The Hunger (38 page)

Can’t die? I must die.
I am dead!

Miriam was cradling her head in her lap, crying bitter tears. “You’ve gone right to the end of my world,” she said, “and missed all the beauty that comes before.” She stroked Sarah’s head again and again, a sorrowful gesture. “My poor, dear Sarah.” She breathed sharply, as if trying not to cry. “What an evil irony.”

Sarah became aware that Miriam had picked her up. With slow steps Miriam was carrying her up a stairway, to an attic.

Miriam took her to a tiny room, one wall of which was stacked with chests of various ages. Sarah writhed when she realized that she was being put in a similar chest that lay open in the center of the room. Her mind rang with pleas but she found she could not speak. The top of the chest came down and a heavy latch was closed.

Sarah was in total darkness.

“It was futile, my darling. You were too much changed for mortal death, and now you’ve got eternal death. Sarah, you missed it all! It’s so beautiful and you missed it all. You poor woman. I’ll make you the same promise I’ve made all the others. I will keep you with me for all time. I will never abandon you, and you will always have a place in my heart.”

‘God help me.’

Even the hunger was still here, tormenting her. The least movement resulted in minutes of weakness.

Time began to pass, but in a different way than it had in life. She knew only that it was passing, not how much was gone.

Little rustlings and sighs filled the air around her, coming from the other chests. So Miriam had done this before. The thought of what must be in the other chests terrified Sarah. How many were there?

Some of them must be hundreds of years old. Some thousands.

Thousands of years like this.

No. Impossible.

She pushed as hard as she could at the top of the chest. She clawed at its sides. ‘I have to get out. I’m so hungry.’

The chest was unyielding.

She remembered what she had done to Tom and what she would do if she did get out. She was glad she was here. At least she could count herself a human being still. No matter what she must suffer, this was better than being Miriam’s thing.

So much had been at stake. She found she could look within herself and even in this hell find riches of peace and love she had never known were there. She was full of grand memories, and she possessed a great love as well. Tom was with her in spirit. No matter how long she must remain here, she came to realize that in the end there was going to be a place even for her, where Tom had already gone, on the far side of the river of life, where the lost of this world are found.

MIRIAM ABANDONED NEW YORK. She dared not remain in her house or in her old identity. The disappearance of the two doctors would be investigated.

She wept for Sarah. The poor woman had not known the pleasure of her new estate, only the pain. Before this experience Miriam had never imagined the heights that could be reached by a human being who was groping toward the truth of love.

She went often to Sarah. The boxes were kept in the coal cellar in her new house, and she would speak softly to her lost friend in the cool and dark.

Such a person would have been a grand companion, more than worthy. But Miriam now realized that the gift she could confer was not above one such as Sarah, but beneath her.

“I miss you,” she said into the darkness. It was the hour after evening and the shadows were deep in her new living room. A fog was rising out on the bay, and she heard the buoys sounding. She enjoyed the beauty and the safety of the fog in San Francisco.

“Did you say something, my dear?”

Miriam smiled up at her new companion, who had appeared with glasses of Madeira for the two of them. “Only that I love you. I’ve never loved anyone but you.”

He sat down, sipped reverently at his glass.

“That’s an 1838 Madeira,” Miriam said. “I hope you like it.”

He kissed her, putting his glass down near the portrait of Lamia that was framed in the table before them. It was like him not to cover the portrait. His devotion was total, to Miriam and to all she had revealed of herself.

She had sought him carefully, looking for loyalty and intelligence and the old hunger for life that she understood so well. She closed her eyes, welcoming his excited kisses.

She would always miss the courage of Sarah, and the nobility. But he would bring contentment, and she doubted Sarah would ever have offered that. As in the past she would dream her dream of his immortality and tell herself that here at last was her eternal companion.

Time would pass and nature would come and shatter the dream. So she would find another companion. And another. And so on until time itself slipped away.

No matter how her loneliness tempted her to find one who would last forever, she resolved never to attempt the transformation on another like Sarah, not this time or the next time, or for all time.

POCKET BOOKS HARDCOVER
PROUDLY PRESENTS

Turn the page for a preview of
The Last Vampire

EVERYONE KNEW the sins of Miriam Blaylock.

Her crime, and it was an unforgivable one, was to enjoy human beings as friends and lovers, rather than to simply exploit them. She could kiss them and find it sweet, have sex with them and afterward sleep like a contented tiger. To her own kind, this was perversion, like a man with a sheep.

The fact that this prejudice was nonsense did not make what she was doing now any easier. She pressed herself back against the seat of the pedicab, instinctively keeping her face hidden, not only from man, but from her own kind. The
samlor 
moved swiftly down the wet street, spattering through puddles left by the last storm. From the shadows of the passenger compartment, she watched a concealing fog rising from the moat that surrounded the ancient Thai city of Chiang Mai.

How could she ever do this impossible thing? How could she ever face her own kind?

The other rulers of the world were now just shadows hiding in dens, their numbers slowly declining due to accidents. They called themselves the Keepers, but what did that mean nowadays? Gone was the time when they were the secret masters of humankind, keeping man as man keeps cattle.

Truth be told, the Keepers were in general decline, but they were far too proud to realize it. Conclaves were held every hundred years, and at the last ones Miriam had seen a change — Keepers she had known a thousand years had followed her mother and father into death. Nobody had brought a child, nobody had courted.

Despite their failure, Miriam valued her kind. She valued herself. The Keepers were essential to the justice and meaning of the world. That was why she had come here, why she had tempted the humiliation and even the possible danger involved: she wanted to continue her species. Miriam wanted a baby.

The last of the four eggs that nature gave a Keeper woman would soon leave her body unless she found a man to fertilize it. For all that she had — riches, honor, power, and beauty — her essential meaning was unfulfilled without a baby. She was here for her last-chance child.

Not only did she enjoy human beings, she took pleasure in human things — painting and sculpture, writing and music. She had been an opera buff from the beginning of the genre. She had been at the opening night of a dozen great operas, had been transported by everyone from Adelina Patti to Maria Callas to Kiri Te Kanawa. She remembered the haunting voices of the
castrati
echoing in the palaces of the Old World.

The rest of her kind lived to eat. She ate to live. She spent heavily, just as her family always had. She consumed money without thought, like so much candy or caviar. Her club, the Veils, was the most exclusive in New York. In a strong month, and most of its months were very strong, drugs and liquor would bring in a half-million-dollar profit. There was no cover charge, of course. If you were important enough to enter the Veils at all, you certainly weren’t the sort of person who would be expected to pay a cover.

Miriam had been the friend of kings for two thousand years. She had seen their generations rise and fall. She loved them in their pride and momentary lives. She loved their finest things, the jewels and whispering silks, the attention paid to the very rich.

When the wallets of her peers opened, you could practically hear creaking. She had fun; they had their careful customs and their dreary, conservative habits. She wanted meaning from life, they wanted only to keep breathing.

But now, for all their rejecting ways, she needed them. Her plan was to travel to all of the current conclaves at one, charming and, hopefully, seducing a man.

She was at the end of her choices. Either she would find someone or she would never, ever give another Keeper to the world.

Miriam had drifted into the habit of taking human lovers because she was lonely and they were satisfying and the emotional commitment was not great. You found a cute male or a sweet, sensual female — the sex mattered not to Miriam, both had their charms — and you seduced, softly, gently, with the caressing eye and the slow hand. Then you put them to sleep with hypnosis and opened their veins and filled them full of your blood, and magic happened: They stayed young for years and years. You told them you’d made them immortal, and they followed you like foolish little puppies. Like the dear creature who now kept her home and business in New York, who warmed her bed and hunted with her . . . the dear creature, so lovely and brilliant and torn by her silly human conflicts. She had almost lost Sarah a few years ago, but had brought her back. The girl should be grateful and compliant, but that was not always the case. Sarah made mistakes. Sarah lived much too dangerously. She was haunted by what she had endured, and Miriam could not blame her. Indeed, she could hardly imagine what it would be like to lie in a coffin like that, slowly deteriorating but unable to die.

Sarah knew that one day the torment would certainly come again. She strove to save herself, using all of her considerable knowledge of medicine to attempt to defeat the process of aging that must slowly consume her, despite the fact that Miriam’s blood now flowed in her veins.

To live, Sarah had to prey on man. She was even more tormented by this than Miriam’s other lovers had been. Her Hippocratic oath haunted her, poor creature.

Miriam stopped herself. Best not go down that path again. She was always troubled by the tormented lives and horrible deaths of her lovers. The delicious little things were her guilt, her pain.

But not now, not on this nervous, excited night, the opening night of the Asian conclave. At least a proper lover would never die as the human ones did, pleading for deliverance even as their flesh became dust. But she would have to submit to him, obey him, live in his cold cell . . . at least, for a time.

Her body was her life — its rich senses, its wild desires, the way it felt when strong hands or sweet hands traveled her shivery skin.

There would be none of that in her future, not when she was part of one of
their
households, as she would be expected to be, at least for the duration of her pregnancy. Long, silent days, careful, creeping nights — that would be her life behind the walls of their world.

But that was how it had to be. She could almost feel that little body in her belly, could imagine hugging it after it came out, while it was still flushed and coal-hot. Only a newborn or a freshly fed Keeper was ever that warm.

The
samlor
glided along Moon Muang Road, heading for the Tapae Gate and the temple district beyond, moving through the murky, soaked night. How did the Asians stand this wretched climate? And yet, the heat was also nice. She enjoyed sweaty beds and long, druggy nights doing every decadent thing she could imagine.

Well, all that was going to change. She was going to become a proper wife, and she certainly didn’t need drugs for that. She wasn’t addicted, so it wouldn’t be a problem.

She could imagine her man, tall and silent, his face narrow, his skin as pale as a shadow. She could feel him, muscles like mean springs, long, curving fingers that could crush a human’s bones or caress her plump breasts. She took a deep breath. These thoughts made her feel as if she were drowning and being rescued at the same time.

The wind rose, sweeping through the dark trees, sending ripples shivering across the puddles that were like lakes in the street. Much lower now, the clouds raced and tumbled. Voices rose from a little market, two girls singing some popular song, oblivious to the
samlor
that whispered past and to the being within, who was carefully listening to the patter of their heartbeats from a thousand feet away.

Her interest in them told her that the hunger was rising within her. She felt it now, a faint gnawing in her belly, a hint of ice in her veins.

This was bad news. Most of her kind could detect their hunger coming for days, and they could prepare carefully to do a hunt. She’d never been able to prepare. One second she was fine, the next it was starting.

She noticed that the smell of the
samlor
driver was washing over her, blown back by the breeze. She took a deep drag on her strong Thai cigarette, attempting to blot out the delicious scent.

It did not work. Okay, she thought, I’ll go with it. She looked at the driver’s sweating back. A thirty-second struggle and she’d be fed for another couple of weeks. The thing was, the hotel had written down her destination in Thai for him. He would not deviate from the route. She needed to get him to go down some darker side street. “Speak English?”

He did not respond. So she’d have to jump him right out here if she wanted him, and that would never do. You did your kills in private, and you destroyed all trace of the corpse. Even Miriam Blaylock followed those two essential rules.

She closed her eyes, arching her back and stretching, forcing his smell out of her nose with a rush of air. Think about opium, she told herself, not blood. Later, she would smoke to relieve this damned hunger. She needed to get back to familiar territory before she fed. It wasn’t safe to do it in an unknown place.