Once Bitten (17 page)

fact revelation. “As to what I am, I'm not sure how to describe it.”

“Vampire?” I said and she threw back her head and laughed. Her neck was long and pale white,

unlined and unmarked. The neck of a child.

“Jamie, do I look like a vampire?” she asked.

I looked at her flowing black dress, her black eyes, the white, perfect teeth and the glistening hair and a small voice inside said yes, that's exactly what you do look like, and what else do you call someone who's as old as the pyramids and who was found over a corpse in an alley with blood on her full, red lips?

“Well?” she pressed.

“I guess not,” I said.

“There are gaps in what I remember,” she said. “That's why I'm a bit vague about actually how old.”

“You remember your parents?”

"Sort of. I remember that they'd have nothing to do with me after my twenty-third summer.

People had shorter life-spans then, and they aged faster. I never got sick, and I showed no signs of aging. They made me leave. I don't remember what they looked like, but I remember how it felt to be rejected by them. I've never forgotten."

I shook my head in bewilderment. “Four thousand years,” I said. "It doesn't seem possible.

How did it happen? How many more like you are there?"

She shrugged. “I don't know how it happened. Genes, I suppose. It's a mutation. As to how many more there are, just a handful, I think. I know of six. It's not hereditary, if that's what you're getting at. My mother and father and my four brothers were all normal. They all died before they were forty.”

“The others, are you all in contact?” I was aware that the questions I was asking weren't following any logical progression, I was asking things at random. If I was going to get anywhere close to understanding her and what she was I was going to have to take a more scientific approach.

God, I wished I had a tape recorder with me, or at least a notebook.

"Not all the time. You have to remember that it's not easy for us to live in normal society,

Jamie. We have to keep on moving, we can never stay in one place for more than ten years in case we are discovered. And once we've moved on we have to wait at least fifty years before we move back. But yes, we do meet, we do help each other whenever we can. We have to. We're all we've got."

“You say you had to keep moving. Where have you lived?”

“God Jamie, you'd be better off asking me where I haven't lived. My first memories are of Egypt, then when Egypt went into decline I moved to Greece and then to Rome. When Rome was sacked, and that was what, 476AD, then I moved to Byzantium. I was in what's now called the Middle East round about 800AD, then went to China and on to Kiev when it was the cultural centre of the Slavic empire. I moved out when Ghengis Kahn moved in, I was in Constantinople when it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. I was in Florence during the Renaissance, in London when the Great Plague swept through Europe, in Paris during the Revolution, in Switzerland during the First World War and I've been in the States since the 1920s.”

“And how many identities have you used?” The questions still had no logic and I knew that I was asking them just to keep talking while I tried to get my mind around the basic premise that she'd laid before me - namely that Terry Ferriman was immortal. By asking questions, no matter how banal, I was at least helping to convince myself that she was telling the truth. But still the question that lurked uncomfortably at the back of my mind was what the hell did she plan to do with me, and was I going to end up like Matt Blumenthal lying flat on my back in an alley somewhere, drained of my lifeblood?

She laughed and shook my shoulders. “Jamie, for God's sake, how should I know? It's only in the last few centuries that I've had to keep records, and you saw how much space they took up in the filing cabinets. Hundreds, thousands maybe. In the old days, in the real old days, all I had to do was to move to another country or even just another town and change my name. This business with assuming new identities and applying for passports and driving licences and social security numbers and bank accounts is relatively recent.”

“And you've never been sick?”

“Not even during the Great Plague. Never. But you saw how I'm allergic to sunlight. We all are. And we do have another what you might call a weakness.”

“A weakness?”

“We think it's connected to the gene that makes us immortal. We are missing the enzymes in a couple of crucial biochemical pathways, which means we must periodically ingest certain proteins which we are lacking.”

Realisation broke over me like a tropical cloudburst. “Blood,” I said. "You have to have blood.

Human blood."

“Not necessarily blood, but that's just about the most efficient way of ingesting them, yes.”

I stood up and felt my knees buckle slightly. I didn't know if it was the fear or the brandy, but I locked my legs and fought to keep my balance. “And you say you're not vampires? What else would you call it? You live forever and you drink human blood? Oh God, I don't believe this, I really don't....”

I guess I must have passed out then because when I woke up I was lying on my back on a black leather couch and looking up at a white-tiled ceiling. I raised my head and saw that I was in some sort of laboratory, grey-speckled linoleum and lots of white Formica working surfaces and I recognised some of the equipment there - a centrifuge, what looked like a scintillation counter and a pair of electronic scales. There was a whole lot of stuff I didn't recognise, though. When I lifted my arms I half expected to meet resistance but there were no thick leather straps holding me down.

She was standing by a sink and as I sat up she came over with a glass of water.

“I'm sorry, Jamie,” she said. “I guess it was a mistake giving you the brandy.”

“Even though it was a good year,” I said and took the water from her and drank it. It felt cold and refreshing and went some way to clearing my head.

“Even though it was a good year,” she repeated and smiled. “Are you OK?”

I laughed ruefully because OK didn't exactly sum up the state of my mind just then. Pole-axed maybe. Stunned, possibly. But not OK. Definitely not OK.

“How did I get here?” I asked, looking around the lab. There was no way of telling if I was even still in the same building, or how long I'd been out. I checked my watch. Two-thirty in the morning.

“I carried you,” she said. She carried me. Just like that. I must weigh almost half as much again as she does and she carried me. And if she carried me then she could just as easily have carried Matt Blumenthal, with or without the eight pints of blood that should have been in his body.

“You were asking about the blood,” she said as if she'd been reading my mind.

“The blood?”

“You wanted to know how we got the proteins we need, the ones our own bodies can't synthesise.” She went over to a large refrigerator that was big enough to walk in. She pulled at its big, chrome handle and it made a hissing noise as it opened. She held it open wide so that I could see its contents. Plastic sachets of blood, all neatly racked and labelled. “We don't go around biting the necks of young virgins, Jamie. Not any more, anyway. There's no need. It's not the blood we need it's just a small fraction of the proteins in it. We buy the stuff in the bulk through a couple of medical supplies companies we own and we extract the proteins here.”

“We?” I asked.

“A friend of mine helped me set up the lab, a guy called Neil Hamshire. Lately he's really got into science in a big way. He's the one who found identified the proteins we're missing, and worked out the extraction procedures using collection tubes containing silica gel polymers.”

“Where is he?” I asked. I held out the empty glass for her to take.

“I wish I knew,” she said. “He disappeared about six months ago. I think the Government has got him. They've been on our trail for at least ten years. Possibly longer.”

“I don't understand? Why would the Government be after you?”

“Think about it, Jamie. We're a threat to them. Not because we mean them harm but because of the way we are. We are outside any of their controls, financially and legally. We are in a position to amass any sort of knowledge we want, we have the time to acquire any skills we want just be applying ourselves over a long period of time. Neil has spent more than fifty years in various laboratories around the world. If he were to ever publish some of the stuff he's discovered he'd have a dozen Noble prizes. There are no secrets in the world that we can't get to, eventually. We just have to keep trying and eventually we get what we want, because we outlast everyone else.”

“So long as you aren't discovered?”

"That's right. We have to keep moving, and we have to keep changing identities, and that's getting harder and harder because more and more records are stored on computers and crossreferenced.

They've caught several of my friends over the years."

“Friends?”

“People like me. And the more they find out about us the easier it becomes for them to track us down. It'll only be a matter of time before they find out that we buy in blood, for instance. And I think they're already trying to track us down through bank records. It isn't as easy to hide money as it used to be. It used to be that you could put $1,000 in a bank account and leave it for fifty years or so at compound interest and go back and take it out. Not any more. It's as hard now to transfer assets and property as it is to switch identities.”

I thought of the millions she had in the bank downtown, and wondered how much else she had squirrelled away around the world. Fall back positions.

“Who in the Government does this, who is trying to catch you? Is it the FBI? The CIA?”

“Worse. Much worse. They don't even have any of the restrictions on their actions that keep the CIA in check. It's like a witch-hunt. No, it's not like a witch hunt. It is a witch hunt. That's exactly what it is, and if they get their way they'll be burning us at the stake.”

“And you think they've got this friend of yours, this Neil...what was his surname?”

“Hamshire. Without the 'P'. Neil Hamshire. Yeah, he was on his way to the lab here one evening and he just vanished. He wouldn't have gone voluntarily because he was in the middle of an experiment, something he'd been working on for over a year.”

“What was that?”

"Genetics. He was trying to find a way of correcting the flaw in our genes so that we don't need to ingest the proteins. And he wanted to do something about the problem we have with sunlight.

And some other stuff. He wouldn't have just walked away from it, I'm sure of that."

She put the empty glass down by the sink and walked over to me, the dress flowing behind her like a black sail. Her hands reached up to hold my head, a cool palm on each of my cheeks and then her lips were against mine, the action so sudden that I didn't have time to draw breath and when she took her lips away I was gasping, my heart racing and my pulse pounding in my ears.

“What do you want?” I asked. “What is it you want from me?”

“Haven't you guessed?” she said. “Isn't it obvious?” She paused and then tilted her head down a fraction so that she was looking at me from under hooded lids as if telling me a guilty secret.

“Jamie, I love you. I have done since I first saw you, even before you ran that ridiculous program by me.”

“Ridiculous!” I snorted. “What do you mean?” Hell, she was dismissing my life's work as if it were no more than a child's crossword puzzle.

“I'm sorry,” she said, reaching out and ruffling my hair. “It's just that when you've taken on so many personalities as I have, psychological tests like your's are, well, laughable. I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.“ She saw how crestfallen I looked. ”Oh, come on, Jamie. Just accept that I'm in a different league to the normal psychos you come across in your line of work, don't take it as a personal affront against your professionalism.”

“Do you mean it?” I asked.

“About your professionalism?”

“About loving me.”

“Totally.”

I smiled and slid off the couch and took her in my arms and her head came up and this time I remembered to take a deep breath first. Her tongue slipped in between my teeth while one of her hands gently massaged the back of my neck and the other moved down the front of my trousers,

caressing and feeling for me. I tried to pull her down onto the couch but she slipped out of my grasp and took me by the hand out of the laboratory and along the corridor to another room. She didn't turn on the main light but led me confidently through the pitch dark and switched on a small lamp on a side table next to a king's size four-poster bed. She pushed me back onto the bed and took off her dress before climbing on top of me and removing my clothes and then she did all the things she'd done to me before in bed and a few other things too and then I guess I must have passed out again because when I woke up I had a splitting headache and I was alone. Terry's dress was lying on a chair so she couldn't have been far away. My throat was dry and I had trouble swallowing so I pulled on my boxer shorts and went looking for a bathroom and a painkiller. I found the bathroom door on the second try and hit the light switch. I was getting used to rooms without windows. There was a glass by the sink and I filled it with cold water and took a mouthful,

swilled it around my mouth, spat it out and then drank for real. I drained the glass and refilled it and then opened the mirrored cabinet on the wall looking for painkillers. There was mouthwash and antiseptic and a couple of sachets of herb hair shampoo but nothing that would get rid of my headache. I closed the cabinet and pulled open a drawer under the sink. There were no painkillers there but there was a black leather wallet. I took it out and flipped it open. There was a plastic window on the left hand side containing a private investigator's licence in the name of Matt Blumenthal. His driving licence was in a side pocket along with a green American Express card and a couple of hundred dollars in the section for notes. The photograph on the driving licence made it look as if he was dead. Prophetic, as it turned out.