“What’s up?”
“We’re exploring,” Lilith said.
“Are we looking for anything in particular? Because this looks like a dead end.”
“It’s not a dead end.”
“Okay. Look, if they have opium dens here or something, count me out.”
Leo laughed, a low sound in the gloom. “This isn’t about drugs.”
“Okay, fine. If it isn’t about drugs, what is it about? Because there aren’t exactly any tourist attractions in the slums.”
Lilith came close to him, squeezed his hand. “It’s a wonderful surprise,” she said.
He took his hand back. “I need to call my mom and dad.”
“Are you ready?” Lilith said softly to Leo. Why was she talking like that? They were looking for something. What in hell was it?
Leo was standing near the wall of one of the old tenements. There was a sort of opening there—just a crack, really. Nobody could get in there.
“Ready,” Leo said. Whereupon she stepped into the crack and was gone.
Lilith pushed him, and he felt a scrape and a pretty hard bump to the side of his head, and he was in this absolutely dark space. Then she came in behind him, her breath hissing.
“What is this place?”
“A passageway into another street.”
“A secret passageway.”
Lilith dragged him on, and all of a sudden they were outside again, and this street was so different that he was almost ready to believe that he’d gone into a parallel universe or something. The crowds were well dressed, there were regular stores with lighted windows, places like Fendi and Louis Vuitton.
He looked back toward where they had come out, but it wasn’t there anymore. “How did we do that?”
“Cairo’s full of those passages.”
She should know, considering that it was her town.
“Over there,” Leo said.
“I see it.”
All Ian saw was a kid of about twelve spearing butts from the sidewalk and field-stripping them into a little bag, tobacco that probably ended up in the damn water pipes.
“I’ll take it,” Lilith said. She strode across the street, threading the Cairo traffic with an agility that would have startled anybody who hadn’t been in bed with her.
He noticed that Leo’s arm had come around him. “Run,” she said, barely breathing, not moving her mouth. He turned to her. Had he heard that right? “Run,” she whispered again. She was shaking so much she had to use him for support.
“What?”
“You have no time. Run.”
“Where?” But he was getting scared now, for sure. Something was wrong, no doubt at all, not now. Then he saw something happen that looked very strange. It had to do with Lilith and the kid. She bent down to him, and he looked up at her. Then she sort of covered him with the folds of her clothing, and he seemed to disappear inside his own clothes. When she stood up, she had something in her hands that looked like a pile of the kid’s clothes, but there was no kid.
“Hey!”
She did not hear Ian, or did not acknowledge his cry. The traffic kept roaring past. The thronged sidewalks were just the same. Except one thing was not the same. Lilith slipped into one of those cunning alleys and came out again, and not even the kid’s clothes were there anymore.
She trotted back across the street. “Well,” she said, “who’s next?”
“What happened to that kid?”
“He went down the alley. I thought he could lead us to a good tobacconist, but I was wrong.”
Leo, whose arm was still around him, seemed as stiff and cold as a corpse. By contrast, Lilith was flushed so red that she looked like she was having some kind of high-blood-pressure attack or something. She looked not so good, actually, and Ian kind of did not like her like this. Her eyes were—now the word was sharp. They were glittering and sharp and made him think of some kind of—well, actually, not even an animal. There was something really creepy in there. The word monster came to mind.
“Want to do another?” she breathed. She was kind of…seething.
“Another what?”
She threw her head back and laughed silently, but the look on her face—eyes closed tight, teeth bared, nostrils flaring—was pure agony.
People flowed around them like an excited river. There was a faintly spicy smell on the air, the scent of the East. At the end of the street the moon had appeared over the horizon, fat and almost red, looking as if you could lay a ladder to it.
Leo had removed an object from her purse, a wicked-looking thing with what looked like a hooked blade on the end of it.
“What’s that?”
Lilith’s head turned toward him with the startling suddenness of an insect’s. “She uses it to eat.”
Leo gave him what he thought was the saddest smile he had ever seen in his life, an unforgettably sad smile. “We have a small problem. You’ll see.”
“A problem?”
“Lilith, I can’t handle a crowded street like this. I’ve got to find a quieter area.”
Lilith stalked off. Ian didn’t follow. He watched her. Not even the way she moved was the same.
“Come on,” she said. Her voice was so completely empty of emotion that it sounded kind of like a machine.
They moved quickly, passing through one crowded street after another, going by what seemed like some kind of instinct, or maybe it was just random, Ian wasn’t sure.
This time it was Leo who went up to somebody. He noticed that she had tears on her face.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, love. We’re merely doing what we came to do.”
“We came to eat and buy clothes and stuff. I want to see the pyramids.”
Leo was talking to an old man, who kept smiling and making gestures. Then Ian understood: these people they were going up to were dealers. The two women were making buys.
“I’m not into drugs,” he said firmly, “especially not in foreign countries.” He’d been as close to a bust as he ever intended to get.
Leo dropped some change, which tinkled on the ground. The money around here was like tin or something, it didn’t sound very valuable. But the old man wanted it, because he went down and started scrabbling around on the sidewalk.
They were in a sort of colonnade. A little farther on, there was a flower seller, and you could smell the odor of her strong Egyptian cigarettes and the softer scent of her flowers in the dim space.
Leo and the guy were both trying to get the money when Ian saw that thing in her hand, the hooked thing. A second later, the old man made a squawking sound and lurched away from Leo. But she held him and put her mouth against his neck. Ian saw his face, which grimaced as he tried to twist away from her. Then there was a sound—ssssuuuuoooo—and the skin suddenly went so tight that the guy’s lips stretched back and his teeth appeared. Another of the sounds, and his eyes collapsed. His head started looking like a skull.
“Go, take some,” Lilith said.
Ian was too shocked to move. He didn’t know what he was seeing, except that Leo Patterson was obviously killing an old Egyptian guy somehow by sucking on him.
Oh, Christ, a vampire sucks your neck. But people weren’t vampires. Vampires were comic-book shit…weren’t they?
Suddenly he was grabbed from behind—it was Lilith, and she pressed him toward the man, toward his oozing neck. He reared back, tried to get away, but she was damn strong. She thrust his face straight into the man’s wound. He tried to turn his head, but she mashed his mouth right onto it, made his lips skid in the blood. It did what his own blood did to him, which was to sting and feel like something crawling in his mouth, and taste all horrible and good at the same time.
Loathsome. It was loathsome. When she finally let him turn his head aside, she growled. Actually growled. He heard the frustration in it, the rage. She let him go.
The man was dead, which any damn fool could see. Ian scrambled to his feet. “What—what did y
ou do?”
Leo smiled a bedroom smile. She was flushed now, too, and stank of raw blood.
“You’re killing people! You’re going around killing people! This is crazy!”
Lilith leaped at him, but he jumped back. The taste of the blood was hideous, it was like a living thing crawling around in his mouth. They were loonies, they drank people’s blood. They were a couple of total freaks, they were horrible, and he was all alone with them way the hell out here with not even his passport, thanks to bribe-happy Leo.
Lilith came after him. “It’s lovely, it’s going to be lovely,” she said.
“There’s a hidden world,” Leo said, but he hardly heard her. He was thinking of only one thing now, and that was getting the hell away from these sick and crazy people as fast as he could go. He turned around, and he ran. He ran wildly and blindly, and behind him he heard the roar of a lion, he swore to it, and he understood that Leo’s strange warning had been for real, damn sure it had.
They were both monsters. Leo wanted to help him, though, but she was scared to death of Lilith. God, what was the world really like, if stuff like this was real?
He dashed around a corner, stopping just long enough to yank his cell phone out of his pocket. This had to work, for sure. He ran farther down the street, punching 911 as he went. He got a three-toned beep unlike any he’d ever heard before.
He ducked into a store and ignored the man with the CDs who came rushing up, all excited to see an American. He jabbed 01, which he thought was the U.S. country code, into the dial pad, and then their number. This time, a different set of crazy tones came out.
Then Lilith was there, striding into the doorway. Her skin was rose-red, and her eyes were flashing with pure rage. She seemed taller and more imposing than ever. There was not one trace of the young girl he had known.
The shopkeeper said in English, “Do you see that?”
“Get it away from me!”
He ran to the back of the shop, pushed aside some curtains. Here was a tiny room with some stools in it and a whole lot of boxes of CDs. Behind him, he heard a snarl and then the high-pitched screaming of the shop owner. He didn’t know what was happening, he just kept running, this time out into a narrow, dark alley that seemed to lead exactly nowhere.
There were a couple of doors, though, and he could hear music. He went in one.
He was in an apartment building with a totally dark hall. The smell of cooking was strong, and there was music playing from inside apartments, Arab music, wailing, sorrowful, women moaning—he supposed—about men they’d lost or wanted. Groping his way, he found stairs that were lit just a tiny bit from light leaking under doors. He vaulted the stairs, one flight, two flights, then hammered at random on a door that had light under it.
A little girl of maybe twelve answered. She was wearing black clothes and she had big, black eyes. She was a very, very pretty child, with a grave expression on her little face. Inside, Ian could see people eating their evening meal around a low table—three men, with women standing behind them near the kitchen door. Everybody was smoking and had been laughing, but now they had all turned toward the door. It was as if a moment in time had been captured—he was standing there catching his breath, the girl was looking up at him, the men’s hands were frozen in the act of moving food to their mouths or to the plates, the women were turned toward him, their faces dark with suspicion.
He said, “Excuse me, may I borrow your phone?”
There was a silence. He took out his cell phone, pointed to it. “I can’t make it work.” He tried to smile, but that only made the girl back away and the men start coming to their feet. The women slipped into the kitchen.
One of the men came forward and made a speech, smiling and gesturing toward the food.
“No, no, thank you. I need to use the phone.” He held his closed fist beside his head and said, “Hello, hello, telephone.”
The man seemed to understand, but he continued shaking his head. Then one of the younger ones said, “No. No here.”
They didn’t have a damn phone. Smiling, he backed out of the apartment. Maybe nobody in the building had a phone. Probably didn’t. But there was an alternative. By now, the two women must have lost him. Cairo was a big place. So the thing to do was to find a cop. He’d been abducted after all, kidnapped, by crazy people. Who in the world would think that actually drinking blood was going to do anything but make you sick? Those girls were way, way crazy, and they were going to get hepatitis or AIDS or something, not to mention ending up spending their worthless lives in a damn Egyptian jail, which was definitely for the best. Beautiful girls, too bad.
He went downstairs, then out into the alley. It twisted and turned; it must be really ancient. He went along it until it opened into a little square. There was a dry fountain, there were a few closed shops, that was it. Cats ran away as he entered the open space. But he saw another entrance and went that way. No matter what, he was eventually going to come out on a big street. It had to happen, the city wasn’t all alleys.
He came to another turning. It had gotten quiet. No open apartment windows around here. This was like a secret Cairo back in here, where everybody had already died or something. His heart was hammering. Could a kid get a heart attack?
Something closed around his arm—a steel cuff. He twisted away, his cries echoing up and down the alley, making cats leap into the shadows and pigeons mumble nervously in their perches.
They’d been right on top of him the whole time. He’d thought he’d lost them, but he hadn’t even been close. She took his other arm and forced him to face her. There was nothing he could do; she was way stronger than he’d realized.
She shook her head, and the scarf that had been concealing it fell away. He saw dark pits where her eyes had been, and her mouth was a hazy black circle. Her skin was as white as the petals of the lilies that choked the entrance to her cave.
A shock of true fear went through him, something he had never known before, something few people ever know. It made him instantly as cold as if he had been rolled naked in snow for an hour. It dulled his senses, causing the world to seem to recede, to become shadowy and unreal…dangerously unreal. Only the face before him was real, and it was a truly terrible face—neither man nor woman, but something else, something that suggested the human but very clearly was not that.
And then the mouth came to his mouth, and he tasted a raw, wet, sharp taste, vileness absolute. He tried to closed his jaws, but her tongue was like a steel bar. It came crushing into his mouth and down his gullet, making him gag and retch.
Something hot was coming into him, being pumped down into his stomach, knotting and burning there, and he thought in the little part of his mind that was still functioning, she’s vomiting in me, and his whole body lurched, and he knew he was getting a seizure.
She thrust him away from her so hard that he flew through the air and hit the base of the fountain. Quivering nausea overcame him and he doubled at the waist, his jaw opening wide, his tongue protruding until it felt like it was going to come off.
And then the fire came, the fire from inside him. A child was screaming in the fire, a child was dying. What had been a terrible agony almost immediately became a terrible, terrible pleasure. Where there had been retching and seizing, twisting muscles and nausea, now came a hot, shivering blast of sensation so delicious that it made the world start racing around him like a crazy, high-speed merry-go-round, and made him scream now in ecstasy.
The thing that he’d called Lilith and thought a girl rose up and stepped back, keeping away from him. It covered itself with its veil and turned away. He saw it only vaguely, disappearing into the night. He lay there, uncaring, only aware of the fire in him. It was like the moment of climax, a somehow stretched, wound-up intensity of delight that never went away.
He sat up. Still, it continued. He stood. Still. He took a few steps.
Despite the pleasure, he thrust his fingers into his throat and tried to make himself vomit,
but all that came up was the sound of his own dry gagging. He sank down, sitting on the edge of the fountain. He’d never felt anything like how he felt now. And how he felt now was real weird. He wanted something. But what? His body—he wanted something! He twisted, turned…and a scent came to him, a scent so good that it drew him to suck air hard, seeking for more.
Salt, sweet, something burned by the sun, something raw…
He jumped to his feet. He had to have this. He had to have it now. They hadn’t fed him in days, damn them. He patted his pockets. Wallet was there. He had to get to this food. Oh, God—oh, smell that, smell that! He trotted to the edge of the square. Where was it coming from? Down an alley—yeah, over there. He strode along the alley, passing a restaurant kitchen lit by shuddering fluorescent lamps, reeking of hot fat. Not from there. But then the odor came again, clear now, clear and strong.
He burst out into a crowded street. There was light, bustle, cars, and throngs on the sidewalks, people sitting at coffee shops, in open-front restaurants, shopping, strolling.
He screamed. Men turned, raising eyebrows, stopping their talk. He staggered, he couldn’t believe it—it was them, they smelled like that, the people, the men and women, the darting children. They smelled so wonderful he couldn’t stand it, he twisted and turned, he clutched his head in an agony of lust—but what lust? Not sex, no, something else—he needed something else. He doubled over, gagging, his stomach suddenly fighting the blood that lay there. Horrible banging in his chest, a gut-twisting sensation deep, as if the blood he’d been fed was coming alive, a dragon swimming in the well of his gut.
A dragon that needed more. Needed more to get bigger. He took another staggering step—and before him was a woman. She was lightly veiled, otherwise dressed in Western clothes. Her hair was dark, gleaming, her eyes were dark also.