In the Dark

by PG Forte

  “It’s like we thought,” Armand answered, crossing again to the chair in which he’d been seated earlier, just perching on the edge of it, this time. “She’s gone home with Brennan. They’re down the street in his apartment…eating ice cream.”

  “Ice cream?” Conrad swallowed another mouthful of blood from the vinyl bag in his hand as he thought about it. Just like anyone raised human might do. Damian must be so proud.

  “Did you want to send someone over there to keep an eye on them?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Conrad said, keeping his voice deliberately casual. “Do you?”

  Armand shrugged. “Not really. I mean, why? He’s only human. So, aside from the possibility of brain freeze, it’s not like she could get hurt.”

  Finding the bag in his hand was already drained, Conrad reached for another from the stack on the table and quickly bit into it, hoping to hide the bitterness in his expression. It was true that humans could never hope to best vampires physically, but where in the world had Armand gotten the idea they could not inflict emotional damage? He certainly didn’t get the idea from me.

  He couldn’t say he was too surprised by Julie’s choice, however. “She seemed somewhat disenchanted with vampires tonight. Is this something new for her?”

  “I don’t know.” For a moment, Armand hung his head. He looked miserable at the thought. “I guess…maybe it is. And, I’m sorry for my part in that, Conrad, I know I overreacted. But, when I saw you like that, I really thought…”

  “I know.”

  “What happened to you?” Armand asked, rushing to get the words out. “I mean, mon Dieu, you looked so awful at first…and where have you been all this time? Damian kept trying to tell me you didn’t wish to be disturbed, but I knew he was up to something and…I mean, clearly, that was all just lies. Wasn’t it?”

  Conrad shook his head, brushing the question aside. Marc had already forced him to say more than he wanted to about the subject. Enough was enough. “I don’t wish to speak of it tonight. Let’s just say that I was paying the price for some old sins.”

  A frown creased Armand’s forehead. “But—”

  “Not tonight,” Conrad repeated tiredly. Tomorrow, perhaps, he could start thinking up a plausible story to explain where he’d been. Tomorrow he could start trying to determine whether this latest threat to the twins’ safety had been eliminated—or merely postponed. But, tonight…tonight he just wanted to forget.

  “Is it true what she said—Julie I mean. Did they really save you?”

  “Yes.” Conrad reached for another bag. He didn’t want it—the taste was bland, flavorless, impersonal. Without savor. Without heat. But his body demanded nourishment, so he drank it anyway.

  “I would have done the same, you know,” Armand murmured quietly. “I mean, if I’d known. And if I could have…”

  “I know you would.” Conrad smiled at him. “And I thank you for that, mon cher.”

  Armand sat back a little in his chair, his face troubled. “They’re very secretive, these twins of yours. They wouldn’t tell any of us a single thing about themselves. Nothing at all about what they were up to, or where they’d come from. And…if they’re really not Damian’s spawn, then tell me, how is it they have such a bond with him?”

  A whispering coldness encircled Conrad’s heart. Was this normal curiosity, or something more? “They’re not Damian’s,” he insisted firmly. “You will wipe the idea from your mind, Armand, and forget you ever heard it. I don’t know why he finds it so amusing to play these little games of his, but this one ends now. The twins are mine. That’s all you, or anyone else, ever need know about them.”

  “Oui. Je comprends,” Armand replied, staring glumly at the floor. “But, there’s more to the story than that, isn’t there? Something else you’re not telling me.”

  Conrad sighed. “Suffice it to say there are certain things you’re better off not knowing.”

  Armand’s eyes were tinged with pain when he raised them to meet Conrad’s gaze. “You used to trust me.”

  “I still trust you, mon ami, but some knowledge is too dangerous to share. I don’t wish to see you hurt.”

  “Ah, merci.” If possible, Armand looked even more wounded than before. “Apparently, then, you don’t mind if Damian gets hurt. That must be what you’re saying, n’est pas? Because I feel certain he is in your confidence.”

  Conrad shook his head. “I assure you, I would much rather have kept both of you out of this. It was unavoidable that he be told some of it. But, even he knows less than he thinks he does.Now, if you don’t mind, Armand, I think I’d like to get some rest.”

  “D’accord.” Nodding, Armand got to his feet. “I could stay with you, if you’d like it?” he asked hopefully.

  “No.” Conrad sighed. “Thank you, my dear, but this is one of those nights when I’m better off alone.”

  “As you wish then.” Armand shrugged and headed for the door, stopping to ask, “But, tell me, now that you’re back, will the twins be staying on here? Or will you be sending them back to…wherever it is you’ve been hiding them?”

  The idea startled Conrad. He hadn’t really thought that far ahead. Now that he had… Damn you, Damian. I wonder if this wasn’t part of your plan all along? “They’ll be staying,” he told Armand firmly. “Right here.” Where I can keep my eyes on them.

  A small smile lightened Armand’s features. “Tres bon. That will be nice. Perhaps things are looking up then, after all, no?” Then he turned toward the door, once again, and left.

  Conrad watched him go with mixed feelings. Despite Armand’s obvious interest in the girl, he seemed not to have made the connection yet between Julie and her mother. He was not likely to miss seeing something like that forever. “And what shall I do about you then, my dear?” Conrad wondered. But there was no point in worrying about that tonight. He had enough to deal with, at the moment.

  He forced down another half bag of blood. It, too, did nothing to alleviate his body’s cravings, or succeed in washing the taste of Damian from either his mouth or his mind. That was hardly a surprise. After all, it had taken the better part of one hundred years to do it the first time—and that was with him gone.

  Reaching into his pocket, he took out the cloth Damian had thrown at him earlier. The sight of it, white linen, stained red with his lover’s blood, brought back memories of another place and time. Of a hospital room and a dying girl. Of another lost love. Another tragic mistake.

  “Ah, chérie. Ma pauvre petite,” he sighed. “I do miss you.” Still. Always. Just as he’d known he would. Hadn’t he told her, right at the start, that she was someone he could never forget? “It’s been harder than I think you could ever have realized keeping my promise to you, and yet I would have had it no other way.”

  He thought back again to the night she died, how he’d walked for hours through the city streets, his heart in pieces, with no thought at all as to where he was going, where he might end up. Plotting, planning, struggling to make sense of what had happened, trying to wrap his mind around the enormity of the task he was facing, feeling almost overwhelmed by the impossibility of it all…

  Vampires were made, not born. He knew that to be an indisputable fact. Pregnant women who were turned invariably lost their young. Their bodies either reabsorbed the fetal material or drained the unborn infants of their blood and expelled the desiccated husks. Desert Rose, or Suzanne, as he should probably call her, must have continued to ingest human food to ward off the change. She’d have had to resist the urge to feed on blood, resist her body’s demands that she complete what they’d started, that she become vampire.

  Had she realized what the end result of her actions must be? Had she known she was dooming herself to become a semi-willing host for the developing vampires she carried within her?

  She must have, he supposed. At least he hoped that was the case. He had to believe it was what she’d chosen because to think otherwise, to think that she
had somehow blundered to her death because he had failed in his responsibility to guide her…that was a torture he was not certain he could survive.

  But even this did not fully explain everything. For there was something else Conrad knew to be incontrovertible fact. Up until now, no human child had ever successfully been turned.

  No one knew why, exactly. Perhaps there was some element present within the vampire blood that overwhelmed the children’s more fragile systems. Or maybe it was something lacking in the children’s makeup, some vital component—a missing hormone, perhaps—that would only come with age, which rendered their bodies incompatible with the vampire life force and left them unable to complete the change.

  Though it had been tried many times over the centuries—for a variety of reasons, not all of them heinous—the results were invariably the same. Once the exchange of blood was completed, the children would go into their long sleep…but they would never wake up.

  How the twins could have survived was a mystery, one that was unlikely to ever be solved. Perhaps it had to do with their having been so young, so completely unformed at the time. Perhaps their developing bodies had somehow absorbed and incorporated the foreign cells rather than the other way around.

  Like all unexplained phenomena, Conrad knew their discovery could not help but engender fear, curiosity, speculation and greed. The children he’d seen in the hospital tonight were more than mere scientific oddities. By virtue of their very existence, they were creatures of myth and legend.

  Born vampires, so the stories said, would no doubt possess unimaginable abilities, unfathomed gifts. They were pre-ordained masters, destined for greatness. If allowed to mature, their power could someday make them invincible.

  It was silly to believe such things. They were childish notions, ridiculous fairy tales. They were nonsense. Conrad’s mind rebelled at the thought they could ever be true.

  Still, what wouldn’t some vampires do to gain access to such potential—or to eliminate it from the Earth, either for stability or safety’s sake, or for the common good? Even Conrad himself could see the wisdom of such an argument. Some gifts, some powers, some creatures were too dangerous to be allowed existence. If things had been different he’d have been among the first to concede that some sacrifices were necessary, some losses were unavoidable; that sometimes the innocent must pay for the sins of the greedy.

  But he’d given his word. He’d promised their mother he’d keep them alive and safe, if it cost him his life. Which it probably would.

  How was he even to go about accomplishing such a thing?

  Bringing up even one vampire child in secrecy would have been difficult enough, two raised the odds to very nearly impossible. In order to give them all even a fighting chance, he would have to leave San Francisco and start over somewhere he wasn’t known. It was doubly clear he would need help with the task. But to whom could he appeal for assistance?

  Not Armand. His feelings for the girl notwithstanding, Armand was too young, too green and far too stressed by the responsibilities Conrad had already pressed upon him. To ask anything more of the boy would be cruel and unfair, would lead to his death—to all their deaths. Besides, Armand lacked the proper temperament.

  Conrad knew only one person with enough reckless daring to even attempt such a thing. One person who possessed the confidence, cleverness and courage a stunt of this magnitude would require—and iron nerves with which to enjoy the charade. Someone who had cut his teeth on palace intrigue and could dissemble with the best. Who would look death in the face and yawn. Someone whose love for him was so great he would, without question, risk his life on what anyone could see was likely to be a fool’s mission…

  It was the last item on the list that had given Conrad pause. Certainly Damian had loved him like that once, but did he still? Could he ever again? It seemed highly doubtful.

  When he’d left Conrad’s House, all those years ago, still favoring his ruined shoulder, bitterness and hurt raging hotly in his midnight eyes, Damian had assured Conrad that all the love he’d ever felt for him had been destroyed. Every last green shoot had been uprooted, ripped from his heart and cast away.

  Even given Damian’s love for hyperbole, Conrad thought it likely that, in this instance at least, his words bore some small measure of truth, and he took it as inevitable that their long love affair was finally ended. What else was there to think? Hadn’t they both done the unforgivable?

  No matter how long he lived, or so Damian had sworn at the time, even if it verged on forever, he would still die cursing Conrad’s name with his very last breath. It was a scenario they’d come perilously close to enacting in the cavern tonight.

  Conrad shuddered at the recollection. It had been that thought, and possibly that thought alone, which had given him the strength to pull away, to release Damian’s throat when his body was demanding he drain him of every last drop.

  He would not be the instrument by which Damian’s prediction was allowed to come true. He would not let him go to his death cursing him in his heart—as Conrad had every reason to believe would have been the case. If that was to be the cost of his survival, Conrad would rather have died himself. The price was too high to bear and a waste besides, for the grief and the guilt would have killed him anyway.

  Now, pressing the bloody cloth to his nose, Conrad breathed in the scent of Damian’s blood, savoring the aroma. Mine, his heart insisted achingly. Mine. Mine.

  “Not mine,” he sighed, struggling to once again accept the bitter truth. He swallowed the rest of the bagged blood, and found it even more tasteless than before. “Not mine anymore.”

  That was over. Done with. Lost to him. Gone.

  Leaving his chair, he went to the window and looked out at the fading sky, the pale stars, the wizened moon. Men might say time heals all wounds, but vampires, with all the time in the world, knew better. Some wounds would never heal properly. Some losses could never be recovered. Some sins were past redemption, some mistakes beyond repair.

  As he drew the curtains closed, shutting out the approaching day, Conrad heaved a heavy sigh, recalling a morning, some forty years earlier, when he’d been awakened by a too-cheerful voice and a too-bright flood of sunshine in his eyes. He’d been so furious with her, and yet now…now he’d gladly trade a goodly portion of his remaining nights for just one more such morning. But not even forever was long enough to make that wish a reality.

  He took the cloth from his pocket and sniffed it again, thinking of all the mistakes he’d made in the past, all the mistakes he continued to make. So many mistakes, and most of them irreparable.

  But, perhaps, if he were very lucky, there might be a few he could put right. For, after all, while there’s life, there’s hope. It was that solitary thought with which he’d consoled himself twelve hundred years ago; tonight, it was still pretty much all he had to cling to.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  San Francisco, CA

  Monday, November, 3, 1969

  Damian stood on the sidewalk outside the gate of the Italianate Victorian mansion, staring irresolutely at the building before him, trying hard to quell the queasy nervousness he was feeling. So it had been a hundred and thirteen years since he’d last seen Conrad, was that any reason for him to be trembling inside like a virginal debutante hoping she’d be asked to dance? It wasn’t likely the man had changed. No doubt Conrad was still the same tyrant he’d always been. Short-tempered. Overbearing. Domineering. Ruthless…

  “So then why are you here, you fool?” he asked himself. Good question. Why had he dropped everything and rushed to Conrad’s side the minute the selfish bastard snapped his fingers? “You’re acting just like the good little lap dog he always wanted you to be.”

  But, the answer to that was obvious. He was here because it was Conrad who’d asked him to come. Conrad, who never forgot and never forgave and never took anyone back, who couldn’t possibly be reaching out to Damian now in hopes of reconciling with him…but who could
hardly have had any other reason for contacting him, either.

  “Idiot,” Damian chastised himself, as he leaned on the doorbell. After all this time, he should know better than to get his hopes up too high. He should have ignored the summons, pretended he’d never gotten the entirely too cryptic message and stayed at home.

  Ah, but that was the problem, wasn’t it? Because, however much he might wish it were otherwise, home was still exactly the same place it had always been for him. Wherever Conrad was.

  “Chi è esso?” Conrad’s rich baritone sounded exactly the same, as well—even despite the distortion caused by the intercom. “Who is it?”

  Damian’s heart contracted. He bit back a shaky sigh. “Es-es yo,” he replied, his voice faltering just a little. “Damian.”

  The intercom shut off with a snap and a buzzer sounded as the gate was unlocked—for all of an instant. Damian grabbed for it just in time and headed toward the house muttering beneath his breath—roundly cursing himself and Conrad and whatever unlucky stars had happened to have been in alignment on the day they’d first met. “I should have never have allowed myself to become involved with such a…with such a peasant.” That had been his first mistake.

  The front door was ajar. Damian froze with his hand extended toward the doorknob and his pulse racing with the thought that it could be a trap he was walking into. For just an instant he considered retreating. But, what the hell? He’d come this far, what was a little more lunacy?

  Still, as he pushed through the door and stepped into the darkened entrance hall the sound of his own heartbeat was so loud in his ears it drowned out any other sound. “Lucy, I’m a-home,” he called in his best Ricky Ricardo impersonation, almost jumping out of his skin when Conrad growled softly, “Quiet.”

  Damian spun around to face him. For a very long moment he just stared, unable to do anything but drink Conrad in, as though his eyes had been starved for the sight of him. Finally, inexcusably late in the day, his self-preservation instincts kicked in. Fear had him drawing back, straightening his spine—even as his insides continued twisting themselves into knots. There was a faint frown on Conrad’s stern face, a wary gleam in his glittering, ametrine eyes. Damian’s own eyes widened in uneasy surprise when the squirming bundles in his old friend’s arms finally registered.