In the back of her mind, a little warning bell went off. When you were talking to your dead brother and expecting him to answer, you were probably out of your mind.
Take out the “probably.”
“I’ll give your love to Tallah,” she said before slipping through the door and relocking it.
As she drove off, she had to fumble in her bag for her sunglasses. The fact that the other cars on the road had their headlights on, and her neighbors were once again streaming home from work, didn’t mean much to a vampire when it came to that barely-there glow on the western horizon. The fact that her eyes were stinging and her skin was prickling in warning under her clothes was a good reminder of exactly how nonnegotiable the whole no-sunlight thing was for the species.
But she couldn’t have stayed in that house for a moment longer.
And yes, dematerializing out was an option. She needed fresh ice, though, and the driving also helped calm her down.
It was amazing how you could be trapped even when you were free to go where you pleased.
Tallah’s cottage was on the far outskirts of Caldwell, a little stone jewel nestled in a glen of maple trees. The trip there took anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes depending on traffic, and Mae put the radio on to distract herself from stuff she didn’t want to think about. NPR didn’t work, though. Her mind still chewed on things like the fact that vampire bodies sank, not floated, in water—something she hadn’t known until she’d started taking care of Rhoger in his current state. She was also keenly aware that time was running out for her and her brother. And she worried that maybe that Book Tallah was talking about wasn’t the answer to the problem.
Maybe all she had for an answer was a Fade Ceremony, a permanently empty house, and the crushing realization that she was the last of her bloodline, left alone on the planet.
If shared memories were the best kind . . . then memories you could no longer share with the collective that were in them were the worst. That kind of solitude turned you into a reference volume rather than part of a story, and she had a feeling the losses made every thought a platform for mourning.
To keep herself from tearing up, she cast a mental line back into a sea of undesirables, and guess what came up on her cognitive hook?
That fighter from the night before.
Great.
Still, as she followed the curving roads into the country, and the population density of humans drained away in favor of cornfields and small dairy farms, she chose him to focus on. It was the best of a bad lot, as her father would have said—and it wasn’t like she had to work very hard at the preoccupation. She could picture Shawn clear as day, from his obsidian eyes, to the tattoos that covered his body, to his aggression . . . to his spilled blood on all that concrete.
How someone could go from nearly dying to just going about his business, she hadn’t a clue. Then again, she had a feeling his little leak hadn’t been the first one he’d sprung. God, if that had happened to her, she would have screamed until she lost consciousness even after she recovered.
Meanwhile, he’d seemed like he was merely stuck in the wrong lane at a supermarket.
And FFS, if she had told him to, he would have brought that male, the Reverend, back for her.
Maybe she should have taken that route. But then what? If the Reverend didn’t know about the Book, how would dragging him back to that garage have helped? And maybe the offer had just been hyperbole on the fighter’s part, a bluster courtesy of his chest-thumping complex.
Right?
As she pulled onto a dirt road that was choked with bushes and overgrowth, she was still debating the pros and cons of a decision that had been made the night before. But at least she was almost to Tallah’s and then—yay!—she had other things to think about . . . like Books that may or may not exist, and may or may not be helpful when it came to her brother’s situation.
In the meantime, she had the bad condition of this goat path to focus on. There were potholes to fight through, her headlights bouncing up and down as she tried to avoid the worst of them, and the brambles that grew up along the shoulder were so tight, the most aggressive of them scratched at the Civic’s paint job.
But then the cottage made its appearance.
As she rounded a final turn, her car pinpointed her destination, the headlights blasting the old stone of the outer walls in an illumination that was kind of unkind. The place was in a genteel state of disrepair, the front door painted in a faded red that was partially chipped away, one shutter hanging cockeyed, the slate roof showing a missing tile here and there. The grounds were likewise a shaggy mess, the rose garden nothing but a tangled circle of thorns and weeds, the front path ragged and frayed by tree roots and mole tunnels. A fallen branch big as a car was in the side yard, and that old birch tree looked like spring’s CPR of warmth and sunshine might not pull it through the winter’s cold coma.
Putting her car in park, she canned the ignition and took a deep breath. She really needed to help more around the property, but between her full-time work online and taking care of her own house, the last year had gone by so fast. Previously, when her father had been alive, he had come here and done a lot of the handyman stuff, and her brother had helped out like that, too. It was amazing how fast things degenerated, though.
Three years without upkeep and things were nearly unrecognizable. And it was hard not to find a parallel in the collapse of Mae’s own life, everything that had once stood strong and true now decaying and lost.
Her parents had seemed so permanent. Rhoger, too.
Youth and a lack of exposure to death had meant her family was immortal and the details of her life—where she lived, who she was related to, what she did—were written-in-stone facts, as immutable as the night sky, as gravity, as the color of her own eyes.
Such a fallacy, though.
Getting out, she almost didn’t lock her car. But an echo of the fear she’d felt in that crowd of humans had her putting her key in the door and turning it.
As she walked over the flagstone path, Tallah opened things up, and the sight of the stooped older female standing in that familiar archway made Mae blink quick. Tallah was always the same, dressed in one of her loose housecoats, this time in a periwinkle blue, and she had on matching blue-and-yellow slippers. Her cane was likewise coordinated, a pale blue ribbon wound down the metal stalk of the support, and there was a corresponding bow at the end of her braid of white hair.
“Hi,” Mae said as she came up to the front step.
“Hello, dearest one.”
They embraced across the threshold, with Mae being careful not to squeeze too hard—even though all she wanted to do was pull Tallah close and never let the old female go.
“Come,” Tallah said. “I have tea on.”
“I’ve got the door,” Mae murmured as she entered and closed things.
The kitchen was in the back, and as she followed Tallah through the tiny, familiar rooms, everything smelled the same. Fresh bread. Old leather armchairs. Faded fires in the hearth and fragrant loose tea leaves. The furniture was all too big for the small house, and it was of absurdly high quality, the tables marked with marble and gilt, the secretary set with fine inlaid woods, the chairs and sofas clad with faded and now-worn silks. Oil paintings in heavy gold-leafed frames hung on the walls, the landscapes and portraits executed by Matisse. Seurat. Monet. Manet.
There was a fortune under the roof of this tiny cottage, and Mae frequently worried about thieves coming out here. But so far, things had been okay. Tallah had been living here since the eighties and had never been bothered. It was a shame, though, that the female had refused to sell even one of those paintings off to better her living conditions. She had been steadfast in keeping her things with her, however, even if it meant that necessary improvements couldn’t be afforded. The obstinance didn’t make a lot of sense, but then it wasn’t anybody else’s call, was it.
Neither of them said anything as Mae took a seat at the kitchen table and Tallah busied herself at the counter with the plug-in kettle and two teacups. The urge to help the female with the tray was nearly irresistible, especially as Tallah hung her cane off her forearm and seemed to struggle with the load of creamer, sugar, and filled cups. But self-sufficiency was the pride of the elderly, and no one needed to take any more autonomy away from the female before it was absolutely necessary.
As Tallah set the things down, Mae nodded to the far corner of the table, where some kind of display of objects was covered with a threadbare monogrammed towel. “What’s under there?”
Usually, the female kept everything neat as a pin, the minimal amount of stuff out on the counters, tables, shelves, mantels.
“Tell me again what happened last night?” Tallah said as she lowered herself down into her chair and passed a cup and saucer over.
The porcelain twosome rattled in her unsteady grip, and the sound reverberated through Mae’s entire body. It was a relief to take the tea and end both the acoustics and the risk of a total spill, and she covered up her rush by giving a factual this-then-that of everything. Naturally, the report had redacted parts. She cut out the part where she roughed up that human woman in the wait line, and yeah, boy, there was a whole lot of gappage when it came to Shawn.
“The Reverend lied about the Book,” Tallah said as she poured some milk into her tea. “He knows exactly what it is. But perhaps not where.”
“Well, he’s not going to be a resource. He was pretty clear on that.”
As they fell into silence, Mae watched the curl of steam rising from her tea. With the cooling of the Earl Grey, the breadth of it was diminishing.
“Tallah . . .”
“What, dearest one?”
She pictured Rhoger in that cold water. “I don’t know how much more time we have.”
It wasn’t that the body was decomposing—yet. But it would. And more than that, she wasn’t sure how many more nights she could hit that Shell, and buy that ice, and go to that tub to drain the water and refill things . . .
Oh, who was she kidding. She would keep doing the job until there were only pieces of him left, nothing but a body-fluid soup in that bathroom—provided there was hope. And maybe that was what was dying for her at this moment.
She pushed the teacup away. “Tallah, this is hard for me to say.”
“Please.” The older female leaned forward and put her hand on Mae’s arm. “You can tell me anything.”
Mae focused on the flower print of the housecoat’s sleeve, the little yellow and white flowers set off in the sea of blue.
“This Book, whatever it is.” Mae looked into those watery eyes, and tried to keep the demand out of her voice, out of her expression. “I mean, what are we really doing here. I don’t want to doubt you, but I can’t . . . I’m finding it hard to keep going on this goose chase. You said the Reverend was our last hope, and we’ve come up dry. Again.”
Well, and then there was the larger issue of what she’d been told the Book would do for her. She so needed to believe resurrection was possible, but she was beginning to worry that this was how urban legends set up shop and propagated: Someone in a vulnerable state, who needed to believe there was a metaphysical solution for their problems, got served up a hoax.
Desperation could mold truth out of any lie. And even if it was from a well-intended source, there was a cruelty to the false promise of help.
With a nod, Tallah took a sip from her cup. Then she sat back, holding the tea between her gnarled hands as if they were cold. “I thought that my losing my station would be the lowest ebb of my life. But watching all that you have endured these past few years . . . it surmounts even my saddest moments. How could I not help you?”
Mae had never asked for specifics, but at one point, Tallah had been at the highest level of the aristocracy, mated unto a member of the Council. Mae’s mahmen, Lotty, had worked for her as a maid. Something had happened, though, and when Tallah had come here, Lotty had insisted on cleaning the house for free on the side—and soon enough, the whole family was involved in taking care of the older female.