Blood Groove (16 page)

He and Fauvette sat on either side of the motel bed. They were both fully dressed. Fauvette’s new clothes consisted of brown corduroy bell-bottoms and a peasant blouse that hung low and loose. Lee Ann slept between them, snoring lightly, still naked under the covers.

Fauvette folded the newspaper and said, “I reckon so.”

She looked at the window. For the last hour the red light had been growing more diluted as the dawn approached. Soon—too soon—it would be sunrise. “It’s almost morning,” she said guardedly.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Perhaps we should go to the river and watch the sunrise over the city?”

Fauvette’s eyes opened wide. “You’re kidding, right?”

He looked genuinely surprised. “I beg your pardon?”

“We’ll burn to chitterlings in the sun.”

Now he frowned. “I have no idea what a ‘chitterling’ is, but . . . you believe the sun will
destroy
you?”

“And you, too, smart guy. Everybody knows that.”

“Where did you get such an absurd idea?”

Her certainty faltered. “Well . . . all the movies have it in there.”

“The movies . . .” he repeated. Lee Ann had used that same word earlier. “What are they?”

“Moving pictures,” she said impatiently. Getting him up to speed on modern terminology would take a while.

“Ah. Cinema. Films.”

“Yeah, all the cinema films have it in there.”

“And you never tested it for yourself?”

“Testing burning to ashes didn’t seem like a good idea.”

With no condescension he said, “Fauvette, please tell me. How do you believe we can be destroyed?”

She sighed. If true death waited for her at sunrise, at least it wouldn’t be long. “We can be destroyed by a stake through the heart, being caught without the dirt from our graves, burning, or exposure to sunlight.”

He leaned over Lee Ann’s prone form, and his voice was almost kind when he took her hand. “We are most powerful in the dark, true. But the sun is always shining somewhere in the world. The sun weakens us, diminishes our powers, but it cannot destroy us.”

“Yeah, well, maybe in your day that was true, but this is the seventies.”

He walked around the bed and took her by the wrist. When she realized what he intended she began to struggle. “No, please, I don’t want this,” she pleaded. “I did what you wanted, let me
go
!”

Another guest pounded on the wall for silence. “It’s six o’clock in the morning, shut
up
!”

Zginski wrapped one arm around her upper body, effectively pinned her hands, and dragged her to the window. The curtains were now white with the full glare of the sun. “No, please!” she shrieked, crying in fear.

With his free hand he yanked the curtains open.

F
AUVETTE HELD
Z
GINSKI
’
S
hand as they strolled through the riverfront park. It was not a romantic gesture; Zginski was the one thing she was sure of at the moment, and she wasn’t about to let him go.

Sunrise joggers passed them, causing Zginski to momentarily wonder what pursued them until he grasped the truth. On the river, a chain of barges drifted downstream, surrounded by hovering gulls. Smaller boats buzzed against the current, bouncing off of or cutting through the barges’ bow waves. He tried to make out the cargo on the big flatboats, but at this distance, through the haze, all he saw were what looked like piles of refuse.

Mosquitoes and gnats hovered in shafts of light, but ignored him and Fauvette. Neither did the heat and humidity affect their essentially inert physical functions. It occurred to Zginski that not sweating would attract attention, and he began pondering ways to overcome that.

Fauvette was beyond such mundane concerns. Birds sang in the trees along with cicadas and stubborn crickets not yet ready for sleep. She had not truly heard birds sing in
nearly half a century, nor had she adequately recalled the many luminous shades of green sported by leaves. The buildings shimmered in the sunrise, the light bouncing off glass windows to cast hot spots of reflection. It hurt her eyes, but she did not look away.

Zginski couldn’t repress a smile at her expression of wonder. “Do you see?” he asked softly.

“Oh, yes,” she breathed. He referred to the prosaic truth about the sun’s effect on them, but she meant something more. For her, the world had opened in a way she thought ended with her last living heartbeat.

Earlier, when Zginski opened the curtain, Fauvette had been sure she was about to die. Since the window faced east, the sunlight came straight at her, seared her eyeballs and singed her skin. She screamed and struggled, but Zginski held her firm, and after a few moments she realized she wasn’t burning, she was
warming
. Her eyes gradually adjusted to the brightness, and instead of gray cliffs of metal and concrete towering over dark glittery streets, she saw a wonderland of bright abstract shapes and hazy towers.

Zginski released her, and she walked to the glass. She put her hand flat and felt the heat against the surface. He reached past her and opened the window, and she reached out into the arms of the sun.

Now she also watched the barges drift down the Mississippi as the morning haze dissipated, and smiled like a child on Christmas morning. “I
forgot
,” she said in wonder.

“What did you forget?”

“Everything. How beautiful it all is by day.”

He smiled and put his arm across her shoulders. “Let’s sit down,” he suggested, and led her to a bench under a large pecan tree. Squirrels scampered, paused, then scampered again across the flat park ground, before disappearing up the branches of a big live oak.

“How is this possible?” she asked. “I always thought sunlight would destroy us. It’s like that in all the books and movies.”

“Those stories were written by the willfully deceptive, to inspire confidence in their own abilities among the ignorant masses. Priests, magistrates, philosophers.
Scientists
,” he said with particular venom, recalling Sir Francis Colby. “We are no stronger than anyone else during the daylight hours, and the sun is rather hard on our eyes. But we can only be permanently killed by destruction of the heart, decapitation, or burning. Often all three, although any one would suffice. As they would for any other creature.”

“What about needing dirt from our graves?”

“A luxury. A comfort, if you will. But ultimately all we really need is a regular supply of blood.”

“I never knew,” she said and shook her head. “Forty-five years of skulking in shadows, sleeping in coffins . . .”

He turned her chin toward him. With clean, shiny hair and suitable clothes, she could pass for his daughter. “Fauvette, how were you made?”

She told him about the old man, and about the Scoval brothers who’d raped her dead body. She explained how she awoke in her coffin and clawed her way out, found her first victim—the elder of the Scovals, who wet his pants and died begging for mercy—and left Kentucky, first for Atlanta, then other cities in the South. She lost track of current events at the end of the Second World War, although she noticed that from 1967 on it was easier to find victims on the streets.

“So you were never taught what we are, or what we can do?” Zginski said when she finished.

“No. At first I watched some movies and read some books. But I had problems accepting some things.”

“Such as?”

She looked down at her hands, clasped demurely in her lap. “Well . . . I was raised in the Church. Hard-core Pentecostal.
I believed that everything was either of God, or of the devil. Since I had become one of the walking dead, it was pretty clear God had denied me the comfort of His heaven. So I figured I belonged to Satan.”

“Do you still believe that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen much evidence of God
or
Satan.” She looked away for a moment, then back at him. “Enough about me,” she said with forced levity. “I’m just a Kentucky hillbilly. What about you?”

Zginski considered this for a moment. He had resolved not to repeat the mistakes that led to his imprisonment in limbo, and one of them was trusting people. Still, this girl was also of the nosferatu, and she’d demonstrated considerable integrity. Plus there was something about her, a compelling innocence that nullified his baser instincts for self-preservation.

“Very well,” he said at last, with no trace of his inner uncertainty. “Do you know anything about the history of Europe?”

Fauvette shook her head.

“In 1825, a group of Russian army officers who called themselves the Decembrists attempted to prevent the ascension to the monarchy of Czar Nicholas I; they failed. Nicholas then became a fanatic opponent of revolution in
any
form, seeing in the existence of royal bloodlines evidence of the true will of God. Your Pentecostals, no doubt, would approve. He went to great lengths to protect himself, up to and including the use of magic and other arcane practices.”

Fauvette nodded, even though she had no idea what every third or fourth word meant. She felt the same way talking to Mark sometimes.

“At any rate, in an attempt to consolidate his own position, he more or less bought the power of his noblemen, exchanging their right to help rule the country as a whole for an almost total control of their own lands, which included the peasantry. Thus each nobleman ruled what was essentially an
independent community of slaves, much like the plantations of this very region, and left national decisions to Nicholas.”

Fauvette nodded again.

“So as these events unfolded in 1841, I was in Belgium attending the demonstration of Adolphe Sax’s new invention—the saxophone, it was quite popular in its time—when I heard that Nicholas had allowed the Kiselev Reforms to become law, thus freeing the peasants from individual serfdom to their lords. This had little practical effect for them, but an enormous one for me. Formerly, serfs could be bought or sold as individuals, much as slaves, but now they could only be sold collectively. So I purchased an entire village.”

She blinked as the words registered. “You bought a whole
town
?”

“Not the town, the people. I was . . . ahem . . . entrusted, shall we say, with a large supply of Japanese
maki-e
artwork, smuggled out just before that country finally opened its ports to the West. It was technically the property of a Chinese shipbuilder, who was too overwhelmed with the Opium War against the British to give much thought to black market art dealing. I agreed to transport it, using my own standing as a nobleman to avoid any unnecessary scrutiny, but then decided to use it to purchase the peasants.”

She frowned in concentration. His big words hid what seemed a very simple truth. “So . . . you
stole
it?”

He scowled. “In a manner of speaking. I appropriated its value, shall we say.”

“And what were you going to
do
with a whole town full of people?”

“That’s the clever part, if I do say so myself. I intended to take them to Ireland.”

Her eyes opened wider than they had all morning. “You were going to take
Russians
to
Ireland
?”

“Yes. You must understand, no one was or is better at making an existence out of the most inhospitable conditions
imaginable than a Russian peasant. Ireland was in the midst of the Great Famine, and whole areas were abandoned as the families left or died off. I intended to bring my people in, use them to stake my claim, and then when the famine ended as I knew it eventually must, I would own vast chunks of the Emerald Isle.” He smiled proudly, his fangs neatly slotted beside his lower canines.

“Heck of a plan,” Fauvette agreed. “So what went wrong?”

“A woman,” he said simply, although the mere word did not begin to capture the feminine flesh and desire that now filled his memory. Earthy scents of loam and sweat mixed with spices and incense, and the steady rumble of blood provided the rhythm for strange incantations and malicious laughter. “One of my peasants, who claimed to be a sorceress. At first she appealed to my . . . ahem . . . physical senses, but she was a
vyrdolak
, a vampire who sought the blood of those she loved best. That was the source of her apparent supernatural powers.”

“I didn’t know there were different kinds of . . . us.”

“There are not, really. It’s a matter of self-identification. She was what she believed herself to be. And, like yourself, she had an imperfect knowledge of her own nature.”

Fauvette scowled, annoyed by his vaguely condescending tone. “So she turned you into a vampire?”

He nodded. “Eventually. And I believe, inadvertently. She did not feed on me, because it was not I that she best loved, a fact I ignored out of mistaken belief in my own cleverness. She merely used me to acquire power within her own tribe, as the favored companion of their purchaser. Unknown to me, she positioned herself so that all pleas had to pass through her before they reached me.”

He paused, sorting through feelings he’d thought long extinguished. “When I discovered this, and confronted her and her lover”—and again a memory, of the hairy young Cossack’s mocking laughter, his neck marked by
her
fresh
bite, came to him with surprising vividness—“that was when she killed me. She did not intend to make me as she was, but as you can see, things did not go as she intended.”

“But you didn’t become a
vyrdolak
.”

“No. That is a choice, not a state of being. Fortunately this occurred as we crossed the Austrian-Hungarian countryside, so the local folklore provided me with all the necessary information about my new condition. I learned I can appear as mist, as a wolf, as a shadow within a shadow, or as you see me now. I can summon the storms and the beasts that prowl the night. And I never practice . . . trust.”

“Can you turn into a bat, too?”

He blinked in surprise. “A
bat
? Why on earth would I want to?”

“Well, I mean, in all the books and movies . . .”

“A bat is a rodent, like a rat or mouse. I can certainly command their actions, but to
become
one would be rather undignified.”