“I could use some coffee, anyway,” Karla said. “How long is this going to take?”
“I don’t know. Probably not long. If you feel uncomfortable parked at the convenience store, just drive to one of the motels and park there for a while. I’d suggest checking into a room, but I don’t think it will be necessary.”
We followed the route Levko had shown me. Just past the Pines Guy’s access drive, I had Karla stop at a wide spot on the shoulder. I got out and she turned the car around and disappeared back in the direction we’d come.
There wasn’t any need for bushwhacking—the house was a good half mile in—so I walked up the access drive, not bothering to conceal myself until I was about a hundred yards from the house. From my approach, the ground sloped gradually down toward the house, giving me a good view of both the front and the open area to the left. Like the night with Levko, there were outside lights burning, but inside, the house was dark. I stopped behind a low thicket of manzanita to consider the layout and to give a little thought to why I was doing this.
People often say they don’t believe in coincidence, that there is no such thing as coincidence, that everything happens for a reason. Once someone is operating under this kind of misconception, it’s only natural to take the extra step and put yourself at the center of the drama, where the reasons that drive the universe orbit around you. Even if you aren’t vulnerable to this particular delusion, when something really improbable happens, it’s natural to suspect some agency of operating behind the scenes. Sheer improbability makes us incredulous of chance. But the truth is, the world is so densely replete with possibilities that seemingly improbable juxtapositions are commonplace. Things bang into each other not because of any grand design, but just because there are so many things moving around. Patterns arise out of deeper patterns, linger briefly, then fade back into the vastness.
Still, sometimes something will happen, something so improbable it’s difficult to resist the feeling that events have been staged for your benefit. Sometimes you can hardly believe your eyes. That was pretty much where I found myself, standing in the woods outside the Pines Guy’s house: dumbfounded, having trouble believing my eyes.
The silence had suddenly been broken by the sound of the front door being flung open. A young girl, maybe in her late teens, stumbled out, confused. She spun one way, then the other, not sure where she was or which way to go, then ran across the open yard, fleeing whatever was inside the house. Two seconds later, a man stepped through the door, not hurrying, but nonetheless clearly interested in the fleeing girl. He took several steps away from the house, then stopped, his eyes moving up the slope to the thicket where I was concealed. Only I knew I wasn’t concealed—not from the eyes that had fixed directly on me. I knew he could see me as clearly as I could see him, because the man standing in the yard was not a man. I had not seen those eyes for a hundred years. The Pines Guy was Calvin, the vampire who a century earlier had turned me.
The girl, as if determined to add to the improbable, did the same thing the two fighting cats had done a few nights before: she ran straight at me, blindly, scrambling through the underbrush, like a wild animal panicked by the chemistry of fear. When she came within reach, I grabbed her by the wrist. She screamed and started flailing, not so much as if she were trying to escape my grip, but as if she were suddenly possessed by an overwhelming and incomprehensible fury. As if after thinking she had escaped, the misfortune of being so quickly caught again was too much for her, and her mind snapped. I yanked her close and covered her mouth. I assume she continued to struggle, but at the moment I wasn’t paying much attention. Calvin hadn’t moved. We stared at each other for what must have been a full minute, then he did the same thing he’d done the first time our paths crossed. He turned around and walked calmly back into the house and closed the door.
The sound of the door closing was like an off-switch. There was a moment of culminating stillness, and then, as if the switch were flipped the other way, something became clear to me for the first time. A hundred years ago in Sicily, Calvin had turned his back and walked away. He did it knowing how vulnerable I was. He knew there was a good chance I’d make some stupid mistake and end up paying for it with my life. In the intervening hundred years, I had harbored a resentment at what I assumed was his callousness toward my fate. But now, standing there in the woods, I understood for the first time that the callousness, if in fact it had been callousness, was not what I resented. What I resented was being taken for granted.
“The thirst will educate you. Nothing else matters.” That’s what Calvin had said. At the time I had no idea what he was talking about. But as the years passed, his words continued to haunt and irritate me. I could neither forget them nor accept them. His blithe assumption that I could be reduced to the satisfaction of a thirst, that there was nothing in me that was not subservient to, and made insignificant by, my dietary requirements, still ate at me. And now, a hundred years later, wasn’t he making the same assumption? Wasn’t he assuming he could leave the girl
