Child of Twilight Read online

  “I wonder if the creators of the show know about the superstition that a vampire can be neutralized by scattering seeds around his grave, so he has to count them until the sun rises?” said Eloise.

  “I wonder,” said Britt, “if they’ve really thought through the implications of those orgasmic thunderclaps.”

  Claude stared at her. “Dear lady, you’re making that up!”

  “Oh, I forgot you don’t follow children’s public TV. No, it’s true. Counting is this character’s addiction. When he finishes a number sequence, he’s rewarded with thunder and lightning. And if he’s somehow prevented from counting, he gets frustrated and twitchy. The thing ought to be rated X!”

  Roger said, “Colleague, you must remember that the general public doesn’t have minds as devious as ours.”

  “True.” Britt contemplated her half-finished salad with a sigh. “Sometimes I miss real salad dressing.” She and Eloise had to stick with plain oil and vinegar to avoid garlic.

  Roger switched his untouched salad for Britt’s almost empty bowl. “Who’s to deliver the baby? Surely not Volnar?”

  “Only in case of complications, thank goodness,” said Eloise. Conversation was suspended while the waiter came around with dinner plates. Claude had requested soup as his main course, a dish he could dabble in without drawing attention to his lack of intake.

  After the waiter left again, he said, “The custom is for a female relative to serve as midwife. The closest we have is Helga, our mother’s cousin. She likes you, strangely enough,” he said to Roger. “She’s also in favor of the hybridization experiments.”

  “Placing her in a distinct minority.” Roger cut into his steak, relieved to see that the chef had prepared it according to his specifications—nearly raw.

  “Be that as it may, Helga’s solidly behind us, and she happily agreed to deliver Eloise’s baby when the time comes. So that’s settled.”

  Later in the meal Britt turned the conversation to the science fiction convention Claude and Eloise would be attending Friday through Sunday. “Isn’t it unusual for both of you to go to a con together?”

  Eloise said with a teasing smile, “I have to tag along with him sometimes. Can’t leave him alone too often with those groupies dying to get their necks bitten.”

  “Really, my love, as if you didn’t trust me!”

  “I trust you just fine, it’s the fans I don’t trust.”

  Roger knew their banter was just that, for Claude couldn’t even be tempted by another woman, however healthy and willing. His bond with Eloise constituted a literal, biochemical addiction, as did Roger’s with Britt.

  “What all will you be doing at this con?” Britt asked.

  “I have the usual panel on vampires in literature, and Claude will do his thing on the horror movie panel. He also has a guest of honor speech at the banquet. I’m giving a writers’ workshop Saturday afternoon.”

  “Also, we’ll do a folk singing performance Friday after the Regency Ball,” said Claude.

  Roger recalled Claude’s mention of this act being added to their repertoire, but he’d never heard Claude and Eloise sing. “What sort of folk songs?”

  “The standards, slanted toward the darker and gorier specimens from Child’s collection. Homo saps can be incredible ghouls, y’know.”

  “I hate to admit it, but that’s what everybody wants,” Eloise said. “Incest and infanticide. Tragic deaths and vengeful ghosts.”

  “Like ‘Barbara Allen’?” said Britt.

  “Lots of people ask for ‘Barbara Allen,’ sure, but that’s awfully tame. They get more of a kick out of stuff like ‘The Well Down In The Valley.’ Girl has five babies by an assortment of male relatives and buries them all over the farm.”

  “Careless,” Britt remarked. “Somebody should have given her birth control information. I’d love to hear you two sing.”

  Eloise blushed. “Well, I could bring the guitar along tonight, if you really—”

  “Please do!”

  The waiter reappeared, pen and notebook poised. Roger suppressed a sigh of relief. For the past several minutes the heavy perfume of a lady at the next table had been making him feel suffocated.

  Britt checked her watch. “We have plenty of time. Couldn’t do any harm to peek at the dessert cart—”

  Eloise picked up the cue. “Yeah, maybe I could find room for a chocolate mousse—”

  Roger glared at Britt, though he knew as well as Claude probably did that the women were teasing them.

  Britt threw Roger a wicked grin and said to the waiter, “Just the check, please.” To Eloise she added, “There’s plenty of ice cream at Roger’s, and I get the feeling the guys would rather have—dessert—there.”

  A few minutes later they separated, Eloise and Claude walking back to the hotel to pick up their rented car rather than riding with Roger and Britt, who walked to Britt’s apartment to collect Roger’s car. Then they drove at once to his townhouse across the Severn River.

  Shortly they pulled up in the parking lot outside Roger’s condominium. He changed from his suit into a more casual outfit while Britt started coffee. By the time he joined her downstairs, Claude and Eloise had arrived. Eloise had exchanged her dress for jeans and a long-sleeved sweatshirt that inquired, “Have you petted your werewolf today?” She carried a tote bag, Claude a guitar case.

  “Can you drink coffee?” Britt asked.

  “This time of night, I can. But no ice cream yet, unless you really want to. I’m temporarily stuffed.” Eloise patted her abdomen.

  “How early could you tell she was pregnant?” Roger asked Claude. “As a matter of medical interest.”

  Claude leaned against the hearth while Roger set a match to the logs already stacked in the fireplace. “A week after fertilization—about the time of implantation, I suppose. If I probed deeply, even then I could sense another life in her body. But not a mind. I still don’t sense a separate personality.”

  “Interesting,” said Britt, switching on the Christmas tree lights. Early in their relationship she’d had an uphill battle persuading Roger to indulge in such seasonal decorations.

  Claude strolled over to the window. “Coming down nicely, isn’t it? I haven’t seen snow in months, and I could do with a walk. What about you, Rodge?”

  The thought of fresh air and exercise appealed to Roger too. Hesitating only long enough to ascertain that their companions really didn’t mind being left, he agreed to Claude’s suggestion.

  Woods surrounded the townhouse complex, tucked away on a side lane off St. Margaret’s Road. For several minutes Roger and Claude walked in silence under the trees through the gentle but steady snowfall. Roger felt Claude’s residual tension from the cross-country airline trip fading away. After a while Roger said, “If you want to hunt, feel free. We have deer, opossums, squirrels, raccoons—”

  “Enough, you sound like that waiter reciting the day’s specials. No thanks, old man, I’ll save my appetite for—dessert.”

  Roger’s stomach cramped with hunger in spite of the steak he’d forced himself to finish. “I, too. I wish Britt wouldn’t be so outspoken in public.” He deliberately changed the subject. “How do you feel about becoming a father? The role is quite alien to you.” Young vampires were cared for by their mothers until weaning, then turned over to a mentor for the rest of their education. The male parent played a purely genetic role.

  “That’s an understatement. Dying to psychoanalyze me, are you? Well, I don’t mind talking about it.” Claude ducked under a low-hanging branch. When they’d moved on to a clearer path, he continued, “I’m doing this for Eloise. Having a child means so much to her. I can certainly spare twenty years or so to fulfill that wish. And it will be an interesting challenge.” He gave a shaky laugh. “I expected that someday, in the very distant future, I might be assigned as a child’s advisor. But not now—and not a newborn infant.”

  “Being a parent is not the same as serving in a mentor capacity.”
/>   “So I gather. Hell, I should be asking you for advice. You were brought up in a human family with two parents—one male, one female. And you’ve sired a child.”

  “That doesn’t make me a father, only a sperm donor.” Roger couldn’t keep a trace of resentment out of his voice.

  “I hope you don’t still bear a grudge against Juliette for that?”

  “Certainly not, I never have. It wasn’t her fault. Volnar manipulated both of us.”

  “I’ve often wondered why you agreed to produce a baby. At first you were dead set against it.”

  “Believe it or not, it was Britt who convinced me that Volnar had a point about hybrid vigor, my duty to the species, and all that. Only I didn’t have a clear understanding beforehand of what the—procedure—would be like. Humiliating is an understatement! But to be fair to Juliette, she hadn’t been fully informed of how imperfectly I grasped the situation.”

  Claude broke into an easy trot. “You’d like Juliette, if you gave yourself a chance to get acquainted with her. She lives nearby, you know—Williamsburg. Teaches English at the college.”

  “I know, Volnar mentioned that. Also that she writes historical romances on the side, which puzzled me. I’ve been told so often that our kind aren’t creative.” He shifted his gait to keep pace with Claude.

  “Have you ever read any of those novels? Creativity may be a factor, but it’s not absolutely required. There’s a formula. The main requirement is knowledge of the period, of which Juliette has an abundance. She specializes in the mid-Victorian era, the time of her own youth. She’s a clever lady—minimizes her need for human donors by keeping three Irish wolfhounds, which are devoted to her. She claims they’re almost as good as the real thing.”

  “I had no reason to pursue an acquaintance with her,” Roger said. “It was made clear at the outset that I’d have no control over the child’s upbringing.”

  “Have you ever met your daughter?” Claude stopped to lean against a tree, scooping up snow and meditatively packing it as he talked.

  “Once. Juliette brought her up for a brief visit when the girl was about three. Really, Claude, I have nothing useful to tell you about fatherhood. What I’ve learned from listening to my human patients wouldn’t help, because you aren’t human. You’ll have to work out your own pattern.”

  Claude tossed his snowball at a tree and started walking again, this time in the direction of the house. “The ladies will be missing us—or I devoutly hope so, anyway. You’ve restrained your prurient curiosity, but I know you want to ask how we obtained the specimen to impregnate Eloise.”

  “I don’t have to ask. It must have been similar to my experience with Juliette. Volnar provided you with a female in estrus to get the—uh—mechanism started?”

  Claude nodded. “Most humiliating experience of my entire life.”

  “But isn’t genital sexuality devoid of emotional significance for you?”

  Claude said with a rueful smile, “Little brother, this wasn’t mating. This was masturbating into a glass container—repeatedly—while the woman responsible sat across the room giggling.”

  Roger arched his brows in skeptical inquiry. “Really? Juliette wasn’t quite that bad.”

  “Oh, mine didn’t snicker out loud, but close enough. It wasn’t malicious. The lady simply didn’t understand why I chose not to couple with her, using a condom.”

  “You didn’t want to be unfaithful to Eloise.”

  “Precisely—a concept totally foreign to our kind. And illogical, when you think about it, since I can never share that with Eloise. Not to full consummation, anyhow.”

  “It may not be logical,” Roger said, “but it feels entirely rational to me.”

  “Perhaps I’m acquiring human traits,” said Claude, “after all these years with Eloise.” He paused at the edge of the woods to look up into the densely swirling snowfall. “Certainly it’s not normal to have such an intense attachment to an ephemeral. Damned if I care. It never gets any less intense It grows more powerful, the longer we’re together. Have you found that?”

  “Yes.” He couldn’t tell whether Claude was listening or not.

  “You don’t know how fortunate you are, Roger. What you stumbled onto with your first long-term liaison, it took me over two centuries to find—a woman who came to me of her own free will with her eyes open and her mind clear. I married her to bind her to me by the laws of her own kind. I never expected the union to become so vital to me. I’ll do anything to preserve that.”

  When they went inside, they found Britt and Eloise drinking coffee in front of the fireplace. Britt had changed into a loose emerald and gold caftan. Candles burned on the mantle. Eloise picked up her guitar as Roger and Claude entered.

  “About time you got back,” said Britt. “I’m waiting to hear some folk songs.”

  “Only a couple,” said Eloise. “I can’t help feeling silly about singing in front of two people.” The two women were facing each other on matching love seats in front of the fireplace. After Roger and Claude sat down next to their respective mates, Eloise said, “What shall we start with? Something special for Roger?”

  Noting the silent glance Claude and Eloise exchanged, Roger had an unpleasant suspicion of what they were contemplating. “Please, not ‘MTA’,” he said. “Sylvia used to delight in torturing me with that blasted song.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence. Sylvia, a young female vampire, had been murdered fourteen years before by one of their own kind. Roger had discovered her body—and had finally destroyed her killer. “Very well,” said Claude. “In deference to Sylvia’s memory we’ll skip the ordeal of poor old Charlie.”

  “I know the perfect thing,” said Eloise. “ Also a tribute to your home state, Roger. ” She strummed a chord, and the two of them launched into “The Ballad of Lizzie Borden.”

  After three choruses Roger declared abject surrender. Britt’s delighted applause didn’t help. Relenting, she said, “How about something serious. A vengeful ghost, maybe?”

  “I have a better idea,” said Eloise. “We’ve just started practicing ‘True Thomas’.” She and Claude alternated verses of the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, with Claude singing the poet’s lines and Eloise the Elven Queen’s:

  “And see you not yon bonny road

  That winds across the ferny lea?

  That is the road to fair Elfland

  Where thou and I this night must be.”

  In counterpoint to Eloise’s pleasant though not particularly strong soprano, Claude gave a rich Scottish cast to the narrator’s lines:

  “It was a mirk, mirk night, there was no starlight;

  They waded through red blood to the knee,

  For all the blood that’s shed on earth

  Runs through the springs of that country.”

  At the conclusion of True Thomas’ seven years in the realm of Faerie, the four of them sat in silence for a couple of minutes. Claude broke the mood by remarking, “Have you ever considered that Thomas’ Queen of Elfland might have been one of us? One of the longaevi, neither hellish nor heavenly, never aging nor dying?”

  Eloise’s eyes lit up. “Interesting—I like that. She’s like Keats’ Belle Dame Sans Merci, with a taste for poetic young men.”

  “Yes, she takes more than she gives, yet none of them seems in any hurry to escape,” said Claude.

  Britt offered refills on the coffee. When no one took her up on that, she proposed they watch Claude’s new film.

  “Great,” said Eloise, “I always like seeing how they fit in the special effects. And Claude enjoys nitpicking his own performance.”

  “Enjoy?” Claude protested. “Cherie, I writhe in agony.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Don’t give me that, you love every minute of it. Some kind of masochism, I guess.”

  “Naturally one wants to critique one’s performance in order to improve it.” He stepped over to the window and pulled aside the curtain. “Your flurry has turn
ed into something of a blizzard.”

  Roger stopped in the middle of adjusting the position of the TV and joined Claude at the window. The snowfall was now so dense that it reduced visibility to a yard or two. Catlike night vision and superhuman reflexes wouldn’t make it safe to drive in this. “It’s just as well we have a movie to watch,” Roger said. “You won’t be going anywhere for the next couple of hours.”

  They settled down on the love seats, angled slightly for easy viewing of the television Roger had wheeled opposite the fireplace. He refused to grant the thing a central place in the living room when it wasn’t in use. When he flicked on the remote, Claude said, “Now I can dissect my performance, and Eloise can cringe at the director’s pointless shredding of her dialogue.”

  Eloise punched him in the chest, then curled up against him, his arm around her shoulders.

  Britt silently asked Roger, [Why aren’t we doing that, colleague?]

  [In public?]

  [This isn’t public; it’s family. Loosen up!]

  He stiffly put his arm around her, trying to act as if he didn’t notice when she laid her head on his shoulder. Instead he focused his attention on Eloise’s running commentary.

  “This is the fairly typical good vampire-bad vampire plot. Claude’s character is trying to stop the evil vampire from continuing his rampage of senseless slaughter—”

  “Yes, I’ve always preferred sensible slaughter,” Claude interrupted.

  Eloise pretended to ignore him. “Eventually, of course, the villain goes after the woman the hero is in love with. They have a terrific showdown in an abandoned, desecrated church. At least it was reasonably terrific the way I wrote it. I hope the special effects crew didn’t screw it up the way they did Varney’s suicide in the volcano in Feast of Blood.”

  After several minutes of watching the villain stalk his first victim along a moonlit country lane, Claude muttered, “Will you look at that idiotic makeup job. Exaggerated—I didn’t like it at the time, but I knew better than to say anything. Hoped the photography would soften the effect.”

  “If you two are going to tear apart every little detail,” said Britt, “how are we supposed to enjoy the essential flavor of the story? Get into the mood?”