Page 19 of The Undead

“Dinner,” he said, and let her go. Her smile was faint and understanding. “Well, actually, a shower, then dinner.”

“May I join you? For the shower, I mean,” she said. Her green eyes were bright and wicked. Twenty years hadn’t been enough to teach her how dangerous her games could be. She laughed, and teased, and never knew what it cost him to play at being human with her.

He forced his lips to smile. His body ached with the effort.

“I wish I could say yes …”

“Then say yes.”

“No.” The smile was gone, through no direct order of his brain. There were times when his body knew better than his mind what was necessary. “Wait for me downstairs.”

Her head came up with a snap, green eyes kindling. For a brief, difficult moment, she seemed to be twenty years younger.

“I haven’t taken orders since I got out of the hospital,” she reminded him. He held her stare.

“I’m too hungry to play, Sylvia.”

The hospital, she had said—not City Square. She meant that terrible place where he’d found her, where she’d saved him from being what he hated most. Maybe it was the mention of that darkest time in their lives, or just the bare fact that he was admitting to hunger, that made her take a step back. Whatever it was, he was grateful and desperately disappointed. Adam picked up his clothes and walked past her toward the shower.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured. She wasn’t, really. To her, he knew, he was Adam, human in everything except biology. Twenty years, and Sylvia Reilly didn’t know him—not at all.

Adam had some things to be grateful for. That was one.

He went downstairs after his shower and busied himself in the kitchen. Sylvia managed to be absent when he opened the small concealed refrigerator and took out a chilled bottle. The liquid in it was dark and gelid, nearly tasteless. He drank it down without pleasure, except that faint sense of triumph that came from defeating his own demons. As he washed the bottle out and set it on the drain-board, Sylvia appeared in the doorway.

“Better?” she asked. He nodded, eyes still on the sink. There were a few red drops still clinging to the white enamel. He turned the water on and washed them away. “What happened last night?”

“What do you mean?”

“You came home in a rare mood, Adam, you think I wouldn’t notice? Adam? Are you going to tell me?” That didn’t get any response, so she tried again. “Hey, you mean you aren’t even going to tell your best friend?”

“No,” he said, a simple snap of a word. Her heartbeat speeded up as adrenaline loaded into her bloodstream, a sharp acrid scent that made him remember the taste. Fear was the greatest spice of all, no matter what he tried to pretend. Best friends? Oh, no, Sylvia, not friends, never that, Adam thought. He had no friends, having friends was suicidal and stupid. He had prey, had acquaintances, and had—rarely, and a dangerous self-indulgence—someone who was something more. Oh, but less than a friend, even at that. “I’m all right. It’s nothing.”

It hadn’t been nothing for Julie Gilmore, raped and left for dead on the cold bloody tiles of her kitchen. She’d lain there for hours, helpless, screaming in her mind. Adam had somehow dreamed with her there in his daytime sleep while her life slowly failed and his waited to begin.

Did he remember the rape, too? A shadow moved across his eyes, pressure, a terrible ripping pain, fear and rage in a potent mixture. Had Julie been linked to him that closely, after such a short time?

“—four. Isn’t that true?” Sylvia’s voice suddenly penetrated the fog. Adam realized that the water was still rushing in the sink and turned it off.

“Isn’t what true?” he asked. She sighed, exasperated, as she crossed to the main refrigerator and took out a salad bowl stuffed with shades of green.

“Julie was your last one. You only had four, and now you’ve only got me, right? You’ll need some new donors.”

“I’ll be fine.” The donors were just an experiment, a bad one, ill-advised and temporary. He’d been a fool to believe it could work; no vampire could exist solely on refrigerated blood, and the few humans he’d found to cooperate in more conventional drinking—from the veins—were delicate. He fought the urge to kill them every time he drank—and one by one theyhaddied, as if his own black hunger had reached out to take them. All except Sylvia.

He’d have to kill very soon, to stop the growing black rage locked in his stomach. The thought hurt him badly, a very physical sensation. It was like a wooden spike driven straight through him; he tensed against it and stared blindly off at some safe distance. Twenty years Sylvia had been with him. Julie had been a casual fleeting acquaintance, and Julie’s death sang dark in his mind. If he killed—if he killed Sylvia—God, what would it do to him?

“You’re far from fine,” Sylvia said doubtfully, and put a forkful of salad in her mouth. She chewed, contemplating him with eyes as green as lettuce leaves, and found nothing reassuring. The air was rich with her scent and the sharp earthy tang of the food, a scrape of garlic light on his tongue. He swallowed hard. “This wasn’t an accident. Gregor I could understand, he was never in the best of health, and Aida died in a car accident—butJulie…”

“We don’t live in civilized times,” Adam answered, still distant. He did not think, at that moment, that he would ever be close again. “There are rapes and murders every day in this city.”

“But—”

“Stop,”he whispered, a raw sound. And against the dark screen of his closed eyes, he saw Julie die, terrified and alone, as isolated by the sterile chill of the hospital as she had been by the tiled kitchen he’d seen in his dreams.

The thing that frightened him so was that the shared memory of her assault hadn’t repulsed him. It had drawn him, moth to flame, pole to pole, predator to prey. If he had been awake when she’d been suffering, he might have gone to her—not to save her, not to help her, but to drink in that intoxicating spice of fear and pain. To kill her.

It is a terrible thing to see yourself as you are, he thought very clearly.

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