Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (33 page)

“You can’t risk explanations, is what you’re saying. Your system’s just like ours—a tarbaby.”

“A tarbaby is what?”

“Something that sticks to you when you touch it.”

He laughed heartily then, and quickly finished his coffee as the steward cleaned up. “Us Copts, we are a tarbaby for Egypt! That’s quite good. You know, I’m not actually even a Copt. My family is unbroken in its line, from the time before. Kawaat is our forbear, the eldest son of Khu’fu.” He laughed softly. “My great-great-grandfather two hundred times removed was a bastard of this prince.”

Paul watched the man, saw the sadness in his eyes, the complex little smile that played there. Normally, he would have found it impossible to believe such a statement. But with this man, no.

“That’s four thousand years ago,” Becky said. “You’re saying your family goes back that far?”

Karas gave her a careful look. “In Egypt, such things are not strange. Julius Caesar was a guest in our house.” He lifted a glass. “We gave him wine kept cool by being immersed in a spring.” The smile returned, blossomed. “This, I believe, is refrigerated, forgive me.”

“Being immersed in a spring is better?”

“The coolness is softer, you know.”

The plane shuddered, the engine noise dropped, and they began descending toward Cairo, the great city that lay almost hidden in the clouds far below.

I
an lay naked, deliciously exposed, in a state of fairy-tale wonder…aside from being as hungry as a horse. Beside him and keeping him warm in the cool of this strange cave of Lilith’s, Leo was cuddled close. He lay thinking, full of questions about this place and these people. The cave was full of things that looked ancient Egyptian to him, wonderful chairs and divans, exotic linen hangings, all of it, if not exactly crisp and new, then certainly serviceable. But why nothing modern? And, strangest of all, where was the kitchen, and where oh where was the damned food?

They had some stuff from the plane, but let’s face it, they’d been in here for days, and he was beginning to wonder if linen was edible. There was water, at least. You got it in these fabulously carved diorite bowls she had around, out of pools with beautiful mosaics of fish and lobsters and crabs and octopi in them. Getting a drink made him hungry.

The thing about it that was good—that was actually amazing—was that both of these women were totally sold on him, to the point that they sort of competed for him in a laughing kind of a way. He turned on his side and buried his face in Leo’s neck, just to be sure he still could.

She sighed and stretched. A week ago, she had been this distant, iconic figure, a picture to gaze at during lonely sessions with Sally Five. Now here she was in the warm, sweet-scented flesh. She was a kid who had been made hard by everybody always wanting stuff from her. She told him she was thirty-one, but twenty-five was a more believable number when you saw her up close. She was really cuddly. This was a girl who wanted to be held. If he whispered “I love you,” to her, she would look at him with damp, sex-besotted eyes.

Lilith had a more sort of servile approach. She acted like he was some kind of a god or a king or something. Him, a kid from East Mill, N.Y., the son of a couple of civil service types—let’s face it, not exactly somebody you knelt in front of and hugged around the waist, for the love of Mike. She would look up with stars in her eyes. He’d smile down at her and quietly wonder what the hell?

If he listened carefully, he could hear her breathing right now, hear the faint swish of her flowing robes as she moved about the room. Somehow, in a darkness so deep that he could not see a finger an inch from his eye, she was pacing like a restless animal in a zoo. Back and forth she went, back and forth.

She was not so easy to understand. Sometimes she was just as vulnerable and needful as Leo. Other times she was harsh, cold. She had long, dark moods that didn’t make any sense. At times—like now—she was downright creepy. And what was she doing living out here like this in this crazy place, anyway? He’d asked her why she was in a damn cave and not in a house, and where in ding-dong was the food? Her answer was to hold him and gaze at him and cry.

They’d had fun in the plane, teaching Lilith to speak better English. This “Here’s looking at you, kid” approach of hers was not working. She claimed to have learned it from watching Humphrey Bogart movies, an obvious lie. No doubt she’d had a bad teacher, and some sort of Egyptian rule of etiquette prevented her from saying so. Or pride. She had enormous pride. At the least sign that she’d made some sort of mistake, her chin would rise, her alabaster cheeks would flush the color of faded roses, and her voice would go all clipped and sullen. Lilith had never made love to him, but there was hardly time, was there, given that he and Leo did it probably five times a day.

He buried his face in Leo’s neck, inhaling the sweetness of her skin. Her lips moved, she muttered garbled dream talk. As many times as he’d done it with her, the hollow-gut thrill of it still made him squirm as his body became ready again. He lay an arm across her spongy breasts and sought her lips with his. She uttered a complicated little sound, a happy sound, and drew him close, wrapping her arms around him.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you,” he whispered. It felt warm right down into the middle of his heart. He laid his lips against her cheek, felt her smile come up under them. Then she turned and they were kissing. His spirit slipped on light and secret steps into the world of her spirit.

This was love, and this was amazing. It was his Leo dream, and he was living it. One thing he knew about this kid: she might be a great lay, but she was no more experienced than him. That made it even more fun, to discover great stuff together.

Lily would watch, sitting in a chair with her chin in her hand, and tap her foot if it took longer than she liked. So he said nothing to the swooping form out there in the dark, as he slid closer to Leo. He let her know with a gentle thrust of his hips that he was ready. There came in response a low murmur, then a sigh—comfortable, silky, prolonged—that was one of the sexiest things she did, the way it made him feel so wanted and so welcome. He went on top of her, felt her fingers caressing him down below, then entered her under their gentle guidance.

He went slowly, proceeding into their private territory of pleasure by careful degrees. After his first bursting tries, he’d learned to prolong it by breathing deep and stroking slow, and if he started to come too quick, he stopped and lay absolutely still and pictured in his mind the pasty, pimple-spotted face of the Child in his sound cubicle way back down the tunnel to nowhere that ended at East Mill High.

Despite the white heat of the situation, that was one thought that could be counted on to cool him down every time. So he did it now, while she squirmed and moaned and whispered, “Hit me, hit me hard as you can, baby, oh please….”

And then he felt, along the short hairs of his neck, moving air. It was as if a bat had fluttered past. When it came again, he gasped and jerked back—and bumped against Lilith, who was looming over them. But then her lips replaced her breath, and he felt her tongue against the skin of his neck. She was more beautiful than Leo, much more, and he had wondered what she would be like and why she wouldn’t do it. But nothing had been said.

Sometimes Leo and Lilith went off alone into the depths of the cave, and when they came back, Leo was always flushed and sweating and didn’t want to make love. So he figured they were getting off somehow together, but he was batteries not included.

Now Lilith’s hands came firmly along the sides of his buttocks and lifted him out of Leo, who made a little sound in her throat—“oh.” And then Lilith, who might as well have the eyes of a cat, was under him instead of Leo, and trembling like a girl.

It hit Ian that she was a newbie, and he said, “Oh, hey,” trying to put a reassuring smile in his voice. “Ready to try me on for size, babe?”

Lilith had paced and sweated, trying to stay away, smelling their rising heat and juices, feeling her own vaginal muscles undulate helplessly as she touched herself and listened. She dared not let him find out how different she was, not until he was introduced to blood and eating comfortably and so hers.

He was not hers now. There was danger. He had never fed, but he could feed, and when he did, his blood would open like a flowing, liquid flower and fill him with the exquisite sensations of his sleeping Keeper being. He would never return to the eating of foliage and animal flesh, not after he had tasted the liquid flesh of man.

But before—oh, it was very dangerous before. If he knew, if he understood what was happening to him, then this sweet child of a ruthless vampire hunter would recoil and run, and she would have to kill the most beautiful and important creature on earth.

Leo had told her how the father, Paul Ward, killed Keepers, and how this boy was the son of a lovely Keeper woman and this monster, part Keeper and part man.

Ian was almost pure Keeper. He was to be worshiped, to be adored, to be served, and she had not served a man in so long that she literally could not remember. She loved being at his service, longed to be filled with his child, hoped to flood his life with every happiness she could bestow.

Her love of this brilliant and muscled boy had displaced even her dream-husband, who waited for her in the mists of time and memory. She had left him beside the Fountain of the Hours in his land far away, which maybe existed only in her mind.

Ian, however, was here now. He was making love to Leo—and that was another thing, he was so sexual, so very capable, that the merest thought of him would make her want to go off deep into her cave, down the tunnels and across the black rivers, to a place where she could howl and claw the walls and mourn. The thick scent of Leo’s steaming
yuni,
the faintly hydraulic sound of their coupling, the faint glow of their rocking bodies—it was too much.

She just had to,
had
to. “Oh, Leo,” she whispered, “please forgive me.”

“Are you sure?” Leo said, warning in her voice.

She would take Leo with her into the deep cave, and Leo would use her tongue to produce orgasms in her, and she would bellow his name,
Ian, Ian,
where the boy could not hear. But it wasn’t enough, not the clinical suction of another woman. “We have to get him to feed,” she would say. But Leo never seemed to entirely agree. But obviously they had to! How could he come truly alive without it? As he was now, he was only a ghost. Of course, she wouldn’t know that. She had never seen a male Keeper in his glory, and thus could not know what a real man was actually like. She was satisfied with these narrow human wraiths, because they were all she knew.

Now came a moment that she had been longing for ever since she looked into his blazing, glorious eyes in the lobby of the Music Room. She was going to touch what she had gazed at with such longing when it danced to Leo’s tune. She lifted her hands, poised them above the length of the shaft. She could feel its heat.

And yet, she hesitated. She was lost in time, and the memories that came to her now were flickers only, of a husband she once had treasured, but to whom she had never yet given herself. There had been a wedding, but not yet a wedding night, in the romance of her lost past, or her mind.

Should she remain loyal to a dream?

She drew her hands closer, closer. “Come
on,”
he said, laughing.

Then he took them and pressed them against him.

Oh, the heat of it, the pulsing of it, the ancient dignity of it, and how lonely she was! She sobbed aloud, and he comforted her, laying a sacred hand on her cheek and saying in his soft, strong male voice, “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.” Then, “Are you a virgin, Lily?”

She answered casually, not realizing how strange it must sound: “I don’t know.” Then she crouched between his legs and held it until the end was tight and gleaming in the tiny light, and kissed it, being careful to keep her tongue far back in her mouth. If she could drink him, perhaps the pleasure of giving him pleasure would be enough. But no, the thought made her frantic. She had to feel him in her, no matter the consequences, and she had to do it now.

Then Leo was there, on her from behind, working her soaked lips with that quick and efficient tongue. It felt good enough—abstractly so—and she let it go on while she kissed Ian’s miraculously erect penis and cried and cried.

Frantically, Leo tried to satisfy her. She could not, must not, take him. The second he was in her, he was going to know that something was radically different. Leo had explored Miri’s vagina, and Lilith’s was much stranger, lined with muscles that were almost as hard as cartilage. If Ian didn’t know what he was doing—and that was not in question—then he was going to get hurt in there, or at the very least become aware that it was very odd.

What would happen then was anybody’s guess. Incredibly, the Wards had raised him without giving him any information about vampires, let alone that he was himself a time bomb, wanting only a sip of living human blood to awaken the shadow that slept within him.

Lilith knew exactly what he was, and she was possessed to get him to eat some poor soul’s blood. He could be her lover, make her pregnant, even.

When he’d gotten on her plane, all Leo had been able to think about was Ian’s body. She’d been wild for him. She knew it was the magic of the blood—that he was, in the end, just another slack-jawed seventeen-year-old fan—but God, the blood was good at making her see past what was commonplace about him. This prosaic little bridge-and-tunnel person revealed inner qualities to her that quickly elevated him beyond the status of sex toy to another status entirely, that of lover.

She had never had a real lover. She had never known what it was to be unashamedly wanted by a man. He wanted her, though, wanted her so bad that he’d woo and sweat until he got her. He was sweet and gentle and generous, open-minded and kind and wonderfully, excitingly strong. And he was so in love that he would just fold himself around her and hold on for dear life, and it was so wonderful.

She had to fight to suppress her jealousy when Lilith showed interest. But Lilith was a great vampire, and she was going to get her way. Leo was just an episode. If she interfered, she’d be brushed aside.

Leo did not want to see him living the vampire life. What was it—a chance to outlive everybody you loved? Great. You’d get tired of life and fed up with life and still have to go on. Worse, you had to kill other human beings in order to live, and that was just plain awful, you never got over it. Even the serial killer—the night she’d done him, she was exultant: a guilt-free kill at last.

No damn way. He haunted her now, the same as the others. If he deserved to die for his crimes, that was up to a jury, not some girl who had no idea what he really was or had really done.