Читать книгу The Green Memory of Fear - B. A. Chepaitis - Страница 6
ОглавлениеChapter 1
“Taking up a new hobby?” Alex asked, picking up a book from the coffee table in Jaguar’s living room.
On top of the book, The Etiquette of Vampires, was a disc titled Vampires of the World.
Jaguar, who was bringing a tray with honey and cups of tea from the kitchen to the living room, stopped and scanned all six feet and one inch of him, from his thick dark hair to his good black shoes. Then she brought her glance up to stay with his angular face and coal dark eyes. Alex, accustomed to her occasional need to visually frisk him for weapons, waited it out.
“Know anything about vampires?” she asked.
“That depends,” he said.
“On what?”
“On what kind you mean. The Draculas, the Japanese river creatures, the lamia. Or maybe you mean the twenty-first century romantic version?”
“Not those,” she said, and she moved toward the coffee table with her burden. “There’s no glitter in the beast, if you ask me.”
“Okay, then. Maybe the Windigo—or the Greenkeepers, as they’re called.”
Jaguar set the tray down on the coffee table and curled herself into a chair, inviting Alex to take the couch. “Apparently you do know something about them,” she said as he sat.
He tossed the book on the table between them. “I like to read, too. Did you get through Davidson yet?”
“Some of it. I had a prisoner to deal with.”
“So why are you interested in vampires?” he asked.
She poured honey into her spoon and stirred her tea with it. “Idle curiosity,” she said, and he laughed.
“What’s wrong with that?” she demanded, viewing him over her spoon as she licked the remaining honey off it.
“Nothing, except I don’t believe you. You never do anything idly. You’re very goal-oriented. Which kind of vampires are you interested in?”
“And you’re as persistent as a truffle hunting pig. What difference does it make which vampire?”
“It’ll tell me what I have to worry about. For instance, if you’re researching Windigo, a Native species, it’s probably for ritual purposes and my level of concern remains low.”
“Windigo aren’t Mertec. My people had a different name for it.”
“I’m aware of that. But Davidson doesn’t have a section on the earth-eater. In fact, I might be the only white man in the world who knows about it.”
She reached across the table and traced a star on his forehead. “Consider it a gold one,” she said. “And if I’m interested in Lamias?”
“You’re not, are you?” he asked.
She retreated into herself, stirring her tea. He reached across the table and touched her wrist as he let his thoughts slip into hers.
What is it? he asked, subvocally.
He felt her sharp retraction, and quickly, courteously, he bowed out. But not before he retrieved a piece of information he’d been seeking.
He leaned back in his chair, picked up his tea. “Why are you interested in Greenkeepers?”
“The Adept at work,” she muttered.
She considered his precognitive capacities the most manipulative of the empathic arts and continued to distrust them, with feeling.
“I don’t think I’m the only one working, chant-shaper,” he answered.
She kept her gaze away from his. He tapped his spoon against the table. She raised her head and lifted a corner of her mouth in a smile. Deliberately neutral, except for her eyes, which studied him hard.
He knew that look. She was waiting to see his next move before she made any of her own. Her ego allowed her to make very few false moves. And right now, it was entirely possible that she was afraid of him, for the same reasons he was afraid of her.
No. Not afraid of her. Afraid of what he felt about her.
They’d worked together for over six years, been very good friends for at least five, and slept together once. Just once. Enough to tell them both that kind of interaction wasn’t something to take or leave lightly.
A few months had passed since then, and the only agreement they’d reached was to go neither forward nor backwards. She’d been aloof, and he’d been polite and distant. They were engaged in a complex dance on a trembling plane, waiting to see if the earth would stop its tectonic motion any time soon, or if they could find new footing on it.
For his part, he’d also been watching for her fur to settle after the intensity of their last encounter, which had served to save both their lives. He approached her as he would any wild thing, with slow and deliberate care. She needed time to know she could negotiate the turf of what would be a totally new geography of the emotions for them both. And right now, she needed to know what he knew about Greenkeepers.
She stretched her legs out, the material of her long, loose dress rippling like water over them. Her gaze was open and clear as ocean, and just as impossible to fathom. Her silence was extravagant and complete. She was waiting for him to come up with something. He obliged.
“The Greenkeeper,” he said, “is a deceptively gentle name for modern North American vampires. They were first written about after the Serials, when quite a few of the earliest murderers brought in claimed they used ritual rape and murder to regenerate themselves physically. Nothing proven, of course, but theoretically Greenkeepers can use energy transfer, blood, or sexual fluids to trigger cellular regeneration. They prefer children, because they’ve got more of the right stuff than adults. The name,” he concluded, “is from the response of regenerative biochemicals to lab experiments.”
He took her hand and lifted his teacup over it, pouring a stream of green tea to pool in her palm. “When isolated, they turn green.”
She stared at her palm, then tipped it to let the tea flow into the saucer under his cup. She closed her eyes and pressed the index finger of her right hand against her lips, tapped them as if sounding morse code. Alex waited. When she reopened her eyes, they were still neutral.
“Pedophiles were some of the earliest ritual killers during the Serials. So how do you tell the difference between a pedophile and a Greenkeeper?” she asked.
“Is that a riddle?”
“No. I’m asking. How?”
That was an unexpected question. He searched his rather extensive memory to see what emerged. Jonathan Post, in his book Unparticular Magic, said early 21st literature that romanticized vampires reflected the larger cultural attraction to pedophilia. Other historians noted that rates for child abuse were higher previous to the Killing Times than at any other time in history. They calculated how many of those abused went on to become abuser, who were released from overcrowded prisons just before the violence erupted.
But pedophiles were a dime a dozen, while even Davidson admitted that Greenkeepers were rare, if they existed at all. They either had to be born with the inherent capacity to access regenerative material, or transformed into that skill by another Greenkeeper. And unlike any other psi capacity, they never turned out well.
They were an anomaly, born to evil in a universe that preferred the good. And their relationship to pedophiles was, theoretically at least, complex.
“While all Greenkeepers are pedophiles,” he said, “Not all pedophiles are Greenkeepers. Greenkeepers have lots of psi capacities—Telekinesis, shapeshifting, hypnopathy, Protean change—and pedophiles don’t. Of course, one Greenkeeper can do damage on a scale beyond the pedophile’s wildest dream, because theoretically they live as long as they keep feeding. And they rarely transform those they feed from. They just bind them at an energy level so they’ll go on to become destructive, but without the powers of their master. That means pedophiles could be former victims of Greenkeepers, bound but not transformed.”
“What happened to the ones brought in during the Killing Times?” she asked.
“You mean the ones who claimed they were Greenkeepers?” he amended.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Those, if you insist on reasonable doubt.”
Alex held his hands palm up. “They disappeared.”
She nodded, as if she expected this answer.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “You disappeared, too. More than ten million people disappeared, one way and another. Everything was in chaos.”
The Killing Times they’d both survived—she as a teenager, he as a young man—left the major cities of North America in upheaval for years. The rise in serial killing from which it derived its name was followed by uncontainable violence, domestic terrorism, burning and death. Keeping track of mythical Greenkeepers was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
“Besides,” he added, “even Davidson admits there’s no actual proof of their existence. All the evidence is anecdotal. Like ghost stories and UFOs.”
“Sexual abuse stats plunged like a rock after the Killing Times,” she said, “and now they’re climbing again, along with incidence of violent crime in children.”
As usual, she knew her facts. In the last year New York state alone put ten children on trial for murder. He’d sat on two committee meetings to discuss whether juvies should go to the Planetoids. Jaguar said they should send the parents up instead.
“Are you suggesting a Greenkeeper’s responsible for that?” he asked.
“I’m speculating about possibilities, great and small. Does Davidson offer any ideas for capture or cure?”
“No cure. There is none. And capture is difficult. Theoretically they can regenerate wounds rapidly, so bullets won’t work. If you keep one locked up long enough without feeding maybe they’ll dissipate for lack of energy—a kind of starvation—but try keeping them locked up if they really can shapeshift. Stories say salt burns them—a bad interaction with their biochem—but it won’t kill them. Also they fear snakes because systemic poisoning makes quick regeneration difficult. But according to Davidson the only viable way to deal with them is your ancestor’s treatment.”
“Which one?”
“Rip their hearts out,” he said. “Basically you have to do enough damage rapidly enough that they can’t regenerate. Getting as close as you need to do that without being killed is the tough part. You only get one shot at a Greenkeeper.”
“Right,” she said. Then, “How do you happen to have all this information at your fingertips?” she asked. “Idle curiosity?”
He was going to try that answer, but since she’d anticipated it, he went for the truth instead. “About a week ago I picked up Davidson and read it through,” he answered. “I don’t know what impelled me, but it did seem important at the time.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. He understood the question in her face, which asked whether this was from Adept space, a precognitive sense that this knowledge would be needed soon. In the absence of a definite answer he merely shrugged.
She accepted that in silence. She stood and walked over to the window, where she stared out over the replica city of Toronto, built to mimic the original for this zone of Planetoid 3. The sun was dipping over the horizon, the buildings washed in soft gold.
“I still want to know why you’re interested,” he noted. “If you think your current prisoner shows tendencies that way, that’d be important.”
“No. Nothing like that. Just—the book fell off the shelf.”
He supposed that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else, but he understood. Empaths were trained to pay attention to small signals. When books leapt off shelves at your feet, you picked them up and read them, even if there didn’t seem any reason to do so. Later, you might find out that part of the shelf wasn’t level. Or you might find this was exactly the information you needed. Either way, knowing the reason behind her curiosity settled his nerves, for now. It could also explain his sudden interest in reading the same book. Their history together included a great deal of close empathic contact, and that sometimes created interesting synchronicities.
“Did you like the Davidson book?” she asked after a while.
“Very much. It’s an evil kind of creature, but her writing’s always beautiful, so it’s worth the read. I think,” he noted more philosophically, “beauty may be the only antidote there is to evil.”
“That’s a romantic notion,” she said.
“Then I’m a romantic. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
His tone gave him away. She turned to him, her face full of questions. She started with the most obvious one. “You didn’t come over to talk about vampires, did you?”
He leaned back and asked his breathing to normalize itself, asked his heart rate to slow down. After all their circling dance, today he was ready to call some new steps. It wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be.
They shared friends and work and knowledge in the empathic arts. They shared assignments and risks and rescues. One way and another, they spent more time together than apart. Their high regard for each other had even survived sleeping together. And here he was, skittish as spit on a griddle about asking her out.
“No. I wanted to see if you’d like to have dinner with me,” he said.
She tried to absorb the question and failed. It was already past dinnertime. “Dinner?” she repeated.
“Later this week. I was thinking La Loba. You said you like their Tequila.”
He saw complexities cross her thoughts as she chewed the inside of her lip. She wasn’t getting it.
“I’m asking you out, Jaguar,” he said, his voice like gravel in his throat. “On a date.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
And then, silence, as she stared at her hands.
At least, he thought, he had the satisfaction of seeing her shocked into speechlessness. That was a rare and precious moment. He savored it briefly, then asked, “Is Thursday good? ”
She conducted another interview with her emotions, and although they weren’t in empathic contact, he could guess the nature of her thoughts. They probably weren’t much different than his, which asked him repeatedly what confused sense of chivalry impelled him to do this.
He had other options. She’d be amenable to something casual, to being intermittent lovers with no strings attached. They’d stay friends and nothing much would change. And she wouldn’t push if he let it drop altogether. Eventually it would disappear, swallowed by his favorite ally, time. But to try and establish something real between them could be pure and gallant stupidity of the most egregious kind. To say I want this, and I want it real was probably the last thing she expected, and the most foolhardy thing he could do.
He waited, while her internal conversation rounded itself out to resolution.
“I’m singing with Moon Illusion on Thursday,” she said at last. She regularly sang with this band of former prisoners so it was a valid excuse, but his disappointment was sharp. He was debating what to say next when she breached the gulf of silence.
“How’s Wednesday?” she asked.
He let his pulse steady itself, then raised himself from his chair to leave.
“Wednesday’s good,” he said. “See you about seven, if that’s okay.”
“Sure,” she said. “Seven’s fine. See you then.”
He thought about saying more, but she’d already turned away. Enough, he thought. Enough for now.
He moved toward the door, and let himself out.