The Taker (32 page)

“Sure,” she says.

When the doctor wakes, the hotel room is bathed in gray. The sun is setting but none of the lamps has been turned on. Luke lies still, not sitting up, trying to get his bearings. For a long minute, his head is stuffed with cotton, and he can’t remember where he is and why everything is unfamiliar. He’s hot and sweaty from lying under the blanket and feels like a kidnapping victim rushed out of a car, blindfolded, spun around.

Slowly, the room comes into focus. The stranger is sitting in one of the hard wooden chairs at the table, looking out the window. She sits absolutely still.

“Hey,” Luke says, to let her know he’s awake.

“Feeling better? Let me get you a glass of water.” She rises from the chair and hurries through a doorway to the kitchenette. “It’s only tap water. I put some in the refrigerator to get cold.”

“How long have I been asleep?” Luke reaches for the glass; it feels deliciously cold, and he’s tempted to press it to his forehead. He’s burning up.

“Four, five hours.”

“Oh Christ, I’d better get on the road. They’ll be looking for me, if they aren’t already.” He pushes the blanket back, and sits up on the edge of the bed.

“What’s the rush? You said there’s no one at home to wait for you,” the girl replies. “Besides, you don’t look well. That shit might have been too much for you. It’s strong. Maybe you should lie down for a little longer.”

Lanny retrieves her laptop from the chipped veneered chest of drawers and walks over to him. “I downloaded these from the camera while you were asleep. I thought you would like to see him. I mean, I know you’ve
seen
him, you’ve seen his body, but you might be interested anyway …”

Luke winces at this macabre little speech, not happy to be reminded of the dead body in the morgue and its relation to Lanny, but accepts the laptop when she hands it to him. The images jump off the screen brightly in the dusky darkness of the room: it is the man in the body bag but there is no comparison. Here he is, vividly alive, vibrant and whole. The eyes, the face animated, electrified with life.

And he is so, so beautiful, the sight of him makes Luke strangely sad. The first picture must have been taken in a car, window down, his longish black hair swirling about his head and his eyes crinkled as he laughs at the woman taking the picture, laughs at something Lanny has said or done. In the next picture, he is in bed, the bed they must have shared at Dunratty’s, his head on a white pillow, again his hair falling over his face, lashes brushing his cheeks, the perfect blush of pink across the high ridge of his cheekbone. A glimpse of throat and the protruding knob of a collarbone are visible beneath a creamy white fold of sheet.

After a minute, looking from picture to picture, it occurs to Luke that the beautiful thing about the man in the photos is not the pleasing quality of his face. It’s not his handsomeness. It’s something in his expression, an interplay between the delight in his eyes and the smile on his face. It’s that he’s happy to be with the person holding the camera and taking the pictures.

A lump forms in Luke’s throat and he thrusts the laptop at Lanny. He doesn’t want to look anymore.

“I know,” the girl says, also choked up, giving in to tears. “It kills me to think he’s gone. Forever gone. I feel his absence like a hole in my chest. A feeling I have carried with me for two hundred years has been ripped away. I don’t know how I will go on. That’s why I am asking you … please stay with me a little longer. I can’t be alone. I’ll go out of my mind.” She puts the laptop on the floor, then reaches for Luke’s hand. Hers is tiny and warm in his. The palm is damp, but Luke can’t tell if the dampness is his or hers.

“I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve done for me,” she says as she looks through his eyes and into him, as though she can see what is swimming inside him. “I’ve—I’ve never—I mean, no one has ever been so good to me. Taken a risk like that for me.”

Suddenly, her mouth is on his. He closes his eyes and sinks his entire being into the warm wetness of her mouth. He falls backward into the spot on the bed he had just left, her nearly insubstantial weight falling on him, and he feels a part of him tear in two. He is horrified by what he is doing, yet he’s wanted to do this from the moment he first saw her. He’s not going back to St. Andrew, not yet anyway; he’s going to follow her—how can he walk away? Her need for him is like a hook planted in his chest, pulling him along effortlessly, and he cannot resist. He is diving off a cliff into black water; he can’t see what’s waiting below for him, but he knows there’s not a force on earth that can stop him.

TWENTY-SIX

B
OSTON
, 1817

A
fter hearing Adair’s story, I withdrew to my room in fright. I crawled onto the bed and tucked my knees under my chin. I was afraid to recall the things he’d told me and I tried to push them away.

Alejandro knocked, and when there was no answer, nudged the door back so he could slip in bearing a tray of tea and biscuits. He lit several candles—“You can’t sit in the dark, Lanore, it’s ghoulish”—and then placed a cup and saucer quietly at my elbow, but I wanted none of his hospitality. I pretended to look out the window, but in truth I could see nothing, still blinded by fury and despair.

“Oh my dear, don’t be so sad. I know it’s scary. I was scared when it happened to me.”

“But, Alej, what are we?” I asked, hugging the pillow to my chest.

“You are yourself, Lanore. You are not part of the magic world. You can’t pass through walls like a ghost or visit God in his heaven like an angel. We sleep and wake, eat and drink, go through our day like anyone else. The only difference is that another person might ponder,
from time to time, which day will be his last. But you and I, our days will never end. We go on, bearing witness to everything around us.” He said all this dispassionately, as though the endless shuffle of days had washed all the excitement out of him. “When Adair explained what he’d done to me, I wanted to escape from him, even if it meant killing myself—the one thing I couldn’t do.

“But to lose your baby on top of it … well, it is too terrible to contemplate. Poor Lanore. Your sadness will pass, you know,” he continued in his singsong English, accented with Spanish. He took a sip of tea and then looked at me through steam rising from the cup. “Every day your past drifts farther and farther away and life with Adair grows more and more familiar. You become part of this family. Then, one day, you will remember something from your other life—a brother or a sister, a holiday, the house where you used to live, a toy you used to cherish—and you realize you no longer mourn its loss. It will seem like something from long ago. That’s when you know the change is complete.”

I glanced over my shoulder at him. “How long does it take for the pain to go away?”

Alejandro lifted a lump of sugar from the bowl with a tiny pair of tongs and dropped it into his tea. “It depends on how sentimental you are. Me, I am very tenderhearted. I loved my family and missed them for ages after the change. But Dona, for instance, he probably never looked back. His family had abandoned him when he was a little boy, for being a catamite,” Alejandro said, dropping his voice to a whisper on the last few words, even though we were all sodomites in this house. “His life was full of deprivation and uncertainty. Lynchings. Starvation. Imprisonment. No, I don’t imagine he has any regrets.”

“I don’t think my pain will ever fade. My child is gone! I want my child back. I want my life back.”

“You can never have your child back, you know that,” he said gently, stroking my arm. “But why, my dear, would you want your old life back? From what you have told me, you have nothing to return to: your family threw you out. They abandoned you in your time of need.
I see nothing to regret leaving behind.” Alejandro stared into me with his dark, gentle eyes, as though he could summon the answer from my heart. “In times of trouble, we often want to go back to the familiar. That will go away.”

“Well, there is one thing …,” I murmured.

He leaned forward, eager for my confession.

“A friend. I miss a particular friend.”

Alejandro was, as he’d said, a tender soul who loved nostalgia. He squeezed his eyes shut, like a cat sitting in the warmth of the sun on a windowsill, eager to drink in my story. “It’s always the people you miss the most. Tell me about this friend.”

Since I’d left St. Andrew, I tried as hard as possible not to think about Jonathan. It was beyond my ability not to think of him at all, so I allowed myself only short indulgences, such as a few minutes before falling asleep, when I’d recall the feel of his warm, flushed cheek pressed against mine, the way my spine tingled when he circled his hands around my corseted waist, claiming me for his own. It was hard enough to control my emotions when Jonathan was only a ghost on the fringes of my memory: to recall him directly was painful. “I can’t. I miss him too much,” I told Alejandro.

Alejandro leaned back. “This friend means everything to you, doesn’t he? He is the love of your life. He was the father of your child.”

“Yes,” I said. Alejandro waited for me to go on, his silence like a string tugging at me, until I obliged. “His name is Jonathan. I’ve been in love with him since we were children. Most people would say that he was too good to end up with me. His family owns the town where I lived—it’s not big or wealthy, but everyone there depends on Jonathan’s family to survive. And then there is his great beauty.” I blushed. “You must think me a terribly shallow person …”

“Not at all!” he said amicably. “No one is immune to the sway of beauty. But truly, Lanore, how beautiful could he be? Think of Dona, for instance. So striking that he enchanted one of the greatest artists in Italy. Is he more beautiful than Dona?”

“If you met Jonathan, you’d understand. He would make Dona look like a troll.”

That made Alejandro chuckle; none of us liked Dona very much—he was so vain he was nearly intolerable. “You must not let Dona hear you say that! Very well, then—what about Adair? Is he not a handsome fellow? Have you ever seen eyes like his? They are like a wolf ’s …”

“Adair has a certain charm.”
An animal charm
, I thought, though I didn’t say it aloud. “But there is no comparison, Alej. Believe me. But—it’s of no consequence. I’ll never see him again.”

Alejandro patted my hand. “Don’t say that. You don’t know—you may.”

“I can’t imagine going home, not now. Isn’t it as Adair said in his story? How would I explain it to them?” I scoffed.

“There are ways … You couldn’t live among them again. No, that would be out of the question, but a brief visit … if you stayed only a short while …” He toyed with his lower lip, contemplative.

“Don’t raise my hopes. It’s too cruel.” Tears pressed at my eyes. “Please, Alejandro, I need to rest. I have a terrible headache.”

He pressed his fingers to my forehead briefly. “No fever … Tell me, this headache, does it feel like a constant prickling in the back of your mind?” I nodded. “Yes? Well, my dear, you’d best get used to it. That is not a headache: that is part of the gift. You are connected to Adair now.”

“Connected to Adair?” I repeated.

“There is a bond between you two, and that sensation is a reminder of that bond.” He leaned toward me conspiratorially. “Remember how I said that you were changed only in one way, that you were not magical? Well, we are a bit magical, just a little bit. Sometimes I think we are like animals, you know? You must have noticed how everything seems a little brighter, how you can hear the tiniest noise, how every odor stings so sharply at your nose? That is part of the gift: the transformation makes us
better
. We are enhanced. You will hear
a voice from a long way away and know who is coming to visit, you can detect the aroma of sealing wax and know a person has a letter hidden on them. You will cease to notice these powers in time, but to others it will seem like you are a mind reader, that you are magic!

“The second thing you must know is that you will no longer feel pain. It has to do with the ability not to die, I think. You will not feel the sharpness of hunger or thirst. Oh, it takes time for the reflex, the expectation that one must eat and drink, to go away … But you could fast for weeks and not feel hunger gnawing at your stomach, or become weak and faint. You could be run over by a charging horse and feel little more than slight discomfort where you might have a broken bone, but the pain will go away in minutes as the bone heals itself. It’s as though you are now made of earth and wind, and can repair yourself at will.” His words made me shiver with recognition. “And this connection to Adair, the needling in your brain, is a reminder of this power because only he can make you like a mortal again. At his hands, and only his hands, you feel pain. But any damage he causes you to suffer will be temporary, unless he chooses otherwise. He can
will
anything on you, pain, disfigurement, death.
By his hand and intent.
Those are the words he uses in the spell. Those are the words that bind you to him.”

I put a hand to my abdomen; he was right about pain. The muted throbbing I’d felt in my purged womb had disappeared entirely.