Thirst No. 5 (29 page)

“You didn’t have to!” Matt yells. “Just being who you are . . . he just had to see you and he was doomed.”

“I don’t understand. Before he came after me, he hadn’t seen you or Umara for a long time. You told me that yourself. He must have already said good-bye.”

“He did that to prepare us. To spare us.”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t even know you two existed.”

“You knew he loved you. He never stopped loving you. My mother knew it, and it was a burden she had to live with for five thousand years. You have no idea what you did to her.”

I nod sadly. “You’re right, I had no idea how much I hurt Umara.”

“And me.”

“And you. But Matt, is it fair to blame me? I loved Yaksha as much as he loved me. And I stayed away from him, and not just out of fear. I kept a distance because I wanted him to have
a life free of the burden of the vow he had made to Krishna.”

“Your distance didn’t make that burden any less.”

“It gave him a life. So your father loved me, he loved your mother as well. She was greater than I ever could be, which means my decision was the right one. He got to share his life with someone he cared for. He got to have a child. He had a family.” I stop. “Something I never had.”

It was Yaksha who stole away my family when he made me a vampire. Five thousand years have passed since that night, yet the wound has never healed.

In fact, right now, this instant, I feel I have never missed Rama and Lalita more. I have spent so long training myself not to think of them. But it’s as if my confrontation with Matt has burst a dam inside. I don’t just miss my husband, I long for him: his touch, his kind words, his loving eyes. And Lalita—my daughter used to have to smile at me to make my day complete.

All these feelings—I don’t know what to do with them. Yet Matt is so close, and I wish I could just hand them to him. . . .

“I know.”

“I know.” Matt stops pacing and approaches me, touching the side of my face. “I apologize. You’re right. When I swung my fist at you, I meant to hurt you.”

“Thank God you have such amazing reflexes.”

He continues to stare at me. “You know, we’re alone in this world. There’s no one else like us. You have Seymour and he’s
a good friend but . . . when you think about it, he’ll be dead before we know it. Then we’ll only have each other.”

“Are you trying to say you love me?”

His eyes are so powerful, so vulnerable. “Yes,” he says.

“But Teri . . . I can never be Teri.”

He touches my chin. “Let’s not talk about Teri.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing,” he says, and kisses me.

I remember his lips, I remember everything about him. But the last time I was naked in bed with him, I was inside Teri’s body, and the shadow of her memories made it impossible for me to surrender to his embrace.

Tonight I feel no such inhibition. We remove each other’s clothes at hyper speed, before everything merges into dreamlike slow motion where every move transpires between two ticks of the clock. He kisses my neck for hours. I brush his hair for days. And as his tongue slides over my breasts and beneath my abdomen, I feel a year go by. But in all that time I don’t blink, I don’t take my eyes off him. Matt, he is so beautiful; the only man who ever reminded me of Yaksha. Which means I must love him, too.

We make love for two hours, according to the clock.

But I never tell him how I feel.

Why? I don’t know.

He has opened his heart to me.

But I’m afraid to do the same.

A part of me waits and watches.

I fear the night has not yet reached its climax.

• • •

Matt and I lie naked in bed together, my head resting on his chest, listening to his heart pound. It could move mountains, the power of his beat. It’s no wonder the Telar feared him so. He is unquestionably the strongest creature on earth.

“Seymour is waiting for us,” Matt says.

“I know.”

“Did he tell you how he plans to unlock your memory?”

“I was afraid to ask.”

“His idea is clever. He wants to use the telepathic bond you two share—in a hypnotic session. You must have heard of mutual hypnosis?”

“It’s where two people hypnotize each other. The theory is their shared trance allows them to reach deeper levels of the subconscious.” I pause. “Does Seymour hope, with us, that it will work a hundred times better than normal?”

“Yes. It probably will.”

I sit up suddenly. “I don’t know. It could harm him. We’re too close. The stuff I went through at Auschwitz, he won’t be able to bear it.”

“Are you worried about that or are you more afraid he’s going to read your mind and know that we just had sex?”

“That is something to worry about. Maybe I should tell him before we start. We should clear the air.”

Matt smiles. “Relax. Seymour’s no dummy. He had Brutran give him the room between ours. By now he can probably mimic the sounds you make when you have an orgasm.”

“I don’t make any sounds. It’s you who bellows like a bull.”

“Sita, has anyone ever told you how romantic you are?”

“Not in a while.”

“I’m not surprised.” Matt climbs out of bed and puts on his sweats. “Did Mr. Grey say anything to you about our ultimate destination before they wheeled him into surgery?”

“He made one strange remark. He said we won’t be going to Nellis Air Force Base.”

Matt nodded. “That’s true.”

I reach for my own clothes and begin to dress. “How do you know?”

“I beat the game.”

“What does that mean? Did you win a prize?”

“I reached the goal of the game.”

“Please don’t keep me in suspense,” I say when he doesn’t continue.

“I’m sorry, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. The reason is because I think the game has something to do with what happened to you in the past. And I don’t want to spoil your innocence just before you link minds with Seymour.”

“You actually think you might influence my memory?”

“Yes,” Matt replies. “On several crucial points.”

“You act like I’m blocking everything that happened at
Auschwitz. That’s silly. There are a few points I can’t remember, probably because I was so near death. But it’s not like the Nazis cast a spell over me.”

“You thought the same about Landulf of Capua and his alter ego, Dante. You thought you got away clean. But we all know how that turned out.”

“Fine,” I mutter. In reality, I still have trouble recalling the days I spent in Sicily a thousand years ago—Seymour’s record of the events notwithstanding. It’s still hard for me to believe a bunch of Middle Ages barbarians were able to outfox me.

Matt and I have a final awkward moment before we leave to meet with Seymour. We are fully dressed and talking about how we should conduct the hypnotic regression when Matt suddenly steps in front of me and puts a finger to my lips, momentarily silencing me.

“What’s wrong?” I ask softly. I can see he’s troubled, and just minutes ago he was cracking jokes. Lowering his head, he removes his finger from my lips.

“I was just wondering how you felt about what I said.”

He is referring to when he told me he loved me.

“I felt wonderful,” I say.

He nods but he is not looking at me. “Good.”

“You caught me by surprise. Like I said, I thought you were still upset about Teri.”

“It’s a deep scar. It will take time to go away. It might never go away.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “I can say it back to you. I want to say it. I just worry, you know, that now is not the right time.”

Matt raises his head and shrugs. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not important.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he says.

It’s after eleven when I knock on Seymour’s door. Chances are I won’t get back to the hospital until after one. That’s fine, I think. It will give Mr. Grey more time to recover. I have no plan to break him out of the hospital. No matter how successful the surgery, he’s going to need to rest a few days if he is to recover. I wish I knew why he is so adamant about staying close to me.

I expect to have a painful scene with Seymour. I know how attached he is to me. His love for me is unconditional, it’s true, but he’s never hidden his attraction to me. I assume hearing Matt and me screwing in the adjoining room must have hurt.

But Seymour surprises me. When I try to bring up the subject, he waves his hand and tells me not to worry about it.

“It was bound to happen,” he says.

“You’re not jealous.”

“Of course I’m jealous. But I’m a realist. Matt’s the closest thing this planet has got to a god. I’m a burned-out writer who smokes two packs a day and never exercises. How can I compete?”

I reach out and brush his hair from his eyes. “You’re amazing.”

“I know.”

“I love you.”

“Of course you do. I love you.” He takes my hand and kisses it. “Now get Matt in here. We should get started.”

I do as ordered. Matt enters the room a minute later.

“Where do you want to start?“ I ask.

“Where you left off on the plane,” Seymour says, before giving Matt a quick rundown of the points he missed, finishing with how Major Klein put a bag over my head and dragged me beneath the ground to his dungeon. Seymour adds, “Once we’re in a deep trance, we’ll start there.”

“I can tell a lot of what happened during my interrogation without resorting to hypnosis,” I say.

Neither Seymour nor Matt looks impressed.

“No offense,” Seymour says. “But it’s hard to rely on your memory after Major Klein got his hooks into you.”

“Why do you say that?” I ask.

“Because what you told us doesn’t sound real,” Matt explains. “A metal box that emits a high-pitched sound—which only you could hear—that tortured you and then knocked you out? Never mind the weird cuffs that you couldn’t break. No one had stuff like that during the war.”

“All right,” I say, in no mood to argue. “I’ll tell the last part of my story in a trance.”

Seymour and I sit in two chairs facing each other, our knees
almost touching. Matt turns the light down low and sits on the corner of the bed, where he can keep an eye on both our faces.

Seymour is a student of hypnosis and I, of course, have my own way of inducing a trance. We stare into each other’s eyes and give a minimum of relaxing suggestions. Soon our eyes are closed and I feel as if we are both enclosed in a bubble that is slowly rising high into the sky. I see stars and intuitively know Seymour sees them as well. But it is not simple intuition—it is our old telepathic bond. To this day I don’t understand why it is so strong, why our minds automatically connect—they just do. The link feels as real as an extra sense.

As if from far off, I hear Seymour speak, in a whisper, and I find his choice of pronouns appropriate—we are locked so tightly together. The only reason we speak at all is for Matt’s benefit.

“We’re surrounded by white light. Like a radiant waterfall, it pours into the tops of our heads, filling all parts of our bodies, before flowing out our feet. The white light continues to flow, in a steady stream, from our feet back to the tops of our heads, forming an impenetrable cocoon that shields us from all negativity. Nothing we see or feel can harm us. It’s as if we are watching a television screen. The controller is in our hands—we are in complete control. Now let our minds journey into the past . . .”

T
he room is a perfect cube, twenty feet on all sides; even the distance to the cement ceiling is the same. A single bright recessed light shines from its center. The walls and the floor are solid concrete. The lone door appears to be made of the same incredibly hard alloy as my wrist and ankle cuffs—both of which have me pinned to a central pole.

Except for the dry odor of concrete, I smell nothing—no blood, no tears, not even a trace of perspiration. I suspect the room has not been used before, that it was probably constructed specifically to hold me.

I have been standing in the center of the room for two weeks.

Without food, water, or blood to drink.

No one has stopped by to visit.

And I hear nothing. Except my heart, my breathing.

I’m in terrible pain. The constant standing has worn out my leg muscles. The cramps in my arms are worse. My wrists are pinned far above my head. I’m stretched so long my toes barely touch the floor. The angle is reminiscent of a crucifixion; my suffering parallels those who have been put to death in that manner. Due to the way gravity drains the blood and lymph fluids downward in the body during crucifixion, a person usually suffocates to death.

But slowly, very slowly.

Every breath is agony.

Every minute feels like an eternity.

I know why they leave me to suffer. They want to break me, and because they know what I am, they figure it will take a great deal of pain to do it. Obviously they want something from me. But what it is I have no idea.