The Ruby Tear

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Tonight the gate hung open, and as she hurried by, she was snatched into the darkness with a suddenness and violence that left her sucking vainly for air to scream with. Someone pinned her against his chest, with his arm tight across her throat. Another closed in facing her, breathing hard, hissing breaths as he fended off her frantic kicks.

  Something flashed in his upraised fist: a blade. She uttered only strangled gasps as she twisted in her captor’s grip with the convulsive strength of panic. The knife whipped past her face, but hard fingers dragged her head back by the hair, immobilizing her for the next blow.

  The man behind her snarled, “Take it easy, you’ll cut my damn ear off!”

  “Hurry up, somebody’s coming!” came a whispered warning from nearby—a female voice. With incredulous horror Jess saw the glint of silver eyebrow-rings as the lookout at the mouth of the alley turned her head. It was the girl who had been with those roughnecks at the coffee shop—one of them was holding the knife, while someone—the other?—held Jess pinioned between the alley walls where no one could see or hear what happened.

  She kicked with all her might, snapping her knee up into the body of the man with the knife. He swiveled, blocking with his hip, and the blade swept up again, toward her face. Flooded with fear too strong for thought, she writhed and strained to turn away despite the agony of her hair that the other held fast.

  There wasn’t a thought in her head; nothing but terror.

  Impossible things happened, one right after the other. Close in front of her staring eyes, the hand that held the weapon seemed to explode open, the fingers splayed wide. She heard a guttural shout of pain, and the blade flew into space and hit cement somewhere with a ringing sound.

  The other man shoved her forward, reeling away from him. Jess staggered to the opposite wall and turned, breathless and stupid with shock.

  Two men struggled, gasping and grunting, one gripping the other in a bear hug and taking furious blows on his shoulders. He lifted his captive, who threshed wildly, and ran with him into the darker depths of the alley like a football player rushing an opponent. Jess heard a crash of impact, one muffled shout, a breathless murmur of unintelligible words, and silence.

  It seemed to last for hours.

  The man who had held the knife moaned on the alley floor near her. She tried to shout for help, but she couldn’t seem to get any air into her lungs to make sounds with.

  She thought about running away, but her legs didn’t move.

  The moaning man drew himself up into a huddle posture, sitting on the ground and hugging his hand to his belly as he rocked, whimpering. He didn’t look in Jess’s direction, but he was still between her and mouth of the alley.

  She stayed where she was, trembling with shock, trying to think. A fire truck roared by somewhere in the streets, siren whooping, but not to her emergency. She might as well be on another planet for all the help she could expect.

  One of the men emerged silently from the depths of the alley, ran three steps past her, and kicked the moaning man. She heard a terrible, ripe sound of impact.

  The man on the ground cried out and fell over, curling tightly on his side, as the other stood over him.

  Jess stared, paralyzed. She knew Ivo by the sweep of his thick hair and the swirl of his long coat as he stepped astride the whimpering man, destructive intent evident in every angle of his body.

  Jess found her voice. “The lookout’s gone,” she gasped hoarsely. “She’ll bring someone.”

  Ivo glanced up at her, a flash of tigerish teeth and eyes, and she saw the black stains on his face. That was blood on his mouth, unmistakably glistening in the streetlight that had just come on at the curb.

  Her uncertainty vanished. He bent again over the would-be knife man, a vampire with astounding strength and savagery, intending to feed right there in front of her. She couldn’t turn away, so she looked on silently, her body still and her mind blank and uncritical, as this predator pulled the man partly upright by his coat collar.

  But he only slapped the face of his captive with a wide, hard swing of his hand, and said harshly: “Who sent you against this lady? Tell me now, or I rip the face off your skull. Hurry up.”

  Jess heard a whining reply, a plea, sobs.

  “The name,” Ivo snarled. “Quick!”

  More whimpering, faint sibilants in words Jess could not make out. She closed her eyes at last, feeling dizzy and sick, and almost fell, but someone caught her. Someone held her up. Shock, she thought, deeply disappointed in herself. I’m still going to faint, damn it.

  Maybe she did; the next thing she knew, she was stumbling, half carried by a companion, toward her own building. The vampire—that was what he was, with his bull-like strength, his bloody mouth—Ivo knew where she lived.

  Sensations washed over her in rapid succession: headlights passing, a dog barking somewhere, her feet stumbled up concrete steps. Hands seized her purse and rummaged impatiently through it. She half fell through the doorway into the stale warm smell of the foyer, then steep, steep stairs. She thought the stairs would never end.

  He fumbled at her apartment door, oddly clumsy.

  She took the keys from his hand that was smeared, she saw, with dark blood, and unlocked her door. Someone was playing the piano on the floor above, a Joplin rag, as she stepped back to let the vampire in.

  Without turning on the light he picked her up and carried her, held against his broad chest, over to fumble her into the armchair by the living room windows. He groaned a little, straightening up.

  He must have wiped the blood from his face: she couldn’t see any now. Maybe he was still hungry, maybe he had brought her up here to finish his meal.

  She blacked out.

  When she woke, there were still no lights on in the apartment, but she knew he was there.

  “Baron?”

  “Yes.” He was on the couch against the far wall, by the direction of his voice. “Ivo, please.”

  “Ivo. Did you kill those men?”

  “I didn’t try to, so I think not.”

  “They mugged me. Did they get my purse?”

  “They weren’t after your purse. One of your colleagues has been trying to drive you away with stupid tricks, but you wouldn’t go. So he hired those ruffians to frighten you away.”

  “A knife,” she gulped, shivering violently. “Jesus! They had a knife!”

  “A straight razor, old fashioned, good for cutting throats.”

  “No, no!” she cried, weeping with horror. “They meant to cut my face! They tried to cut my face!”

  Silence.

  “Who would do that?” She punched the arm of the chair in impotent rage and fear. “I don’t know people who would do a thing like that, I don’t work with people like that!”

  A creaking sound came as he shifted his weight.

  She scrabbled an old tissue out of her coat pocket and wiped at her eyes. “Someone who knows what scars mean to an actor—to an actress—they did this. It was someone I know. What time is it?”

  “Late,” he murmured. “That bitch of theirs will be off saving herself, so I think I we’re secure here for now. Jessamyn, she hurt me. I must rest awhile.”

  “Hurt you?” She squinted woozily, seeing more than she had before now that her eyes were used to the reflected illumination from cars passing below. “How could she hurt you?”

  How could that skinny girl with rings in her face hurt the creature that he was (couldn’t be, of course, but she’d seen the bloody slick on his lips—). How could anyone hurt it—hurt him—what did I really see? Not what I thought I saw, because that’s impossible. And you have to invite a vampire into your house, or he can’t come in.

  Did I invite him in?

  She couldn’t remember. She could hardly think at all . . . A beat of silence went by, two beats.

  “She had an ice pick,” he whispered, “and she used it as I entered the alley, before she ran away.”

  “Oh God,” Jess croaked, sho
ving herself up out the chair with fierce energy. He was just a man, of course, what else could he be? And he was wounded. She wondered if she was cut somewhere herself but too numb to know it.

  She staggered, afraid she would vomit or pass out. Shock. Shock on top of shock.

  Be like Eva: toughened by crises, able to press on beyond her own needs and even her limitations when necessary. No: be Eva.

  She tottered closer and let him take her hand and guide it to a torn place on his shirt. A kind of thick welt throbbed on the hot skin beneath.

  “Here,” he said.

  There was no blood. His shirt was dry. How could there be no blood?

  She tugged him up somehow, dragging his arm over her shoulder and using her hip as a kind of cantilever to move his sagging weight, helped him cover the few steps to her bedroom. He was dense with muscle, heavy with fatigue and pain. The bed creaked loudly when he fell onto it. She turned on the bedside lamp and helped him get out of his coat, jacket, and shirt. His torso was smooth-skinned, except for some puckered scars.

  A fighter, she thought; barons led soldiers to war, in the days when the title meant something functional. No wonder he talks confidently about violence. Its stories are written on his body.

  She ran her palms along the strapping of muscle encasing his ribs and down the plates of his belly, looking for other punctures from the ice pick. There weren’t any, but the feel of him was strange.

  This was not the sculpted musculature of the gym or even the dojo, but the coiled, packed power of a body that had been tested and strained, fighting hard fights from an early age. It was beautiful the way the exaggerations of heroic statuary can be beautiful, but poignant, too, because it spoke of a life without childhood. In the modern world, he might be a man who had grown up in a street-gang, fighting savage skirmishes over urban turf from an early age.

  What an insult it must be to him, to be hurt like this by a work-tool in the hand of a girl! But no; he had already forgotten, she thought. His body threw off an immediate heat that was life, now, fighting to persist—there was no time, and no purpose, in looking back at the struggle in the alley.

  Where he had beaten back two other men, even though he himself was injured. This, not all the rest, this impossible thing made her wonder again, is it all true? Can he really be a man out of another time, preserved by some unthinkable dark magic?

  Preserved till now, anyway.

  “What can I do?” she said. She wasn’t Eva after all. She had never witnessed violence worse than a boy knocked off his bicycle by a delivery truck on Third Avenue.

  And her own red hands, cut up by flying shards of Nick’s windshield, of course. Nick should be here, he knew more about such things. He had been on battlefields himself, an observer rather than a warrior, but still.

  “I need more light,” she said, and when Ivo didn’t answer, she went to the wall switch and snapped on the overhead fixture.

  His face looked bluish white. Dark stains of exhaustion had spread below his closed eyes. Exploring gingerly, she found again the ugly puncture wound under his lower left ribs, sealed now as if with swelling. And still, no blood.

  “Ivo, what should I do?” she whispered, sitting beside him on the bed. “Does this need bandaging, or disinfectant? Something?”

  He shielded his eyes with his forearm. “Make it dark again, please,” he said. “Just sit with me.”

  She turned the overhead back off and clicked the three way bulb in the lamp to its lowest setting, and then sat there, her hands folded uselessly in her lap and tears sliding silently down her cheeks. “Can I get anything, bring anyone?”

  “No.”

  “Are you dying?”

  “No.”

  “But you should be,” she said in a strained voice. “There should be blood, you should be begging for a doctor, asking to go to a hospital—” Her voice died away. She heard only her own thin, distressed breathing. “Walter says Nick has met people in Europe who think you’re a vampire.”

  He sighed, a shallow sigh with a catch in it. “Thank you. This makes things easier for me. What they say is true, although they’re mistaken about the details.”

  “She really hurt you,” Jess said stupidly. She couldn’t free her thoughts from the slow, sludgy thickness of shock. “She really stabbed you, that girl with the rings. But you’re a vampire, so you can’t die?”

  “I’ll heal. At least, I always have before. But the weakness—No one must come, no police, no little leather-armored vermin with razors and ice picks. So we can’t stay here.”

  “But—”

  He caught her wrist to quiet her, though his grip was weak. “You have an enemy at that theater, so the enemy knows where you live—but not where I live. We must find a taxicab and go to my apartment instead.”

  She had an enemy. Ivo von Craggen admitted to being a vampire. One of these things she could face right now, but not both.

  “What enemy?” she said. “That kid told you who sent him after me. Who was it?”

  No answer.

  “Ivo, they were going to cut my face, or maybe worse. My whole professional career, the use of whatever talent I have, it all would have been destroyed. I’ve got to know: who sent them?”

  “Don’t ask me this.”

  She was drowning in horrified confusion. Nick didn’t want her in his play, but Nick was in Europe. Nick was crazy, or not crazy, or half crazy and half sane—could it be him? Had he hired them? She couldn’t live another second without knowing, one way or the other.

  “That bastard with the razor told you. Now tell me the name.”

  After a long moment he said quietly, “Anthony Sinclair. I’m sorry.”

  The knot of tension in Jess’s chest finally dissolved, and it felt as if her whole life melted away with it. Away drained all of the good, warm feeling of belonging where her talents fitted her to be, among people who understood and respected her work, people dedicated to the same cause; all selfless, at least while in service to the play itself.

  Anthony. His flirting, his solicitude, his suggestions that she think about quitting the job. All those nasty tricks, most of them not really dangerous but designed to cut the ground from under her feet until she had no firm place left to stand. She could almost despise the man for the paltriness of the means he had chosen.

  Why? If he had some reason of his own, not just a pay-off from Nick (could that be?), then what reason? And why not just murder her at the start and be done with it? All this time he’d been so sympathetic, so supportive, so full of concern! Taking her to his apartment that night after Whitely’s party—would he really have slept with her if she’d invited him, given what he was doing secretly to drive her out of the play?

  An actor is someone capable of behaving very differently from the way he really feels, someone who can throw himself into any part. An actor can be two personalities at the same time. She’d been completely taken in by him.

  How could he do that to a colleague? Why?

  Though she couldn’t begin to piece together a motive for Sinclair’s attacks on her, it never occurred to her to doubt the truth of what Ivo said. Once the words were out, she saw that it was the right answer, the only answer: a monstrous answer from the mouth of a wounded monster.

  How had her path veered into this eerie territory of shadowy plots and irrational betrayals? How would she ever make her way out again into the plain light of day? Worn to her limit and stretched too tight to bear, she began at last to sob and gasp, covering her face with her hands.

  Retreat

  His apartment was a studio over a carpet dealer’s on Madison Avenue, in a stolid building with a plain facade in clay-colored brick: no doorman, no awning, no marble-floored lobby. This was a commercial building on the ground floor, its unimposing entrance a locked plate glass door set between two shops. The foyer held a wall of mailboxes, a table for packages, a tiny elevator, and a fake marble urn next to the bottom flight of the stairs.

  East side, yes;
but East side basic, and it probably cost a small fortune instead of the usual huge one for this area.

  God, I am such a New Yorker; I’m not even in the door, and I’m pricing the vampire’s apartment in my head.

  They took the elevator up, crammed together at very close quarters. Jess was horrified by the trembling she could see now in his lips, his hands. She refused to think about the prospect of his collapse there in that coffin like space.

  But he lurched out of the elevator under his own steam, and moved determinedly down the carpeted corridor to his door. Leaning on her shoulder, he got the assemblage of locks open.

  “It came furnished,” he said. “I don’t spend much time here, or bring visitors.”

  He was apologizing for the unexceptional breakfront and dining table, the sofa and the dully upholstered armchairs grouped near the street windows with a small glass-topped coffee table. The closet sized kitchen was spotless, clearly unused except for a wine rack in the corner and bottled water in the fridge. A thin layer of dust filmed the countertops.

  Geraniums crowded in leggy clumps from two pots on the street side windowsills. The kitchen window, around the corner on a side street, framed a snake plant.

  Plants. The vampire kept plants and flowers in his apartment.

  This is crazy, crazy, crazy; I am dreaming or out of my mind.

  “Not what you expected,” he murmured, as he sank onto the couch in with a grateful groan. “Where are the dusty tapestries and glowering portraits, or at least a suit of armor in the corner? Don’t be embarrassed; you’re only a hundred years too late. It took that long to grow out of nostalgia, but I did. It’s better now. More free.”

  “Oh,” she said. Someone had paid strangers to try to cut her face, and now she was listening to a vampire some unnumbered centuries old, talking about his psychological growth.

  His journey, people now would say. She couldn’t help it; she giggled.

  “I mean that,” he said. “I like this life, but only after I learned that I need only functional shelter, an occupation, and the appearance of a normal life. Why not live as others do?”