Page 15 of The Tainted and the Tamed
“It confuses me.”
Setouchi tilted his head.
“She has a few conflicting smells,” Haruki explained. “Almost as if there’s some underlying note I cannot place.”
“She isn’t a bouquet of flowers, or spring blooms in the garden. A woman is not there to be plucked.”
“I know that.”
“Yet you persist. Why is that?”
Haruki sighed. “Perhaps a recent, er, dalliance, has awakened something else in me.”
“The hunger?”
“Yes. No. The need for companionship.”
“Ah.”
“‘Ah’ what?”
Setouchi shook his head.
“Out with it, Setouchi.”
The physician raised his eyes to the chairman. “I think,” he said carefully, “that you have finally admitted to yourself you’re still a man.”
“Except I’m not.”
“The vampire and the man can coexist.”
Can they?It seemed impossible. What the man wanted, the vampire would eventually desire to consume. A man wished to build things—a home, a family, a life—and a vampire sought only to destroy.
“I wish I was free of these cravings,” Haruki said with a resigned sigh.
“There is no cure for it,” Setouchi said somberly, “as I’ve told you from the first day you took my wife and me in. At least, it is not some type of herbal medicine I can prepare for you, or some exercise I can prescribe. So I must ask you, what if denying the man in you has given the vampire that also lives within you free reign? What if in denying one, you have caused yourself to become more of the other?”
“You’re saying I’ve abandoned my humanity. Which implies I still have some.”
“Of course you do. I see evidence of it daily.”
“Then you should know that the other night, I drained an innocent girl of all her blood.That I may have made her into a monster because of what I am.” Haruki’s fingers curled inward. “There’s no man in me left.”
“Look around,” Setouchi said. “You aren’t a monster. You don’t kill on a whim. You barely even feed. I see a man who is trying to create, not destroy.”
“And I see destruction everywhere I look.”
“Well,” said Setouchi, returning to his notes, “I am a physician, not a psychoanalytic psychologist.”
“Are you certain? You sounded like one for a minute.”
“Quite certain.” Setouchi began to write, signaling the end of their conversation.
Halfway to standing, Haruki paused. “You’re treating the new maid from the city.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“It wasn’t a question.” Still, Haruki hesitated before asking, “Is her case very advanced?”
