Twenty, he thought, isn’t bad. He said, “That’s my son up there.”
One or two of the guards glanced at the empty stage, but nobody reacted. He repeated it, screaming at the top of his lungs, yelling until his voice was the only sound in the room.
The problem was, there was nobody up there—nobody except Becky, whom he saw going into the backstage area.
They dragged him to his feet and started manhandling him out of the theater. Behind him, the audience settled down. The audience began to clap. They wanted their baby back.
“What the fuck was that?” Leo demanded as George dropped a sable around her.
“A nut,” George said. “It happens.”
“Ian!” A female voice echoed from behind them.
“Mom?”
As Leo looked toward the sound, a frown crossing her face, Lilith heard and knew instantly what was happening. She took the boy by his arm and drew him to her. He grabbed a feather boa that Leo had used in her act and held it in front of Lilith, seeking to shield her breasts from view. Being unaware of the notion of privacy herself, she did not respond. For her, clothing had to do with ritual, not concealment. But she understood the boy’s desire to cover her. She knew the mind of man, after all, in great detail.
Drawing the feathers around herself, she took him in her arms and kissed him. He sprang up between his legs so quickly that she broke away and laughed.
“Ian!” The mother called again.
“Mom?”
“We gotta take a powder,” Lilith told Leo.
“I—who’s the kid, anyway?”
“His moniker is Ian. Look, get a move on.”
“My mother—” the boy pleaded.
“She cannot be your mother!” Lilith said. “Your mother is a Keeper.”
“Oh, my God,” Leo said.
He tried to break away. “Mom!”
“Ian, where are you?”
Lilith kissed him again, this time with all the depth of passion that she possessed. In the kiss, her loneliness washed away, disappearing as easily as dew on the fronds of morning. She held him to her nakedness, covering them both with the feathered shawl, drawing him into the softness and warmth of her. For a long moment he resisted her, but then his muscles seemed to tremble as if from some deep upheaval, and his arms grew tight around her.
“This way,” Leo whispered, and Lilith went, drawing Ian with a gentle but insistent hand. As he had come onto the stage, he came with them now.
“Don’t look back,” she said when the woman called Ian again, her voice sharp in the gloom and silence of the backstage. Far away, as if on another world, the audience was clamoring for their darling Leo.
“Where are we going?” Ian asked.
“Someplace close by, to get to know each other,” Leo said.
Ian regarded Lilith. “Who are you? What’s your name?”
That was better. That was very much better. “Lilith,” she said.
Leo stopped, stumbled, then recovered herself. “That’s the name of the mother of them all.”
Lilith smiled, watching cheerfully as a pallor spread over the sweet creature’s face. So she knew the meaning of the name. Lilith gave her as warm a smile as it was in her power to give. Leo rushed to her and threw her arms around her, weeping.
“There’s no time for this now.”
But she couldn’t stop, she was clearly beside herself. It was the wrong place: they had not escaped. The human woman would soon appear again.
“Ian!”
“I have to go to my mom!”
“Ian, this chance will not come again. Spend an hour with us.”
“An hour?”
She drew him on.
“Ian!”
“Mom, it’s only an hour.”
“Ian!”
A metal door opened. Beyond it was a magnificent black equipage like the one that had brought her here.
They threw themselves into the back of the thing, and Lilith found herself in a very plush little chamber. Immediately, it began to move. In the front sat a driver, never looking back. He was isolated by a glass window.
“Hey, this is all right,” Lilith said.
Leo shuffled a white stick out of a small package, put it to her lips, and lit one end. She shook as she did it. When she exhaled, a ghastly odor filled the small room. Lilith had noticed other humans doing this—Ibrahim, for example, among the men—but she had not seen it up close, not until this moment.
“What is that?”
“You don’t know what a cigarette is?” Ian asked.
“You better believe I do, buddy.”
“Okay. Because you’d have to be some kind of a—look, Miss Patterson, uh, where are we going?”
Leo smiled. “Ask her.”
“So where are we going?”
“A little hideaway somewhere. We gotta talk.”
“You sound like Joan Crawford imitating James Cagney. Who are you?”
“English isn’t my lingo, bud. I learned it from…perhaps from bums.”
Leo laughed. “Let me ask you this. Would you like to go home to Momma, or to one of the most beautiful places in the world with us?”
“Leo, my name is Ian Ward, and I don’t know what I’m doing here.”
Leo Patterson smoked hard. So, the name had told her something, something that she did not wish to hear. It had left, judging from the steadiness and inlooking of her eyes, a residue of suspicion, and more than a little fear.
“We’ll go to my place on St. Barts,” Leo said.
“St. Barts! I can’t go to St. Barts!”
“You can go,” Lilith said. “Think of it. Us. Together. For just a little while.”
“Five hours there, we’ll be on the ground by two.”
“My parents—”
“You’ll be back tomorrow before midnight. I guarantee it.”
Lilith saw that Leo was cold toward the boy, cold and suspicious. In fact, she seemed a little unbalanced, so suspicious was she. Lilith would not pass judgment, though. It was obvious that much about this situation remained hidden from her. Whatever this St. Bart’s was, it must be a pleasant place. Perhaps there would be pools in which to swim, and maids to anoint her with oil, and some fresh-blooded humans to satisfy what hunger she might feel.
“I can’t do this,” Ian moaned.
“But Ian,” Lilith said, “you want to.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because you lean against my shoulder when you say you can’t. Shall I order you? I have the right, you know.”
“She does.”
“Nobody can order me except my mom and dad.”
“I can, but I won’t. Come for fun.”
“Look, Ian,” Leo said, “there are probably a hundred million guys just like you who would give their blood to do this. So don’t blow it.”
“Leo, I owe it to my folks. I can’t just disappear on them.”
“I have a palace in Egypt,” Lilith said. “Take a look at my palace.”
“Now, that’s far away! And no, I’m definitely not going.”
“Grace, will you call ahead and tell them to get the plane ready? I could be going anywhere, so they should plan accordingly.”
“Yes, ma’am,” a female voice said out of a box.
“We’ll go to St. Barts.”
That seemed to calm him. His eyes kept devouring Leo. He was dying to be with her, Lilith could feel it. Why was the male such a blind and fickle creature?
“Anybody want a drink?” Leo asked.
“Sure.”
“What’ll it be, kid?” Lilith asked Ian.
“Uh, Cutty and soda?”
“Cutty? The only Scotch in here is—what is this?” Leo reached into a compartment made of wood and polished to a gloss. “Johnnie Walker Blue Label.”
She poured the liquid into tumblers and filled them with what Lilith had discovered at the Royalton Hotel was called “ice,” a substance that, if left on a couch, for example, slowly
sank into it and disappeared. To what it might touch, it communicated coldness. This was a form of hard snow. In the early times, she had lived in places where snow came with the winter season, but of late that had not been true.
“Is it illegal?” Ian asked.
Leo shrugged. “Everything’s illegal somewhere.”
He took his drink, lifted the glass in the way humans had from time immemorial. Leo lifted her glass. Lilith watched them, smiling softly.
“Madonna,” Leo said, gazing dog-eyed back at her.
Lilith did not know the meaning of the word, and did not ask. She let the creature adore her with her eyes, though.
Becky had lost Paul, and she was going to lose Ian if this cab didn’t step on it. Paul had been taken in, of all the damn things, on a disorderly conduct rap. She couldn’t follow him, so she called their lawyer from the cab, told him to go down and get him out. Morris didn’t ask any questions, but his voice said that he certainly wanted to. The Wards had given him a busy few days.
“Where do you think they’re headed?”
“Upstate. Goin’ out on the West Side Highway.”
“Keep with them.”
“You got it.”
She watched the limo’s tail lights as it headed up the ramp onto the highway.
“They’re crossing the GW Bridge. You still want me to stay with ’em?”
“Sure thing.” She hardly glanced at the magnificence of New York spreading out along the Hudson as they proceeded across the bridge.
She wished she could predict their destination. She had been derelict in not researching Leo Patterson more carefully. Had she been unwilling within herself to help Paul, for fear of what the consequences could be for Ian? Or had it been more subtle than that, a gradual loss of faith that had come from all the years of endless, futile investigation?
Either way, she didn’t have a clue about Leo’s life, and therefore no idea where this journey might take them. She had an inspiration: she tried Ian’s cell phone, jabbing in the numbers and telling herself she was damn well senile not to have done this before.
And then she heard his voice. “Hi, Mom.”
“Ian, for God’s sake!”
“Mom, I’m fine, I’m with Leo and some girlfriend of hers. Mom, please let me do this.”
“I want you to listen to me. You are in danger, Ian. You have to get out of that car, and you have to do it now.”
“It’s going sixty miles an hour. Can you see me?”
“Of course I can see you! Look, there’s going to be a light. There has to be a light. The second it stops, you get out of there and you run, Ian. You run!”
She watched the limo leave the bridge, then head down Route 17, going south. There were no lights around here, but there were lights on Route 17. “Close it up,” she said.
“You ain’t gonna get me shot at?”
She managed a laugh. “Heavens, no. That’s Leo Patterson’s car. I’m her hairdresser.”
“Where’s she goin’ this time? Paris? London?”
For a moment, she didn’t get what he was driving at. Then she did. Teterboro Airport was a few miles south of here. Her urgency intensified. She leaned forward, staring at the limo.
A light came up…green. “Goddammit!” Then another—yellow. The limo sped up, got closer, closer yet. Red.
The limo slipped through, but the cab had to stop.
“Please!”
“They goin’ t’Teterboro. You’ll catch up.”
And sure enough, they turned into the airport. She called Ian again, but this time got his message.
Could she charter a plane here, on the spot? She had no idea. But she did know this: no matter who had given birth to him, that was her son in that car, and she was not going to let them get her son, not now and not ever. If they did, there would be only one reason that they had: she was dead.
* * *
Leo watched the two of them, the nervous kid with his red cheeks and semipermanent boner, and the fabulous blond woman wrapped in a cheap feather stage prop. She wriggled in her seat, wishing she was sitting where Ian got to sit.
Ian Ward, Christ. She knew Paul Ward had a kid, and in Ian’s strong face, his steel-blue eyes, she could see a shadow of him. What the hell was happening? And why did she want him so desperately? It wasn’t just his looks, it was something else that had made her drop to her knees before him on the stage, and thrill—just absolutely thrill—to be bending there in homage to his beauty.
But fucking Paul Ward?
And then it smacked her in the face like a tap from a blackjack: this was Miri’s baby. This was who she’d been carrying all those years ago.
Oh, God, oh—
She reached his hand, took it. And there, yes, in the line of the jaw, in the laughter hidden in the lips, in the careful sculpture of the nose—it was her, beloved Miri was there too—Miri and Paul, their baby.
This was a full-fledged vampire boy, this was. “What’s your mother’s name?” she asked.
“Rebecca Ward.”
“Your real mother?”
“She is my real mother, and listen—”
They hadn’t told him. They damn well had not told the poor kid! He didn’t feed, either, she would bet on that.
Lilith, on the other hand, did, and Lilith was just beginning to get a little hungry, she could see by the way she rubbed herself here and there, like an addict with the itchies. Leo knew the state well.
Lilith…she whispered the legendary name in her throat.
“Yes?”
“I was…thinking.”
“You kids don’t know each other, do ya?” Lilith said in her odd English.
To Leo’s ear, she spoke as if she’d learned from a talking computer programmed by Sydney Greenstreet.
“No,” Ian said. “I don’t know her. I’m a fan.”
“A fan? Like, flit, flit, flit?” She moved a languid hand in the smoky air.
“No, it means a person who really goes for a certain star.”
“Which star?”
“Her.”
Lilith gave her the most wonderful, most thrilling look. It was more than a stripping look, it was a render-you-naked-and-fill-your-holes-and-soul look. Leo squirmed with delight when Lilith reached across and touched her breast. “You’re one sensitive kid,” she said.
They pulled up in front of the main building. Grace got out quickly and threw the door open. “We’ve had a cab on our tail the whole way,” she said to Leo in an undertone.
“Better tell security if they try to come in.”
“Uh, I have to go,” Ian said.
“Sure,” Leo agreed, “go.” Excellent.
“Okay?”
“I said yes. So go! You’re being followed anyway. By whoever called you a few minutes ago, would be my guess. Mommy Becky.” She looked back down the long drive that led out to Route 17. “Here she comes.”
Ian walked a few steps away, waving. The lights of the cab approached.
“What’s the situation?” Lilith asked.
“We’re going to the Caribbean. I guess he isn’t.”
“Ian—”
Lilith turned her back on Ian, for a moment concealing Leo from him. As easily as a human being might pick up a small dog, Lilith lifted her. She locked onto her lips. For a moment, Leo resisted, then just went limp in the steel arms. Lilith’s tongue rampaged into her mouth and snaked its way deep down her throat. She stiffened, raising her head to try to accommodate its bulk. It was just like this with Miri, they kissed you almost senseless.
She got wet, soaked, raining between her legs. The desire was so great that it made her hurt, made her scream around the blasting kiss.
Then Lilith released her. “Get on the program, sister,” she whispered. “I want the kid with us.”
The cab arrived—and George came out. Leo saw Ian’s face freeze, then fall as if some youthful confidence had just been shattered. “I have clothes,” George said to Leo. He held out two shopping bags. I
an still wore his jeans, but he went for the Leo sweatshirt and the black pullover he’d been wearing before he arrived on the stage.
Lilith was indifferent to the clothes, seemingly impervious to the cold October air. The feathery wrap Ian had given her blew about her.
Leo said to Ian, “She wants you to come.” She paused. “I want you to come.”
“Look, I don’t belong here. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, I—”
“Please,” Lilith said. “Was that your frail in the talking machine?”
“My mother…she was supposed to be here.” He gazed offdown the road.
Leo thought fast. She had to make this work. She had to have Lilith and Ian both.
She took his hand. “At least take a look at my plane.”
“What kind of plane?”
“Come look.”
Glancing back, he allowed her to lead him to the apron where they parked the planes. Her sky blue Gulfstream IV stood under the lights. It was, quite frankly, magnificent. It had better be, for $18 million.
She squeezed Ian’s hand. “Come on, take a look.”
He didn’t move.
She drew him toward the steps. “It’s a really amazing plane.” She started up the steps. Lilith was right behind him, staying close. Leo saw that she was discreetly cutting off his escape. So they were kidnapping him. Paul Ward’s kid? Oh, well.
“Hey, Lauren, hey, Jack,” she called to her pilots as they entered. “Ready to roll?”
“We’re cleared,” Lauren said. “Not a lot of traffic at this hour.”
“Lauren’s my pilot. Timmy?”
The attendant was in the galley. He came forward and drew the door closed. “Have a seat,” Leo said.
Ian said, “Look, I better not do this.”
Lilith laid an arm around his shoulders. “Don’t let it get to you, kid. It’s gonna be one hell of a ride.”
For part of the taxi, Lilith stood like a sentinel, close to Ian, who had sunk down in one of the armchairs. Leo had her plane decorated like a comfortable den from a lovely home circa about 1920. Forward was her bedroom, all chintz and girlish frills. The couches and chairs in this compartment made into beds. It didn’t look like it, but she could sleep twelve in here, slumber-party style. With the plane’s six-thousand-mile range, that capability came in handy.