Teeth: Vampire Tales

Why Light? by TANITH LEE

My first memory is the fear of light.

The passage was dank and dark and water dripped, and my mother carried me, although by then I could walk. I was three, or a little younger. My mother was terrified. She was consumed by terror, and she shook, and her skin gave off a faint metallic smell I had never caught from her before. Her hands were cold as ice. I could feel that, even through the thick shawl in which she’d wrapped me. She said, over and over, “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right. It will be okay. You’ll see. Just a minute, only one. It’ll be all right.”

By then of course I too was frightened. I was crying, and I think I wet myself, though I hadn’t done anything like that since babyhood.

Then the passage turned, and there was a tall iron gate — I know it’s iron, now. At the time it only looked like a burned-out coal.

“Oh, God,” said my mother.

But she thrust out one hand and pushed at the gate, and it grudged open with a rusty scraping, just wide enough to let us through.

I would have seen the vast garden outside the house, played there. But this wasn’t the garden. It was a high place, held in only by a low stone wall and a curving break of poplar trees. They looked very black, not green the way the house lamps made trees in the garden. Something was happening to the sky; that was what made the poplars so black. I thought it was moonrise, but I knew the moon was quite new, and only a full moon could dilute the darkness so much. The stars were watery and blue, weak, like dying gas flames.

My mother stood there, just outside the iron gate, holding me, shaking. “It’s all right. just a minute. only one. ”

Suddenly something happened.

It was like a storm — a lightning flash maybe, but in slow motion, that swelled up out of the dark. It was pale, then silver, and then like gold. It was like a high trumpet note, or the opening chords of some great concerto.

I sat bolt upright in my mother’s arms, even as she shook ever more violently. I think her teeth were chattering.

But I could only open my eyes wide. Even my mouth opened, as if to drink the sudden light.

It was the color of a golden flower and it seemed to boil, and enormous clouds poured slowly upward out of it, brass and wine and rose. And a huge noise came from everywhere, rustling and rushing — and weird flutings and squeakings and trills — birdsong — only I didn’t recognize it.

My mother now hoarsely wept. I don’t know how she never dropped me.

Next they came out and drew us in again, and Tyfa scooped me quickly away as my mother collapsed on the ground. So I was frightened again, and screamed.

They closed the gate and shut us back in darkness. The one minute was over. But I had seen a dawn.

Fourteen and a half years later, and I stood on the drive, looking at the big black limousine. Marten was loading my bags into the boot. Musette and Kousu were crying quietly. One or two others lingered about; nobody seemed to grasp what exactly was the correct way to behave. My mother hadn’t yet come out of the house.

By that evening my father was dead over a decade — he had died when I was six, my mother a hundred and seventy. They had lived together a century anyway, were already tired of each other, and had taken other lovers from our community. But that made his death worse, apparently. Ever since, every seventh evening, she would go into the little shrine she had made to him, cut one of her fingers, and let go a drop of blood in the vase below his photograph. Her name is Juno, my mother, after a Roman goddess, and I’d called her by her name since I was an adult.

“She should be here,” snapped Tyfa, irritated. He too was Juno’s occasional lover, but generally he seemed exasperated by her. “Locked in that damn room,” he added sourly. He meant the shrine.

I said nothing, and Tyfa stalked off along the terrace and started pacing about, a tall, strong man of around two hundred or so, no one was sure — dark haired as most of us were at Severin. His skin had a light brownness from a long summer of sun exposure. He had always been able to take the sun, often for several hours in one day. I too have black hair, and my skin, even in winter, is pale brown. I can endure daylight all day long, day after day. I can live by day.

Marten had closed the boot. Casperon had gotten into the driver’s seat, leaving the car door open, and was trying the engine. Its loud purring would no doubt penetrate the house’s upper story, and the end rooms that comprised Juno’s apartment.

Abruptly she came sweeping out from the house.

Juno has dark red hair. Her skin is white. Her slanting eyes are the dark bleak blue of a northern sea, seen in a foreign movie with subtitles. When I was a child I adored her. She was my goddess. I’d have died for her, but that stopped. It stopped forever.

She walked straight past the others, as if no one else were there. She stood in front of me. She was still an inch or so taller than I, though I’m tall.

“Well,” she said. She stared into my face, hers cold as marble, and all of her stone still — this, the woman who trembled and clutched me to her, whispering that all would be well, when I was three years old.

“Yes, Juno,” I said.

“Do you have everything you need?” she asked me indifferently, forced to be polite to some visitor now finally about to leave.

“Yes, thank you. Kousu helped me pack.”

“You know you have only to call the house, and anything else can be sent on to you? Of course,” she added offhandedly, “you’ll want for nothing, there.”

I did not reply. What was there to say? I’ve “wanted” for so much here and never gotten it — at least, my mother, from you.

“I wish you very well,” she coldly said, “in your new home. I hope everything will be pleasant. The marriage is important, as you’re aware, and they’ll treat you fairly.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll say good-bye then. At least for a while.”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye, Daisha.” She drew out the ay sound; and foolishly through my mind skipped words that rhymed — fray, say. prey.

I said, “So long, Juno. Good luck making it up with Tyfa. Have a nice life.”

Then I turned my back, crossed the terrace and the drive, and got into the car. I’d signed off with all the others before. They had loaded me with good wishes and sobbed, or tried to cheer me by mentioning images we had seen of my intended husband, and saying how handsome and talented he was, and I must write to them soon, email or call — not lose touch — come back next year — sooner — Probably they’d forget me in a couple of days or nights.

To me, they already seemed miles off.

The cream limousine of the full moon had parked over the estate as we drove away. In its blank blanched rays I could watch, during the hour it took to cross the whole place and reach the outer gates, all the nocturnal industry, in fields and orchards, in vegetable gardens, pens, and horse yards, garages and workshops — a black horse cantering, lamps, and red sparks flying — and people coming out to see us go by, humans saluting the family car, appraising in curiosity, envy, pity, or scorn, the girl driven off to become a Wife of Alliance.

In the distance the low mountains shone blue from the moon. The lake across the busy grasslands was like a gigantic vinyl disk dropped from the sky, an old record the moon had played, and played tonight on the spinning turntable of the Earth. This was the last I saw of my home.

The journey took just on four days.

Sometimes we passed through whitewashed towns, or cities whose tall concrete-and-glass fingers reached to scratch the clouds. Sometimes we were on motorways, wide and streaming with traffic in spate. Or there was open countryside, mountains coming or going, glowing under hard icing-sugar tops. In the afternoons we’d stop, for Casperon to rest, at hotels. About six or seven in the evening we drove on. I slept in the car by night. Or sat staring from the windows.

I was, inevitably, uneasy. I was resentful and bitter and full of a dull and hopeless rage.

I shall get free of it all — I had told myself this endlessly since midsummer, when first I had been informed that, to cement ties of friendship with the Duvalles, I was to marry their new heir. Naturally it was not only friendship that this match entailed. I had sun-born genes. And the Duvalle heir, it seemed, hadn’t. My superior light endurance would be necessary to breed a stronger line. A bad joke, to our kind — they needed my blood. I was bloodstock. I was Daisha Severin, a young female life only seventeen years, and able to live daylong in sunlight. I was incredibly valuable. I would be, everyone had said, so welcome. And I was lovely, they said, with my brunette hair and dark eyes, my cinnamon skin. The heir — Zeev Duvalle — was very taken with the photos he had seen of me. And didn’t I think he was fine — cool, Musette had said, “He’s so cool — I wish it could have been me. You’re so lucky, Daisha.”

Zeev was blond, almost snow-blizzard white, though his eyebrows and lashes were dark. His eyes were like some pale, shining metal. His skin was pale, too, if not so colorless as with some of us, or so I’d thought when I watched him in the house movie I’d been sent. My pale-skinned mother had some light tolerance, though far less than my dead father. I had inherited all his strength that way, and more. But Zeev Duvalle had none, or so it seemed. To me he looked like what he was, a man who lived only by night. In appearance he seemed nineteen or twenty, but he wasn’t so much older in actual years. Like me, a new young life. So much in common. So very little.

And by now “I shall get free of it all,” which I’d repeated so often, had become my mantra, and also meaningless. How could I ever get free? Among my own kind I would be an outcast and criminal if I ran away from this marriage, now or ever, without a “valid” reason. While able to pass as human, I could hardly live safely among them. I can eat and drink a little in their way, but I need blood. Without blood I would die.

So, escape the families and their alliance, I would become not only traitor and thief — but a murderer. A human-slaughtering monster humanity doesn’t believe in, or does believe in — something, either way, that, if discovered among them, they will kill.

That other house, my former home on the Severin estate, was long and quite low, two storied, but with high ceilings mostly on the ground floor. Its first architecture, gardens, and farm had been made in the early nineteenth century.

Their mansion — castle — whatever one has to call it — was colossal. Duvalle had built high.

It rose, this pile, like a cliff, with outcrops of slate-capped towers. Courtyards and enclosed gardens encircled it. Beyond and around lay deep pine woods with infiltrations of other trees, some maples, already flaming in the last of summer and the sunset. I spotted none of the usual workplaces, houses, or barns.

We had taken almost three hours to wend through their land, along the tree-rooted and stone-littered upward-tending track. Once Casperon had to pull up, get out, and examine a tire. But it was all right. On we went.

At one point, just before we reached the house, I saw a waterfall cascading from a tall, rocky hill, plunging into a ravine below. In the ghostly dusk it looked beautiful and melodramatic. Setting the tone?

When the car at last drew up, a few windows were burning amber in the house cliff. Over the wide door itself glowed a single electric light inside a round pane like a worn-out planet.

No one had come to greet us.

We got out and stood at a loss. The car’s headlamps fired the brickwork, but still nobody emerged. At the lit windows, no silhouette appeared gazing down.

Casperon marched to the door and rang some sort of bell that hung there.

All across the grounds crickets chirruped, hesitated, and went on.

The night was warm, and so empty; nothing seemed to be really alive anywhere, despite the crickets, the windows. Nothing, I mean, of my kind, our people. For a strange moment I wondered if something ominous had happened here, if everyone had died, and if so, would that release me? But then one leaf of the door was opened. A man looked out. Casperon spoke to him, and the man nodded. A few minutes later I had to go up the steps and into the house.

There was a sort of vestibule, vaguely lighted by old ornate lanterns. Beyond that was a big paved court, with pruned trees and raised flower beds, and then more steps. Casperon had gone for my luggage. I followed the wretched sallow man who had let me in.

“What’s your name?” I asked him as we reached the next portion of the house, a blank wall lined only with blank black windows.

“Anton.”

“Where is the family?” I asked him.

“Above” was all he said.

I said, halting, “Why was there no one to welcome me?”

He didn’t reply. Feeling a fool, angry now, I stalked after him.

There was another vast hall or vestibule. No lights, until he touched the switch and grayish, weary side lamps came on, giving little color to the stony, towering space.

“Where,” I said, in Juno’s voice, “is he? He at least should be here. Zeev Duvalle, my husband-to-be.” I spoke formally. “I am insulted. Go at once and tell him — ”

“He does not rise yet,” said Anton, as if to somebody invisible but tiresome. “He doesn’t rise until eight o’clock.”

Day in night. Night was Zeev’s day. Yet the sun had been gone over an hour now. Damn him, I thought. Damn him.

It was useless to protest further. And when Casperon returned with the bags, I could say nothing to him, because this wasn’t his fault. And besides, he would soon be gone. I was alone. As per usual.

I met Zeev Duvalle at dinner. It was definitely a dinner, not a breakfast, despite their day-for-night policy. It was served in an upstairs conservatory, the glass panes open to the air. A long table draped in white, tall old greenish glasses, plates of some red china, probably Victorian. Only five or six other people came to the meal, and they introduced themselves in a formal, chilly way. Only one woman, who looked about fifty and so probably was into her several hundreds, said she regretted not being there at my arrival. No excuse was offered, however. They made me feel like what I was to them, a new house computer that could talk. A doll that would be able to have babies. yes. Horrible.

By the time we sat down, in high-backed chairs, with huge orange trees standing around behind them like guards — a scene on a film set — I was boiling with cold anger. Part of me was afraid, too. I can’t really explain the fear, or of what. It was like being washed up out of the night ocean on an unknown shore, and all you can see are stones and emptiness, and no light to show the way.

At Severin there were always types of ordinary food to be had — steaks, apples — we drank a little wine, took coffee or tea. But a lot of us were sun born. Even Juno was. She hated daylight but still tucked into the occasional croissant. Of course there was Proper Sustenance, too. The blood of those animals we kept for that purpose, always collected with economy, care, and gentleness from living beasts, which continued to live, well fed and tended and never overused, until their natural deaths. For special days there was special blood. This being drawn, also with respectful care, from among the human families who lived on the estate. They had no fear of giving blood, any more than the animals did. In return, their rewards were many and lavish. The same arrangement, so far as I knew, was similar among all the scattered families of our kind.

Here at Duvalle, we were served a black pitcher of blood, a white pitcher of white wine. Fresh bread, still warm, lay on the red dishes.

That was all.

I had taken Proper Sustenance at the last hotel, drinking from my flask. I’d drunk a Coke on the road, too.

Now I took a piece of bread and filled my glass with an inch of wine.

They all looked at me. Then away. Every other glass by then gleamed scarlet. One of the men said, “But, young lady, this is the best, this is human. We always take it at dinner. Come now.”

“No,” I said, “thank you.”

“Oh, but clearly you don’t know your own mind — ”

And then he spoke. From the doorway. He had only just come in, after his long rest or whatever else he had been doing for the past two and a half hours, as I was in my allotted apartment, showering, getting changed for this appalling night.

What I saw first about him, Zeev Duvalle, was inevitable. The blondness, the whiteness of him, almost incandescent against the candlelit room and the dark beyond the glass. His hair was like molten platinum, just sombering down a bit to a kind of white gold in the shadow. His eyes weren’t gray, but green — gray-green like the crystal goblets. His skin, after all, wasn’t that pale. It had a sort of tawny look to it — not in any way like a tan. More as if it fed on darkness and had drawn some into itself. He was handsome, but I knew that. He looked now about nineteen. He had a perfect body, slim and strong; most vampires do. We eat the perfect food and very few extra calories — nothing too much or too little. But he was tall. Taller than anyone I’d ever met. About six and a half feet, I thought.

Unlike the others, even me, he hadn’t smartened up for dinner. He wore un-new black jeans and a scruffy T-shirt with long, torn sleeves. I could smell the outdoors on him, pine needles, smoke, and night. He had been out in the grounds. There was. there was a little brown-red stain on one sleeve. Was it blood? From what?

It came to me with a lurch what he really most resembled. A white wolf. And had this bloody wolf been out hunting in his vast forested park? What had he killed so mercilessly — some squirrel or hare — or a deer — that would be bad enough — or was it worse?

I knew nothing about these people I’d been given to. I’d been too offended and allergic to the whole idea to do any research, ask any real questions. I had frowned at the brief movie they sent of him, thought: So, he’s cute and almost albino. I hadn’t even gotten that right. He was a wolf. He was a feral animal that preyed in the old way, by night, on things defenseless and afraid.

This was when he said again, “Let her alone, Constantine.” Then, “Let her eat what she wants. She knows what she likes.” Then: “Hi, Daisha. I’m Zeev. If only you’d gotten here a little later, I’d have been here to welcome you.”

I met his eyes, which was difficult. That glacial green, I slipped from its surface. I said quietly, “Don’t worry. Who cares.”

He sat down at the table’s head. Though the youngest among them, he was the heir and therefore, supposedly, their leader now. His father had died two years before, when his car left an upland road miles away. Luckily his companion, a woman from the Clays family, had called the house. The wreck of the car and his body had been retrieved by Duvalle before the sun could make a mess of both the living and the dead. All of us know we survive largely through the wealth longevity enables us to gather, and the privacy it buys.

The others started to drink their dinner again, passing the black jug. Only one of them took any bread, and that was to sop up the last red elements from inside his glass. He wiped the bread around like a cloth, then stuffed it into his mouth. I sipped my wine. Zeev, seen from the side of my left eye, seemed to touch nothing. He merely sat there. He didn’t seem to look at me. I was glad of that.

Then the man called Constantine said loudly, “Better get on with your supper, Wolf, or she’ll think you already found it in the woods. And among her clan that just isn’t done.”

And some of them sniggered a little, softly. I wanted to hurl my glass at the wall — or at all their individual heads.

But Zeev said, “What, you mean this on my T-shirt?” He too sounded amused.

I put down my unfinished bread and got up. I glanced around at them, at him last of all.

“I hope you’ll excuse me. I’ve been traveling and I’m tired.” Then I looked straight at him. Somehow it was shocking to do so. “And good night, Zeev. Now we’ve finally met.”

He said nothing. None of them did.

I walked out of the conservatory, crossed the large room beyond, and headed for the staircase.

Wolf. They even called him that.

Wolf.

“Wait,” he said, just behind me.

I can move almost noiselessly and very fast, but not as noiseless and sudden as he apparently could. Before I could prevent it, I spun around wide-eyed. There he stood, less than three feet from me. He was expressionless, but when he spoke now his voice, actor trained, I thought, was very musical. “Daisha Severin, I’m sorry. I’ve made a bad start with you.”

“You noticed.”

“Will you come with me — just upstairs — to the library? We can talk there without the rest of them making up an audience.”

“Why do we want to? Talk, I mean.”

“We should, I think. And maybe you’ll be gracious enough to humor me.”

“Maybe I’ll just tell you to go to hell.”

“Oh, there,” he said. He smiled. “No. I’d never go there. Too bright, too hot.”

“Fuck off,” I said.

I was seven steps up the stairs when I found him beside me. I stopped again.

“Give me,” he said, “one minute.”

“I’ve been told I have to give you my entire life,” I said. “And then I have to give you children, too, I nearly forgot. Kids who can survive in full daylight, just like me. I think that’s enough, isn’t it, Zeev Duvalle? You don’t need a silly little minute from me when I have to give you all the rest.”

He let me go then.

I ran up the stairs.

When I reached the upper landing, I looked back down, between a kind of elation and a sort of horror. But he had vanished. The part-lit spaces of the house again seemed void of anything alive, except for me.

Juno. I dreamed about her that night. I dreamed she was in a jet-black cave where water dripped, and she held a dead child in her arms and wept.

The child was me, I suppose. What she had feared the most when they, my house of Severin, made her carry me out into the oncoming dawn, to see how much, if anything, I could stand. Just one minute. What he had asked for, too, Zeev. I hadn’t granted it to him. But she — and I — had had no choice.

When I survived sunrise, she was at first very glad. But then, when I began to keep asking, “When can I see the light again?” Then, oh then. Then she began to lose me, and I her, my tall, red-haired, blue-eyed mother.

She never told me, but it’s simple to work out. The more I took to daylight, the more I proved I was a true sun-born, the more she lost me, and I lost her. She herself could stand two or three hours, every week or so. But she hated the light, the sun. They terrified her, and when I turned out so able to withstand them, even to like and. want them, then the doors of her heart shut fast against me.

Juno hated me just as she hated the light of the sun. She hated me, loathed me, loathes me, my mother.

About three weeks went by. The pines darkened and the other trees turned to copper and bronze and shed like tall cats their fur of leaves. I went on walks about the estate. No one either encouraged or dissuaded me. They had then nothing they wanted to hide from me? But I don’t drive, and so there was a limit to how far I could go and get back again in the increasingly chilly evenings. By day, anyway, there seemed little activity, in the house or outside it. I started sleeping later in the mornings so I could stay up at night fully alert, sometimes until four or five. It was less that I was checking on what went on in the house castle of Duvalle than that I was uncomfortable so many of them were around, and active, when I lay asleep. There was a lock on my door. I always used it. I put a chair against it, too, with the back under the door handle. It wasn’t Zeev I was worried about. No one, in particular. Just the complete feel and atmosphere of that place. At Severin there had been several who were mostly or totally nocturnal — my mother, for one. But also quite a few like me who, even if they couldn’t take much direct sunlight, as I could, still preferred to be about by day.

A couple of times during my outdoor excursions in daylight, I did find clearings in the woods, with small houses, vines, orchards, fields with a harvest already collected. I even once saw some men with a flock of sheep. Neither sheep nor men took any notice of me. No doubt they had been warned a new Wife of Alliance was here, and shown what she looked like.

The marriage had been set for the first night of the following month. The ceremony would be brief, unadorned, simply a legalization. Marriages in most of the houses were like this. Nothing especially celebratory, let alone religious, came into them.

I thought I’d resigned myself. But of course, I hadn’t. As for him, Zeev Duvalle, I’d been “meeting” him generally only at dinner — those barren awful dinners where good manners seemed to demand I attend. Sometimes I was served meat — I alone. A crystal bowl of fruit had appeared — for me. I ate with difficulty amid their “fastidious” contempt. I began a habit of removing pieces of fruit to eat later in my rooms. He was only ever polite. He would unsmilingly and bleakly offer me bread and wine, water. Sometimes I did drink the blood. I needed to. To me it had a strange taste, which maybe I imagined.

During the night, now and then, I might see him about the house, playing chess with one of the others, listening to music or reading in the library, talking softly on a telephone. Three or four times I saw him from an upper window, outside and running in long wolflike bounds between the trees, the paleness of his hair like a beam blown off the face of the moon.

Hunting?

I intended to get married in black. Like the girl in the Chekhov play, I too was in mourning for my life. That night I hung the dress outside the closet and put the black pumps below, ready for tomorrow. No jewelry.

Also I made a resolve not to go down to their dire dinner. To the older woman who read novels at the table and laughed smugly, secretively at things in them; the vile man with his bread cloth in the glass. The handful of others, some of whom never turned up regularly anyhow, their low voices murmuring to one another about past times and people known only to them. And him. Zeev. Him. He drank from his glass very couthly, unlike certain others. Sometimes a glass of water, or some wine — for him usually red, as if it must pretend to be blood. He had dressed more elegantly since the first night, but always his clothes were quiet. There was one dark white shirt, made of some sort of velvety material, with bone-color buttons. He looked beautiful. I could have killed him. We’re easy to kill — car crashes, bullets — though we can live, Tyfa had once said, even a thousand years. But that’s probably one more lie.

However, tonight I wouldn’t go down there. I’d eat up here, the last apple and the dried cherries.

About ten thirty, a knock on my door.

I jumped, more because I expected it than because I was startled. I put down the book I’d been reading, the Chekhov plays, and said, “Who is it?” Knowing who it was.

“May I come in?” he asked, formal and musical, alien.

“I’d rather you left me alone,” I said.

He said, without emphasis, “All right, Daisha. I’ll go down to the library. No one else will be there. There’ll be fresh coffee. I’ll wait for you until midnight. Then I have things I have to do.”

I’d gotten up and crossed to the door. I said through it, with a crackling venom that surprised me, I’d thought I had it leashed, “Things to do? Oh, when you go out hunting animals and rip them apart in the woods for proper fresh blood, that kind of thing, do you mean?”

There was silence. Then, “I’ll wait till midnight,” he flatly said.

Then he was gone, I knew, though I never heard him leave.

When I walked into the library it was after eleven, and I was wearing my wedding dress and shoes. I told him what they were.

“It’s supposed to be unlucky, isn’t it,” I said, “for the groom to see the bride in her dress before the wedding. But there’s no luck to spoil, is there?”

He was sitting in one of the chairs by the fire, his long legs stretched out. He’d put on jeans and a sweater and boots for the excursion later. A leather jacket hung from the chair.

The coffee was still waiting, but it would be cold by now. Even so, he got up, poured me a cup, brought it to me. He managed — he always managed this — to hand it to me without touching me.

Then he moved away and stood by the hearth, gazing across at the high walls of books.

“Daisha,” he said, “I think I understand how uncomfortable and angry you are — ”

“Do you?”

“ — but can I ask that you listen. Without interrupting or storming out of the room — ”

“Oh, for God’s — ”

“Daisha.” He turned his eyes on me. From glass green, they too had become almost white. He was flaming mad, anyone could see, but unlike me, he’d controlled it. He used it, like a cracking whip spattering electricity across the room. And at the same time — the pain in his face. The closed-in pain and. was it only frustration, or despair? That was what held me, or I’d have walked out, as he said. I stood there stunned, and thought, He hurts as I do. Why? Who did this to him? God, he hates the idea of marrying me as much as I hate it. Or — he hates the way he — we — are being used.

“Okay,” I said. I sat down on a chair. I put the cold coffee on the floor. “Talk. I’ll listen.”

“Thank you,” he said.

A huge old clock ticked on the mantelpiece above the fire. Tock-tock-tock. Each note a second. Sixty now. That minute he’d asked from me before. Or the minute when Juno held me in the sunrise, shaking.

“Daisha. I’m well aware you don’t want to be here, let alone with me. I hoped you wouldn’t feel that way, but I’m not amazed you do. You had to leave your own house, where you had familiar people, love, stability” — I had said I’d keep quiet; I didn’t argue — “and move into this fucking monument to a castle, and be ready to become the partner of some guy you never saw except in a scrap of a movie. I’ll be honest. The moment I saw the photos of you, I was drawn to you. I stupidly thought, This is a beautiful, strong woman who I’d like to know. Maybe we can make something of this prearranged mess. I meant make something for ourselves, you and me. Kids were — are — the last thing on my mind. We’d have a long time, after all, to reach a decision on that. But you. I was. looking forward to meeting you. And I would have been there, to meet you. Only something happened. No. Not some compulsion I have to go out and tear animals apart and drink them in the forest. Daisha,” he said, “have you been to look at the waterfall?”

I stared. “Only from the car. ”

“There’s one of our human families there. I had to go and — ” He broke off. He said, “The people in this house have switched right off, like computers without any electric current. I grew up here. It was hell. Yeah, that place you wanted me to go to. Only not bright or fiery, just — dead. They’re dead here. Living dead. Undead, just what they say in the legends, in that bloody book Dracula. But I am not dead. And nor are you. Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “your name, Daisha — the way it sounds. Day — sha. Beautiful. Just as you are.”

He had already invited me to speak, so perhaps I could offer another comment. I said, “But you can’t stand the light.”

“No, I can’t. Which doesn’t mean I don’t crave the light. When I was two years old, they took me out — my dad led me by the hand. He was fine with an hour or so of sunlight. I was so excited — looking forward to it. I remember the first colors — ” He shut his eyes, opened them. “Then the sun came up. I never saw it after all. The first true light — I went blind. My skin. I don’t remember properly. Just darkness and agony and terror. Just one minute. My body couldn’t take even that. I was ill for ten months. Then I started to see again. After ten months. But I’ve seen daylight since, of course I have, on film, in photographs. I’ve read about it. And music — Ravel’s ‘Sunrise,’ from that ballet. Can you guess what it’s like to long for daylight, to be. in love with daylight. and you can never see it for real, never feel the warmth, smell the scents of it, or properly hear the sounds, except on a screen, off a CD — never? When I saw you, you’re like that, like real daylight. Do you know what I said to my father when I started to recover, after those ten months, those thirty seconds of dawn? Why, I said to him, why is light my enemy, why does it want to kill me? Why light?”

Zeev turned away. He said to the sunny bright hearth, “And you’re the daylight, too, Daisha. And you’ve become my enemy. Daisha,” he said, “I release you. We won’t marry. I’ll make it clear to all of them, Severin first, that any fault is all with me. There’ll be no bad thing they can level at you. So, you’re free. I regret so much the torment I’ve unwillingly, selfishly put you through. I’m sorry, Daisha. And now, God knows, it’s late and I have to go out. It’s not rudeness, I hope you’ll accept that now. Please trust me. Go upstairs and sleep well. Tomorrow you can go home.”

I sat like a block of concrete. Inside I felt shattered by what he had said. He pulled on his jacket and started toward the door, and only then I stood up. “Wait.”

“I can’t.” He didn’t look at me. “I’m sorry. Someone. needs me. Please believe me. It’s true.”

And I heard myself say, “Some human girl?”

That checked him. He looked at me, face a blank. “What?”

“The human family you seem to have to be with — by the fall? Is that it? You want a human woman, not me.”

Then he laughed. It was raw, and real, that laughter. He came back and caught my hands. “Daisha — my Day — you’re insane. All right. Come with me and see. We’ll have to race.”

But my hands tingled; my heart was in a race already.

I looked up into his face, he down into mine. The night hesitated, shifted. He let go my hands, and I flew out and up the stairs. Dragging off that dress, I tore the sleeve at the shoulder, but I left it lying with the shoes. Inside fifteen more minutes we were sprinting, side by side, along the track. There was no excuse for this, no rational reason. But I had seen him, seen, as if sunlight had streamed through the black lid of the night and shown him to me for the first time, light that was his enemy, and my mother’s, never mine.

The moon was low by then, and stroked the edges of the waterfall. It was like liquid aluminum, and its roar packed the air full as a sort of deafness. The human house was about a mile off, tucked in among the dense black columns of the pines.

A youngish, fair-haired woman opened the door. Her face lit up the instant she saw him, no one could miss that. “Oh, Zeev,” she said, “he’s so much better. Our doctor says he’s mending fantastically well. But come in.”

It was a pleasing room, low ceilinged, with a dancing fire. A smart black cat with a white vest and mittens sat upright in an armchair, giving the visitors a thoughtful frowning scrutiny.

“Will you go up?” the woman asked.

“Yes,” Zeev said. He smiled at her, and added, “This is Daisha Severin.”

“Oh, are you Daisha? It’s good of you to come out too,” she told me. Zeev had already gone upstairs. The human woman returned to folding towels at a long table.

“Isn’t it very late for you?” I questioned.

“We keep late hours. We like the nighttime.”

I had been aware that this was often the case at Severin. But I’d hardly ever spoken much to humans — I wasn’t sure now what I should say. But she continued to talk to me, and overhead I heard a floorboard creak; Zeev would not have caused that. The man was there, evidently, the one who was “mending.”

“It happened just after sunset,” the woman said, folding a blue towel over a green one. “Crazy accident — the chain broke. Oh, God, when they brought him home, my poor Emil — ” Her voice faltered and grew hushed. Above also a hushed voice was speaking, barely audible even to me. But she raised her face and it had stayed still rosy and glad, and her voice was fine again. “We telephoned up to the house, and Zeev came out at once. He did the wonderful thing. It worked. It always works when he does it.”

I stared at her. I was breathing quickly, frightened. “What,” I said, “what did he do?”

“Oh, but he’ll have told you,” she strangely reminded me. “The same as he did for Joel — and poor Arresh when he was sick with meningitis — ”

“You tell me,” I said. She blinked. “Please.”

“The blood,” she said, gazing at me a little apologetically, regretful to have confused me in some way she couldn’t fathom. “He gave them his blood to drink. It’s the blood that heals, of course. I remember when Zeev said to Joel, it’s all right, forget the stories — this won’t change you, only make you well. Zeev was only sixteen then himself. He’s saved five lives here. But no doubt he was too modest to tell you that. And with Emil, the same. It was shocking” — now she didn’t falter — “Zeev had to be here so quick — and he cut straight through his own sleeve to the vein, so it would be fast enough.” Blood on his sleeve, I thought. Vampires heal so rapidly. all done, only that little rusty mark. “And my Emil, my lovely man, he’s safe and alive, Daisha. Thanks to your husband.”

His voice called to me out of the dim roar of the waterfalling firelight, “Daisha, come up a minute.”

The woman folded an orange towel over a white one, and I numbly, speechlessly, climbed the stair, and Zeev said, “I have asked Emil, and he says, very kindly, he doesn’t object if you see how this is done.” So I stood in the doorway and watched as Zeev, with the help of a thin, clean knife, decanted and poured out a measure of his life blood into a mug, which had a picture on it of a cat, just like the smart black cat in the room below. And the smiling man, sitting on the bed in his dressing gown, raised the mug, and toasted Zeev, and drank the wild medicine down.

“We’re young,” he said to me, “we are both of us genuinely young. You’re seventeen, aren’t you? I’m twenty-seven. We are the only actual young here. And the rest of them, as I said, switched off. But we can do something, not only for ourselves, Day, but for our people. Or my people, if you prefer. Or any people. Humans. Don’t you think that’s fair, given what they do, knowingly or not, for us?”

We had walked back, slowly, along the upper terraces by the black abyss of the ravine, sure-footed, omnipotent. Then we sat together on the forest’s edge and watched the silver tumble of the fall. It had no choice. It had to fall, and go on falling forever, in love with the unknown darkness below, unable and not wanting to stop.

I kept thinking of the little blood mark on his sleeve that night, what I’d guessed, and what instead was true. And I thought of Juno, with her obsessive wasted tiny blood-drop offerings in the “shrine,” to a man she had no longer loved. As she no longer loved me.

She hates me because I have successful sun-born genes and can live in daylight. But Zeev, who can’t take even thirty seconds of the sun, doesn’t hate me for that. He. he doesn’t hate me at all.

“So will you go back to Severin tomorrow?” he said to me as we sat at the brink of the night.

“No.”

“Daisha, even when they’ve married us, please believe this: If you still want to go away, I won’t put obstacles in your path. I will back you up.”

“You care so little.”

“So much.”

His eyes glowed in the dark. They put the waterfall to shame.

When he touched me, touches me, I know him. From long ago, I remember this incredible joy, this heat and burning, this refinding rightness — and I fall down into the abyss forever, willing as the shining water. I never loved before. Except Juno, but she cured me of that.

He is a healer. His blood can heal, its vampiric vitality transmissible — but noninvasive. From his gift come no substandard replicants of our kind. They only — live.

Much, much later, when we parted just before the dawn inside the house — parted till the next night, our wedding day — it came to me that if he can heal by letting humans drink his blood, perhaps I might offer him some of my own. Because my blood might help him to survive the daylight, even if only for one unscathed and precious minute.

I’ll wear green to be married. And a necklace of sea green glass.

As the endless day trails by, unable to sleep, I’ve written this.

When he touched me, when he kissed me, Zeev, whose name actually means “wolf,” became known to me. I don’t believe he’ll have to live all his long, long life without ever seeing the sun. For that was what he reminded me of. His warmth, his kiss, his arms about me — my first memory of that golden light that blew upward through the dark. No longer any fear, which anyway was never mine, only that glorious familiar excitement and happiness, that welcomed danger. Perhaps I am wrong in this. Perhaps I shall pay heavily and cruelly for having been deceived. And for deceiving myself, too, because I realized what he was to me the moment I saw him — why else put up such barricades? Zeev is my sunrise out of the dark of the night of my so-far useless life. Yes, then. I love him.