Now you know; what’s coming of it is your arrest for murder.”
Lane sighed. “I’ve told you, you can’t arrest me. There’s no way to force me back to San Francisco and no jail that can confine me. Accept it.”
“No!” There had to be a solution, a way to make her answer for Adair and Mossman’s deaths.
She sighed again. “All right. Suppose you do manage to arrest, try, and imprison me. Having accomplished the purpose for which you’ve insinuated yourself into Baumen and my mother’s life, what are your future plans?”
“I have none. I don’t expect to be around. There’ll be no reason for it.”
She eyed him thoughtfully. “You mean you plan to destroy yourself?”
If it did not occur naturally. “My life is already destroyed. I detest what you’ve made me. Once I’ve seen you face judgement I want out of this existence.”
Lane’s breath wrapped white around her and melted away into the mist. “Do you? When there’s such a wide and wondrous world out there? A world I’m betting you’ve never seen.” Her voice turned musical, floating across to him along with the light spicy-musky scent of her perfume. “You lived in a seaport, but did you ever think of boarding one of the ships docking there and sailing away on her? Wouldn’t you like to see wonders like the Himalayas above Kathmandu or climb to the temples of Tibet? Or walk the Great Wall of China and explore the ancient ruins of Karnak and Zimbabwe? Poling through the Okavanga Delta in Africa at flood time there is such richness of life that it makes your throat ache, and there’s nothing more awesome than the migrations in the Serengeti, when the plains stretch like a sea of grass and herds of wildebeest and zebra stretch as far as the eye can see. Even the Sahara has raw, stunning beauty…dunes, rock outcroppings, wildlife where you’d think none could exist. In the heat waves you can almost see the cities of ancient civilizations that existed before the sand buried them.”
In movement almost too fast to follow, she came over the car and down beside him, voice dropping to a whisper. “There’s a city in northern China with a winter festival every year that fills the city with ice sculpture, not snowmen but pure, clear ice chiseled into a wonderland of heroes and mythical animals and castles, and ice arbors with ice benches to sit on. Vienna, Rome, and Copenhagen aren’t like they were before the war, but they’re still beautiful, and Beijing, Mecca, and Sri Lanka. You shouldn’t miss Venice, where all greatest glass craftsmen work. There’s so much out there a human life span isn’t enough to explore it all…but ours is.”
The vision dazzled Garreth…places that had always been just names, that he never dreamed of visiting. He and Marti talked about a trip to Hawaii, but listening to Lane made him realize how foreshortened his horizons were. To see all those places…to have time enough for it -
Reality cut the thought short. “One problem. Travel takes money, which I don’t have.”
“I
He felt as if someone jabbed him with an electric prod. It jumped him sideways away from her. “Is that what you expected by letting me live…a companion? There is no way in hell that is ever going to happen!”
“What a pity.” She smiled at him. “Or maybe not. You want two things, you say: justice and death. I can give you one…you dumb mick!” Fast as a striking snake, she grabbed the front of his jacket and drove her knee into his crotch with a force that lifted him off his feet, then hurled him to the ground to lie curled in blinding agony. “I’d kill you right now except people have seen me with you and I won’t shame my mother. But you’ll have that death you want before the night is out.” She ripped his radio off his belt and strode away, calling back from the mist, “Consider yourself a walking dead man.”
Duel
1
Garreth struggled to stand, to pursue Lane, but could not even make it to his knees, only continue to huddle gasping and cursing…at himself as well as her. Dumb mick, all right. Damn right the maiden was powerful. When the hell was he going to get that through his thick skull. He had been kneed in the nuts before, but never with vampire power behind the knee. After this, he reflected, the pain of passing through a door qualified as no more than discomfort.
What felt like hours later he managed to drag himself up the car door and climb in. To sit huddled over the steering wheel. Despite how he hurt, he needed to concentrate on his next move. The lady of ice and steel was out there planning how to kill him. Possessing his radio enabled her to track him and pick where to attack. Being aware of that, however, he knew when to watch for her. The radio might even prove an advantage, luring her to him. By which time he hoped he had a way to deal with her.
Belatedly he became aware of his car radio…Doris calling his number. From the anxiety in her voice, she had been doing so repeatedly. “
He thumbed the mike button and tried to make his voice normal. “Seven Baumen.” Not succeeding. He sounded more in Maggie’s vocal range.
Doris shot back, “
Duncan radioed, “
“The cemetery. I’m 10-4.” That came out better. “I lost my radio and just returned to the car after failing to find it. Do you have something for me?”
“
Since Doris saw how he limped up the hall to the radio rack, he gave her a quick lie. “I was in foot pursuit of a skeleton and Grim Reaper and tripped and landed astraddle one of those narrow old tombstones. I’ll be fine. What’s the call?”
Duncan had taken the one originally intended for him, but now they had a mother anxious because her fourteen-year-old daughter, who was supposed to be home from a Halloween party at ten, was now almost an hour late.
On the way there, Garreth swung by his place for a quick drink of blood. By the time he reached the call address — a block and a half from the high school, he noted — he walked normally.
“I may know where your daughter is.”
They drove to the gym with the mother shaking her head. “You think Cici crashed the wedding reception? I’ve brought her up with better manners than that.” But when they stepped inside, she said, “Oh.”
“Do you see your daughter?”
She pointed at a Wonder Woman and mini-skirted witch dancing to “Witchy Woman.” “That’s her and her
