Fledgling (3 page)

He sighed and held me, leaning back in his seat and letting me lean against him. “So what was that?” he asked after a while. “How did you do that? And why the hell did it feel so fantastic?”

He had enjoyed it—maybe as much as I had. I felt pleased, felt myself smile. That was right somehow. I’d done it right. That meant I’d done it before, even though I couldn’t remember.

“Keep me with you,” I said, and I knew I meant it the moment I said it. He would have a place to live. If I could go there with him, maybe the things I saw there would help me begin to get my memory back—and I would have a home.

“Do you really not have anywhere to go or anyone looking for you?” he asked.

“I don’t think I have anyone,” I said. “I don’t remember. I need to find out who I am and what happened to me and … and everything.”

“Do you always bite?”

I leaned back against him. “I don’t know.”

“You’re a vampire, you know.”

I thought about that. The word stirred no memories. “What’s a vampire?”

He laughed. “You. You bite. You drink blood. He grimaced and shook his head. “My God, you drink blood.”

“I guess I do.” I licked at his neck.

“And you’re way too young,” he said. “Jailbait. Super jailbait.”

Since I didn’t know what “jailbait” was and I had no idea how old I was, I didn’t say anything.

“Do you remember how you got that blood on your clothes? Who else have you been chewing on?”

“I killed a deer. In fact, I killed two deer.”

“Sure you did.”

“Keep me with you.”

I was watching his face as I said it. He looked confused again, worried, but he held me against his body and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m not sure how I’m going to do that, but yeah. I want you with me. I don’t think I should keep you. Hell, I know I shouldn’t. But I’ll do it anyway.”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be alone,” I said. “I don’t know who I should be with, though, because I can’t remember ever having been with anyone.”

“So you’ll be with me.” He smiled and his confusion seemed to be gone. “I’ll need to call you something. What do you want to be called?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to give you a name?”

I smiled, liking him, feeling completely at ease with him. “Give me a name,” I said. I licked at his neck a little more.

“Renee,” he said. “A friend of mine told me it meant ‘reborn.’ That’s sort of what’s happened to you. You’ve been reborn into a new life. You’ll probably remember your old life pretty soon, but for now, you’re Renee.” He shivered against me as I licked his neck. “Damn that feels good,” he said. Then, “I rent a cabin from my uncle. If I take you there, you’ll have to stay inside during the day. If he and my aunt see you, they’ll probably throw us both out.”

“I can sleep during the day. I won’t go out until dark.”

“Just right for a vampire,” he said. “How did you kill those deer?”

I shrugged. “Ran them down and broke their necks.”

“Uh-huh. Then what?”

“Ate some of their meat. Hid the rest in a tree until I was hungry again. Ate it until the parts I wanted were gone.”

“How did you cook it? It’s been raining like hell for the past few days. How did you find dry wood for your fire?”

“No fire. I didn’t need a fire.”

“You ate the deer raw?”

“Yes.”

“Oh God, no you didn’t.” Something seemed to occur to him suddenly. “Show me your knife.”

I hesitated. “Knife?”

“To clean and skin the deer.”

“A thing? A tool?”

“A tool for cutting, yes.”

“I don’t have a knife.”

He held me away from him and stared at me. “Show me your teeth,” he said.

I bared my teeth for him.

“Good God,” he said. “Are those what you bit me with?” He put his hand to his neck. “You
are
a damned vampire.”

“Didn’t hurt you,” I said. He looked afraid. He started to push me away, then got that confused look again and pulled me back to him. “Do vampires eat deer?” I asked. I licked at his neck again.

He raised a hand to stop me, then dropped the hand to his side. “What are you, then?” he whispered.

And I said the only thing I could: “I don’t know.” I drew back, held his face between my hands, liking him, glad that I had found him. “Help me find out.”

Three

O
n the drive to his cabin, the man told me that his name was Wright Hamlin and that he was a construction worker. He had been a student in a nearby place called Seattle at something called the University of Washington for two years. Then he had dropped out because he didn’t know where he was heading or even where he wanted to be heading. His father had been disgusted with him and had sent him to work for his uncle who owned a construction company. He’d worked for his uncle for three years now, and his current job was helping to build houses in a new community to the south of where he’d picked me up.

“I like the work,” he told me as he drove. “I still don’t know where I’m headed, but the work I’m doing is worth something. People will live in those houses someday.”

I understood only that he liked the work he was doing. As he told me a little about it, though, I realized I would have to be careful about taking blood from him. I understood—or perhaps remembered—that people could be weakened by blood loss. If I made Wright weak, he might get hurt. When I thought about it, I knew I would want more blood—want it as badly as I had previously wanted meat. And as I thought about meat, I realized that I didn’t want it anymore. The idea of eating it disgusted me. Taking Wright’s blood had been the most satisfying thing I could remember doing. I didn’t know what that meant—whether it made me what Wright thought of as a vampire or not. I realized that to avoid hurting Wright, to avoid hurting anyone, I would have to find several people to take blood from. I wasn’t sure how to do that, but it had to be done.

Wright told me what he remembered about vampires—that they’re immortal unless someone stabs them in the heart with a wooden stake, and yet even without being stabbed they’re dead, or undead. Whatever that means. They drink blood, they have no reflection in mirrors, they can become bats or wolves, they turn other people into vampires either by drinking their blood or by making the convert drink the vampire’s blood. This last detail seemed to depend on which story you were reading or which movie you were watching. That was the other thing about vampires. They were fictional beings. Folklore. There were no vampires.

So what was I?

It bothered Wright that all he wanted to do now was keep me with him, that he was taking me to his home and not to the police or to a hospital. “I’m going to get into trouble,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when.”

“What will happen to you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Jail, maybe. You’re so young. I should care about that. It should be scaring the hell out of me. It is scaring me, but not enough to make me dump you.”

I thought about that for a while. He had let me bite him. I knew from the way he touched me and looked at me that he would let me bite him again when I wanted to. And he would do what he could to help me find out who I was and what had happened to me.

“How can I keep you from getting into trouble?” I asked.

He shook his head. “In the long run, you probably can’t. For now, though, get down on the floor.”

I looked at him.

“Get down, now. I can’t let my uncle and aunt or the neighbors see you.”

I slid from the seat and curled myself up on the floor of his car. If I had been a little bigger, it wouldn’t have been possible. As it was, it wasn’t comfortable. But it didn’t matter. He threw the blanket over me. After that, I could feel the car making several turns, slowing, turning once more, then stopping.

“Okay,” he said. “We’re at the carport behind my cabin. No one can see us.”

I unfolded myself, got back up onto the seat, and looked around. There was a scattering of trees, lights from distant houses, and next to us, a small house. Wright got out of the car, and I looked quickly to see which button or lever he used to open the door. It was one I had tried when he was threatening to take me to a hospital or the police. It hadn’t worked then, but it worked now. The door opened.

I got out and asked, “Why wouldn’t it open before?”

“I locked it,” he said. “I didn’t want you smearing yourself all over the pavement.”

“… what?”

“I locked the door to keep you safe. You were trying to jump from a moving car, for Godsake. You would have been badly hurt or killed if you had succeeded.”

“Oh.”

He took me by the arm and led me into his house.

Once I was inside, I looked around and immediately recognized that I was in a kitchen. Even though I could not recall ever having been in an intact kitchen before, I recognized it and the things in it—the refrigerator, the stove, the sink, a counter where a few dishes sat on a dish towel, a dish cabinet above the counter, and beside it, a second cabinet where my nose told me food was sometimes stored. I remembered the blackened refrigerators and sinks at the burned ruin. But this was what a kitchen should look like when everything worked.

The kitchen was small—just a corner of the cabin, really. Beyond it was a wooden table with four chairs. Alongside the kitchen on the opposite side of the cabin was a small room—a bathroom, I saw when I looked in. Beyond the bathroom was the rest of the cabin—a combination living room-bedroom containing a bed, a chest of drawers, a soft chair facing a stone fireplace, and a small television on top of a black bookcase filled with books. I recognized all these things as soon as I saw them.

I went through the cabin, touching things, wondering about the few that I did not recognize. Wright would tell me and show me. He was exactly what I needed right now. I turned to face him again. “Tell me what else to do to keep you out of trouble.”

“Just don’t let anyone see you,” he said. “Don’t go out until after dark and don’t …” He looked at me silently for a while. “Don’t hurt anyone.”

That surprised me. I had no intention of hurting anyone. “All right,” I said.

He smiled. “You look so innocent and so young. But you’re dangerous, aren’t you? I felt how strong you are. And look what you’ve done to me.”

“What have I done?”

“You bit me. Now you’re all I can think about. You’re going to do it again, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

He drew an uneven breath. “Yeah. I thought so. I probably shouldn’t let you.”

I looked up at him.

He took another breath. “Shit, you can do it right now if you want to.”

I rested my head against his arm and sighed. “It might hurt you to lose more blood so soon. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t you? Why not? You don’t even know me.”

“You’re helping me, and you don’t know me. You let me into your car and now into your house.”

“Yeah. I wonder how much that’s going to cost me.” He put his hand on my shoulder and walked me over to the table. There he sat down and drew me close so that he could open one of my filthy shirts, then the other. Having reached skin, he stroked my chest. “No breasts,” he said. “Pity. I guess you really are a kid. Or maybe … Are you sure you’re female?”

“I’m female,” I said. “Of course I am.”

He peeled off my two shirts and threw them into the trash can. “I’ll give you a T-shirt to sleep in,” he said. “One of my T-shirts should be about the size of a nightgown for you. Tomorrow I’ll buy you a few things.”

He seemed to think of something suddenly. He took my arm and led me into the bathroom. There, over the sink, was a large mirror. He stood me in front of it and seemed relieved to see that the mirror reflected two people instead of only one.

I touched my face and the short fuzz of black hair on my head, and I tried to see someone I recognized. I was a lean, sharp-faced, large-eyed, brown-skinned person—a complete stranger. Did I look like a child of about ten or eleven? Was I? How could I know? I examined my teeth and saw nothing startling about them until I asked Wright to show me his.

Mine looked sharper, but smaller. My canine teeth—Wright told me they were called that—were longer and sharper than his. Would people notice the difference? It wasn’t a big difference. Would it frighten people? I hoped not. And how was it that I could recognize a refrigerator, a sink, even a mirror, but fail to recognize my own face in the mirror?

“I don’t know this person,” I said. “It’s as though I’ve never seen her before.” Then I had another thought. “My scars are gone.”

“What?” he asked. “What scars?”

“I was all scarred. A few nights ago … three nights before this one, I was scarred. I remember thinking that I must have been burned—all over. And I couldn’t see for a while when I first woke up, so maybe my eyes were scarred, too.” I sighed. “That’s why I hurt so much and why I was so hungry and so tired. All I’ve done is eat and sleep. My body had so much healing to do.”

“Scars don’t vanish just because wounds heal,” he said. “Especially not burn scars.” He pushed up the sleeve of his right arm to display a shiny, creased patch of skin bigger than my hand. “I got this when I was ten, fooling around our barbecue pit. Caught my sleeve on fire.”

I took his arm and looked at the scar, touched it. I didn’t like it. It felt the way my own skin had when I examined my scars. I had the feeling I should be able to make his scars go away too, but I didn’t know how. I turned his hand to look at the bite mark I’d made, and he gasped. The wound seemed to me to be healing as it should, but he snatched his arm from me and examined the hand.

“It’s already healing!” he said.

“It should be healing,” I said. “Are you hungry?”

“Now that you mention it, I am. I had a big meal at a café not far from the job site, but I’m hungry again.”

“You should eat.”

“Yeah, but I’m not into raw meat.”

“Eat what’s right for you. Eat what your body wants.”

“But you ate raw meat to heal?” he asked.

His words triggered something in me—a memory. It felt real, true. I spoke it aloud: “All I need is fresh human blood when I’m healthy and everything’s normal. I need fresh meat for healing injuries and illnesses, for sustaining growth spurts, and for carrying a child.”