Fledgling Page 11

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s something about his manner, his body language. But more likely it’s his scent. I kept hoping to remember something while I was with him, any little thing. But there was nothing. He introduced me to my brother Stefan, and still, there was nothing. But I never doubted that they were who they said they were. And all their human symbionts recognized me.”

  “Yeah,” Wright said.

  “You talked to three symbionts. Do you think they were lying?”

  “No, I don’t think they were lying.” He ran his hand over my head and down my back. “They said I was lucky to have you—lucky to be your first. That was when I realized that ... of course you’d have to already have others, even though I didn’t know about them. Then the woman, Brook, told me all Ina have several symbionts.”

  “How much blood do you think you could provide?” “You . . . you taste me just about every day.”

  “Just a little. I crave you. I do. And I enjoy pleasuring you.”

  “That’s the right attitude,” he said. He rolled over, trapping me beneath him and thrust into me again. This time I was the one who could not let out a groan of pleasure. He laughed, delighted.

  Later, as we lay together, more satisfied, more at ease, he said, “They’ll be coming for us next Friday.” “Yes,” I said. “I don’t want to go live with them, but I think we have to.”

  “I was going to say that.”

  “I need to learn how to set up my own household—how to make it work. When I can do that, when I’ve learned the things I need to know to do that, we’ll go out on our own.”

  “How big a household?” he asked.

  “You, me, five or six others. We don’t all have to live in the same house the way my brothers do with their symbionts, but we need to be near one another.”

  “It’ll be rough to live together in your father’s house.”

  “He says he’ll sell my mothers’ property, and when I’m older, the money will give me a start somewhere else.”

  “And he’ll hook you up with a male Ina, or rather, with a group of Ina brothers. My God, a group of brothers . . .”

  I said nothing. My mothers had lived together in the same community, shared a mate, and worked things out somehow. It could be done. It was the Ina way. “That will all happen in the future,” I said. “Next week, we’ll be in rooms at Iosif ’s house, you and I and Theodora. She’s one of our neighbors, a few doors down. You might know her.”

  There was a long silence. Finally he asked, “Is she pretty?” I smiled. “Not pretty. Not young either. But I like her.” “Are you going to tell her to join us . . . or ask her?”

  “Ask her. But she’ll come.”

  “Because she’s already fallen so far under your influence that she won’t be able to help herself?” “She’ll want to come. She doesn’t have to, but she’ll want to.”

  He sighed. “I think the scariest thing about all this so far is that all three of those symbionts seem

  genuinely happy. What do you figure? Old Iosif told them they were living in the best of all possible worlds, and they bought it because as far as they’re concerned, he’s God?”

  “He didn’t,” I said. “You asked?”

  “He told me that it was wrong, shortsighted, and harmful to symbionts to do such things. I didn’t ask. I

  had already figured that out.”

  “So you believe that’s what he believes?” “I do, at least on this subject.”

  “Shit.”

  I kissed him and turned over and went to sleep.

  During the next week, I visited each of my people, fed from them, and said good-bye. I became a dream to them, as Iosif had suggested, and I left them. Finally, on Thursday, I visited Theodora.

  I paid attention to her house and waited until shortly after sunset when she was alone. Then I visited her.

  I hadn’t seen her for a while, but as I looked at her large, handsome house, it occurred to me that in spite of what I had said to Wright, perhaps I should not ask Theodora to join me until I had a home, something more than rooms in Iosif ’s house to offer her. The thought surprised me. It occurred to me after I

  reached her front door and rang the doorbell.

  I heard her come to the door. Then there was a long pause while, I suppose, she looked out through the peephole and tried to figure out who I might be. She had never seen me before. I had visited her in darkness three times and had not allowed her to turn on a light. She must have gotten an idea of my general size, but she had never seen my face, my coloring, or the fact that I looked so young.

  Finally, she opened the door, looked down at me questioningly, and said, “Hello there.”

  “Hello,” I said, and as she recognized my voice, as her expression began to change to one of shock, I

  said, “Invite me in.”

  At once, she stood aside and said, “Come in.”

  This was a bit of vampire theater. I knew it, and I was fairly sure she knew it, too. She had probably been brushing up on vampires recently. Of course, I didn’t need permission to enter her home or anyone else’s. I did find it interesting, though, that human beings made up these fantasy safeguards, little magics, like garlic and crucifixes, that would somehow keep them safe from my kind—or from what they imagined my kind to be.

  I walked past her into the house. There was, near the front door, a broad staircase on one side and a living room almost as large as Iosif ’s on the other. The walls were a very pale green, and the woodwork was white. All the furniture was, somehow, exactly where it should be and exactly what it should be. Iosif

  ’s living room was more lived-in, more imperfect, more comfortable to be in. I began to feel even more uneasy about asking Theodora to come with me.

  She came up behind me, and when I turned to face her, she stopped, staring at me with a kind of horror. “Is it my skin color or my apparent age that’s upsetting you so?” I asked.

  “Why are you here?” she demanded.

  “To talk with you,” I said. “To have you see me.” “I didn’t want to see you!”

  I nodded. “It will make a difference,” I said, “but not as great a difference as you think.” I went to her, took her arm, tried to lead her into the perfect living room.

  She pulled back and said, “Not here.” She took my hand and led me up the stairs into a room whose walls were covered with books. There was a sofa and two chairs also piled high with books and papers. In the middle of the room was a large, messy desk covered with open books, papers, a computer and monitor, a radio, a telephone, a box of pencils and pens, a stack of notebooks and crossword puzzle magazines, a long decorative wooden box of compact discs, bottles of aspirin, hand lotion, antacid, correction fluid, and who knew what else.

  I stared at it and burst out laughing. It was the most disorderly mass of stuff I had run across, and yet it all looked—felt—familiar. Had I once had an equally messy desk? Had one of my mothers or sisters? I would ask Iosif. Anyway, it was the opposite of the living room downstairs, and that was a relief.

  Theodora had been clearing books off a chair so that I could sit down. She stopped when I laughed, followed my gaze, and said, “Oh. I forget how awful that must look to strangers. No one ever sees it but me.”

  I laughed again. “No, this is who you are. This is what I wanted to see.” I drew a deep breath, assuring myself that she was still free of me, still unaddicted. She was, and that was a good thing, although it felt like a flaw I should fix at once.

  “I write poetry,” she said. She almost seemed embarrassed about it. “I’ve published three books. Poetry doesn’t really pay, but I enjoy writing it.”

  I took some of the books off the sofa and piled them on the chair she had been clearing for me, then took her hand and drew her to the sofa. She sat with me even though she didn’t want to—or she didn’t want

  to want to. I felt that she was teaching me about herself every moment. I turned her to face me and just enjoyed looking at her. Sh
e had waist-length, dark-brown hair with many strands of gray. Her eyes were the same dark brown as her hair, and the flesh at the corners of them was indented with arrays of fine lines—the only lines on her face. She was a little heavier than was good for her. Plump might have been the best word to describe her. It made her face full and round. She wore no makeup at all—not even lipstick. She had been at home, relaxing without her family around her.

  After a moment, I leaned against her, put my head on her shoulder, and she put her arm around me, then took it away, then put it back. She smelled remarkably enticing.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I don’t either,” I said. “But the things I don’t understand are probably not the same ones giving you trouble. How long do we have before your family comes home?”

  “They’re visiting my son-in-law’s family in Portland. They won’t be home until tomorrow.” The moment she said this, she began to look nervous, as though she was afraid of what I might make of her solitude, her vulnerability.

  “Good,” I said. “I need to talk to you, tell you my story, hear yours. Then I have something to ask of you.”

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “What’s your name? What . . . What ...?” “What am I?”

  “. . . yes.” She looked away, embarrassed.

  I pulled her down to a comfortable level and bit her gently, then hard enough to start blood flowing on its own so that I could be lazy and just take it as it came. After a while, I said, “You told me I was a vampire.”

  She had not objected to anything I’d done even when I climbed onto her lap, straddled her, and rested against her, lapping occasionally at the blood. She put her arms around me and held me against her as though I might try to escape.

  “You are a vampire,” she said. “Although according to what I’ve read, you’re supposed to be a tall, handsome, fully grown white man. Just my luck. But you must be a vampire. How could you do this if you weren’t? How could I let you do it? How could it feel so good when it should be disgusting and painful? And how could the wound heal so quickly and without scars?”

  “You don’t believe in vampires.”

  “I didn’t use to. And I never thought they would be so small and ... like you.” “I’ve been called an elfin little girl.”

  “That’s exactly right.”

  “In a way, it is. I’m a child according to the standards of my people, but my people age more slowly than yours, and I have an extra problem. I may be older than you are in years. As far as my memory is concerned, though, I was born just a few weeks ago.”

  “But how can that—?”

  “Shh.” I started to get off her lap, and she tried to hold me where I was. “No,” I said. “Let me go.” She released me, and I sat beside her and leaned against her.

  “Three, maybe four weeks ago,” I began, “I woke up in a shallow cave a few miles from here. I’m being vague about when and where because I don’t know enough to be exact. During my first days in the cave I was blind and in and out of consciousness. I was in a lot of pain, and I had no memory of anything that had happened before the cave.”

  “Amnesia.”

  “Yes.” I told her the rest of it, told her about killing Hugh Tang, but not about eating him, told her about hunting deer and eating them. I told her about Wright finding me and taking me in, and about finding my father and brothers. I told her the little I knew about the Ina and about what an Ina community was like. I told her I wasn’t human, and she believed me. She wasn’t even surprised.

  “You want me to be part of such a community?” she asked. “I do, but not yet.”

  “Not . . . yet?”

  “My father is having a house built for me. Come to me when the house is ready. I’ll see to it that there’s

  space for your books and other things—a place where you can write your poetry.” “How long?”

  “I don’t know. No more than a year.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to wait that long.”

  I was surprised. I had been careful to let her make up her own mind, and I had believed she would come with me, but not so quickly. “I have nothing to offer you now,” I said. “I’ll be living in rooms in my father’s house. He says you can come, but when I saw what you have here, I thought you’d want to wait until you could have something similar with me.”

  “I have no patience,” she said. “I want to be with you now.”

  I liked that more than I could have said, and yet I wondered about it. “Why?” I asked her. I had no idea what she would say.

  She blinked at me, looked surprised, hurt. “Why do you want me?”

  I thought about that, about how to say it in a way she might understand. “You have a particularly good scent,” I said. “I mean, not only do you smell healthy, you smell ... open, wanting, alone. When I came to you the first time, you were afraid at first, then glad and welcoming, excited, but you didn’t smell of other people.”

  She frowned. “Do you mean that I smelled lonely?” “I think so, yes, longing, needing . . .”

  “I didn’t imagine that loneliness had a scent.” “Why do you want me?” I repeated.

  She hugged me against her. “I am lonely,” she said. “Or I was until you came to me that first time. You’ve made me feel more than I have since I was a girl. I hoped you would go on wanting me—or at least that’s what I hoped when I wasn’t worrying that I was losing my mind, imagining things.” She hesitated. “You need me,” she said. “No one else does, but you do.”

  “Your family?”

  “Not really, no. This is my home, and I’m glad to be able to help my daughter and her husband by having them come live here, but since my husband died, all I’ve really cared about—all I’ve been able to care about—is my poetry.”

  “You would be able to bring only some of your things to my father’s house,” I said. “A few boxes of books, some clothing, and I’ll be fine.”

  I looked around the room doubtfully. “Wright and I will be moving tomorrow. I’ll need your telephone number so I can reach you. If you don’t change your mind, we’ll come back for you and your things the Friday after next.”

  “Promise me.” “I have.”

  “Will you stay with me tonight?” “For a while. Have you eaten?”

  “Eaten?” She looked at me. “I haven’t even thought of eating, although I suppose I’d better. Do you eat regular food at all, ever?”

  “No.”

  “All right. Come keep me company in the kitchen while I microwave something to eat. I don’t think I

  should miss very many meals if I’m going to be with you.”

  “Exactly right,” I said, and enjoyed every moment of the flesh-to-flesh contact when she bent and kissed me.

  ten

  No one came for us on Friday.

  When the night was half gone, Wright tried to phone Iosif—tried each of the numbers he had given us. At first, there was no answer, then there was a computerized voice saying that the number he was calling

  was out of service. He made several fruitless attempts. “We need to go there,” I said.

  He looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “Let’s go,” he said.

  I grabbed a blanket from the bed, thinking that we might have to spend part of the coming day in the car. I didn’t want to think about why that might happen, but I wanted to be ready for it. Thoughts of the burned-out ruin that had been my mothers’community jumped into my mind, and I couldn’t ignore them.

  Wright was not certain how to reach Iosif ’s community. His maps didn’t show the tiny community, of course. Iosif ’s card contained a sketch of a map that turned out to be hard to follow. We got onto what seemed to be the right side-road, but found no turn off where Wright had expected one. We tried another side road, then another, but still did not find the community.

  Finally, I did what I hadn’t wanted to do.

  “This is no good,” I said. “We’re in the right general area. Find a
place to park, and I’ll go out and find the community. I can find it by scent if not by sight.”

  He didn’t want me to go. He wanted to keep driving around or, if necessary, go home and try again during the day.

  I shook my head. “Find a safe place and park. I need to go to them and see that they’re all right. And if

  ... if they’re not all right, if this is anything like what happened to my mothers, you can’t be there. If my father or my brothers are injured, they’ll be dangerous. They might not be able to stop themselves from killing you.”

  “And eating me,” he said. He didn’t even make it a question.