“No,” he says. “I would never do that to you, even if you asked me.”
“But, when you take my blood?”
“I won’t.”
“I’m the only person out here, Ben! Or are you going to grab a snack or something whenever you sneak into town?” I ask.
“No,” Ben says. “I don’t take from humans anymore. I haven’t for a few years now. Just animals.”
The image of him embracing another person right before coming to me fades, to be replaced by a mental image of him chasing down a raccoon or something in the woods. The absurdity of that new image calms me a little bit, but can’t quite let myself draw close to him again.
“I have to eat just like you do,” he says. “It’s no different, and I’ll do it where you can’t see it.”
“It’s just hard for me to imagine,” I say.
Ben laughs.
“What?” I ask.
“You’re taking longer to get over the fact that I drink animal blood instead of human than the fact that I’m more than a hundred years old and have been involved in some war or another for most of that time.”
“I’ve been hunting. I know what it’s like to see an animal bleed, and I have never looked at that and thought about taking a big drink. That’s as quick that I know. I can’t even begin to figure out how to deal with the rest, so I’m setting it aside until I can work out how to process it.”
“Fair enough,” Ben says. He shifts a bit on the bed and opens his arms to invite me to come closer again.
I slowly accept his offer. “What did you mean when you told me you wouldn’t turn me even if I asked?”
“Life as a vampire is not pleasant. I have gotten many more years than I would have otherwise, but very, very few of them have been happy.”
“But you keep going on?” I ask.
“I keep going on. None of them have been so terrible that I’ve felt ending it all would be better. But there’s really been no hope in me that things will turn around, that someday I’ll find out how to be happy as a vampire. It’s a strange place to be, neither content nor truly unhappy. Just sitting in some dim and dreary place between,” Ben says.
He runs a finger through my hair. “Even after having found love, real and genuine love, for the first time, I can’t even keep you warm at night. I can’t walk in the sun with you. I can’t sit back and enjoy a fine meal with you. There are so many things I will never be able to give you.”
“If I ever develop a taste for your diet, we could dine together,” I say.
My little joke seems to put him at ease for a bit.
“Maybe tomorrow, before bed you could go out and hunt?” I ask. “Just enough to make a little bit of heat.”
“I can do that,” Ben says.
“There is one thing you could do for me that no warm man will ever be able to,” I tell him.
“What’s that?”
“Since you can read in darkness, go to the living room and get a book of poetry, and read some to me while I fall asleep.”
*****
Morning finds me waking to the scent of coffee, and Ben’s footsteps inside the cabin. It’s not the same as Grandma treading on that one squeaky step on the way upstairs, but there seems to be one board somewhere in the kitchen that has a little bit of a creak to it.
I crawl out from under the covers, and find my clothes neatly folded on a small side table in the bedroom. I pick up just a tiny scent of fresh soap on them, and they have that little bit of stiffness of clothes that have been dried on a line.
“Can you write down your clothing sizes for me?” Ben asks, when I get to the kitchen. “I don’t want to go near your house tonight, and quite frankly, I’d feel really weird going through your closets and drawers anyways, so I’ll go into Grantham tomorrow night to do some shopping.”
“And here I was hoping that the first time a guy bought me underwear it would be something really sexy he’d like to see me in.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Ben says. “There is one of those adult stores not far from here.”
“Not very practical for living out here, though.”
“The kinds of underthings sold at such stores aren’t practical for anything,” Ben says, setting breakfast in front of me. “But people buy them anyways.”
“Stick with practical for now, please,” I say. I see a little bit of disappointment in his eyes at that, but he seems to accept it.
I finish up my breakfast, and this time insist on helping him do the dishes. I want to be able to take care of things whenever he’s away from the cabin. I’m also getting a little stir crazy already, with just books and conversation for entertainment. I’m missing my piano terribly, and am starting to worry about my friends. I always talk to Kate and Nathan several times a day, I used to with Carl, too. They have certainly figured out something is wrong by now. I’d be very surprised if they hadn’t been by the house already to check on me when I hadn’t responded to any texts, emails, or calls for two full days now. I can only trust that Grandma knew enough from my message I’d sent to reassure them that I was Ok.
She’s probably beside herself with worry, too. All she knows is that I’m on the run with Ben, apparently for my own safety, and nothing more.
I am starting to feel very cramped in the cabin, so I decide to go out and walk around the woods.
Chapter Sixteen
Nathan Marsh
It has been two days since Ben and Ivy ran off, and I have completely lost track of them. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If Ben managed to get the two of them hidden well enough neither Emily nor I know where they are, hopefully the hunter is off their scent as well.
On the subject of the hunter, since I presume Ben and Ivy are safe, I want to make sure they stay that way. I have spent a good amount of time driving around keeping my eyes open for her motorcycle, and have even asked a few enthusiasts I know if they have seen it around town lately, to no avail. None of the hotels in the area have had a guest matching her description.
The next best course of action is to go back to her home. Another fast, lights-out trip up to Pangbourne, Wyoming in the small hours of the night. I find the hunter’s house easily, just after midnight. There is a small amount of heat coming from a few plugged-in appliances. There is a computer inside that seems to be actively running, but I can detect no sign of the vampire at all. Feeling confident that she is nowhere around, I completely shed my mortal shell, all the better to move freely and undetected by any mundane and physical devices she has around the house. This also gives me significant advantage in locating her other monitors and countermeasures.
Magic, however, is the one tool they have against my kind, if she were knowledgeable and strong enough to use it effectively against me. Magical barriers can be created to completely deny me access, or to alarm to my presence. Any attempts she has made, or has had others make for her, to keep my kind off of her property are weak and old. The strongest, by far, is a protective circle I can detect down in the basement, probably in the room she sleeps in during the day.
At this point I pause, and ponder. I can go in and search through her home leaving as little trace as possible, do everything I can to leave her no evidence I was ever anywhere near here, see if I can figure out where she has gone and go confront her there.
Or, I can come in like a herd of intoxicated bison, my full and true self bright and powerful. Leave her no doubt at all that her circles have been crossed, her home entered, her secrets revealed. The more power I show, the louder her alarm blares, the more she will understand the danger I represent to her. But would that overdo it? Would that push her to something that would increase the danger for Ivy?
Unlike me, the hunter was once mortal. Perhaps I need a mortal’s perspective. I drift back to my car, reassume my mortal form, and dial my phone.
“Any news?” is the first thing Emily asks when she picks up.
“None,” I say. I fill her in quickly on my attempts to locate Ben, Ivy, and the hu
nter since we’d last spoke.
“Before you go any further,” Emily says, “Stop looking for Ivy. I need Carl to back off, too. As long as we don’t know where the hunter is, it might be using one of us to find them. Ben got a sense that she could use Carl to find them. If they don’t already know that you and Ivy are close, they will know soon.
“That is wise advice,” I tell her. “I would like some more. I am at the hunter’s home right now. I see no sign she has been here since the day before Ben and Ivy left. She has a small amount of weak warding and alarm. Do I trigger it all or not? Will it panic her and throw her off her hunt, or will it make her unpredictable and more dangerous?”
“What do you sense?” Emily asks.
“I can get no sense on this count. These paths are all hidden from me.”
“My first instinct is to be silent for now. Leave no trace, but find out what information you can. Alarming her this close to her narrowing in on Ben and Ivy, and with Carl in the mix, would make it undeniable that Ivy is something valuable. It would come to the direct attention of old Mihai Racoviță, and these mountains would be crawling with Negre within a day.”
“Do you suspect they still think they’re just after Ben for now?”
“Until you told me she’d found Carl’s house, I think they did. It’s not going to take long for them to learn that there is a triangle between Ben, Carl, and Ivy, and they’ll need to reconsider everything then. If they get any hint at all that you are involved as well, Papa Racoviță will certainly get personally involved.”
“If it did not put Ivy in the position of being bait, it would be a golden opportunity to take Racoviță. No matter the greater good, though, I would never use Ivy that way.”
“I’d have put wards on her like you wouldn’t believe if I ever thought you would,” Emily says.
“Thank you for the bit of clarity,” I tell her. “And thank you for still not binding me with what you know about Ivy.” When I first met Emily, many years ago, before the birth of her own daughter – Ivy’s mother – she had told me that she had received a prophecy about her yet unborn granddaughter. But as I have mentioned before, never ask a witch what she sees in the future. It is very hard to simply walk toward the inevitable end without suffering great harm along the way.
“Don’t call me again tonight unless it absolutely can’t wait. Let’s keep our communications to only what is necessary. Find out what you can, and I will get in touch when I have something more to share.”
I bid Emily a good night, and decide to maintain my mortal shape. Now that I have gotten a good sense of her home and its protections, I will be able to work around them easy enough, without accidentally triggering anything targeted at my true nature.
I first take a look into the garage, since I have already been there. Only the motorcycle is gone. The weapons hidden inside the tool cases of the truck and one of the ATVs are still stowed. A shelf holding camping gear shows a few shadows in the dust, where some small items were recently removed. Judging by other items on those shelves – her organization system is strict and impeccable – it looks like a small backpacking tent and a sun proof tarp were among the items she took.
Leaving the garage, I take a moment to defeat the locks on the door to the house. The interior is as uncluttered and orderly as the garage. Since I know what I am looking at, it is clear that the kitchen has been carefully staged, with a couple of dishes out on the counter, coffee maker and teapot, bread box, paper napkins in a dispenser. It looks exactly how the kitchen of a neat freak would look if they slipped a bit and did not put their cereal bowl directly into the dishwasher after breakfast. Even the trash can has things in it, but I notice none of it is perishable. The empty soup can at the top of the bin, carefully rinsed, has an expiration date on it three years in the past.
In the living room, there is a television, hooked to a satellite receiver with a remote control on the coffee table. The computer is the item I am most interested in. The monitor is switched off, but the LED on the front panel of the tower, and the indicators on the wireless modem, are both active. I realize there is another electronic box beside the modem, also with rapidly blinking LEDs. A little poking about, and digging up my admittedly weak knowledge of modern technology, and I see she is running her own web server. I find myself wishing I could find decent cover to bring one of my classmates up and let him go at it. Then I realize that this is a Negre hunter, and that there are probably layers of security on it that would rival what the governments of many nations are capable of. On the other hand, one thing I have learned during my time in Stokers Mill is to never underestimate this generation of young people.
Unfortunately, the desk with the computer on it is devoid of any paper, or even of a pen. I start searching the house, and despite the fact that I had seen her with a paper map on her motorcycle, there are none inside, no notes anywhere. In my search, I find a bedroom up on the main floor of the small house, as carefully arranged as the living room and kitchen to give an illusion of a normal life. Down in the basement is a laundry area that looks like it does receive actual use. From what I recall of the protections I had seen from outside the house, the most powerful protective circle should be located about five feet beyond a blank cinder block wall, right behind the clothes dryer. However, just to the left of the clothes dryer is a wooden hutch containing laundry detergent and several racks of home canned vegetables and fruit. I wonder exactly how old they are?
It is the process of only a little bit of examination to locate first the hidden hinges behind the hutch, and then the catch on the other side that would release it. I remember my conversation with Emily, about being as careful as possible to leave absolutely no trace. This close to a reasonably proper protective circle, I dare not tap into my nature to see what sorts of physical protections or indicators may lie behind the secret door. I take a moment to consider, and decide that whatever is behind that door is not so vital yet as to risk revealing myself before Emily has had time to consider the matter further, or set things up so that it will not matter.
Regretfully, I leave the house with no new information, no new insights into this hunter, except that she must keep any information that is important strictly digital, probably stored on a mobile device and accessible while offline, considering how much of the area around Stokers Mill has extremely tenuous connectivity.
At least I have no information that I am dying to tell Emily. She can wait a few days to hear nothing.
The next most productive thing for me to do is to see if anybody has been by Ivy and Emily’s home since they both left town. I make my way to their place, yet again indulging in my recent habit of parking far down the road. Since I will not be near the vampire’s home and anything she has set up, I drop the mortal body again and go fully into my true self. It takes just a short leap and a handful of wing beats to get me high up into the air, and just a handful of seconds to be over the house. I can pick out the harsh glow of Emily’s personal circle and the one she shares with Ivy. Both have powerful permanent protections that are regularly recharged, so they are potent, powerful, and painful for me to even look at. Ivy’s circle has a much weaker degree of protection around it. She does not do the kind of work there that would require such firm boundaries. Using the raptor qualities of my eyes, I look for motorcycle tracks on the property, footprints where none should be, any easy and physical evidence that the hunter has been near the house. Finding nothing on that first pass, I shift my perceptions to different qualities, tapping into the memories of the grass, trees, and stones. This gives very little detail, but some loose impressions. When people live somewhere, they and the land adapt to each other. There is a familiarity that each has for the other that over time leaves very little trace.
Strangers on land look at it all differently, process it differently, react to it differently than people who know that land. The land picks this up and retains a thin patina of that unfamiliarity. If you listen to enough small things, you can find en
ough of them that tell you the same thing. If I were standing on a spot where a stranger to the land had stood, looking in the same direction, with the senses I am using now, I would know it beyond any shadow of a doubt. To try and survey for such from the air is a less certain and more subtle process. I eventually find Ben’s track from where he had picked Ivy up for their first date a few days ago, because I know Ben and I know how he feels when he is around Ivy. From there, I see if I can detect anything like Ben that has been nearby. Now that I know what the leaves and twigs and soil calls Ben, I can listen for parts of it that have seen something like Ben.
I am only partially comforted that I have found no evidence of another vampire. For as little as I rely on this sense, I cannot guarantee that it is the absence of a vampire as much as it is my inability to detect one from a distance.
I look to the sky, and realize that if I leave right now, I will be back home in time to sneak back into my room again before anybody knows I spent the night away. But with Ivy’s safety at stake, I decide it is better to bear the trouble I will get with my family than to be the good little foster son. Kate will have to pointedly eat my breakfast in the direction of my empty seat at the table this morning instead of having her own hot and waiting for her.
I land as close to the shared circle as I dare get to its protective barrier, and mentally go over the layout of the property. The hunter has very definite skills on riding her motorcycle off road, but most of the ridgeline would be completely inaccessible to her. Only the top tier riders on bikes so specialized they are completely impractical for the road would be able to approach up the ridge from the highway below. She may have opted to drive past the house on the road as she did when she was sniffing out Carl, maybe stopping near it to feign a break or a check of directions so she could scout the place a little bit more. That would be pretty much impossible for me to detect under any circumstances. Road traffic blends into itself so anonymously so quickly.
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