When the corpse was alight, Caleb took the stake and placed it into Grigore’s hand. “Thanks for helping out, Grigore,” he said to his friend. “Nice job.” The young Romanian grinned proudly.
Back at the camp, listening to Mike fill his friends in on the details of the hunt, Caleb decided his work there was done. Between practical jokes, mummification, and rabies, the situation was explained sufficiently to satisfy Mike. He was already arguing with Vijay about how to determine the age of a desiccated corpse, and Taofang was offering to make an animal hologram.
There was one more person to consider, however, someone who might not accept the stories of rabies and mummies so readily. He approached the Chinese graduate student at his computer, waiting for a lull in the conversation.
“It’s not a German Shepherd,” he couldn’t stop himself from inserting when he saw the hologram.
Taofang looked up. “Sorry?”
“Never mind. Where is Lamia?”
“She in her tent,” he replied casually, directing his attention back to his computer screen. “But she came out. Just went into trees, near caves.”
The final twilight of the afternoon was fading as Caleb started up the path to the caves. He expected to find her inside; instead, he just made her out in the darkness, sitting on a rocky ledge about twenty feet from the main entrance. Her knees were drawn up to her chest and her long, loose hair spilled over them like a dark river.
She could have been a statue adorning some secluded mountain garden, sitting so still that she gave no notice of his approach.
“Er, excuse me,” Caleb began, uncertain of how much to reveal, “there was quite a bit of excitement at the camp this afternoon. I don’t know if you heard…”
“My hearing is excellent,” she murmured, her face buried in her knees and shielded by her hair.
“I want to explain what happened,” Caleb said, taking a seat on the rough granite ledge. She dropped her arms stiffly and moved away slightly, turning to stare at him with those odd violet eyes, which hid rather than revealed her feelings.
“I would be very interested to hear what you have to say,” she replied coolly, a hint of challenge in her voice.
“I think you know more than the others.”
“You’re not a botanist. Is that what you mean?” Lamia snapped. “You are an American wizard.”
Caleb picked up a handful of small pebbles and rattled them in one hand, letting them dribble slowly to the ground. For a time the clinking of the rocks was the only sound. “You were on to me from the first, weren’t you?” He smiled at her. “I take it that your Romanian grandmother was acquainted with magic?”
She did not return his smile, but replied through tight lips, “Yes. She told me many stories of things that live in these mountains.” She shook her head suddenly and looked away, concluding in a hoarse whisper, “I should not have come.”
Caleb was about to ask another question when she turned to him, her face now darkened by shadow and more unreadable than usual.
“You killed him, didn’t you?” she accused roughly, her voiced tinged with horror and perhaps even a little relief.
“The vampire? Yes,” he responded simply, curious to hear more about what she knew.
But she did not volunteer anything further. “Poor Mike,” Lamia sighed, rising abruptly and dusting bits of gravel from the back of her pants. “I should go see how he’s feeling.”
With that, she strode past Caleb toward the camp, the conversation clearly at an end. He had many questions, but suspected that getting the answers would be as easy as pulling teeth from a dragon.
21. Down the Rabbit Hole
“How’s Mike?” Vijay looked up from the console, his face splashed with green and blue light from the oscilloscopes and computer displays, the only lights in the cave.
“He’s sleeping. His color looks a bit better,” Lamia shrugged. “You should get some sleep, too.”
“Sure,” he yawned in response. “What a day, eh? You missed most of the excitement.” His dark eyes sparkled with the memory. “I can’t believe you slept through the whole thing. That botanist pulled a guy out of the caves, bitten by the same, er, spider that bit Mike.”
Lamia wondered whether Lupeni had put a spell on Vijay’s mind or whether he actually believed the fantastic story of the cave spider. The American wizard thought she needed protection. He was wrong.
Pushing those thoughts aside, she approached the other student to check on the current state of the experiment. She stopped short a couple of feet away.
“Vijay, you’ve got garlic in your pocket.”
“Yeah,” he grinned, “I forgot you don’t like the stuff. I was humoring that Lupeni chap. Just forgot to take it out of my pocket. A bit absurd, isn’t it?”
“Well,” she said lightly, “if vampires really existed, I suppose it might be useful. Show me what we got from the Cerenkov detectors last night.”
He happily recounted the events of his shift, including an anomalously high background of neutrino events that he thought might tell them about a supernova. The data from the events could also be used to look for neutrino oscillations, something he had always been interested in but couldn’t get their advisor to care about. Vijay certainly didn’t want to be a graduate student for 1033 years, waiting for protons to decay.
After hearing all this, Lamia shooed him back to the camp, relieved to be alone with numbers and abstract concepts once again.
She hummed softly to herself as she created a graph of energy distributions in three dimensions, looking like a fairy castle as it rotated slowly on the computer screen before her. Once, a long time ago, she wanted to live in a real castle. Now she longed to lose herself in the realm of subatomic particles. The real castle hadn’t worked out very well.
So intent was she on the unseen world of baryons and leptons that at first she did not notice the presence of another in the cave, did not see any movement reflected in her computer display. A faint rustle, not of bat wings but of fabric, informed her that she was no longer alone. She turned to face two dark orbs, the eyes of someone standing right behind her. With an unsettling jolt, all thoughts of physics fled from her mind as she recognized the jutting nose and angled cheekbones of one whom she hoped never to see again.
“Cuza,” she said coldly in Romanian. “I thought you might show up.”
“Emil told me he had seen you, but I scarcely believed him,” said the vampire with an air of conquest, now that he was sure of her identity.
He looked exactly the same as the last time she had seen him, twenty years ago. The Undead did not age, need not reflect the passage of time at all. But I am not the same, she thought, desperate to force away the memories that his haughty face called forth.
“You have changed,” he marveled, as if reading her mind. “Your eyes. Something is wrong.”
She laughed harshly, hopping off the stool and moving away from him. “A human thing called—” She stopped, realizing she didn’t know the Romanian word for contact lenses. The language she knew was from another time, another world. Why bother explaining it to a vampire, though?
“What do you want from me?” she asked, eyeing him warily. “I told Emil that I wanted nothing to do with the whole lot of you.”
“Of course, my dear,” he replied smoothly, the old steeliness creeping in underneath. “That is what you said when you left. But, you have come back to us, have you not?”
“No,” she growled, turning away from him and staring intently at a different monitor, this one for controlling the argon that filled the metal boxes of the detectors. She typed furiously for a minute, as if she could make the vampire vanish the same way she controlled the gas.
“Then why have you come?” he inquired, still sure he knew the answer. “Emil told me some story about these humans, but I did not believe it.”
“I hear you left the castle,” she said, pointedly ignoring his question. Focusing on the argon pressure became increasingly difficult
as Cuza drifted toward her, hovering at her back.
“Things became difficult in the mountains,” he mused. “The living became scarcer and more cautious. We scattered to find better hunting.”
She laughed, in spite of the loathing she felt for the vampire who had once been her lover and much more besides. She had always been the one to keep the peace among the group at the castle, interceding in their pointless arguments over events that had happened decades earlier. Their long days of boredom were filled with endless rehashing of the past. The next meal was about as far into the future as they thought. She had finally grown so disgusted that she left, hoping to find something better elsewhere. She had drifted to Bucharest, Athens, London, New York. The vampires she met in those cities were more cultured, had more to talk about, but also remained focused on the past. She wanted to learn new things—obviously an alien concept for the Undead—and so embarked on a career of sorts, skipping from one university to another. Incredibly, the voyage had returned her to the mountains she had fled, and now to the presence of Cuza.
“And you live among these humans now, and they think you are one of them,” he spoke the words hungrily.
She moved away from him again, and toward the towers of metal boxes stacked to the ceiling. She felt the rough surface of the metal and tried to put her mind inside the boxes with the argon atoms, waiting patiently for the next neutrino to come whizzing by. But the call of the past was too strong.
“I don’t feed on them, if that’s what you mean,” she responded harshly, turning to face him with her back against the tower of detectors. She stroked the metal with her hand, as if the lifeless metal could overpower the lifeless vampire before her.
“No?” he inquired with much curiosity, drawing closer. “How could you resist so much, so close?”
“I have not had—it has been five years since I—” she faltered.
“No human blood at all? You deprive yourself so, my dear.” His surprise turned to a seductive whisper. “Have you forgotten what it is like?”
How could she explain? She had not forgotten, in the same way that a heroin addict never forgets that roaring thunder of sensation that sweeps away the mind and the self, leaving only raw pleasure so intense that it would hurt, if feeling pain were possible. But the ecstasy of human blood left the brain fuzzy and confused, filled only with the lust for more.
She had come to appreciate the pleasure of a fine, sharp mind, the joy of being able to shape complicated concepts the way a sculptor works in clay. She was willing to give up human blood for that joy, but Cuza would never comprehend that, and she told him so.
“You cannot possibly understand what I have become,” she said coldly, wishing he would leave her to the peaceful solitude of the oscilloscopes and displays.
“I know what you are,” he crooned, drawing near enough to brush her cheek gently with his hand. She froze, momentarily hypnotized by his empty eyes and soft whispering. Languidly, he drew his hand down, the fingers curving possessively around her neck with the gentleness that she remembered. The gentleness that stood in stark contrast to his cruelty.
“You may become a human on the outside, but you will always be one of us,” he whispered, brushing his lips softly on her hair, on her cheek, on her neck.
“You’re wrong,” she cried, pushing him away with both hands. “I have changed and I want nothing more to do with you.”
After he had gone, she sat for a long time bathed in the green and blue lights of the familiar instruments, heedless of the pulsating blips and flowing numbers. She knew he would be back.
22. Dogfight
As June became July in the mountains above Stilpescu, the profusion of pinks, whites, reds, and yellows gave way to rich summer green. Stands of birch and beech formed canopies with their deep green leaves and bundles of catkins. In the meadows between trees, tall tufted grasses extended awns to tempt the birds and bees. The flowers that remained were of a large and hardy sort: daisies and black-eyed Susans with broad, flat leaves, clover, and dandelion, some beginning to fluff with seed.
The lush and peaceful scenery soothed Caleb’s irritability as he walked in the grasses, between a row of aspens and a forest of evergreens, on his way to Grigore’s cottage. It was less than half an hour till moonrise, but he didn’t hurry. It wasn’t just the imminent full moon that was making him snappish; he didn’t want to run into Liszka while they could still talk, and risk a replay of the arguments they’d been having ever since he blocked the cave to Albimare.
There was a reason he hadn’t encountered Vlad’s pack at the caves last month. Liszka knew he planned to pass through the Sixes territory, and she suspected that if Vlad caught Caleb there, alone, he would kill him. So she had directed the Fives to loiter around their mutual border, provoking minor skirmishes throughout the night that distracted Pack Six from Caleb’s work.
When Vlad found out a week later what had happened to the cave, he was furious. Liszka now insisted that the Fives had to attack, to drive the Sixes out of the strip of mountains between the castle and the Petrosna caves. The others were leaning towards agreeing with her. The fact that she was a female complicated matters: She didn’t have to challenge Caleb directly in order to become leader. Either member of the alpha pair could make decisions, and the final authority would rest with whomever the group considered the better leader.
Caleb would readily admit that he didn’t fit that description. He carried too much of the human into his plans, feeling almost apologetic for pulling rank and wanting to settle their differences without a fight if at all possible. The Fives territory was already twice the size of the Sixes, and contained the fertile, rabbity meadows that made navigating the mountains easier. It would be painful and pointless to go on the offensive…and if they did fight, he didn’t want Bela involved.
Liszka had regarded him with scornful astonishment at that last sentiment. Bela in wolf-form was as big as some of them now, and had proved himself on the night Caleb was absent, although Caleb had refused to hear any details. She went so far as to suggest that the wolf belt was still affecting his mind, and had no qualms about telling him that it was the mother who made the final decision when it came to the pups.
“He’s just a kid,” Caleb had objected.
Liszka tossed up her hands in disbelief. “A kid is a goat, Lupeni,” she said.
So he wasn’t particularly looking forward to the night ahead. First he’d have to see if the pack was still obeying him, or if Liszka was going to lead them all off on a hunt for Vlad.
She is wrong, he thought, wincing at the thought of their bitter arguments. He wasn’t ashamed of what he was—no more than she was, at any rate. She just had different ways of showing it. It wasn’t something he expected Grigore to understand, but Liszka was intelligent enough to know that making peace with the villagers was their only real hope.
He didn’t want his kind to die out. They didn’t have to bite to reproduce: while the young of two werewolves would not survive, the offspring of a werewolf and a human was a healthy young werewolf. Few of either kind knew this. Caleb had recently met the first child of such a union that he could find. Contrary to all legends, the girl was good-looking and healthy, more well-adjusted than he had been at that age. Such a simple fact, and yet he himself hadn’t known it until now.
Intermarriage would help both kinds—dispel fear, increase diversity, and improve the werewolf gender ratio. But it would be impossible as long as each group was convinced the other was out to kill.
He arrived just as the first sliver of the moon emerged above the horizon. The Fives were coming out of the cottage, taking their places in the grasses and trees. Caleb chose a secluded spot in a clump of birch, relieved at not having to speak, his head starting to hurt. Hopefully last month’s experiment with the wolf belt wouldn’t carry over into tonight.
The six members of Pack Five gathered around Lupeni as he emerged from his hiding place, nuzzling him and pushing their noses into his muzzle.
It would’ve looked threatening to an observer, all those teeth so near his lips and throat, but the ritual comforted him. It meant they accepted him as their leader and were waiting to follow orders. With a glance at Liszka to assure himself of her cooperation, Caleb took off across the fields at a run, tail held high.
They spent the evening at the northern limits of their territory, as far from the Sixes as possible. There was a creek there, running low in the summer drought, and they did some fishing. Bela had never tried this before, and the first time he scooped a paw into the water and came up with a fish, he was so surprised he dropped it with a startled bark.
The first hint that something was wrong was a scent of blood.
Detecting it simultaneously, the Fives all raised their noses, sniffing. Not wolf blood, or human blood…it smelled of prey, rabbits perhaps, or squirrels. Turning to look in the direction of the odor, they saw a pack of wolves standing nearly motionless on the riverbank.
It was Pack Six. Not only Pack Six—there were more of them than usual, coming up the bank one by one. The Fives were outnumbered two-to-one; and Vlad, clever schemer that he was, had made sure they had eaten their fill before seeking out the enemy. There was now less chance that they would tire of the fight and give up to search for food. Blood and fragments of small animals still clung to their lips as they regarded the Fives with hostile snarls and growls.
In the split second that Caleb hesitated to think, there was a flash of white. Liszka dashed up the riverbank and threw herself on Vlad, knocking him backwards, her teeth in the loose skin just below his throat.
Caleb sprang to her defense, but he was less experienced at fighting and didn’t anticipate the Sixes attacking from behind. As he tried to get a grip on Vlad, he felt a sharp pain as fangs bit into his Achilles tendon. He whirled around, snapping.
Grigore and Bela came next. Grigore helped Caleb drive back the Sixes—and the Fours, who’d joined up with the Sixes—while Bela tackled Vlad from behind. The surprise attack knocked Vlad to the ground, where Liszka was able to undo her hold and get a better one higher up, right over the arteries of his neck. She gave a low growl, one that called Caleb away from his tangle with two scrawny Fours and over to her side.
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