The Ruby Tear

  “Flowers?” she said, wandering into the kitchenette. The dirt in the geranium pots was satisfactorily moist. He took care of his plants. There was an odd little terrace outside the kitchen, built adjoining the fire escape landing. “Do you put them out on the terrace in the summer?”

  “We had gardens in the old castle,” he said, “terraced gardens with cracked, mossy steps, dangerous steps. I spent time in those gardens, recovering from war, from wounds, fevers, bellyaches from eating bad food.”

  Jess came back and perched on the arm of the sofa. “You had a castle? Of course, you had a castle, Baron. And spoiled food and raids and battles . . .”

  “Jessamyn,” he said in a small voice, “I’m cold.”

  She got up and drew his overcoat over him, tucking the collar around his neck. Eyes shut, he added faintly, “I don’t miss much from then any more. But I miss the sense of certainty. Can you understand? We knew who we were, and what God wanted us to do, and where we would go when life ended, depending on how we had lived and whether we died shriven or not. It wasn’t a bad life for people who for the most part didn’t live long enough to mature.”

  She was quiet, considering the painful irony of his situation: a man who had enjoyed such a circumscribed, short-term existence in a time of knights and castles had been somehow drawn into a tremendously prolonged existence of constant shifts and expansions. He had already had more time than anybody could possibly need, to mature and grow old, very old indeed.

  “How old were you?” she said. “When that life ended for you?”

  “Oh, seventeen, eighteen,” he sighed. “I don’t remember. We went to war young in those days. It was shocking that I wasn’t long since married and a father of children! But we had broken with one family after endless negotiations, and another bride chosen for me died suddenly, so there was nothing to keep me at home. I went off to war when I could, while my parents went on looking for a suitable match for me.”

  “Weren’t you lonely, if all your friends were already married and had families?”

  “All my friends were soldiers. We shared the love life, as you call it now, of soldiers when we were in the field together. I’ll spare you the details. I’ll just say, there was plenty to be forgiven by a priest, when we could find one. Are you shocked?”

  She hesitated, then admitted, “Yes, I am.”

  “I was an arrogant roughneck in those days. But at least when I killed a man, it was hand-to-hand and for serious reasons.”

  Jess stared at him. “What reasons? Better ones than ours?”

  His long, thick lashes rested for a moment on his cheeks; then she saw the glint of his open eyes again. “The same ones: property, privilege, class, religion. Personal grudges. But it was not so—so calculated as now, so complex.

  “In peacetime we farmed and hunted. When enemies left their own farming and hunting to threaten us, we fought them. Then all those who were left thanked God to be still alive and returned to farming and hunting, for the living must eat or die.”

  She felt herself tearing up. “You must have been older. You don’t look seventeen, Ivo!”

  He checked a motion that had been intended, she thought, for a shrug. “Well, I’ve lived a long time since. I’ve been—seasoned, if not exactly aged. You can’t see all that I’ve seen and show nothing in your face, I think.”

  Her mouth was dry and she felt her muscles tense to flee, but her terror had a blunted edge. She was getting used to the idea of what he was, though her body still rang with fear. She intertwined her fingers and made herself sit still. “A vampire is supposed to be a—a revenant, someone who dies and comes back to life. Did you really die?”

  “Yes, I died.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Not like what the priests said.” He laughed, coughed, groaned. “Do you know the effects of the anesthetic gas used by dentists? It was something like that: a tingling feeling, a sense of suspension, weightlessness, and distance, but at the same time a very close, sharp awareness of the throes of the body. But it just didn’t matter enough to try to do anything about it, even if there had been something to be done.

  “And then some drifting, darkness, confusion—and waking again with the soreness in the limbs of having been trampled by warhorses, and the beginnings of a hunger that has been with me ever since.”

  She sat mute, shivering.

  “I saw no tunnel, no angels, no pure white light, if that’s what you’re asking,” he added, “but then, this was no normal death. I worry now and then about how it will be when I come to truly die. I pray sometimes still—in fact I’ve spent several periods since in monasteries. They’re restful. But I think religion is a fairy tale for the fearful.”

  Jess got up and moved restlessly around the room, bending to read the titles of the books on the shelves by the false fireplace: auction catalogs, issues of collectors’ magazines, books on the history of gems and jewelry; a few volumes on arms, armor, and the history of warfare; a half-shelf on horsemanship. Several books on clocks.

  She sat back down across from him, feeling weirdly normal. “How long have you had this apartment?”

  “Under a year, and I travel.” He gazed unhappily at her smudged fingers. “I use a cleaning service, but they’re unreliable. I’ve been meaning to change them.”

  She leaned forward, resting her forehead on her palm. “Ivo, what am I supposed to do now? Have this nice, insane conversation in your living room and then go home and forget it ever happened?”

  A chessboard lay on the coffee table, set up for a game. His right hand fumbled weakly among the pieces, adjusting them to sit neatly in the centers of their squares,

  “This a nice conversation, isn’t it?” he said. His voice had sunk to a thready whisper. “I hope we can keep it a nice conversation. I have trouble sometimes, calming when there has been violence. It shakes my—my balance. Hatred always disturbs me.”

  Jess shook her head. “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble concentrating, myself. What were we talking about?”

  “About Ivo the vampire, of course. Ivo the murderer, too. I think I might have killed one of those brutes. I hope so, and I’m not in the least sorry.”

  Jess shuddered, shaken by a mixture of disgust, revulsion, and savage joy: maybe one of them was dead, and she hoped so too.

  He watched her. “I was a soldier in a time when men were either slaves of the soil or slaves of the sword. I went first into battle when I was fourteen years old, and younger men fought under my command, or against me. I have no patience with these modern toughs. They have no discipline, no skills to speak of, and no reason beyond quick thrills for anything they do.”

  “Maybe they don’t see it that way,” she murmured. “Or maybe you hate them so much because you were like them.”

  “I saved your life,” he said in a shocked tone. “Are you trying to insult me?”

  Jess took a breath and tried to think. Weak as he was, she was sure he could throttle her one-handed if he chose to. She remembered that she had something to say, and she meant to say it.

  “Nick and Walter have told me about you, and then you told me yourself: the Ruby Tear. That’s your family’s story; and I know more than you think. You’ve spent centuries hunting down Nick’s family. That sounds like extended gang vengeance to me, Ivo: an eye for an eye, one drive-by shooting for another.”

  “Not at all,” he said in a stronger, offended tone. “I watch the news on your television, and it’s not the same at all. My reasons are old and unchanging. I’ve caused the deaths of many men of the Griffin line, but I still haven’t found the treasure their ancestor robbed from my father’s castle. They’re a clever clan, which makes the hunting more interesting.”

  “Maybe you haven’t cared as much about your lost treasure as you think,” she said. “Maybe you just like being a secret persecutor.”

  “Then I am a lost soul indeed,” he murmured, tipping over the white bishop with his finger. “Nearly a devil of Hell alr
eady, irredeemable forever.”

  Jess knew she was in over her head. How could she answer a man from a time when people believed in Hell? He seemed to believe and disbelieve at the same time, or alternately.

  “I think,” he went on thoughtfully, “that it’s the crimson of fresh blood that I’m looking for now, not so much this cold red gem from ages ago. That would explain why I’ve hunted it so ineptly, don’t you think? I, who was a champion huntsman in my father’s woods.”

  She saw the flash of his eyes in the light from the window: wide, gleaming eyes, slightly hooded, daydreaming of blood . . .lion eyes.

  She had to bring his focus back from realms of speculation that were closed to her and down to now, to this life, this world, this real person sitting in his real apartment with him while he rested a real wound.

  “You’re not a hunter or a soldier now,” she said strongly. “You’re a vampire, living on people’s blood. You drink from other people than Griffin men and their families, right? From Lily Anderson, for instance.”

  “Yes.” His eyelids drooped, veiling that predatory stare.

  She forced herself to continue. “Does she know? I mean, does she remember, afterward?”

  “I hope not. I can put suggestible people into a sort of trance with my voice, my eyes—no, not you, Jessamyn. All your suggestibility is inward, from yourself to yourself, in the service of your art. You aren’t vulnerable to me in that way.”

  “And Lily’s not—changed? Because you—” Her throat closed on the words: bit her and sucked blood out of her veins.

  “She’s not changed and won’t change. I’ve never had the power to pass my condition along to others; neither that, nor any illness in the blood of anyone I drink from.”

  She shuddered. “You didn’t have time to take much from that man in the alley. You’ll need to drink again soon, won’t you? Everyone needs nourishment to heal.”

  “Even me, yes,” he said. “And for something that isn’t going to kill me, this tiny wound hurts very much.”

  There followed a short silence during which she watched helplessly while he dealt with his pain in his own way. Jess hugged her knees, thinking of the scars on his body, all the pain that must have come with each of them. Her own scars from the crash tingled with uneasy sympathy.

  At length he said, “Don’t worry. When I can, I’ll go out and serve myself, as you say. You won’t be involved any further.”

  “You’ll kill somebody.”

  “Not by intention.” She heard the dangerous distance in his voice. In this territory she clearly was not welcome, let alone influential.

  “You should have drunk one of those bastards dry on the spot,” she said fiercely. The flashing blade, the grip on her hair—her scalp, she realized, was still aching from it.

  “God damn them!” she raged. “I didn’t go through all those operations and therapy and nightmares just so a pair of creeps could—could slice—Jesus! You know who cuts up women’s faces? Pimps. Crooks working for a mob do that, to prostitutes who give them trouble! I can’t believe—”

  She blotted her nose on her sleeve. “Shit. I’m sorry, I can’t believe I’m raving like this. Surviving that car crash—you know about that, don’t you? Along with everything else, it’s just—”

  “I know about it,” he answered.

  “Living through that should have made me stronger, not hysterical and maybe crazy. God, suppose I’m still in the hospital, hallucinating you the way Nick hallucinated a woman on a white horse? No, no, never mind, that’s just the theatrical imagination running overtime. Isn’t it? Say something, damn it! Don’t just lie there listening to me snivel and swear!”

  His hand hovered above the chess pieces. “He didn’t hallucinate. That visit of the Dark Lady is paid to each of the Griffin men when the time is coming for him to meet me.”

  “What? She’s yours?”

  He snorted. “More the other way around.”

  “But who—what is she?”

  “A spirit, a demon, a witch,” he said, catching up the black queen and turning it in his fingers. “A dream the Griffin men dream because of their guilt and fear; or a cultural idea, an ethnic myth from a bloody nation. An old story, an ancient being from a time before mankind. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I deal with her when and as I must. You’ll never have to.”

  Jess’s mind couldn’t find a foothold in this. Her thoughts shunted aside, back to the play, to Eva, who was as much a spirit of idealism as a character. The opposite of this ominous woman.

  She sat up straighter, illuminated by a connection.

  “It’s not an emerald, it’s a ruby,” she said. “The gemstone in Nick’s play. He put the whole story in his play. It’s a gesture of defiance, aimed at you!”

  “The red flag to the bull, you could say,” Ivo replied. “I think so, yes.”

  “But why?”

  “He knows he can’t fight me and win. He knows he can’t escape. Once he saw the Lady, he must have decided to get it over with instead of living his days in fearful anticipation. I’ve met some bold and impetuous men of that line.”

  “But that makes no difference to you,” she said. “Whether they’re brave or not.”

  “No, that makes no difference to me.”

  “You’re going to kill him.”

  His hand dipped, giving the white king a sharp tap that flipped it off the edge of the board onto the carpet. That was his answer.

  “Oh, no. Ivo, no.”

  He offered only silence, a terrible silence that felt like withdrawal down a corridor of centuries. From outside came a screech of tires and a car alarm much farther off. They were like sounds in a dream.

  “Listen,” she said. “You owe me. I could have left you there in that alley with your injury, I could have gone for the police and told them everything.”

  He laughed, then coughed. “You could barely walk at the time.”

  “Damn it, I’ve helped you. I got you to my place to rest, I even got you here!”

  He raised one finger. “One: you took my gifts and were careless with them. They’re ruined now.”

  “You said it didn’t matter!” she cried, outraged at his duplicity. “You said the earrings were just trifles, and it was your own fault for giving them to me! I never asked—”

  “Two: I’ve saved your fine looks, probably your sanity, and possibly your life tonight. This certainly cancels any debt.”

  “Don’t be so sure about my sanity,” Jess groaned, rubbing her eyes. This isn’t happening.

  But there was something else, something that brought a flare of hope and a surge of new energy. He wasn’t out hunting Nick right now, he wasn’t boasting and threatening. He was here dealing with her, instead. He had kissed her once, and he had charged her attackers like a tiger, exuding fury, when they had done him no harm—as if he were angry on her behalf.

  He cared; the monster cared. And while he cared, while there was that to use in some way, Nick might still have a chance.

  “Three,” he concluded. “I’ve discovered for you the identity of your cowardly persecutor. It seems to me, Miss Croft, that you owe me, not the other way around.”

  “And I can repay you,” she said. Now that she understood, her new course opened up before her, simple and clear. “What would you say if I helped you get hold of the Ruby Tear?”

  He became very, very still and for a wild moment she wondered if he had died after all. Would he crumble into dust right in front of her?

  “This is a trick,” he said at last.

  “Trade me Nick’s life for the Ruby Tear.”

  “You don’t have it to trade.”

  “I’m telling you, I can get it! That is, I can show you where it is and help you get it.”

  Silence again. Then he said, “I’ll listen.”

  She took a deep breath. “Nick is out of the country, running from you—”

  “I don’t think so,” the vampire interrupted. “Not running. Researching, I
hear. I have sources of my own.”

  “He and I were going to be married,” she hurried on, before she could change her mind and see her plan as the lethal folly it was. “I still have keys to his house in Rhinebeck, security system and all. And I know where the safe is. His dogs know me, and I know Dobermans. We should go up there right away, while Nick is still in Europe. There; you’ve turned me into a burglar.”

  She stopped in heart-dropping consternation. “What I don’t know is the god damned combination! Can you crack a safe? It’s an old-fashioned one, no fancy electronics.”

  “Are you trying to fool me?” he demanded. “The stone can’t be there. He must have put it in a safe-deposit box or a bank vault somewhere. You continue to think of me as hopelessly backward-looking. I do know modern ways, Jessamyn.”

  Jess shook her head hard. “Nick hates banks and bankers, he doesn’t trust them; not since his mother’s trust fund was mishandled. He’d stuff valuables in a mattress before he’d turn them over to a bank.”

  The Baron sat up, moving slowly but without having to stop for breath. “Then I’m an idiot,” he murmured. “I could have just gone and taken it, and Griffin would have come to me. You would never have been involved.”

  He sighed and thought, rubbing his palm over his jaw with a rasping sound.

  “You don’t know what to think, do you,” she said. For all his proud claims to sophistication, she could see that he was at a loss for the moment. “Ivo. Think of me as somebody who still loves Nick Griffin very much—”

  “Oh, yes? Enough to betray him by handing over his most precious possession to his sworn enemy?” he inquired dryly. “That’s devotion indeed.”

  “He won’t see it that way! Nick knows—” But who knew what Nick knew or believed these days? “Well, if he hates me, he hates me, that’s my problem. I want you to let him off the hook, him and his descendants. If helping you rob him is what it takes, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “What if it takes more?” Soft-voiced, tentative.

  Her heart hammered so hard her ears rang. At the same time she wanted to laugh: oh, come on, why don’t you twirl your mustache while you’re at it, and leer? Are you kidding me?