“Yes, that’s right. Are you ready?”
He nodded. “Just need my gloves and cloak.”
“I’ll bring the car around to the front. Come out when you’re ready.” She was stilted, and so was he.
This is ridiculous, Parsons told herself, starting the automobile as the gardener’s assistant, who loved cars and was always poking around the garage, opened the doors for her. Whatever happened in the past, you saved him from that place. Pull yourself together.
As she pulled up, he stopped to take a good look at the car. “This is yours?” he asked, as he climbed in the passenger’s seat.
“Yes. It’s imported. A Cadillac.”
“It doesn’t have a crank. What year is this?”
“It’s the 1912 model,” she said, relieved to be on comfortable conversational footing. “But we’re making our own now. They’ll be available by the winter, I think. Although I’m not sure they’ll be as nice as this.”
“I never imagined you driving an automobile.”
“No one ever does. But I adore driving.”
“It suits you,” he said. “And Calban told me you work in an office reading magazines from my world?” He sounded like he didn’t think that could possibly be a real job.
“I work in the product development office,” Parsons said. “And yes, that’s about right. The purpose of the department is to inform ourselves of everything being invented and refined in your world and decide what we want to adapt to our market.”
He laughed faintly and looked out the window. “And what then? Are you going to invade Earth?”
Parsons’ eyes widened. “Fates, no. Why would we do that? In fact, Lord Jherin has strict rules to keep us from getting caught when we go there. For instance, I’m not allowed to go anymore because I’m a Fanarlem. Only certain people have clearance to travel through the mirrors.”
“How the devil did you get a Cadillac through a magic mirror?”
“There is at least one mirror that’s very large.”
“You stole this auto, then?”
“I think it was traded. There are a few people there who know about us, so we can have a proper exchange of goods.”
“What people? Magical people, like me?”
“I don’t know.” Parsons paused.
“But you do steal things, don’t you?” He stared out the window as they passed the other mansions on the street. “You must steal a lot of things. Do you have any ideas of your own around here?”
“What? Of course we do. We’ve had thousands of years of culture.”
“But our culture is just better?”
“No—but—” Parsons narrowed her eyes. She had never heard anyone phrase it that way before, but now that she thought about it, maybe it was true. All her life, everything from the Fallen Lands was new and exciting and fashionable. Some fringe groups of Daramons protested the supposed corruption of Earthly cultures. No one who mattered paid any attention to them. She had some vague sense that the world had been slower and more boring around the time she was born.
“How long has it been going on?” Dennis asked. “This—making your strange fairy tale world into New York?”
“I guess about as long as I’ve been alive,” Parsons said. “We used to know about your world a long time ago. I mean, thousands of years ago. But then we lost track of it until Lord Jherin found it again.” She tried to follow Papa’s instructions. “If Lord Jherin hears something in his meditations, we know it’s the right thing to follow. So when he discovered Earth, he immediately understood that he was meant to find it. We were meant to have your technology and all the other things too.”
“How do you know Lord Jherin is guided by fate? That’s how you refer to it, I believe.”
“Well, how else would he have known to find your world? That’s a miracle in itself. If you’re going to be free, you probably shouldn’t question him, whatever you think deep down. I know you must be a Christian and for all I know, maybe Jesus talked to fate in your world, but here it’s Lord Jherin.”
He laughed dryly. “I don’t think you know much about it. But I guess you’ve put me in my place. No Jesus here. You ought to put up a sign for when we come in, just so we won’t bother praying.”
She gave him a sideways look, feeling vaguely like he was mocking her again. “I just need to explain how important Lord Jherin is to people here, because—otherwise you could get in trouble.”
“Oh, I understand. When I got here they told me all about him, all his amazing accomplishments and immortality and meditations upon ‘fate’. I understand there were other Wodrenarunes before him. He sounds like the Pope. Like a two-hundred-year old Pope who never leaves his bedroom.”
“He leaves his bedroom.”
“When?”
“To give speeches. I mean… Calban gives the speeches, but Lord Jherin is right there with him.”
“Oh, yes. He leaves his bedroom behind a veiled curtain and lets Calban speak through him. I thought you said you'd read the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. There might be nothing but a little old man back there. And yet, he doesn’t even have good illusions.”
Parsons didn’t have a truly great defense for this, but at the same time, of course Lord Jherin was real. Wouldn’t someone figure it out, if he wasn’t? “But he is certainly real. He’s done remarkable things. He just can’t give speeches anymore. He is so tuned to fate now that the crowds bother him.”
“Sure,” Dennis said. “Sure they do. I probably shouldn’t say another word about it, or else you’ll be putting me right back in prison.”
“I won’t,” she said. She didn’t even know how he could joke about that. “I want you to know that I won’t, no matter what you say about Lord Jherin. But you should be careful about being flippant.”
He turned to the window, ignoring her comment. She had reached the bottom of the hill and turned toward the palace complex. A solid wall, about eight feet tall, surrounded the palace and all of its supporting buildings. Construction on the palace itself had finished when she was a baby. She had grown up in view of its numerous towers, in awe of its beauty and always thrilled to accompany one of her parents there. The palace rested at the end of a long row—a little over a mile—of landscaped park squares, where trees and flowers bloomed in a magnificent variety. On either side of the squares were brick apartment buildings for many of the workers, then the offices for the various departments, the library, the beautiful conservatory, a school and a hospital.
Parsons pointed all of this out to Dennis. “I work in that building,” she said. “But we’ll circle around.”
“I’ve seen this before,” he said. “When I escaped the palace.”
“How old are you, anyway?”
“Thirty-four, technically. Or twenty-three forever.”
“You weren’t always a vampire, though? I read in your file that—”
“No, of course not.”
“So what happened?”
“I caught the vampire flu.”
“That isn’t the story,” she said, annoyed. “I know you have to be turned by another vampire. What’s the real story?”
“I was on a fishing trip and a vampire girl found me out alone in the wilds and bit me because she thought I was handsome and she liked men who fish.”
“That isn’t the story either.”
“That is the story, actually.” He seemed fidgety, flexing his fingers like the gloves were too tight. Some children were poking around in the street with a ball and Parsons didn’t even blow her horn at them. Usually she had no patience for roadblocks.
She glanced at him and thought that it wasn’t very often she met someone who began life as one thing and then had to live the rest of it as something else.
“I can remember the day perfectly,” he murmured. “I had taken a train out to the wilds of West Virginia, where it was nothing but logging camps and animals in the forest that would come right up to you, like they’d never seen a man before. I was all alone out ther
e, and in fact I’d had a close call earlier in the day. Almost got taken out by a falling tree branch. So I was feeling philosophical, thinking about how fleeting life can be. At least, in my world it can be, and often is, very fleeting.”
“Have you known a lot of people who died?” Parsons asked. People didn’t usually die in her world unless they were old, or went to war, or chose to die. But in the Fallen Lands, people seemed to die all the time.
“Quite a few,” he said. “My sister Mary died when she was two. That was the worst of them. I was eight. And then my father, when I was nineteen. He was sick for a few years, so we had time to prepare, at least.”
“How did they die?” She tried not to sound too fascinated. None of her friends had lost a parent the way she had. No one had lost a sibling—certainly not a two-year-old. She couldn’t imagine the terror and uncertainty of such a life, where small children died.
“Sickness. Mary had a bad fever and cough. My father had heart trouble. Anyway, it’s just the way of things. I don’t like it, but immortality is worse. It’s hard to believe I might celebrate my hundredth birthday. And still look like this.”
“It’s not so strange here,” Parsons said. “You wouldn’t want to look old, would you?”
“I don’t know.” He ran his hand over his chin like he was considering. “What about you? Are you ever going to die?”
“Someday I will, of course.”
“How?”
“I’ll have to ascend. My soul will choose to move on.”
“What if your soul never wants to move on?”
“I don’t know.” She furrowed her brows at him. He certainly made some strange conversation. Or had she started it? “That’s a long way off.” She wondered if he guessed that she worried about this sometimes. When Mama died, she wished she could die. Of course, if you could ascend just from grief, people would die more often. It must take a great effort to will yourself into death and what did you do if you couldn’t manage it?
“And you’ll still look the same,” he said. “When you’re fifty, or a hundred…you’ll still look like a little girl.”
“I don’t look like a little girl. It’s very impolite to say so. Not that you care about being polite, that’s certainly clear.” She felt like she was just trying to goad her, not that he really even thought that.
“I guess you don’t look like a little girl, but I thought you’d be even more offended if I said you looked like a doll again,” he said, with an infuriating casualness.
“I would! And I don’t know why you want to offend me. I appealed to the Peacock General for your release.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t think you’re dangerous and I don’t think you ought to be locked up.”
“Thank you,” he said sarcastically. “I can’t wait to join you in reading magazines from America, knowing I can never see home again.”
She hit the brakes. “What is wrong with you?” she snapped. “Don’t you get it? I don’t have any control over this stuff, but if you lay low…”
“You’re the one who doesn’t get it,” he said. “Your people have tortured me. And whatever you or anyone else does to me, I heal. I keep living. I don’t fear prison, not especially, because I expect it won’t be long before I’m back there again, even if I follow all the rules. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Her innards pitched like she was on a ride at Wonderland. She so wanted to ask what Calban had done to him. And then, she wanted to do something to make up for it. As if she could.
But that probably wasn’t what Calban had in mind.
He looked at her briefly. There was a lot of that: her looking at him for a moment, and then him looking at her. She wondered what it meant, when he looked at her, if he found her so startling. Maybe he was just trying to get used to her, in quick glimpses.
“I wish you had a cigarette,” he said.
She pointed at the glove box.
“So, I was out fishing, as I said,” he continued as he lit one of the Swells, as if he had never drifted from his story. “Far away from all the troubles of the world. And that was when this girl came upon me. Eliza looked about seventeen or eighteen, but later I found out she had been hiding out in the woods with a group of vampires for some twenty years. She bit me, and I must have passed out, but when I woke up she forced me to drink her own blood, and that was what changed me.”
“What happened to her?” Parsons asked.
“She’s out there somewhere. Her and a clan of other vampires—six of them. They live in the wilds of West Virginia. I only stayed with them for a year.”
“So there are other vampires.”
“Yes.”
“What if you told Calban where they were? Maybe he would send you home and experiment on one of them instead. Or are you trying to protect them?”
“Oh, no. I’m not trying to protect them. But I imagine he would find two vampires better than one. And the last thing I want to see is anyone from that clan.”
“Why?”
“They’d…given in to their hunger.”
She could easily guess what that meant by the dark way he said it. “Is it hard not to give in?” she asked.
“It is, but…it isn’t. The woods are full of deer and rabbits that can satiate my hunger. But taking the life of a human…that will haunt a person until the end of their days. It seems like older vampires have a harder time resisting. It wears on you, the hunger. I fight it with every fiber of my being, but…I don’t know if it’s enough. If it will continue to be enough. It wrecks your mind, this thing—this curse—” He sounded more distant.
“It’s different here,” Parsons said. “Daramons can give you blood without being hurt.”
“It is…different. That is true.”
Parsons was riveted, struck by a deep urge to reach her hand toward his. To touch him, to comfort him, to smooth his hair. If she still had a heart it would be pounding. She felt something, anyway. Some rushing, almost manic sensation going on inside her that made her hands tingle. “You could live a normal life, maybe.”
“No matter what blood I drink, the hunger has altered me and I’m not sure anything will change that. I’m a predator now, and everyone around me is potential prey.”
“Not me,” she said.
“That’s true,” he said. “I can’t eat you, can I?”
“No,” she said, although the hint of mischief in his tone was enough to drive her to distraction as she pulled up to the building. The palace complex, unlike Wonderland Park, had not been planned out with parking, so she always just left her car on the curb.
She led the way up to the door, but he was right on her heels, his stride surprisingly relaxed. The entrance doors opened to a broad hallway with some potted plants, doors on either side branching to different departments. Her office was not the only division of product development; on the ground floors healer-sorcerers studied medicines and across the way from them were chemists. “Where did you work, in America?” Parsons asked.
“I was in law.”
“Law? Really.”
“How I must look, if you can’t even believe I ever had a respectable job.”
“I didn’t say that. I just—I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d work with your hands.”
“Only if you count using a pen, but the drama of local politics was not for the faint of heart. 1906 was so heated, in fact, that was part of why I had to go fishing, just to forget about it. I was quite content out there all alone with the fish, I must admit.”
Parsons opened the door to her office. She was a little late, due to all the driving around, and it seemed most of the men were in a meeting. Lu was at her desk, staring at Dennis. “Are you going to introduce me?” she asked.
Oh, sure. Lu never paid any attention to Parsons before. “Mr. Faraday. Our secretary, Lu.”
“Good morning,” Dennis said, but his eyes had already moved to the walls. Lu looked disappointed, her eyes tracking his every move.
Parsons had stopped paying any consideration to her surroundings at work a while ago, but she realized how strange it must look to Dennis. The walls were plastered with magazine clippings from Earth; colorful advertisements for automobiles and cigarettes providing a template for the office artists.
“I’ll be damned,” Dennis said. “It really is just as you said.”
“It’s been changing fast around here,” Parsons said. “At first we focused mostly on researching new inventions. But then, when we started reprinting novels from your world, the rich merchants bought everything up in a flash. Now they’re focusing more on exports. Lord Jherin has been granting people the right to lay claim to products. One of Papa’s friends just got the Coca-Cola account…”
“This is utter madness,” Dennis murmured, peering behind the partitions that separated the art department from the rest. A painting in progress rested on an easel, copied from phonograph advertisement. The artist was duplicating the lady in a bathing suit holding a record, but giving her pointed ears and darker hair like a Daramon.
“You want to be just like Americans,” Dennis said.
“Stop saying it like that.”
“Why not? What else is this? Tomorrow I expect you’re going to take me to a baseball game.”
“Oh, no. No one understands baseball,” Parsons said, ever so slightly amused. “In fact, some of the men here have been trying to figure it out. I think that’s why you’re here. We need explanations for lots of things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, like Santa Claus. I know he’s not real, but then sometimes it sounds as if he is. Do some people think he’s real?”
“Sometimes parents tell their children he’s real.”
“Even though he’s not?”
“To get them to behave themselves.” He smiled, eyes narrowing. She could just tell he was drawing comparisons to the Wodrenarune. “Where is your desk?”
“Here—oh.” Parsons could already see there was a note atop her magazines again.
Here’s a surprise! Dolly Dingle has a new pal.
Parsons ripped open the Pictorial Review, which was another women’s magazine she usually didn’t bother to read. It always featured a page with a paper doll named Dolly Dingle, or one of her friends, surrounded by her clothing with little cut-out tabs for children to play with.
The Vampire's Doll (The Heiress and the Vampire Book 1) Page 12
