Sweeter Than Wine

  At my inquiry, the girl told me the price. Quinn whistled. “Do you have any idea how expensive it’s going to be, every time you pull the trigger?”

  I think she decided that she hadn’t heard that.

  “Yeah, and every time I do, it’s gonna make me madder until he’s dead.” I glanced at the girl again. Her eyes had gotten big. “Forget I said that,” I told her, pushing her only a little bit. “This is purely theoretical.”

  Quinn and Anton didn’t even notice what I’d done. I had the girl multiply the length by seven—the number of shells my shotgun holds; there wouldn’t be time to reload—paid her in cash, and, once the chain had been properly measured, cut from the spool, and lay safely in its own zippered plastic baggie, took my gloves off and shook her hand.

  If we’d been alone, I would have “bitten” her.

  30: IF YOU WOULD HAVE PEACE...

  “Evil is not something superhuman, it’s something

  less than human.”—Agatha Christie

  Getting home seemed to take forever.

  It always makes me nervous when there’s somebody else driving, and doubly so when they’re driving my car. Unfortunately, I’ve never found a windshield glass that filtered the ultraviolet to my satisfaction, and we hadn’t had much choice with regard to the business hours of Acme Precious Metals and Findings. So it was back to I-25, north to the middle off-ramp to New Prospect, and eventually the Suburban slid into my big garage beside the PT Cruiser as the heavy door swung down.

  I hollered through the connecting door that we were home, not waiting for an answer. Instead of going into the house, I conducted my guests downstairs, the basement being accessible from the garage as well as the kitchen. That’s where I keep my basic cartridge reloading setup. The room is cool, clean, and dry. I had painted over a pair of windows—a surprising number of individuals don’t understand that reloading is perfectly legal—but had hung plenty of lights here and there.

  Incandescents—I hate fluorescent light.

  I can reload spent shells from my .45 and .38, but seldom do it much, preferring factory loads with bullets that do fancy tricks on impact. I reload shotgun shells whenever Anton and I go out to murder little clay disks, so he can laugh at me. I’m terrible at the sport. The way I have to dress in daylight may have something to do with that.

  With Anton and Quinn watching me, I rummaged through a big plastic bin of fired shells until I found seven that matched. This practice is a bit less silly than it may appear. All other things—powder, shot, and primers—being equal, shells that are as identical as possible tend to shoot more or less identically, which means that you have an idea, having fired one, where the next slug or load of buckshot is headed.

  The steps were relatively simple. I used a bench-mounted device—called a reloading press—designed to remanufacture pistol and rifle cartridges, rather than one dedicated strictly to reloading shotgun shells. They make those, too, but they always seem so flimsy and overcomplicated.

  Screwing a machined cylinder called a “resizing die” into the top of the press, and snapping the proper shellholder into the “ram”, the part that moves up and down, after some adjustment, I reshaped the seven cases (they expand when they’re fired) at the same time removing the spent primers, the little part the firing pin hits to ignite the gunpowder.

  Next, I used the machine to push new primers into the back ends of the cases. After that, a measured amount of smokeless gunpowder went into each shell, dispensed by a special little device screwed to the bench. I then installed a plastic “shot cup” in each shell to seal in the powder and hold whatever projectiles I intended to fire from the gun.

  Now came the unusual and interesting part. Normally, I’d have used another dispenser, not unlike the one for powder, to pour lead shot of the desired size into the cases, or slipped in a slug by hand. This time, putting on another pair of gloves, I poured the silver chain out of the Ziploc bag and measured it into seven equal parts. I used a pair of tiny sidecutters on it, although the stuff was so fine and soft I could have used a butter knife, or a pair of kindergarten scissors. I then slithered a piece of the chain into each of the seven shells.

  There followed a stage in which the crimp was started—which means I was closing up the front end of the shell, over the silver chain—and another that finished the crimp. And there they stood, seven shells that looked almost as good as if the factory had made them.

  The whole process had taken less than half an hour.

  As a final precaution, I loaded six of the shells into the Remington’s tubular magazine and, shucking the forend back and forth (I added the seventh when there was room for it), made sure they fit the weapon and fed properly. This process had been highly recommended, among others, by a professional African hunter, guide, and author who’d watched one of his clients stomped flat and torn limb from torso by an elephant he’d managed to annoy but failed to kill when his rifle—the client’s—jammed on ammunition that had been untried this way.

  “All right, gents,” I said, taking off the gloves and gathering up the freshly reloaded shotgun. “Let go upstairs and say hello to the ladies.”

  ***

  I once had a cartoon above my desk that showed one vulture telling another, “Patience, hell! I’m gonna kill something!” It’s still around somewhere, yellowed and brittle. It pretty much summed up my attitude over the next week. I’m normally a fairly patient individual. It pays to be in my line of work—waiting in the rain at night in some dirty alley with only a dumpster to talk to—but it was much harder, this time.

  In the first place, we had no idea where Xopher was holed up. It could have been in that dumpster I mentioned. It could have been in the Presidential Suite of New Prospect’s answer to the Ritz. Some detective I was. Anton had put the word out to his men to be on the lookout for the guy—and he’d poked the multijurisdictional task force—although what he’d said beyond that, I had not the foggiest idea.

  Some detective I was.

  My greatest worry was that, having been on Red Alert since Xopher had shown up at the house, we’d grow lax and fall off our guard. I was morally certain our ancient enemy was counting on it. I wasn’t certain how we could prevent it. Nobody can survive on an adrenaline rush forever.

  Anton and Priscilla had more or less moved in for the duration, using a spare bedroom upstairs. They talked between themselves, not really arguing, about whether she should “go all the way” as he had. The Kowalskis had moved in, as well, into the study off my office, although they lost money every day they were away from the facilities in their own home. I promised myself I’d make it up to them somehow. I had an inkling, but I wasn’t prepared to examine it too closely yet, myself.

  Surica and I continued to live like honeymooners, the inclination heightened by the fact that each day—each hour—might be our last together.

  Again.

  I hadn’t exactly been a monk in the 65 years after I’d lost her the first time, but I’d never again encountered anyone even remotely like her. The touch of her skin, the warmth of her body (no, vampires are not cold to the touch, if anything, we run a little hot), her firm softness, her soft firmness, the smell of her hair and her breath—somewhere along the line, I realized that my lovely Rumanian freedom fighter was the only girl with whom I’d ever been intimate who was not dying, however slow the process, or faraway the end. Each and every cell of her being was alive, in a way ordinary human beings are not.

  There was time for intellectual curiosity. I was 80 years old, but I still got carded in bars. Surica was a year shy of 300 and although she took measures to avoid it—unlike every other woman in the world—still looked like the 17-year-old beauty she’d been when she was bitten.

  And then there was Deabru, Richard Francis Xopher as he styled himself, a not-quite-human creature who had existed and preyed gorily on others, for as much as fifty millennia. Two huge questions about him:

  First, I had tried drinking animal blood as an ethic
al substitute several times when I was new to this way of living. As a man, I could survive on it if I had to—the Masai do it, and, to some extent, the Mongol warriors who conquered China, although it could be nasty—the virus was unimpressed, I got weaker and weaker until I fed it what it wanted.

  So if Xopher really belonged to a different species—Homo heidelbergensis, Quyen had called it—how come he and his virus could be nourished by what to him must have seemed like animal blood? Did that mean I could live on the blood of a chimpanzee or a gorilla, both of which are extremely close, genetically speaking, to Homo sapiens?

  Or how about a bonobo? I didn’t know, and I didn’t relish finding out. I’d get arrested at the zoo, and the media—unwilling to accept the simple truth that I was a really truly vampire—would accuse me of sexually molesting the apes. As I recall, there’s a limerick about that.

  “And what about genetic drift?” I demanded of Surica, who was discussing these matters with me while we waited—well, never mind what we were waiting for. “Every time that a cell replicates itself, there’s a chance that a copying error will occur, producing something new. Odds are it will be lethal—we get cancer that way, and two-headed chickens—or destroyed by our immune systems, or not make any difference, but occasionally it’s an improvement and that’s how evolution happens. Wouldn’t you think, after fifty thousand years, that Deabru would be a big lump of overlapping tumors or something by now?”

  “Why do you ask me, my lovely man?” Surica answered, pouting a little, or pretending to: I was lying beside her in bed, naked, thinking about something other than making passionate love to her. “I was...well, let me see...189 years old when I first heard of genetics.”

  “So you never wondered about this?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that, darling. I became interested in genetics because of that very question. I never found an answer that satisfied me.”

  “How about this: viruses are communists—”

  “They’re what? Communists?”

  “Sure. They bore their way into their host’s cells, seize the means of production—or in this case, reproduction—and use it to turn out more viruses like themselves, instead of more cells like the host’s.”

  “All right, I will give you that one. Very clever. Viruses are communists. I will also give you this—” She turned a little and laid something in my hand. The first part of her that I had ever touched.

  About forty-five minutes later, she resumed our conversation. “So if viruses are communists, what does that tell us about genetic drift?”

  She was as bad as I was, after all. “Only that this particular virus knows us intimately. It’s large, as viruses go—I showed you—I’ll bet it’s large because it contains a copy of our blueprint, our DNA. With that information, it can take us back to when we were in prime condition—have you noticed how Anton looks younger every day?—and it can correct any errors in our replicated DNA that it may detect.”

  “Brilliant,” she said. Is there some way to prove this?”

  “I’m sure there must be, and once we’re past this Deabru mess, I’ll go right to work on it, probably with the help of Quinn and Quyen.”

  “Tell me, darling man, before you make love to me again. Aren’t viruses always mutating? All those influenzas? What keeps ours from drifting?”

  About an hour later, I told her I didn’t have any idea.

  31: DEEP AS THE MARROW

  “He who does not punish evil, commands

  it to be done.”—Leonardo da Vinci

  A week turned into two and then gave birth to three.

  It wasn’t so much that everyday life returns to its normal rhythms as that it imposes those rhythms whether we want it to or not. Mail, of the e- or snail variety needs to get read and even occasionally answered. Garbage needs to be taken out to the alley. Clothes need to be washed and dried. Grass needs to be mowed, lest the city lawn Nazis have their way with us. Bills must be paid or they’ll eventually turn off the water, the gas, the electricity, the TV cable, and all the fun.

  We’d all been through the house thoroughly several times. I never bought the place with security in mind, for its defensibility, but now that was an issue. There was the front door, opening onto a glassed-in front porch with entrances inside to both my office and the living room. There was a back door, also to a glassed-in porch, leading into the kitchen. There was a side door coming into the kitchen from the garage.

  The house was far from new. It didn’t have a coal cellar like a lot of the older places do in New Prospect, with its slanting door covering a chute. It did have a delivery door in the kitchen, about three feet high, where milk used to appear every morning, back during a happier and safer time in our civilization’s history. There were half a dozen basement windows and a couple of big skylights in the roof.

  That’s right: special glass in the skylights.

  I spent a couple of long days—nights, actually—putting new catches, nails, and screws where they’d do the most good. Fresh air is better, but my central air conditioning would have to do for the duration.

  Anton took what days of sick leave he had left—until now, he’d almost never been sick—and then had himself assigned to the night shift. Priscilla worked for herself and made her own hours. Normally that means a self-employed individual works 100 hours a week instead of only 40, but just now she was busy looking after her husband as he recovered.

  Waiting for the other shoe to drop doesn’t suit my temperament, and Surica had used up all of her patience—half a century’s worth—in that Rumanian dungeon. Every night, we prowled the city, trying to find Xopher before he could finish healing so we could finish him altogether. I thought I’d known the city of New Prospect pretty well until I began patrolling every street and alley, every pathway in the park.

  “Excuse me, sir,” requested a whiskerless young rent-a-cop whose “beat” was one of our tonier gated communities, about a hundred square blocks of luxury bedrooms for folks silly enough to commute into the Denver smog every day, like lemmings. My lovely partner and I were gambling that the unprecedented number of fancy homes for sale, being repossessed, or abandoned might be tempting to our quarry: luxurious digs surrounded by what might as well have been fast food and gourmet restaurants everywhere. It was past two in the morning. The rentie had pulled up and climbed out of his company-marked Chevy HHR as I leaned against a lamppost listening to the neighborhood breathing in its sleep.

  “This is private property, sir. Do you have some reason for being here?”

  The boy’s khaki uniform and ballcap made him look like a filling station attendant circa 1955. The clutter hanging on his wide, black, basket-stamped belt included a brand new full-sized Glock .40 and a couple of spare magazines. On summer days, he and his colleagues wore cargo shorts and rode Segways. Silliest goddamn thing I have ever seen.

  As we talked, the radio on his belt conversed with itself.

  “I’m a private investigator, officer. Tonight I’m looking for a missing person.” Surica was a block away, sitting in the PT Cruiser. From there, I knew she could easily hear what the security guy and I were saying. I gave him a look at my credentials—an empty palm—and briefly described Xopher, adding, “He’s mentally ill, extremely dangerous.”

  His eyes widened. “Maybe I should call it in then.”

  I pushed gently. “No need for that, son. Just keep your eyes peeled.”

  He grinned. “I can do that. Good night and good luck, sir.”

  “Thanks. Have a good evening.” He climbed back into his little truck and was gone. I was curious about the HHR, but liked my Cruiser better.

  As we had made our “rounds” earlier, Surica and I had talked about the future. Over the last six and a half decades, I had never really hoped to do that with anyone. So I had to ask, at least once in our lives.

  “Why me, Surica? I know why I love you—”

  She breathed; I loved and the sight and sound of it. “Because, lovely man, you
are the kindest, gentlest, sweetest person I have ever known.”

  “Hell of a thing,” I told her, “to be saying to a vampire.”

  “Hell of a vampire to be saying it to. For what it is worth, you are also the fiercest, my darling. And I have never known anyone, in my almost three hundred years, who loves life the way you do. Most people merely end up dragging themselves through their three score and ten, grateful when it’s finally over. If we can, we must have many children so you can teach them to love life the way you have taught me.”

  “Best offer I’ve had all day.” I didn’t know what else to say. If Surica and I survived this fight with her old nemesis, we would be truly free to make what we might of our lives, our love, and our immortality, together. We would start by sharing our gift with Priscilla, if she was willing. And we had a friend who needed a new leg.

  As I watched the HHR’s taillights dwindle in the gated suburban distance, Surica somehow managed to slip up soundlessly behind me, let one long, smooth leg with its high-heeled ankle-strap shoe escape the slitted skirt she was wearing (she has odd ideas about combat gear), and leaned against the lamppost, wrapping that leg halfway around the post.

  She parted her lips...

  It was almost a whisper. Looking up at me suggestively from under her long eyelashes, she was singing a very old, very familiar tune, familiar, that is, to any who’d lived through the Second World War, in a low, growly, ninety-nine and forty-four one hundredths percent sexy voice: