by Hunter
He could drug her into madness, as he had the rather dull-witted Avenger he’d treated previously, leaving him perpetually twitching, strapped to a hospital bed, with various tubes to feed and vacate him, but that seemed, on an aesthetic level at least, a waste. There were other options. He’d toyed with turning her, but really, how would that look? He was already under a cloud of suspicion, something he could not afford. As a Caitiff, he was given the protection of the clans by virtue of his usefulness. If he betrayed some sympathy, some preference for a hunter, even as a childe, his ability to continue his work would be imperiled. There was even the possibility, though he felt it slim, that they would reject him entirely. And that would rapidly mean his final death. Unprotected by the status quo, he would easily fall to the rogue elements that often dined on Kindred blood. Though the air that whipped around him was cold, the thought made him shiver.
Inside, Sheila tucked her daughter in and brushed the child’s hair from her forehead. Leaning forward, she gently kissed the bare spot of skin her hand had revealed. As his eyes followed her out of the room, Eberhardt pensively stroked the tip of one of his canines with his tongue.
He already knew what he needed to — the number and location of the doors and windows, the security system and so on. Entering, taking her, or killing them all, could be accomplished in minutes. Not tonight, though. A few days, a week at most. Any further delay and there’d be direct pressure from Garth. And that, well, that would just look bad.
In any event, it was time to hunt for some sustenance — perhaps a bohemian from one of the local coffee shops — then return home to his notes and his books. For some reason, instead of moving, he kept watching the child.
Jessica was awake, but barely breathing, clutching some little stuffed animal to her chest, staring at the ceiling, eyes half-closed. He remained, a statue, indistinguishable to a casual observer, from the rest of the building. He was trying to understand his own instincts, to comprehend what it was he wanted from this child before he killed her. Shaking his head free of whatever spell kept him, he turned and was about to make his way back to the roof, when he noticed her lips moving.
His hearing was extraordinary, of course, but wind and traffic obscured the words. Shifting his weight, he pressed his ear to the glass.
She was singing, something soft, some-thing familiar.
I will hold you For as long as you like I will love you For the rest of my life1
Eberhardt swooned as a strange vertigo shook his core. At once enraged, he tore at the wall, hand over hand, until, at the top, he propelled himself through the air like a great black raven, briefly in flight before sprawling onto the tarpaper roof. He pulled himself onto his knees, but couldn’t bring himself to stand. He was panting, pained as if a stake had been driven into his heart.
Could it be coincidence? Yes. No. Had he ever mentioned it to her? Ever? No. Never. Why would he? It would be madness. Even madder to forget. Could she, as Garth suggested, already have some hunter powers? According to the hearsay he’d studied, some could see things, know things. It might explain how she destroyed the saiwala.
Whatever the precise explanation, she may just as well have signed her own death warrant. Clearly she was too powerful. It was all he could do to keep from bursting through her window at that very moment and shredding her like paper.
The song she was mumbling to herself in the darkness with her high, sweet voice, was the same he once sang to his own children, before putting them to sleep.
• • • •
Garth remained composed. If he was shocked, as Eberhardt suspected he must be, he didn’t show it. He did wait for Eberhardt to repeat himself.
“I want more time with her, ” Eberhardt said again. “To what purpose? ” Garth said, enunciating each word carefully.
“This is a singular opportunity to chart the growth cycle of a hunter, from beginning to end, ” Eberhardt leaned back in his chair, trying to look calm.
“To end? Do you propose we adopt her? ” “No. ”
“Perhaps pay for her education? ”
“As she grows, drugs can be provided… or she can be dominated… or… ”
‘They’re breeding like rats. Others will find her. ” “Not if we’re careful, ” Ebrahrdt said, rising. He walked over to the lean, taller creature and put his hand on his shoulder. The Keeper’s eyes narrowed at the odd contact, but he allowed Eberhardt to continue.
“I know how it must sound, but I’m on the verge of a break-through. I honestly believe I can deliver some final answers, some solutions, information that could well lead to the salvation of the Kindred! ”
Garth twisted his head to the side, genuinely confused. “The children of Caine
stretch back through time, to all but the beginning of man. We will stretch ahead to his end. I don’t believe the Kindred require salvation from you, Caitiff, nor do I think the prince will find the concept even remotely amusing. These Hunters are an irritation, a blip on the screen. What exactly do you think you can learn? We already know they can die. The rest is mere detail. ”
Eberhardt held his ground, “We also know we can die. And that they can kill us. ”
Garth relaxed a bit, as if remembering their friendship, “You put yourself in danger. ”
“I’ve dealt with Hunters before, “ Eberhardt said confidently.
“The girl is only your third. But, I don’t mean that you’re in danger from her, which, of course, you are. Remember, I like you. I will do for you what I can, but in the coming days I advise you not to deceive yourself about your importance to us. ”
Eberhardt turned away.
“You’ll pass my message to the prince? “ he said. “Along with my impression of it, ” Garth said. “Good. ”
“Good-bye, Stuart, ” Garth said.
In a clearly agitated state, not bothering to conceal himself Garth crawled out of the window and down into the street. In plain view he walked down the block, his mind ablaze with phrases and strategies, his goal shifting from protecting Eberhardt to protecting himself.
John O’Malley, police detective, hunter, sensed Garth coming before the creature even entered his field of vision. Feeling a dull tingling at the back of his neck, he put his newspaper down on the steering wheel. He glances up just in time to see the lean figure weave quickly through the crowd and pass a mere few yards from him. In an instant, he knew what Garth was.
Growling, he started the engine, thinking the traffic lean enough to let him follow, and knowing he’d finally gotten lucky. He’d been parking for hours, nearly every night for weeks now, in different spots, just a few blocks from where they’d found Padavano’s head.
• • • •
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
— Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Just what, Eberhardt wondered with his fine mind, as he slumped in his fine chair and scanned the fine walls and fine windows of his fine office, had brought him here, to this odd spot, where his future was as murky as the past? As a mortal, he’d dabbled in Jung, but ultimately became a Freudian. Why? He once thought it was out of spite, because Freud was out of vogue. Now he wondered if perhaps even then he was hewing to some deep psychological need to walk between worlds. Maybe that was the problem right there. A need to test his position. He was never a very good psychiatrist. The more familiar he became with the sort of problems his over-privileged clientele had, the more he found himself at first resenting, then utterly hating them. At least as a vampire he found them interesting, if only as a potential food source.
Towards the end of his mortal career he wasn’t really treating anyone. Mostly, he enjoyed the process of tweaking the dosages of various psychotropic medications, and found the results often delightfully surprising — sometimes downright titillating. He could make them laugh, he could make them cry. He could give them dreams with colors they never even guessed existed. It was a joy he ca
rried with him even when he was turned. The sole joy he could recall with any completeness from his time spent in the cycle of living and dying - before he looked into the abyss and found it looking back.
Three and a half years ago it found him and he knew. He knew at least something was watching. For weeks, at odd moments, alone, he felt a chill on his back that would slowly creep inside him and overwhelm him with its desolation. At first the sensation seemed invoked by his own through processes, which had grown increasingly dark, as if he had conjured the heavy elan himself. But, eventually, it came unbidden.
When it finally braved the safety of distance and came to him outright, even his terror was mitigated, on the one hand, by the satisfaction of knowing his intuition had been right and on the other, by relief that what had been haunting him was in fact external and not the projection of some disenfranchised insect corner of his psyche.
He was sitting in a coffee shop between sessions, reading a new translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, hard cover, first edition, when it sidled up beside him trying to project the faint echo of human lust.
Eberhardt remembered the book well, even the texture of the paper page as it poked through the black ink. In it, a daring translation of certain phrases gave rise to the possible interpretation that Samsa’s transformation had in some sense, freed him. As a creature of the fantastic, Samsa was no longer beholden to the pattern and form of his stale, old life, leaving the creation of an utterly new one, if he could just let go of the shadows of former habit, within his grasp. The tragedy, then, was not in what he became, but in clinging to what he remembered himself to be. The possibility tickled Eberhardt, feeling claustrophobic as he was, in his own senseless routine.
“You like books? ” it asked, smiling.
“Some, ” he responded, barely looking up.
“Expressions of will chained in the vagaries of syntax and grammar. Do you really think they matter much? ” it wanted to know.
Eberhardt looked up into what he could see of its eyes, shaded as they were by the rose-colored spectacles made briefly popular by Coppola’s co-opted Dracula.
“Nothing has more power than an idea whose time has come, ” he said, rattling off the quote as if ordering a usual meal.
It laughed freely, like the lively she its form recalled, then draped a white hand on his shoulder and whispered in a language that wrapped around his world-weary mind like dream. It promised tingling without consequence. It promised to shatter the wall between will and action, to free an ancient longing from the mind’s cage of word and image. It promised an end to decay, to the descending spiral of natural change. It promised to leave only the grand momentum of existence, the ebb and flow of desire and fulfillment.
Eberhardt put the book down. The sound the hardcover made as he laid it on the table burned into his head, blurred though it was by the murmur of lesser conversations and the nearby hiss of milk being steamed with the machine-like precision of well-trained vendors.
Without asking, though his answer would have been yes, it took him out into an alley, hid with him in the shadows and drained him. It sucked every parcel and pain of his human experience right out of his flesh, then made him drink of its own. A few months later, it abandoned him, perhaps sick of his books, perhaps simply heeding another distant call. Now, he thought of it fondly, like some wild black storm so grand and hurried, it could only be witnessed once. But he never knew his dark mother’s name.
Wife and children no longer a concern, he decided to continue his practice, mostly for the sake of the aforementioned fascination with medication. Then one day, an unusual patient was recommended, because of some vague, accidental success Eberhardt once had in quelling the delusions of schizophrenics. Minutes into their first session, the man realized what he was and tried to kill him. He was strong, adamantine in intent, but Thorazine had slowed him enough for the doctor to prevail. Stuart Eberhardt had encountered his first hunter.
According to the police, it was clearly self-defense. Others in the psychiatric community rallied about him with sympathy most sincere. Eberhardt even feigned a bit of Post-trauma disorder during a few mandatory therapy sessions, a maneuver which earned him some respect among the more discerning practitioners of the Masquerade. It helped explain his new paleness, even his separation and subsequent divorce. In point of fact, though, he was as ecstatic as he imagined that odd back-woods cult of Christian snake-handlers were when they danced and whirled with the poison reptiles. In death, he had finally come alive.
When he found himself delighted when hearing more and more tales of such attacks upon the Kindred, he decided on his new calling. He would study, catalogue, and ultimately eliminate these strange creatures, this odd threat to his newfound immortality. Having a live specimen was rare, but he collected data, did research and soon managed to deliver reports to the primogen, pages and pages filled with his various theories regarding hunter strengths, their weaknesses, the limits of their abilities and the extent of their flaws. With every presentation, no matter how accurate the information, his stock in the eyes of the city’s masters rose. Months ago, Garth had even suggested he take part in a blood hunt, diablerize a particularly heinous offender, to make his own blood stronger. Eberhardt’s standing was such that Garth was certain the prince would look the other way. Eberhardt refused. The problem then would be that he would have a clan, which meant alienating one or another of his wide-eyed supporters. In a sense, he thought himself more powerful being powerless.
Tonight, he was realizing for the first time how wrong he was. He was feeling fragile, mortal for the first time in years. During his final session with Jessica he could barely bring himself to speak. If she noticed anything different about him, she said nothing, and instead, seemed so bored by the silence that she finally curled up on the sofa and seemed ready to drift off to sleep.
For days he’d managed to resist the requests Garth brought, but they would soon become orders, then threats. He had to kill her. He had to. Clearly, for his own preservation. Quickly and carefully. Right now. A pillow. A quick blow to the head. Toss her out the window and pretend she slipped while they were looking at a bird. No, even he didn’t believe that. The parents, then, upon their arrival, would have to go as well. He could carry them out. Make them vanish. Hide the pieces here and there. Sloppiness he might be forgiven, even extreme sloppiness, eventually, but inaction he would not.
He hovered over her, unaware he’d even stood and stepped to the couch.
She, still awake, twisted her head and looked up at him through sleepy eyes.
“Stuart? ” she said softly, as if trying not to wake herself, “Will you make a Blood Contract not to hurt me today? ”
“Shh… ” he said, afraid it sounded more like a hiss.
She looked at him, Yoda-eyes sucking in every detail of his face, carefully building a phantom world in her mind, probably much more ordered than the real one. What could she see? How much did she know? What could she tell him? Should he ask her how she wanted to die?
After a moment, her eyelids dropped and she fell asleep. He just stood there, ready to abandon even the notion of mobility as he watched her. The minutes ticked along.
It was cold in the office. Temperature didn’t matter much to him. It kept the bills down and tended to shorten the sessions. Some adult patients would bring sweaters, but Jessica was shivering.
Without thinking, he took a green blanket he kept folded over one end of the couch, and covered her. When she smiled as she snuggled under its warmth, he suddenly realized what he was doing and snapped to attention.
What if someone had seen? Garth could be here right now. What was he doing? Immediately, he ripped the blanket off. She made a face and scrunched up her shoulders, but did not awaken. He stood there, holding the blanket, his eyes darting back and forth in his skull, trying to see the unseen.
For the first time since his death, he felt like an utter idiot, terrified by this young piece of flesh, holding a soft green blank
et in fingers that had torn open countless throats. Quickly, awkwardly, he put the blanket back on her. For appearances. It was as good an explanation as any. Garth would understand that. It was part of the Masquerade.
Eberhardt failed to notice that he was no longer even thinking of killing her. When Sheila and Mark arrived he met them at the door, holding Jessica, wrapped in the blanket, in his arms.
“Poor thing, ” Sheila said, softly as she took her, blanket and all. “She’s had a long day. ” “Yes, she has, ” Dr. Eberhardt said, nodding. Quiet goodnights were exchanged. Mark had a question, but decided it could wait. Stiffly, Eberhardt staggered back into his office, and placed both hands on the end table to steady himself.
“Are you here? ” he said. He meant to make it sound matter of fact, but it came out as a whisper full of dread.
“Yes, “ Garth said, taking form, “And I saw. ” There was silence for the longest time. “Could you…? ” Garth began.
“What? “ Eberhardt said hopefully.
The Keeper shook his head, “Never mind. It’s too late. I was thinking perhaps that if we caught up with them before they reached home, and you killed the child, in front of me, then signed a Blood Contract, then perhaps, with much begging and pleading. But no, in the end you’re Caitiff. And it’s gone beyond that already. It’s why I’m here. To tell you it’s out of your hands — and determine what to do with you next. ”
“What do you mean? ” Eberhardt asked as the guessed-at details sifted through his mind. “Why before she reached home? ”
“They’re coming for her tonight… ” “What? ” Without another word, he bolted for the door. Garth swept in front of him, cutting him off, trying to hold him still with his great, steely arms.
