Throat (38 page)

“Your … blood … is so … sweet. I … I can still taste it,” she said, whispering. “I can taste the sun in your blood. My God, Emma. It was like … feeding. It
was
feeding. I didn’t intend to really feed—I had eaten so recently! I only wanted you to fully experience the joining of your personal
Feld
with that of another. Your neck was so pristine! But once I began!—it was all I could do to pull away. I wanted you so much. I cannot understand it … why there is still so much … of the sun in you.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was still slumped against her. It felt strange to be held that way by someone smaller than me.

“That is enough for now,” she said finally. “We need … to come down. I need … to let go of you. I might start again. It would be … too dangerous.”

When we joined Anton and Donne, they looked at us with strange eyes.

“Something happened, didn’t it?” Anton said. “I knew it. I knew there was something different about her.”

I didn’t know what to say. I was still a little bit in shock. The wounds in my neck throbbed, but it felt more like a pulse than a pain. As if what Lena had done had somehow made my body, my
spirit, still move in rhythm to the beat of her heart. It was frightening.

Lena didn’t answer Anton’s question. She was sitting across the room from the rest of us. She had cleansed her face, though I noticed she held the rag she had used close to her nostrils as if sniffing the last traces of my blood.

I held a cloth to my neck. The cloth was damp with alcohol. Lena had warned me to keep it there while we were inside the little cave room, even if the bleeding had stopped, to blunt the scent.

Donne watched me curiously without saying a word.

Later, after things had settled down, I had something important to ask and was looking for the right moment. Finally I just blurted it out.

“I need your advice,” I said. “The thing is, is there any way you can help me? Against Wirtz?”

Lena thought a long while before speaking.

“I’m sorry, Emma. I wish so much that we could, but we don’t dare provoke the
Verloren
. Another war would be … utterly devastating. Any act of aggression … would be a terrible provocation.”

“They’ve already been provoked, as far as I’m concerned,” Donne said. “We’ll be lucky if some of them don’t come snooping around here now. She’ll draw them to us.”

“And how is that my fault?” I said.

“It is not, of course,” Lena said. “But the
Verloren
have a kind of primitive code of honor they call the
Fütterung
. The Feeding. This does not mean literal feeding. It means there is no greater death, no greater sacrifice to be made in their world than to give oneself willingly in service to the warrior. Who in your instance would be Wirtz.”

“You haven’t answered his Call,” Anton said. “So you’ve never submitted to the
Fütterung
, okay? In his mind, you haven’t lived up to your end of things.”

I thought of the girl, Ava. What had happened to her when she had resisted the vampire.

“That’s why he’s coming for you,” Anton said. “It’s the only way to satisfy his wounded honor.”

“Oh boy,” I said.

“So thank you for messing everything up,” Donne said. “We were doing all right until you came along, Fresh. They’ll come again, I know they will.… It will happen all over.” She turned her face away.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “No wonder you
Sonnen
lost the war! If all of them are like you, Donne—”

“Emma!” Lena said. She spoke so sharply, I knew immediately I was supposed to drop it.

She motioned to me silently, and we left the cave and stood beneath a tall hickory tree that had moonlight fanning through its leaves. The sound of the little waterfall muffled our voices.

“That is why she never speaks of it … the night she was turned,” Lena said. “
Verloren
 … So often when one is in the throes of blood frenzy, the
Blutraserei
, a different sort of lust comes over them as well.”

“You mean she was—”

“Assaulted,” Lena whispered. “Can you imagine the horror? To already be suffering the greatest … theft … that can be suffered in a life. To have every choice from that moment on colored by the actions of another. She didn’t fight back. She knew she couldn’t, that her only hope of living was in choosing to do … nothing.”

“Oh wow. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Donne was a damaged spirit for years. You cannot believe
what it took to gain her trust. If not for Anton … He can be so much like a very bright … child. Locked inside a kind of perpetual … immaturity. Yet that is why she trusts him. He reminds her of her lost brother. Perhaps it is her only way of trusting a man.”

“I didn’t know,” I said. “No wonder she didn’t want to tell her story. I was thinking.… Oh, forget it. It’s not important.”

“What? Tell me.”

“I guess I just thought she didn’t like me for some reason.”

“Give her time.”

“Probably I should go,” I said.

“It might help if you were to come back inside a moment. I have something to ask you, and the others need to hear this as well.”

We went back inside and sat down again. Donne seemed to be okay, but she was almost leaning against Anton.

“I wanted you two to hear this,” Lena said. She turned to me. “All right, Emma. What is it? Have you decided yet? Which side you will choose?”

“Well, sure,” I said. “I thought it was pretty obvious that I’m on your side. Why would I go with the
Verloren
after what Wirtz did to me?”

“So you are ready to join us?”

The way she asked it felt almost formal … as if we were about to partake in some kind of weird vampire ceremony. I didn’t know how to respond.

“I … I want to,” I said. “I really do. There are just some things.… Well, it’s all so different for me. I don’t know if I’m ready to … wait like you guys do. I don’t know if I have the patience for it. What if the
Sonneneruption
doesn’t come for another hundred years? Two hundred? Sagan said the last one, the flare from 1859, was the strongest in five hundred years.…”

“Sagan. Who is Sagan?” Anton said.

*    *    *

“I knew it,” Donne said after I had spent the past hour explaining about Sagan, how our friendship had developed. “I knew there was something you were hiding from us.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I should have told you. But … I didn’t know how you would take it. I figured you just might throw me out.”

“Well, your instincts were right on,” Donne said, fuming. “You’ve betrayed our trust. Told someone about us—someone we are forced to hunt to live. A person who is going to betray us sooner or later.”

“Sagan would never do anything like that!” I said, struggling to hold in my temper. “Don’t you believe there are good people out there?”

“Of course we do, Emma,” Lena said.

“Only we’ve never known any of them,” Donne said.

“That’s because you’ve never tried,” I said. “And I know why. Because … you think you can’t. They are what we … consume. I understand that. But please—you have to make an exception in Sagan’s case for your own good. He can help! I know he can.”

“How?” Anton said.

“I don’t know all the technical stuff,” I said. “But he has … instruments he can use, ways to forecast what the sun is going to do at any given time. Predict the changes. He would know about the next
Sonneneruption
the moment it leaves the sun! Before anyone else in the whole world.”

“This is true?” Anton said. He seemed ready to jump at the chance. I explained as much as I could remember about STEREO and the Solar Observatory. I was laying it on kind of thick, but …

“Lena?” I said.

“I see no harm in it, I suppose.”

“Outvoted again,” Donne said, scowling. “But why would this
Vollmensch
help?”

“What’s that?” I said.

“Human, a human who has never been turned,” Anton said.

“Because he told me he would,” I said. “I believe him.”

“Why?” Donne said.

“Because …”
Because he loves me
, I wanted to say.

I loved watching Sagan work the next day. I couldn’t help sneaking glances every so often, especially when he got hot and pulled his shirt off and hung it on the railing. Something about the way his muscles moved … it made me feel this weird tingly sensation in my mouth. I wondered if I had this power before becoming a vampire. As if my senses were opening up in ways that I never could have imagined.

“So they’re really coming tonight?” he said, taking a drink of water.

“Huh?” I was checking out his Adam’s apple sliding up and down his throat. “Oh yeah. They said they would.”

“And you really think it’s okay?”

I tried not to look worried. I could still hear Donne’s voice ringing in my ears.

“
Okay, okay, I’ll go! I’ll go. And if we don’t like him, we can just take him.
”

“
Donne!” Lena had said
.

“
You know it’s true,” Donne had said. “What else can we do? He will know.
”

“
She’s right,” Anton had said
.

“It’s fine,” I said to Sagan, trying to sound perky and positive. “You have to look at it from their perspective. They’ve been so isolated. Their whole world has been about hiding, staying unseen,
unknown. But when I explained all about the observatory, the things you can do …”

Sagan grunted, almost laughing.

“No, really. You could help them so much. Maybe even find a new place for them to live on the base.”

“Just what I need,” Sagan said. “Four of you running around loose out here.”

“Be serious.”

“I am. I’m sorry. I just can’t really believe it. No matter what I’ve seen, what you’ve shown me … vampires are real? And I’ll be meeting three of them tonight?”

“Yep. It’s a big step for them. I practically had to make you out to be a sun god to get them to come.”

Sagan stretched magnificently, the little golden hairs on his arms glistening, a vein in his neck throbbing out a measured beat.
Hmmm, maybe I was right
.

“Can you see that?” he said as we positioned a tank behind a steel pillar and strapped it in place with bungee cords.

I leaned back, shading my eyes to look. “Nope. Not unless you’re coming up from the other side, and then you would probably just think it was part of the test stand. Thank goodness for rust.”

“Best camouflage there is,” Sagan said. “Okay, how’s that?”

I checked out his handiwork. “Good stuff. I’m impressed. I never would have guessed what a nasty mind you have lurking inside that angelic head of yours.”

Sagan was concentrating so hard, I’m not sure he heard that last part. “Some of this probably seems like overkill, but …”

“Papi always says he would rather be loaded for bear and face a
Rotluchs
than the other way around.”

“What’s a
Rotluchs
?”

“Bobcat,” I said.

“They have bobcats in Germany?”

“Guess so if they have a word for it.”

“I like the way your papi thinks.”

“Me too. I hope you can meet him someday.”

“Plan on it,” Sagan said.

We sat on the edge of the structure, mopping our faces with stolen high-end towels. The sun was going down. The sky to the west was turning scarlet as if the clouds were filling with blood.

“Hey,” I said. “All this stuff we’re setting up … be honest … will it work?”

“You’re supposed to be the cocky one, Emma.”

“I know. But … if this were an experiment … what would you say the percentages are?”

Sagan was quiet a little while. “You prepare the best you can. You try to increase your odds, but once you’ve done everything you can do—”

“I know; it’s out of your hands. But will it work?”

“Well … it’s got to, to a certain extent, right? Wirtz is a physical creature. So he’s got to have physical limitations. These things we have set up—they will have some effect. The only questions are these: how big an effect, and—maybe more important—can we hit the target?”

“There you go with that ‘we’ stuff again.”

“You’re stuck with me for the duration, Emma.”

“Until I decide to stash you somewhere safe.”

“We’ll see.”

“Sagan … do you worry at all about … killing someone?”

He stood up and turned away from me, leaning against the railing and looking somewhere over the fields. “We’re talking about a monster,” he said. “That’s what you called him.”

“I know. But he used to be a man.”

“Well, the problem is, it’s not real to me the way it’s real to you,” Sagan said. “You’ve seen vampires. Experienced what they can do. Being out here with you today, setting things up in the bright sunshine … it feels more like we’re getting ready for Halloween. It doesn’t feel real. So it doesn’t hit me that way.”

He spat and watched the small white blob fall all the way to the ground, wafting on the air currents as it fell.

“So … is it going to bother you? What we’re doing, I mean?” I said.

“Do we have a choice?” Sagan said. “We’ve got to come hard and with deadly force. If we try to be humane …”

“We’ll die. I get your point. It’s starting to feel a little too real,” I said. “You think this is what soldiers go through right before they go to war?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think it has completely sunk in for me. I wish I could see what you have seen.”

I shuddered. “No, you don’t.”

Night had fallen at last. We were standing outside the Solar Observatory, excitedly waiting for Lena, Donne, and Anton to arrive.

“You ready for this?” I said.

Sagan flashed a shaky smile. “Sure. I hope I am. Is there spinach in my teeth?”

“You’ll be fine. Just don’t think of them as … you know …”

“Vampires? Oh sure. That’ll be easy. Especially if they lick their lips a lot.”

“They’re people, remember? Human beings caught in a … bad situation. They want to be cured, be normal again. What they are doing, the sacrifices they are making and all—it’s pretty amazing. Lena is the leader, but Donne is the most suspicious. Win her over, and you’ll have all three of them. Or not.”