Navigating the metal stairs up proved the most challenging. Her strange feet slid, skittered, and she could not hold onto the railing, the coat and the rucksack. What was it going to take to change her back now? Why wasn’t this like the first time? She would have been happy to forget all that had happened this evening, to erase the emerging part that had thrilled at slaying them all as she had forgotten the rapist she had slaughtered.
At the door she paused to listen beyond it and, hearing nothing, opened it and left the catacombs. No one was outside nor lurking in the woods. In this form, she thought, it would be impossible for someone to sneak up on her. No sign of the driver or Harry, not even his scent on the wind.
She stepped out from the stone tower and into a patch of moonlight through the bare branches overhead. The moonlight stung. Unprepared for the sharp pain, she stumbled and pitched forward onto her knees. Her joints burned. She tried to twist away from an agony that was inside her, impossible to escape. Terrible light exploded in her head.
When it was over, she lay curled into a ball on the cold ground. Her arms, hands, her body was hers again. The pain was something distant, as if it had happened years before. Naked, she rolled onto her hands and knees, and let her head loll for a minute before she tried to get to her feet. But the energy was there, that same strange energy that had come to her in the aftermath of the first attack.
Ruksana shivered in the cold, alive and tight as a steel spring, but finally dug into the rucksack for clothes. They weren’t terribly fresh but at least they were warm. She put on her coat, sat on the concrete step and put on her shoes. Her own bag she stuffed into the rucksack, which she hoisted onto her shoulders.
She walked back through the woods dividing the highway. As she did, a half dozen police vehicles, sirens screaming, zipped past her. She turned and walked the other way on the shoulder of the road, facing the oncoming traffic.
Shortly she saw a sign for Pl Denfert-Rochereau a half kilometer ahead. It bore the symbol for a metro station, an M in a circle. She was ravenously hungry now, so instead of going straight to the airport, she took the Metro to St. Michel, and went up to find a restaurant. She hoped it wasn’t too late. She wanted something hot.
— 15 —
The story broke before her AirFrance flight boarded.
A suspended television screen between gates flashed the word “Vampires!” over the head of the news anchors.
A slaughter had taken place in the catacombs below Paris and all further tourism there was suspended indefinitely. The prim newswoman announced, “We have confirmation from the government this morning that the plague of new vampires that has swept North America is with us in Paris. Like warring street gangs, it seems that different factions of these blood-suckers are fighting for dominance. This latest battle left only a single human survivor, whose identity is being withheld at this time, but who provided police with a description of one of the monsters.”
Possibly the strangest Identikit drawing in history filled the screen. She knew it must be a portrait of her, although nowhere in the fierce eyes, elongated snout and sharp elflike ears could she find a hint of herself.
“Strangest of all, according to the survivor’s statement, this creature defended him against others and led him out of the tunnels to safety. So far there’s been no trace of it anywhere, although the remains of four so-called vampires and seven humans have thus far been located in the tunnels. The commissioner of police assures the public …”
Ruksana moved away from the screen, retreating to the nearest restroom in the terminal. She sat in a stall for perhaps half an hour, so paralyzed by the enormity of it all that she couldn’t manage to stand up and leave. She had killed them eagerly. If Harry hadn’t escaped, she would have hunted him down, too, though he had been her good friend. Deb Arliss had roomed with her. Why was there no guilt, no shock as there had been the first time?
Finally she heard the announcement that her flight was boarding, and she made herself stand, heft the rucksack and unlock the stall door. In front of the sinks she paused to splash water on her face. She stared deep into her own eyes as if she might find her soul in them, and made a particular point of not looking at her silvery mane of hair.
— 16 —
“Nine hundred years ago,” explained Decebal, “our Wallachian ancestors, yours and mine, were tasked with guarding the living from vampires. I suspect we had been doing this for many centuries before this was written down. We were considered to be werewolves, just as the revenants were classified all as vampiri. The specifics are lost now beneath layers of superstition and folklore, just as Pausanius conflated the real story of Damarchus the Parrhasian, our ostensible ancestor, with Lycaon, a king who in myth was turned into a wolf by Zeus for serving the god a dish of human flesh. Even Pausanius confessed he doubted the connection, but he gave us no more of Damarchus than that. The truth is all lost, save that our kind existed in 400 B.C., and so, we must assume, did our enemy.”
Seated across from him at the kitchen table, Ruksana pushed back her white hair. “Then where did they all go?” she asked.
“I don’t know. The Church moved across Europe and wherever they landed, they cursed our kind as demons in league with the devil, just as they did every witch that they ever encountered. There was no white magic. There was their good and everyone else’s evil, period. That drove us into hiding, but it doesn’t account for our eradication.
“I think we were already fading away then, as were the last of the vampiri. Sometime before the 13th century, we vanished altogether, consigned to legend, to stories that scared children — the Red Riding Hoods and the clever foxes. We were a genetic dead end, Neanderthals. Believe me, I have looked into every written text to try to find evidence of us, and there’s so little. The Church had usurped our position in the society as they did those Night Walkers of the Friuli that I’ve told you about. There could only be one force for good in any village, and by Christ it was going to be the Church. So when we truly died out, we had already been consigned to the shadows.”
“So I am a throwback to an earlier form? A genetic freak?”
He sat awhile, thinking of how to explain it.
She had arrived home almost twenty-four hours after arriving in Paris. On the flight she’d been unable to sleep, but once home could barely make it up the stairs to the apartment while hanging on him. Decebal had carried her to her bed, and she’d slept the clock around. He had made her a fritata and she had eaten every speck of it and drunk an alarming amount of wine, which seemed thus far not to affect her.
He said, “When I saw that white spot in your hair, I wondered. That —the mark of the white wolf — is in the literature. Of course in the stories, werewolves are just wolves. What I told you I suspected when you called me back from Malpensa Airport is true. And what I read while you faced them in Paris makes me think that we have had this inside us all this time, waiting for their return. Now because of some unexplained agency it’s come to life again. The nature of that agency interests me only a little. What interests me utterly is that at a time when the vampiri resurrect in our midst, you have become what our people used to be. That is too great a coincidence.” He smiled slightly. “Also, I am glad to have removed your shoes.”
She smiled, too, though not sure whether she was persuaded by his folkloric endeavors or not. He had shown her a piece circulating on the internet, penned by an internationally renowned folklorist named Swann that came to not dissimilar conclusions about the vampires themselves. Decebal was even now trying to contact this man. But she was tired of the discussion.
She reached over and fumbled with her phone. “I need to call Costin,” she said.
Her grandfather gently placed his hand over hers and the phone. She met his gaze, full of portent. “You cannot,” he said.
“Bunicul, don’t terrify me anymore. What’s wrong?”
“You cannot see Costin ever again.”
“Why, because of what I am? I know, I’ll have to make him understand that there’s a very real risk being with me —”
“It’s too late for you to make him understand. The risk was the risk. He … he turned while you were in Paris. The police have him. Or they did.”
“What?” Then she shook her head and smiled. “But that’s good, he’s already infected, we won’t have to worry, will we? He’s —”
“Little Flower, Costin is not of our people.”
She sought in his eyes for any meaning but the one he intended. “No,” she said, “it’s not right. How did I do this to him?” She glanced desperately around the apartment as though it was a trap, a cage, and there had to be an escape, a way to put things back where they should be. “I have to get out of here, away, anywhere. I can’t stay here.”
His hand upon hers squeezed, bringing her attention back to him. Her eyes welled with tears, and so did his. “No, it’s not right,” he told her, “nor is it your fault. It is a thing that happened to you, to him. To us. If you go near him now, you’ll kill him. There won’t be a choice, it will be instinct. What you described, the thirst in the catacombs — that will befall you again. He is the enemy now through no fault of his or yours. I’m so sorry.”
She wiped at her eyes. “Don’t you see, this is why I can’t stay here. Listen to me, bunicul, if I’m carrying this disease, this plague, then I’ll contaminate you. I might have already.”
“You might. And I can only hope that you do. Look at me, child. See how I’m wearing out. It’s all I can do to climb the stairs in the evening now. My finger joints are knots of pain, and soon my hands won’t be any good for anything. I have to pay attention just to hold the handle of a pan. Another year and it’ll be a fork that I can’t hold. I live in books, in my mind. That’s what I’m reduced to. And here you have this energy that you can harness.
“I want to feel what that’s like. I want to run in the night the way our people did once through the mountains of Wallachia. Even one time before I die, that would be enough.”