"Wilhelm sometimes uses it to clean the chrome on the Ferrari." The old man sniffed. "You are going to be very sick from drinking that, you know."
"I think it's my turn." She shoved the hair hanging in her eyes out of her face. "Val's not dead. My brother isn't going insane, and he won't die of mutant malaria. In a week or two all of this is going to seem pretty funny."
He gave her a sad look. "I do not think I will laugh."
"Neither do I. Which is why they will never hire me to be a crisis counselor." She felt her stomach heave, but after a moment the sensation passed. "Wailing and not knowing. How do we do that, Gregor? How do we act like we're okay and everything will be fine when the people we love are in danger and we can do nothing to help them?"
"I can't." His lower lip trembled. "Suzerain Jaus is a lord paramount, and I am sworn to serve him. I know my place and my duty. But that is not all that he is to me. Alex. I love Valentin. I love him like a son. Now, when he is in trouble, when he most needs me. I cannot go to him."
"Gregor."
"I cannot find him. I cannot bring him home and take care of him. I don't eat; I don't sleep. I cannot think of a life without him in it." He drew in a shuddering breath. "I cannot bury another son, Alexandra. This time I fear they will have to put me in the grave with him."
Alex put her arms around him and held him as he wept, making soothing sounds until he composed himself.
"You are very kind to an old man, my lady." Gregor seemed embarrassed now.
"I wish I were like you, but I hate my brother. He's a stuck-up, sanctimonious jerk." And the way he avoided looking at her was driving her up the wall. "I didn't ask for this vampire thing to happen to me. I didn't want it. But I adjusted, and I'm doing the best I can. I'm not whining or crying, even when I want to. And I'm still his sister. I love my brother. And you know, he can't even look at me anymore? Because when he does, he can't hide how much he hates me for what I am."
"Alexandra." He rested one frail hand against her cheek. "Whatever happens, he will always be your brother, and you his sister. That bond, it is forever. Nothing changes it. Not even death."
She sat back and looked into his eyes. "I think the same thing goes for you and Val."
He took his handkerchief from her and blew his nose in it. "You are wrong. You do not suck at this."
"Thanks. I feel better." She pressed a hand to her abdomen. "Except I have to go throw up now."
* * *
Chapter 16
Liling woke up at dawn, the sunlight making her squint. Jaus had rolled away from her and pulled a pillow over his head. He slept so deeply he looked almost lifeless. She got up and draped the window with the quilt they had kicked off sometime during the night.
She went to find some clothes. Her own had been left in a soggy pile, but she discovered a trunk filled with clothing and took the smallest she could find to wear: a pair of black sweatpants with an elastic waist, and a red-and-black plaid shirt.
Taking them into the bathroom, she turned on the shower and stepped inside. The deodorant soap and strong shampoo the cabin's owners had left behind made her nose wrinkle, but in the past she had been forced to use worse.
As she washed, Liling tried to imagine what it would feel like to have Valentin fall so deeply in love with her that he would want to kill anyone who tried to take her away from him. Had this Jema woman been blind? How could she not have known? How could she have wanted anyone else?
The water grew warm, and then hot.
The bathroom had grown steamy before Liling recognized the danger and turned off the taps. She couldn't allow her emotions to affect her like this. She had gotten too close to him; she had allowed the sex and the fulfillment of her fantasies to seduce her and make her forget her responsibilities. Valentin wanted her, and for a time she could be with him. Here, while they were alone, while there was no danger of being discovered.
An ache grew in her stomach as she thought of how it would be after they were rescued. The attraction between them was strong. He also felt grateful to her for taking his pain and for helping him to see from where it had come. She now knew his secret: that he could heal himself. In many ways they were exactly alike.
He liked how well they fit together as lovers, too. He would not let her go easily.
She had to leave him eventually. Not only to protect him, but because it couldn't last. Valentin wanted her, but he couldn't love her. He had already given his heart away to Jema.
Liling felt sick, and braced herself over the sink, but nothing happened. And then she knew it was the thought of leaving him, and of knowing he could never love her as much as he had Jema, that was making her ill.She couldn't leave him, and she couldn't stay. What was she going to do? How could she tell him?
She looked down and saw that the water that had been running down her legs had beaded, unmoving, on her skin. She glanced at the shower and saw more drops running over the edge, across the floor, streaming toward her.
He had found her again.
Steam rose from her body as she crouched, ignoring the icy touch of the water as she pressed her hands to the tiled floor. The droplets on the floor began to jump and sizzle as the tiles turned red. The room was a cloud of steam by the time she rose, snatched up the clean clothes, and walked out.
She dressed outside the bathroom and went to the kitchen. Valentin had put some canned soft drinks in the refrigerator, and she took one out and drank down the entire can, then a second, and a third before the thirst passed. Her stomach surged and she hurried over to the sink.
She vomited until her stomach emptied.
Liling straightened and gasped for air. Something was different: something was wrong with her insides. She tried to drink another can, which made her sick again. As she washed her hot face, the water she hated wet her lips, and she was able to drink and hold down some of that.
Weakened by the bizarre episode, she went out and sat in front of the fireplace. She felt terribly hungry, but the thought of food turned her stomach. She curled up in the strange clothes and stared at the flames.
Fire comforted her like nothing else. She understood its hunger, its greed to consume everything it touched. It was powerful and dangerous, but it could be confined, controlled, made useful. As she had been.
She got up slowly and went back to the bedroom. As soon as she lay on the bed beside Valentin, he rolled toward her and put his arm across her.
Her eyelids slipped down as she drifted off to sleep.
Liling wandered through the dreamscape, watching the gray dullness around her draw and redraw itself. It reminded her of the Magic Board her twin had stolen for her when they were nine.
She had wanted only a book. The priests forbade them to keep anything but Bibles in their rooms, but one of the doctors kept some children's books and toys in a cabinet in one of the hurting rooms. They were worn and tattered—the doctor had bought them at a library discard sale, ten cents a box—and most of them were too young for her. She had been left in the hurting room long enough to unearth a few good ones by Sydney Taylor, Judy Blume, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and if she didn't make any sound during the testing the doctor would let her take them back to the dormitory.
"I want to read The Long Winter," she told her twin. "But Pern took it first."
Her twin thought books were stupid, and told her that, and made her cry.
Liling found the Magic Board, her twin's prized possession, under her pillow the next day.
The Magic Board was covered with silly cartoon stick drawings and was fun fun fun! for girls and boys. Made of a thin sheet of cardboard with thin plastic film rectangle glued at one end on top of a rectangle of sticky gray stuff, it came with a white plastic stylus attached on a black string. Her twin, who loved to draw, had stolen it from the toy cabinet long ago, and had successfully kept it hidden from their monitors.
Liling drew with the stylus on the film, and gray lines appeared as the film adhered to the sticky stuff underneath. Then, when she lifted the film—making a sound exactly like ripping paper—the lines would vanish and she could draw something new.
She carefully etched two pictures on the film, but her twin came over and told her that it was more fun fun fun! erasing them. That ripped-paper sound it made bothered Liling, but her twin loved it.
Unfortunately, the Magic Board was old and well used. As Liling drew the third picture—two stick-figure children in front of a real Picasso of a house next to a broccoli-stalk tree—the lines began slowly erasing on their own from the scarred, ratty film layer. Each lime she tried to draw them back in, some of the tree or the house would vanish.
Her twin saw her tears and snatched the board away from her. Why do you have to be such a baby?
I want to live in a real house with a mother and father, and you, she said. Like Laura in the Little House books.
They're never going to let us do that, her twin said. We don't have parents. We don't have names. We're nothing. Her twin tore the board to pieces.
The priests came in and they were both beaten twice, once for stealing, and once for destroying the board.
Liling understood why her twin had become so angry. It wasn't because she had cried. They knew everything that the other thought, that the other felt. They couldn't help but know.
Every time they were sent to a new facility, they were made into a new picture. When they were taken away, it was as if someone ripped the film up and erased them. She tried to be good so they would keep them in one place, but they never did. That was what had made her cry, and had enraged her twin.
Still, Liling couldn't stop thinking about someday finding a home and a family. She built a little house in her thoughts, with rooms for a mother and father and her and her twin. They would have a big dog to run and play with outside, and flowers all around the house that their mother would tend. They would eat delicious home-cooked meals at a small table with a red-and-white checked tablecloth, and at night their father would read them bedtime stories, and their mother would kiss their brows and tuck them in.