Unbitten (22 page)

“Hello, big boy,” she said, rubbing his muzzle
the way he liked her to. “Hey Thierry, you have any
treats around here? Some apples or carrots or anything like
that?”

“Drogo, his favorite thing is dates,” said
Thierry, trotting back to the room that held bins of oats
and other food.

“Dates, huh?” Jo said to the horse. “What
exotic tastes you have.”

“Well, he is Arabian, after all,” said Thierry,
already back with a handful of dates. “It is a native
food for him.”

Jo held a date out in the flat of her hand and Drogo
reached his big rubbery lips over and snatched it right up.
She could see the gratitude in his eyes.

“Hey Thierry,” said Jo.

“Yes,
Mademoiselle?
”

“Why don’t you ride with us today? I’m
going to the bridle path, not too far, just to warm up. And
later I thought I would work in the ring. But I’d
like the company, if you’re up for it.”

Thierry grinned and took off for the tack room, shouting
over his shoulder that he wouldn’t be a minute.

David was in his bedroom, but he was not sleeping. He had
called down to the kitchen and asked for some chamomile
tea, even though herbs were known to have unpredictable
effects on vampires. In moments of stress, however,
David–and Henri and Pierre, and probably most other
vampires as well–often went back to their old,
pre-vampire habits, even though those habits dated from
when they were children, perhaps centuries ago. And even
though doing so often backfired.

The tea did not turn out to be calming. He paced from one
end of his bedroom to the other, his slippered feet
crossing rugs and stone and more rugs. He wore a silk
dressing gown that kept slipping open, revealing his
muscular chest and flat belly.

“Why in
HELL
did I leave Jo
and go to the cottages?” he said out loud, not
worrying that anyone could hear through the thick walls.
“I have never even come close to drinking anyone out
like that. Not even close.”

David was thinking in many directions at once, looking for
someone or something, anything at all, to blame for the
situation he was in. And the irony was that all of the
stress and all of the upset made him want to find Jo and
bite her even more than before. If that were even possible!
He had gotten it in his head that she would soothe him,
that her blood would finally give him the calm he had
always wanted, the peace, the harmony with the world. He
was tired of always feeling so driven, never feeling
satisfied for more than a handful of minutes before having
to charge off to the next thing.

Jo was the closest he could get to his beloved horses, for
one thing. And her attention and her desire for him were so
addictive; the more he got, the more he wanted.

He flopped into his English arm chair with the moiré
stripes. Gingerly, he thought for just a few moments about
the hour before dawn, when he had taken the girl from New
Hampshire into the forest and given her body to the
witches. They had cackled like something out of a horror
movie, he thought with a shudder. Or maybe cackle
wasn’t the word. It was a bird noise they made, a
terrible, predatory bird noise. He closed his eyes, wanting
that sound wiped from his brain.

His mother was the only person he knew who ever really had
much contact with the witches. She used to go into the
forest all the time as a girl, on horseback and on foot,
because she loved birds and especially the birds of the
deep forest. He wasn’t sure whether she had met the
witches, or even known about them, before her husband had
sealed her fate as a vampire. But either way, Antoinette,
his mother, had made it very clear to everyone at the
Château that they were not to be disturbed or
bothered in any way, and left to do whatever it was they
did in respectful seclusion.

Which would have been fine, and was fine, in the old days
when the Château was private and anyone who worked
there was local. But now David had other concerns. He
couldn’t have paying guests out strolling and running
into them. He couldn’t trust them not to sneak up and
try to pluck the guests’ hair or snip off bits of
their clothing or any of the other socially unacceptable,
not to say totally creepy, things he had seen them do.

They had powers, he knew that much. He was afraid of them.

And really, why was he complaining about them when they had
just saved his ass?

He had run down the bridle path at a truly remarkable
speed. The girl’s blood had not been run of the mill,
no. It had given him a surge like he had never felt before.
He was already like a super-concentrated
human–stronger, faster, more of everything. And the
New England girl’s blood had pushed him another
twenty degrees beyond that. Like something out of a comic
book. His mind had been going faster than it ever had,
thoughts upon tumbling thoughts, lightning speed,
hyper-aware of everything around him.

When he had gotten close to the hut he stopped and
listened. He tried to think of everything his mother had
told him about the witches’ habits, but he
couldn’t remember much. He was intensely nervous that
they wouldn’t be interested in the body. Or worse,
that they would sound an alarm somehow, and the next thing
would be Tristan Durant coming at him with handcuffs.

But he needn’t have worried that they wouldn’t
be interested.

They were interested, oh yes.

First, that wolf came around. A pet, maybe? He came up
to me sniffing, and grumbling, walking around and around
me. I think it may have nibbled a little
on…something.

David absent-mindedly took a gulp of tea.

Can’t think about this anymore.

I really should go talk to Mother. Someday very soon, I
will go visit her, he said to himself, or rather lied to
himself, which was a little odd since he did not fool
himself for a second, yet nevertheless made the effort to
lie.

He walked over to the bed and stretched out, then pulled
out his cell phone and texted his brother, not for the
first time, that an absolute blockbuster moneymaker would
be something to cure vampire insomnia. This not being able
to sleep was the worst thing ever. Sleep was the only time
he was free of the yearning to bite Jo, and he
couldn’t get there no matter what he did.

Henri had considered going straight back to Mourency after
his last conversation with Claudine. The idea of developing
Hemo-Yum for
labrim
had so taken hold of him that
he could think of nothing else. He was still struggling to
understand how he had failed to see the most obvious thing,
that
labrim
must always drink from male vampires,
who generally did not like being bitten. Which meant that a
synthetic product they could use instead would mean
independence, and the freedom to live by themselves if they
wanted to. It would mean many more
labrim
would
live to adulthood–an untalked-about scandal of the
vampire world was that so many young
labrim
starved to death for lack of any male willing to allow
himself to be bitten.

Henri could change all that. And possibly he could improve
his poor mother’s life as well, if it wasn’t
too late.

He stuck around in Paris, walking the streets in his
anti-sun outfit, attracting some attention but unaware of
it, turning the problems over and over and upside down in
his mind. Eventually he wandered back to Montparnasse and
caught a train home.

He walked home from the station under a slight moon, just a
fingernail clipping of a moon, thirsty, and very much
looking forward to getting to work in his lab. He was so
hungry and thirsty and work-obsessed that he stopped off at
the kitchen and grabbed a bag of Hemo-Yum for himself, to
have at the lab while he worked.

“No dinner?” said Marcel, his face falling.

“Not tonight, dear Marcel. I’m sure whatever
you made is lovely. But my work –”

“You are spending too much time with
Americans,” Marcel said sadly. “They work too
hard, don’t take time…”

“Americans? I don’t think I even know any
Americans,” said Henri.

Marcel laughed. “Head in the cabbages!” he
said. “You don’t remember the girl who was
riding on the moped with you last week?”

“Oh,” said Henri. He reached over to a basket
full of leftover croissants and picked one out. “Yes,
of course I remember her,” he said, with a warm
smile. “All right then, see you later.”

Henri headed down the path to the lab, eating the stale
croissant without noticing that he was eating it. He pulled
the bag of Hemo-Yum out of his pocket–Highland
Lassie, another ridiculous flavor–stuck in a straw,
and began to suck. At first he was remembering Jo, simply
picturing her, how she had looked that afternoon, how her
face lit up when she saw him coming on the moped. He dwelt
on that smile for some time, smiling to himself at the
memory. And then, inexorably, his thoughts turned to work.
There were several especially knotty problems with the
labri
version of Hemo-Yum, and for some of them he
didn’t even have a beginning of an approach to
solving them.

When Henri was working like this, his mind was so engaged,
so completely taken up by whatever problem he was trying to
solve, that physical realities such as where he was walking
and the weather and who was nearby simply did not register.

He did not see Jo coming the other way on the path, back
from the barn. He did not think to put his Hemo-Yum back in
his pocket before they met. And Jo, for her part, was
exhausted from her long day of riding, eating lunch with
Thierry while talking horses, doing barn chores to keep
herself busy, and then more riding. She was walking along
looking at the white pebbles in the path, her mind
blissfully blank thanks to plain old tiredness.

They did not smack into each other, but just barely.

“Henri!” said Jo. “You surprised
me!”

“I’m sorry, Jo,” said Henri, putting a
hand on her forearm. “I didn’t mean to startle
you. I was thinking some things over and lost track of
where I was,” he said, a bit ruefully. Then he
thought about the Hemo-Yum and rather gracefully slid it
into his jacket pocket, hoping it wouldn’t stain.

He made a mental note: work on bloodstain removers. Vampire
market could be immense.

“And did you have a lovely ride?” he asked,
interested in her answer.

“Wonderful,” she said, and smiled at him.

He noticed that her green eyes were the color of the ferns
in the forest. And that her skin was glowing from exertion.
Without intending to, he leaned forward just a little,
inhaling her smell.

They stood there, neither one able to think of what to say
next, but not ready to go their separate ways. They
strained for words. But came up with nothing.

“Well,” said Henri, finally. “I’m
afraid I have to get back to work.”

“This late?” asked Jo. “And you’ve
been in Paris, is that right? How was your trip?” She
rolled her eyes at herself for coming up with such lame
conversation, but at least it was something.

“Invigorating,” he said. “I love my
work,” he said, looking into Jo’s face, and
meeting her fern-green eyes as though he really wanted her
to understand this about him.

“Same,” said Jo, grinning. “I would be
lost without my horses.”

With that, the conversation sagged again. They looked down
and Jo dragged the heel of her boot through the gravel,
making an arc.

Why is it that people can be so hard to talk to, even when
you want to talk to them? she wondered.

“I have so much to do, so I’ll say good
night,” said Henri, “I’m off to the
lab.”

When Jo was well down the path and no one else was in
sight, Henri carefully took out the Hemo-Yum and finished
it up. Not so sure about Highland Lassie, he thought.
It’s a little thin. Needs a bit more, let’s
see, voluptuousness. Yes, that’s it.