Time for Eternity

cover

Time for Eternity

Susan Squires

Title

Contents

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Epilogue

Copyright

To Harry, who chose
These Old Shades

to read aloud when it was his turn,

and to the wonderful woman who wrote it.

They opened up a whole new world to me.

I have been in love with them both ever since.

(Technically, I was in love with Harry

before the book.) Homage is due.

One

Bartending wasn’t a bad gig for a vampire. Night work. You could get a job anywhere. Especially if you looked not a day over twenty-five and exuded that vampire electric energy that made you seem more alive than anyone else around you.

Ozone was one of the trendiest gin joints in San Francisco. Frankie’s shift had been attracting lots of tourists lately. See above, vampire attraction. That and the French accent she couldn’t seem to quite shake. Americans loved accents. It might be time to move on. This city was too damned foggy anyway. She wiped down the brushed stainless steel bar. The bottles behind her on glass shelves were backlit by a huge glass panel that gradually changed colors, sliding along the rainbow. The stools were lighted blue disks that seemed to float in midair like the bottles. The neon sign O outside in the murk cast a pale blue glow over the front tables.

2

The last of a birthday party was breaking up just before closing. The crowd milled around, collecting coats and umbrellas.

“See ya, Frankie.” That one was a regular—Jason? Josh? He left a hundred on the bar. She’d been giving generous pours all night, no matter what kind of shit-ass drink they’d ordered. Chocolate schnapps and vodka was in no way a martini just because you put it in a martini glass.

She nodded to him and wiped her glass. Suzie, the waitress, saluted, letting Frankie know she was leaving half an hour early. She had a boyfriend waiting at home. Drove Frankie crazy sometimes, imagining what they’d be doing by the time she could close up and trudge back to her third-floor walk-up over on Holt. One (but only one) of the curses of having this thing in her blood was that it drove her crazy with wanting sex.

Great. She could blow outta here right at closing. Like she had somewhere to go or someone waiting for her. The weight that settled in her chest seemed natural after a couple of centuries. Eternity stretched ahead, empty of any real relationships. Couldn’t let people close when you had something to hide. She couldn ’t even escape her fate. The thing in her blood loved life. A lot. It regenerated cells to keep its host body young, and once it got hold of you, you just couldn ’t bring yourself to commit suicide, no matter how hard you tried. And she had. Maybe sex was an expression of its urge to life too. Maybe that’s why she was so horny.

No escape and no solace. No friends, no lovers, not even God. She’d lost any interest in a God that let someone be made into a monster through no fault of her own.

For the millionth time she thought about the moment she’d been infected. A stupid little scrape. How could she know he was a vampire? Or that even one molecule of his blood could infect her?
He
knew what he was. He should have been more careful. But Henri didn’t care about anything. Or anybody. It made her blood boil just to think about it.

Damn you to hell, Henri Foucault …

She slid glasses into the racks over the sink at the end of the bar, hanging them by their stems.
If someone granted me one
wish, I’d go back and do it over. I’d stop myself from touching Henri’s bleeding hand.
It was a kind of game she played.

How could you make one wish turn out the way you wanted when the universe was out to trick you? Wish to lose weight and you might lose a leg. Want money? What if people thought you stole it and locked you up? No, you had to wish for something in just the right way, with plenty of codicils. So not touching Henri’s cut wouldn’t be good enough. He might infect her some other time with the same result. She’d been living in his house and imagined herself in love with the “wicked duc.” A young girl’s foolish crush.

The girl she’d been would never leave him. Henri was not only a gorgeous guy but he had that irresistible vampire vitality. Sooner or later, it would be vampire time for her.

She followed the twisted path she’d daydreamed about so many times before. The horrific conclusion didn’t seem so horrific after you’d repeated it a million times.

The only way to prevent herself from being made vampire for certain was to kill Henri.

It had taken a while to accept that, rat though he was. She wasn’t a killer by nature even now. Those people she’d killed before she knew how to take blood without damaging them still haunted her. For decades she tried to work out various ways of ensuring that her naïve former self wouldn’t fall in love with Henri. But there was only one way to be sure. And what would it matter if he died? It wasn’t as if Henri made any positive difference to the world. He didn’t care about anything or anyone. He was a monster in the truest sense.

Glasses clinked as she dunked them two by two in soapy water, then in hot water laced with sanitizer, then set them out to dry on a wooden rack. The question was, how could a girl of twenty-one decapitate a vampire with more than human strength? They healed anything less drastic. She knew that personally. And she knew decapitation was the way to kill a vampire because that’s the way two vampires had tried to kill her when they found she’d been made by another vampire, not born to the blood.

She’d found the answer to her problem during her addict phase in fin de siècle Paris. With enough fruit of the poppy, vampires could be drugged. It took a lot. Enough to kill a human. So if she could drug Henri, then …

The door opened.
Merde.
She glanced to the glowing blue clock at the rear. Twenty minutes to closing. Why couldn ’t these idiots stay home on such a raunchy night?

And then she felt the electric vibrations so powerful they existed just at the edge of consciousness and caught the scent of cinnamon and ambergris. Double
merde.

The woman looked like she was about to walk a red carpet somewhere. Black hair done up in complicated, intertwining loops, eyes so dark they might be black, creamy shoulders wrapped in swathes of translucent coppery fabric shot through with gold threads. Her dress was copper satin, full-skirted. She might have been any age.

Literally.

Frankie’s breath caught in her chest. Vampire. And that meant big trouble.

“I felt your vibrations on the street,” the woman said. Her accent was vaguely … Italian. She slid onto a blue barstool.

“What do you want?” Frankie asked, her voice flat.

“I’ll have a Bombay Sapphire martini, straight up, two olives.”

Like that was what Frankie meant.

The woman raised her brows. “And do use vermouth. So many bartenders these days don’t. That makes it a shot of gin with an olive, not a martini.”

The vampire might be preparing to kill her, but at least she knew how to drink. Frankie filled a martini glass with ice to buy time.

Could she get past her to the door? The vibrations said this one was old and strong. Did Frankie even want to escape? Maybe death would be a relief, but the thing in her blood shuddered in revulsion. She grabbed the blue, square bottle and the Noilly Prat and scooped more ice into a stainless steel shaker.

“I can’t place you. So you must be made.”

Frankie stopped shaking the drink. “Look, if you’re going to kill me just get on with it.”

“Kill you because you’re made?” The woman’s chuckle was deep and throaty. “I’m the last to point fingers. I made my husband.”

“You made him vampire?” Whoa. Probably some horrible divorce revenge.

The woman’s smile could only be described as fond. “In A.D. 41. I hope he can get here before closing. He’s hosting the afterparty for the opera. I find crowds difficult these days.”

Frankie was shocked on so many levels. At how old the woman was. That she had been with one man for that long. That she still spoke of him fondly. “Didn’t he hate you for making him … what he is?” How could he not?

She shook her head, still smiling. “It gave us forever. You were not made by a lover?”

Frankie snorted. “I thought I loved him.” She set the martini on the bar. “But I was just a nuisance. He probably did it to punish me.” She wanted to shock this woman who believed in love enough to stay with one man for almost two millennia.

The woman frowned. “You … you are French?”

Frankie nodded.

“How long ago were you made?”

Frankie shrugged. “Couple centuries and change.”

“French, around the Revolution.” The woman tapped her chin. “Not Henri Foucault?”

“The very one.” Frankie’s voice was light, as if she didn’t care.

“He was a fine man,” the woman murmured. “He would not have broken the Rules of our kind for petty revenge. It is the Cardinal Sin to make another vampire. One is outcast from vampire society if the Elders ever find out, never allowed the solace of others who understand one. It is a commitment to the one you make like no other. He must have loved you very much.”

A fine man? Frankie snorted. “He loved no one. It might have been an accident. That’s the best face I could put on it.”

“Making a vampire is never accidental. The human needs repeated infusions of a vampire ’s blood to acquire immunity to the Companion and survive the infection.”

The Companion. That’s what Henri called the parasite too. “Oh, he made me drink his damned blood, all right. Then he abandoned me without a word.”

The beautiful vampire thought about that for a moment. “You hate him.”

“Bingo. And I hate what I am and I’d give anything to take back that instant when his blood got into that stupid little scrape on my palm.” Frankie stared at her. “Anything.”

“Ahhhh.” The woman sighed. “Centuries of regret and anger can poison your soul.”

“I try not to think about it.” Frankie started putting the trays of limes, lemons, olives, and cherries into the refrigerator.

“But you think about it all the time.” The woman’s voice held pity.

Like she should be strong enough not to think about it? “Oh, only when I have to drink somebody’s blood to stop the craving.

Or when I have to hide my strength. When a wound heals instantaneously. Or when I can see in the dark, or hear the drip in the men’s room sink from here, or smell that a woman wearing perfume walked by three days ago, that sort of thing. ” She sounded bitter, even to herself. “So, yeah. I think about it.”

“I’m sorry.” The woman took a long sip of her drink. “I know what regret is like.”

Frankie shut the fridge door. “I just want to be normal. With normal relationships and a normal life span … You know …

normal?” Frankie tried on a shrug. “Probably not. Anyway, I don’t want to spend eternity serving the needs of this thing in my blood.”

“Henri …” The woman’s voice was hesitant. “Henri was guillotined. Did you know?”

Frankie jerked around. Henri,
dead?
Her parasite’s reaction to the thought of decapitation sent another shudder through her. Or maybe it was something else. She’d thought he was out there somewhere, alive, callous, bored with the world but doing exactly as he wanted, always. She’d dreamed of confronting him, even looked for him a couple of times in Paris over the years. The thought that he had been dead all along just seemed … wrong. Then she started to chuckle. The damned, cruel good-for-nothing had escaped even being held accountable for his misdeeds.