Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (32 page)

“Why did you do it, Paul?”

“What?”

“Set Ian up the way you did.”

“I didn’t.”

“Bullshit. If you’d left well enough alone—”

He turned toward her, his face stricken. “Jesus Christ, look what happened! He was just goddamn fucking
magnetized
to them!”

“If he hadn’t felt so humiliated and ashamed, maybe he wouldn’t have gone.”

“The boy was kidnapped!” He threw himself back against his seat. “Fucking kidnapped.”

She fell silent, regretting the fight. Paul had not caused this to happen. The blood had caused it, that mystical, fearful blood of theirs.

As the plane droned on, Paul would fall asleep—which was something he had done very little of since Ian’s departure—and when he did, she would hear him moan.

It was a bedroom sound, full of heat, not the moan of a man tormented by loss. Finally, it got loud enough to begin to embarrass the other passengers.

She shook him awake.

He opened his eyes. “Uh, yes? Oh—what…”

She leaned close to him, kissed his cold, slack lips. “You were dreaming about the vampire,” she said, knowing that it was true and unable to conceal the sadness in her voice.

“I love you,” he said.

Yes, she thought, the same way you’d love a good hunting dog. She wanted him right here and now, in this airplane, in front of everybody. She wanted to proclaim it to the world, to the vampires, and above all to that damn blood: this man is mine.

“It’s the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Makes goddamn Blaylock look like a nun.”

She squeezed his hand, but did not reply. She couldn’t, not without revealing her sadness to him, in the tears that would fill her voice.

He wanted to be loyal to her, but it was hard not to at least in his imagination contemplate what it would be like with that gorgeous creature. His desire, though, was like something that had been grafted into his brain by some mad scientist. It felt alien and unreal, even though it stirred him like no other feeling he’d ever known, not even his feeling for Miri.

He slept again, and was disturbed again by images of the vampire, her breasts like smooth snow peaks, her eyes as merry as a child’s and as slow as a tiger’s. The danger was what did it, made her irresistible. The dark side of the feminine was there, he thought, to teach you who you really were.

“Maybe she’s just a dream,” he said when he woke up.

“A nightmare.”

Outside the window, he could see the City of Light, gray and vast in predawn rain. They landed, then, and as he faced the reality of Ian’s loss in this new place, Paul thought that she was exactly right about that. No matter how much it sweated him, the dream of the vampire was indeed a nightmare.

Jean came forward out of the crowd as soon as they cleared customs. His embrace, in the French manner of greeting, marked much more than a simple reunion between friends. The three of them had faced death together. That made you more than friends.

“Paul,” Jean said. “Please accept—” Then he saw Becky and fell silent. He embraced her, the continued silence speaking his admiration for her, and his respect for the sanctity of their marriage. Paul suspected that Jean had loved her, once. Maybe he still did. “We’re ready to go,” Jean said. “Unless you wish to freshen up—a shower, perhaps, in the VIP suite?”

“Let’s keep moving,” Paul said. It turned out that the Egyptian air force was providing transportation from here to Cairo. The plane, a small official jet, was waiting for them in the private international area. On the way, Bocage said, “You will meet Kari. He is on the plane. He is—well, you will meet him.”

“I’ve heard a lot about him.”

“I have worked with him for years, Paul, my friend. He is—he is like you.”

Paul looked sharply at Bocage. “So?”

“In the blood a little, I think.”

Paul thought that he should have been amazed, but he wasn’t. There was really so much they didn’t know about the vampire, and therefore about the world we live in. How long had the vampire been here, and was it something that had come from some other place, or was it an earthly evolution? Why were there people like him, and now apparently also like this Egyptian, who also bore elements of the strange, complex blood of the vampire in their own veins, but without any corresponding need to feed on their fellow man?

Paul’s blood contained an array of six anomalous cells, the most important of which was the T-4 lymphocyte which gave his immune system extraordinary reactivity and power. The Sarah Roberts papers revealed numerous experiments involving attempts to transfer this cell into the human body. She could achieve a temporary antiaging effect, but it didn’t last more than a few hours.

Paul’s platelets also had a life span of years rather than days and were extraordinarily proactive in healing. A wound requiring stitches in a normal person would heal on its own in hours.

Unfortunately, as strong as all this made him, his heart had simply endured too much stress over the years, and his ravenous lust for red meat, nearly raw, had taken its toll in blood vessel damage.

He was even more interested to meet General Karas now. Maybe he knew something about the origins of people like himself and Paul.

“Paul,” Bocage asked as they went toward the waiting plane, “have I upset you?”

“I’m thinking.”

“I had no idea there were others,” Becky said.

“I was surprised when he told me.”

“I didn’t think anything could surprise you,” Paul said, laughing a little. Bocage was an impressive man, highly skilled. When Paul followed Miriam Blaylock from Bangkok to Paris with his old team, ignoring the French operation, Bocage had trapped them all very neatly. He had insisted on something that in those days had been complete anathema to Paul—that they work together. Paul was obsessed with how easy it was for some vampires to blend in with human society, and he had lived in constant fear of moles and plants.

Jean’s professionalism had defeated his fears. They had sterilized Paris together, shoulder to shoulder, working their way through the vast complex of catacombs and ancient mines that twisted beneath the city, in the process rooting out over a hundred of the creatures. Subsequently, missing persons cases had become as rare here as they now were in New York, down from thousands a year to just a couple hundred, with few of those remaining open for long.

Paul saw that they would be on a Citation III, which was standing outside the glass wall at the far end of the lobby they had just entered. The plane was white, in Egyptian military livery. He knew planes, and this jet would get them to Cairo in about six hours. Good.

There were no longer any customs to worry about. They had gone from the world of commercial air travel to another level altogether, where the hindrances of borders more or less evaporated. Their luggage, for example, would have caused no end of official questions, given that it consisted, among other things, of military-grade satellite navigation equipment, night-vision goggles, special microphones and listening devices, climbing equipment, forger’s tools, and a subminiaturized drone aircraft protected by diplomatic seals. The drone folded into a case the size and shape of a golf bag, and could remain aloft for six hours without recharging its fuel cell. The thing about the craft that was so valuable was that the vampire’s body temperature dropped steadily between feedings, and the drone carried a temperature-sensitive camera that could easily identify one from thousands of feet away, even in a crowd.

The legendary general met them at the door of the plane. “Colonel Ward,” he said, “Mrs. Ward. It’s really a privilege.” As they continued into the plane, he added, “I only wish that the circumstances could be more pleasant.”

The moment they sat down, he spoke into the intercom. As the plane started off, the steward secured the door.

General Karas was a trim man, his eyes set in a perpetual expression of surprise. His uniform was exquisitely tailored, but rumpled from constant movement. He had a cocked, restless quality, an uneasiness that seemed to dominate his personality.

“I thought we’d gotten them all,” he said, “until this wretched situation arose.”

“We’ve been watching missing persons reports for fifteen years,” Paul said. “We never saw a trace of the old pattern reemerging in the United States.”

“How many lives have you saved? In America?”

“Over the fifteen years,” Becky said, “about fifty thousand.”

“My God, that’s what I keep telling my government. But nobody wants this. Nobody is interested. Nothing like that in Egypt, they say. That’s why they give the assignment to a Copt.” He rolled his eyes and swept a nervous hand along the leather arm of his chair, and the imposing general suddenly looked like an agitated little boy. “We took our last one just months ago. It had been living in the Corniche, can you imagine, in Cairo! We found things in there—coin from the reign of Cleopatra, for the love of all that is holy. All manner of treasure in that filthy hole. It will go to the Department of Antiquities.” He leaned forward, his eyes suddenly glaring, his hands now gripping the chair arms as if he was considering launching himself toward them. “We nailed it to the door of its damned hole, to draw others. And we watched. This new one showed up about six months later. It had already killed a child and possibly a Bedouin in the desert, my God. The thing about it is that it is magnificently beautiful—tall and slim and blond. Very powerful and athletic—you should see it run, leap—my God. You would think that it was an American damned movie star. It took the child”—he made a sipping motion, his pinkie extended—“as easily as milady at her tea.”

Jean said, “You’re sure it came out of the desert?”

Karas gave him a careful, appraising look. “You know, in Egypt—you would be surprised, I am sure—we keep better records than your media would have you believe. We are not damned third-world idiots, chewing rice and scuttling about in a perpetual state of confusion.” He raised an eyebrow, giving his face an almost comical cast, as if he wanted to lessen the criticism implied in his remark. Then he laughed, the easy, sophisticated chuckle of a man used to power. “So I can say with certainty,” he continued, “that we have not had any sort of pattern of missing persons that would fit the existence of another vampire. How this one got to Egypt and where it came from are questions that I would very much like to answer. Except that it was here to eat, of course.”

“It fits the description of the one that appeared in New York a few days ago,” Becky said.

Karas stared at her. Paul had not often seen such careful appraisal in a human face. This man was highly intelligent, that was clear. “Ah, it’s in your country.”

“Perhaps,” Paul said.

Karas raised his eyebrows.

“It’s possible that it’s returned, in the company of a blooded woman…and our son.”

Karas gazed down at the front of his tunic, nervously dusting his medals with his fingers. “I have a daughter, Hamida,” he said in a soft, caressing tone. “Like me—like you, Paul, but worse, because my wife Violet, also—” He smiled, as tormented an expression as Paul had ever seen. So his wife was a carrier, too. That meant that the daughter would have even more of the blood factors than either parent. She wouldn’t be as extreme a case as Ian, but it would be in that direction. “I have also wondered what the effect would be, if she came into—how do you say—proximity, yes—proximity to a vampire.”

“It was like some kind of black magic,” Becky said. “You have no idea.”

They flew on, heading east beneath a hard gray sky, the stately waves of the Mediterranean sweeping beneath them. At length the steward served a meal of tangy
mulukhiya
soup with rice, followed by a variety of
shawarma
meats and vegetables. Afterwards, there was coffee, served with a variety of
um-ali,
small, intensely flavored sweets.

Paul ate, and watched Becky eating, and thought that it was the first real meal they’d had since Ian’s abduction. He hadn’t been able to eat on the plane over, let alone before that. Now, though, knowing that they were going into action, that they were getting closer to Ian—they were both hungry, and that was good.

The sun was glaring into the windscreen of the cockpit when the intercom warbled. Karas listened for a moment, then said, “We’re landing in twenty minutes. And there is good news.”

Paul felt Becky stiffen. Ian had been found wandering the streets of Cairo, or asleep in a hotel room, or safe somewhere else, but safe, please God, safe.

Ian had not been found. None of them had been found. But Leo’s plane had been located. It was at the airport at Beni Suef, a hundred klicks south of Cairo. The pilots, now under house arrest, were more than willing to talk to the authorities. They were being held at the Mena House in Cairo. Karas concluded, “Her plane is now impounded, of course.”

“I wonder if we should do that?”

Karas smiled. “It’s on Egyptian soil illegally.”

“Impounding the plane brings in customs. What if they give the case to the police?”

Karas sank into thought. “The relationship between my unit and the police is complicated. We are old Egypt—by which I mean, men from before the coming of the Muslims. No Muslims in my unit. The consequence is, we have not unlimited power. We must let the military and the police deal with the plane according to established protocols.”