“Lucky you.” Ian sat in one of the folding chairs that were scattered around the room. The Child closed his eyes. “I’m really back here looking for X.”
The Child laughed silently. “As am I, as am I.”
“You don’t have any?”
“So you can’t get any from—who’s that guy in—uh—that junior? My beloved competition?”
“Robinson. Robinson’s been, like, tied to his bed by his parents. They suspect him of being a drug dealer, or some such nonsense.”
“That girl did herself.”
“What girl?”
“Robinson, Brittania, of bag nose fame.”
“Britt Robinson is a bag nose? Where’s she get that kind of money?”
“Ask the cocaine angel in the sky. She’s with him now.” He rolled his eyes. “She went, like, eckeckeck”—he convulsed furiously—“in the Gilford Road McDonald’s. In the la-a-a-dies.”
Britt Robinson had been in Lit. 6 with him last semester, and she’d just offed? This had happened? “You’re shittin’ me.”
He shook his head. “Life goes on.”
Not hers, though. He did not want any X, all of a sudden. Kerry sang, and the Child played the gain. “I’m gonna oooooeeeee….”
“I’m—Jesus.”
“You suckin’ face wit her?”
“No—no, it’s just a shock. Do people know?”
He shrugged. “Sure. But she was, like, a bag nose. Nobody cares.”
Ian left the dance, walking out into the starry night. Why was there even a dance going on? What about honoring the dead? They all knew her, she’d been around just yesterday. Now she was just another kid dead, goombye. It was like war. In war, somebody dies, you don’t cancel the dance. “Oooooeeeee…” from inside the gym.
Ian wanted his dad’s big arms around him, like when he was a kid. No, he didn’t, dammit, he did not! He got in the ’Stang and drove off, jamming the gas to the floor, listening to the tires scream, feeling the lousy front end wallow. Driving fast and too fast, he swept through East Mill, went out Gilford Road past Jergen’s Ice Cream Stand and past Amon Antique Village, past the glaring Taco Bell, and pulled into the McDonald’s.
A couple of people were inside, there were the usual busted-down kids behind the counter, the neon was humming. That was it, life goes on.
Somebody died, hey! Hey!
He drove on, past the abandoned radio station and the Exxon station, leaving the last lights and then turning north into the hills, pushing the car hard on the cruel roads, driving on. He did not want to stop, not ever, just to drive, to somehow catch up with her soul. He slammed a cassette into the deck, fast-forwarded to “Hey I Matter.”
“Hey I matter, please look at me, Hey I matter. I matter, I got a name, hey I matter.” And then the mean drums, and then her voice again, “I matter, I got a name, hey I matter…”
One thing, Leo, you’re wrong about. We don’t matter, we’re fodder, or not even that. Just names slipping into memory and then gone, lost names. “WE FUCKING MATTER!”
He’d yelled so loud his throat hurt. Up the road he saw a deer, swerved, listened to the tires squeal, felt the front end contemplate his death, then decide he had a couple more minutes after all.
He drove on, pushing the car maybe hard enough to kill them both, deep into the night.
Becky Ward read the e-mail again. It wasn’t that she couldn’t believe what she was seeing, but that she wasn’t sure what to believe. The agency’s search engine had found a link to a story in the on-line edition of a Tunisian newspaper about the apparent murder of a child in Cairo that fit their alert criteria.
Under the headline, “The Monster of Cairo,” the story described how a tall woman in a black cloak had rushed into a street where some children were playing, and immediately killed one of them, “leaving the remains dry and hard, and as light as paper.”
They hadn’t done Cairo, the Egyptians and the French had. She recalled that Jean Bocage had found the Egyptian sterilization team to be extremely efficient. Given that they had to work against what was probably the world’s most long-standing infestation, and that Colonel Bocage handed out praise with the generosity of an anorexic miser, that was quite an affirmation.
She went to the Tunisian paper’s website. The story was brief, and mentioned no names. She next tried some of the keywords in the Egyptian press. Nothing came up, so she printed the story for Paul and left it at that. He was upstairs in the den. She’d heard him pacing back and forth, back and forth.
His den was as his father had left it, but exactly. Even the magazines that his father had been reading the day of his disappearance were still in the stand beside his old leather chair.
In her heart, Becky knew that the huge grief of his loss dominated his life more than any love ever could, except perhaps for the love that his damned blood made him feel for Miriam Blaylock. Paul had not married her, he had taken her in from the storm. That was the truth of it—she’d been adopted. She tried not to blame Paul for bringing all this emotional baggage to their marriage. By rights, she ought to really hate what she had here, the obsessed man and the boy who was not hers. But they were needful and sparkling with charisma, both of them. She couldn’t help but feel as she did, the fierce loyalty, the equally fierce love.
Back and forth he went, back and forth. She should tell him about the Monster of Cairo. She locked the communications center, set its alarms. Ian had gotten used to his curiosity about this room, and it had been a long time since he’d come down here to challenge the system. Still, the way he’d been lately, so sullen and bitter and withdrawn—she didn’t know what he might do next.
Last night, he’d come in at three, his eyes broadcasting to his mother that he was both high and drunk. But he’d been as stable as a rock, his voice careful, sharp, and entirely unslurred. Just like his father. Paul could get fantastically drunk. He could put down a fifth of Scotch and still draw his gun from under his arm aimed and ready to fire in two seconds flat.
“Paul,” she said, walking into the den, “I have something here.” She handed him the printout.
He read it at least three times before he so much as moved. Then he said, “I’m going down to Langley.”
Their mission survived for one reason only: out of sight in a big bureaucracy was pretty much out of mind. “That’s a mistake.”
“Oh, okay. We have vampires on the loose, and that’s a mistake? Thank you.”
“Won’t Bocage be right on top of it? I mean, the French were on station there. Plus, that Egyptian—their team—it was supposed to be top drawer.”
He took another long, careful look at the story. “The French program is still active, that’s true enough. I don’t know if the Egyptians got decommissioned or what happened to them.”
“In either case, it’s not our problem.”
“So what’s your suggestion? Just sit?”
“You’ve been on my case lately, Paul.”
“I haven’t been on your case.”
“And I’m beginning not to like it.”
“I’m not on anybody’s case, okay? I just see this thing coming back to life, and I think we’re going to need help, and nobody cares. That’s the problem.” He tossed the printout onto his desk. “I want to get some more assets assigned to Patterson.”
“That won’t happen.”
“Well, that’s blunt, at least. Why won’t it happen, considering that there are holes in coverage the size of the damned Grand Canyon? I know she left the suite under cover three nights ago. I know she took somebody to her house, and I know why. I need people on her day and night, from now until as long as it takes.”
“Paul, if you go to Langley—” She stopped. She didn’t want to say it. It would only make him worse.
“What?”
She turned away from him. “You know what.”
She felt him staring at her back, and the fierceness she felt thrilled her, even when they were on the knife edge of a blowup. May
be she would never stop being excited by this man, and maybe she would never feel entirely comfortable with herself for putting him first when he did not reciprocate.
“I got myself fired and reinstated. Once you win one of those hearings, the morons leave you alone. I need more bodies on Patterson, and I need them now, and I will get them.”
“Paul, you’re going to broadcast a very clear message down there, and that message will be that you’re fishing without a hook in an empty pond.”
“The furnace was hot, and the man is gone! For chrissakes.”
“That’s the evidence you’re taking to Langley?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll not only get no additional assets, what you have now will be taken from you.”
He smiled at her, the explosive intensity of it lighting up the room. His son did that, too, when he smiled.
She just suddenly kissed him and let herself melt into his clumsy response. He was a clumsy dancer, too, and she adored that about him as well. “If I wanted my face sanded, I’d go to a carpenter,” she said, laughing.
He felt his beard. “I shaved.”
She ran her fingers along his blue cheek. “Two days ago.”
“That long? Are you sure?”
“I was there.”
He looked down at her, and for a moment she was gazing into the eyes of a giant child. It always startled her to see the face he had shown to his father, and the shadow of his own son that flickered there. In a way, she was not a wife and mother but the keeper of two strange, incredibly appealing beings. When she’d told Dr. Rhodes—Allie, her shrink for three years—“My husband isn’t quite human,” Allie had taken it as metaphor.
“We’re in trouble, big-time,” he said.
“Not if you stay away from Langley, we’re not.”
“We have two vampires still operating in two vastly different parts of the world, and that is what I define as big-time.” He paced to the window. “The guns,” he said softly. “I want to bring out the guns.”
“Oh, come on. What if Ian should see them? Or—my God, you talk about Langley. If Langley finds out we kept those guns, they’re liable to take the legal route.”
“We had to keep them! Jesus Christ!”
“I know we had to keep them. I helped you keep them. Remember whose name’s on the returned property manifest? Not yours.”
“If there are two, what if there are twenty or fifty or five hundred?”
“You know that isn’t true.”
“I’ve got a meeting with Briggsie.”
“That’s a fascinatingly bad idea. You not only bust the chain of command, you show up in the office of the person who likes you the least.”
“He has authority. I need somebody who can say yes.”
“I think you need to start with Cici.”
“Cecelia’s a drone.”
“Cecelia is fair, and she’s also your direct superior. Go into her office with good evidence, and she’ll listen. You don’t respect the chain of command, Paul, you start out from behind. That kind of approach is why we’re hanging on by our teeth when we ought to be like Bocage, with a whole operation still in place, waiting, watching.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault. Of course. And to think all these years I thought it was the fault of deadwood administrators.”
“Paul, I don’t want you to go down there and blow it. We could lose what little is left of this operation.”
“So what? You think it’s over anyway.”
“Of course it isn’t over! I wake up night after night in a sick sweat because it isn’t over. And I know—oh, God, Paul, what’s happening to Ian? What’s he becoming? Paul, is Ian—is that why you’re so—so frightening lately, Paul? Is Ian…”
“What’s Ian got to do with this?”
“Ian has everything to do with it! He has to do with us. And I’m scared for him. I don’t know what’s happening to him.” She paused. “What will happen. Might.” There it was, on the table.
“Nobody knows what Ian’s going to become. Watchful waiting, that’s the prescription.”
Paul had been about to say more, but his jaw snapped shut, and his head whipped around. Becky turned. Ian was standing in the doorway. Paul’s face went rigid. She went to their son, asking herself the same questions that she’d seen in Paul’s frightened eyes: How long has he been there? What has he heard?
“Ian,” she said, “good morning.”
“It’s afternoon,” Paul growled.
“Watchful waiting, Dad? For what?”
“It’s shop talk. We can’t discuss it, and you know we can’t.”
“Yeah, you can, Dad, because that’s a lie. It’s about me.” He came into the room, came close to his father. “What are you watching for?”
“Ian, for chrissakes.”
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Ian—”
“Shut up, Mom.”
“Don’t you tell your mother to shut up.”
“Then you tell me what you’re watching for, Dad. What’s wrong with me?” He flushed; his eyes widened. Becky had never seen a look like that in his face. “What’s wrong with me?”
Anger was radiating from him like nuclear heat. How long had he known that there was some issue about him that they did not discuss with him? How much did he know?
“Nothing’s wrong with you,” Paul replied, and the love in his eyes shocked Becky, shocked her and made her heart hurt for both of them.
“Oh? Then maybe I’ve got it backward. Because if nothing’s wrong with me, then I have to ask, what’s wrong with you?”
“Ian—”
“Mom, something is wrong! Because this family has changed. It isn’t like it used to be. Dad, you and I, we used to—” His voice broke. He was silent for a moment, as the man inside struggled to control the boy. “Dad, do you hate me, deep down? Is that it? Or is it that you’re scared of me?”
Paul sighed exactly as a man did who’d just had his aorta sliced through by a well-thrown knife.
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“If I do something right, he’s a damn tomb. But if, God forbid, I do something he slightly does not like, then he’s coming at my head with a jackhammer. Am I right, Dad?”
Paul remained silent.
“You say it, say you don’t despise me or fear me or hate me or whatever in hell it is. Say it, Dad!”
Paul’s cheeks drew inward; his eyes dropped. From her interrogation training, Becky knew that he felt threatened by the demand, and there was a danger he would blow up right back. “Paul,” she said, warning in her tone—she hoped.
“You do not do drugs. You do not get drunk. You do not disappear in my goddamn car until three o’clock in the fucking morning!”
“Oh, God. God, I can’t believe this. I just cannot believe this.” He looked at Becky, his young eyes glistening, the tears that were swimming there making her want to cradle him, to cradle them both, to somehow make this family heal by the sheer power of her will.
“Read the fucking obituaries,” Ian spat. “I guess I spent a little too much time driving off my grief—as trivial as that probably is to you—in your goddamn car. So please let me apologize.”
He ran upstairs. Listening to his thundering feet, Becky could not help but follow him. The husband she left behind was hurting, too, she knew that; but Ian was the son, and so the husband had to wait.
She found him throwing clothes into a backpack, and in that moment wanted the days to come back when her kisses were magic on his wounds. She took a shoulder, trying to turn him to her, was shaken off. She tried again.
“Mom, will you please just back off!”
“Honey—”
Ian pointed to the door. “That man—that man—he ruined my life.”
“Ian!”
“Mom, I got straight A’s from the first grade on, I speak four languages, and he’s forced me to stay in this stupid, god-forgotten hellhole of a school—and he can only say those dumb, meaningless t
hings to me when I hold out my hand to him and ask him for the truth.” He strode to the door. “Thank you, Father! Because you’ve made it easy for me! You’ve made it so damn easy!”
“Where will you go?” she asked him. She was defeated, she knew it. The tension between Ian and Paul—the awful, grinding, destroying tension—had been too much. Things had always been headed toward this end; she’d known it for years. And now a secret part of her mind, a part that she did not often face, opened itself to her, and a voice whispered, Let him go. At least he’ll be safe from Paul.
She went to him and held him. He let her, but did not encourage her. She laid her hand against his magnificent blond head. “I remember when I got your curls cut the first time,” she said.
“Momma…”
“I cried.”
They were silent then, the woman and the child, and Becky from Jersey, who’d done it early and gotten most everything wrong, knew again, and from deep within, that one thing about her was true: she was a mother, and this was her son.
Paul trusted Becky to handle Ian. He could not handle Ian. He couldn’t even face him. The older the boy got, the more uneasy he became that letting him live had been the cruel gesture of a man too proud to believe that a child of his could become a monster. Well, his mother had been one of the most horrible of all the vampires, a brilliant, bloodthirsty sophisticate with a spectacularly lethal ability to blend into the human world.
What had he expected—that the laws of damn nature wouldn’t apply to his kid? Yeah, that’s right. And he had reason—Ian wasn’t full-blooded, Ian wasn’t raised to the vampire life, he had never fed on human blood. To make sure he’d never be even slightly tempted, he’d been told nothing about vampires.
But now he was reaching puberty, and this obsession with Leo Patterson was terrifying Paul. “I love you with my soul,” he said into the murmuring of the voices upstairs. “Oh, my son.”
He went out and got into his ’Stang, noticing immediately that Ian had used about four gallons of gas last night. This old lady drank about a gallon per sixteen miles, so he’d taken a fair journey, more than the few miles to the high school and back. He had indeed been driving the hills, just as he’d said.