Revenants Abroad
Page 30
Two days later, Anne-Marie was more fully recovered and felt well enough to go shopping. Andrej went out onto the balcony to watch the sun set. It was still his favorite time of day, when he indulged himself in the moment, nothing needing his attention, and the coming stillness of the evening descended over him. It wasn’t his habit to reminisce, but deep down, buried under the debris of centuries of memories he tried to avoid, this time of day still brought on a feeling of comfort, going back to his own childhood. Except now he had a glass of scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. As if on cue to destroy the moment, Paimon walked out onto the balcony.
“I hope I didn’t startle you,” he said, although Andrej, without saying so, was pretty sure that had been his intent.
“Of course not, I felt your presence as soon as you got here,” he told him.
“Ah good. I see she’s not here. We need to talk about her conversion.”
“I thought that was on hold?”
“It is, but there are certain things you need to be aware of in any case.”
“All right.”
“We’re not sure she can be converted,” Paimon said.
Andrej looked at him, not sure he’d heard right. “What did you say?”
“Someone tried to convert her, long before you met her. She, somehow, managed to fight it off. Like a cold. Unsurprisingly, she’s wanted by your creator. This has never happened before, and he wants to know what it is about her that allowed her to resist.”
Andrej suddenly flashed back to the night he’d met Anne-Marie in the alley, when he’d tried to read her mind and couldn’t. That darkness in her mind that he had hesitated to probe further, the trauma in her past, was no doubt the attack by some other vampire that had been closed off from her conscious memory. That she had wandered into the path of a second vampire defied the odds.
“Then what was all that about wanting to convert her?”
“A second attempt needs to be made,” Paimon said.
Andrej considered this silently for a moment. “You thought someone older, stronger, might be able to make the change in her?”
“It’s worth investigating. Which is why you will be allowed to be the one to try.”
“So this never had anything to do with her being some kind of threat to us, did it?”
“Yes it did, partly. If our enemies were to find out about her apparent ability to prevent being converted to a vampire, they would no doubt try to harness that for their own purposes, to find new, more effective ways to destroy your kind. Whether she would aid them willingly or otherwise is not the issue.”
“She told me you said the decision had been postponed. Why?”
Paimon nearly smiled. “These crusaders, as you like to call them, don’t appear to be as much of a threat as they would like to think they are.”
“Are you sure? It almost seems there may be even more of them than we originally thought. They’re networked and well connected. Quite frankly, I’m getting tired of worrying about them.”
“Then you should leave Prague, as soon as possible. Constantly engaging and eliminating them is going to draw undue attention, as well as escalate their responses.”
“I don’t like letting them dictate where I can go,” Andrej said, staring up at the night sky as if looking for an answer written in the stars.
“Wishing for the moon again, are you? You know what they are, how they think.”
“All right, but there’s no rush for me to try to convert Anne-Marie, is there?” he said.
“No, there’s not. If you can be out of Prague within the week, it should throw them off for awhile. I also suggest you adopt a new name, a new identity wherever you go. They can track this one too easily.”
Andrej hated that idea more than having to leave Prague. He had occasionally bothered to use an alias over the years, while he felt the constancy of his own name was the one thing that anchored him, kept him whole.
“Anne-Marie’s on her way back,” Andrej said, sensing her approach.
“Think about what I’ve said.” Paimon made one of his hasty exits as Andrej considered these things.
A week later, the three of them—Andrej, Anne-Marie, and Neko—stood at the airport in Toronto, waiting for a taxi to take them to their new home. Anne-Marie had argued against it at first, not wanting to go back to the town where her only relative, her older brother, was a police detective. In the end Andrej persuaded her it would do, at least temporarily. Still, she decided not to contact him until after their arrival, when they were settled in and she could see him alone, without him arriving at her new home and running into either Andrej or Neko. Trying to explain to him why she was there under an assumed name would take more explaining than she cared to go into.
“Ok, for the next few months anyway, we put aside our real names and go only by the new ones, even when we’re alone. We don’t want any missteps to give ourselves away,” Andrej reminded them as they stood at the curb, waiting for their luggage to be brought up from the car.
Anne-Marie glanced down at her passport. ‘Eden Gray’ read the name. She sighed, “This won’t be easy.”
Andrej smiled and put his arm around her. “Sure it will, just like acting a part. It’ll be fun, you’ll see.” He was remarkably cheerful, under the circumstances. Then again, he’d been going through this routine for a long time. Andrej and Neko had chosen names of old friends who had died long ago: Andrej would assume the identity of James Marceau, andNeko would become Max Hartmann. He thought the more twists and deviations from their real lives, the better for now.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll manage.”
“You know, I’m really proud of you. You’ve had an awful lot thrown at you over the last couple years, and instead of expecting the world to reorder itself to suit you, you’ve managed to adapt incredibly well.”
“I second that,” Neko said.
“Well, life’s never been a bowl of cherries, has it?” she said.
Andrej puffed on a cigarette. In general he had no quarrel with fate. He was beyond the need to rail against what was, but he had had lifetimes to learn to adapt. This was a new game to her, and that sort of adaptability could take at least one lifetime to acquire. If things kept on the way they were going, it looked like she was going to have that time.
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