The Last Vampire (36 page)

“We’re here for you, Paul. All of us that are left.”

“What about Justin?”

“Screw him. And screw the Company.”

“They take an enlightened approach, it would seem,” Miriam said.

Why in hell was she so calm? What did she know? “Be careful, Becky.”

“Oh, yeah. Look, Mrs. Blaylock, we’ve got this place surrounded.

We’ve got video of one of your little helpers committing a murder. And we’ve got you.”

“You won’t kill Paul.”

Becky’s face changed. It grew as hard as stone. Nothing needed to be said. Miriam took Paul by the arm and began to back out of the room.

Becky stalked forward, bracing the gun. “Shoot, girl,” Paul said.

Miriam backed them up another step. Becky came forward. “I love you, Paul,” she said.

“Me too, baby.” And his heart told him — it’s true, it’s always been true. He wanted her. He wanted normal human love, and that was what she had to offer. By the God in heaven, he wanted her.

She closed her eyes. He saw tears. He knew that he was about to die at the hands of the only normal human woman who had ever loved him, before he had even damn well kissed her.

So he made a move. Why the hell not? Might as well attempt the impossible. What he did was to leap toward Becky, hoping that Miriam wouldn’t expect that.

He was free, falling toward her. Becky danced aside. And suddenly he was behind her.

The two women faced each other. Miriam covered her belly with her hands. Miriam screamed. It was the most terrible, bloodcurdling wail of despair Paul had ever heard.

The bedroom door burst open, and Sarah and Leo piled in behind her, both of them bracing Magnums. Paul recognized a standoff. He also recognized a situation that wasn’t going to last more than a few seconds.

“We’re gonna get ’em all,” he murmured to Becky.

In the same instant that she squeezed the trigger, a desperate Miriam used her great speed to leap into her face. Instinct made her raise the weapon — and the blast went crashing into the trompe l’oeil ceiling, which came crashing down in sky-painted chunks, filling the room with dust.

Becky was hurled all the way back against the far wall of the office. She hit the wall with a resounding slap. But she was Becky, she was no ordinary girl, and she came back immediately.

Paul had the gun. Behind Miriam, Sarah and Leo were getting ready to open fire. He started to squeeze off the shot that would reduce them all to pulp.

Then his finger stopped squeezing. He stood, agonizing. “Pull it,” Becky shouted,
“pull the damn trigger!”

The clock ticked. Sarah Roberts began moving slowly to the left, sliding like a shadow. He saw her plan: she was going to throw herself between them, try to absorb the shot.

“Pull it!”

“Please, Paul,” Miriam said.

He stood there like a pillar, and pillars cannot move, they cannot pull triggers. He saw not Miriam, but his baby, the little half-made child who had maybe looked at him.

In all his years of killing, he had never killed a baby, and now he found that this was his limit. This was the one murder he could not commit.

His mind searched for a way to let his heart win. And his mind spoke to him in the voice of his father . . . or maybe it was his father’s real spirit there, giving his son the guidance that he needed: “If you kill that child,” his father’s voice said to him, “my life and my death and all the suffering of our family will have been for nothing.”

All those thousands of years of struggle on the earth — the slow evolution of the apes, the coming of the Keepers with their breeding and their feeding and their tremendous acceleration of human evolution — all of it had led to this moment, to the burning, unanswerable moral question of the mother, and to the baby.

“Gimme that gun,” Becky said.

He did it. He gave it to her. As he did so, Sarah Roberts came forward. Her face was white, her eyes were huge. She loomed up, pointing her own weapon. With the clarity that comes to men at moments of great extreme, Paul saw a tear come out of her left eye and start down her cheek. And then her magnum roared and Becky’s pistol roared, and the room was choked with dust and debris.

Silence followed, and in it the improbable bonging of a distant clock. Before them lay the shattered remains of Sarah Roberts.

Becky looked down, then stepped quickly across the blood-soaked corpse.

The other two were nowhere to be seen. Paul and Becky followed them out and downstairs, saw them as they were disappearing into a pantry.

There was a brick tunnel leading deep. “Know where it goes?”

“Nope.”

“Shit. And there’s no map?”

“No map.”

“Then we’ve lost it.”

“Temporarily. It ain’t over till it’s over, girl.”

She dropped her gun to her side. “That one really got to you,” she said.

He looked down the dark tunnel where the monster that carried his son had taken him. “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken . . . then the dust shall return to the earth as it was.”

“Okay.”

They were silent together. Paul could feel the cord that linked him to his boy, feel it unwinding into the void.

“That’s the last one,” Becky said.

“The last vampire? Are you sure?”

“They’re cleaned out. All of them.”

“Even here in the U.S?”

She nodded. “Bocage is almost as good as you.”

He felt her hand in his, her strong, good hand. “Becky?”

“Yeah?”

“How the hell did you get in here?”

“They got a lotta skylights in this dump, boss.”

He threw his arms around her. When he kissed her at last, he immediately found what he’d lost hope of ever finding, which was his heart’s true happiness. This was where he belonged, in the arms of this wonderful, normal, completely human woman.

They left the house, leaving the maggots or the police to deal with the corpse upstairs. As far as the vampire and its helper were concerned, they would be found. Their time would come.

But not until his son was born, no way. Not until then.

“What’s your opinion on kids?”

“Kids’re okay.”

“You could raise a kid?”

She looked at him. “Married to you I could.”

“Married to me.”