Fledgling(23)

“You did, yes. You were born here. Doesn’t this setting stir any memories?”

“No memories. Only a feeling that I’m somehow connected to this place. I came here when I was able to leave the cave where I woke up, but I didn’t know why. It was as though my feet just brought me here.”

“Home,” he said. “For you, this was home.”

I nodded. “But you don’t live here?”

He looked surprised. “No. We don’t live males and females together as humans do.”

I swallowed, then asked the question I had to ask: “What are we?”

“Vampires, of course—not that we call ourselves by that name.” He smiled, showing his very human-looking teeth, except for the canines, which looked a little longer and sharper than the other people’s, as my own did. If his teeth were like mine, they were all sharper than other people’s. They had to be. He said, “We have very little in common with the vampire creatures Bram Stoker described in Dracula, but we are long-lived blood drinkers.” He looked at Wright. “You knew what she was, didn’t you?”

Wright nodded. “I knew she needed blood to live.”

Iosif sighed, then spoke wearily as though he were saying something he had to say too many times before. “We live alongside, yet apart from, human beings, except for those humans who become our symbionts. We have much longer lives than humans. Most of us must sleep during the day and, yes, we need blood to live. Human blood is most satisfying to us, and fortunately, we don’t have to injure the humans we take it from. But we are born as we are. We can’t magically convert humans into our kind. We do keep those who join with us healthier, stronger, and harder to kill than they would be without us. In that way, we lengthen their lives by several decades.”

That got Wright’s attention. “How long?” he asked.

“How long will you live?”

“Yes.”

Iosif took a deep breath, then said, “Barring accident or homicide, chances are you’ll live to be between 170 and 200 years old.”

“Two hundred … I will? Healthy years?”

“Yes. Your immune system will be greatly strengthened by Shori’s venom, and it will be less likely to turn on you and give you one of humanity’s many autoimmune diseases. And her venom will help keep your heart and circulatory system healthy. Your health is important to her.”

“Sounds too good to be true.”

“It is mutualistic symbiosis. You know you’re joined with her.”

Wright nodded. “It scares me a little. I want it to be with her, need to be with her, even though I don’t really understand what I’m getting into.” After a moment, he asked, “How long do your kind live?”

“Long,” Iosif said. “Although we’re not immortal anymore than you are. How old do you think your Shori is?”

“I’ve been calling her Renee,” he said. “I’m Wright Hamlin, by the way.”

“How old is she?”

“I thought she was maybe ten or eleven when I met her. Later, I knew she had to be older, even though she didn’t look it. Maybe eighteen or nineteen?”

Iosif smiled without humor. “That would make things legal at least.”

Wright’s face went red, and I looked from him to Iosif, not understanding.

“Don’t worry, Wright,” Iosif said after a moment. “In fact, Shori is a child. She has at least one more important growth stage to go through before she’s old enough to bear children. Her child-bearing years will begin when she’s about seventy. In all, she should live about five hundred years. Right now, she’s fifty-three.”

Wright opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything. He just stared, first at Iosif, then at me. I knew that Wright was twenty-three, sexually mature, and aware of much that went on in the world. If Iosif was telling the truth, I was almost twice Wright’s age, and yet I knew almost nothing. Someone had taken away most of my fifty-three years of life.

“Who did this?” I asked, gesturing at the ruin. “Who set the fire? Did anyone else survive?”

“I wasn’t here,” Iosif said. “I don’t know who did it. And I haven’t found … any other survivors. I’ve arranged for the other people who live in this area to keep their eyes open.”

That got my attention. “You were careless. Raleigh Curtis wasn’t just keeping his eyes open. He was going to shoot Wright. He did shoot me.”

“Accident. He didn’t know you were one of us. If he’d seen you clearly, he wouldn’t have fired.”

“Why would he want to shoot Wright?”

“He didn’t know Wright was with you.”

“Iosif, why shoot anyone over this rubble? Only the people who did this should be punished.”

He stared at me. “Someone burned your mothers and your sisters as well as all of the human members of your family to death here. They shot the ones who tried to get out, shot them and threw most of them back into the fire. How you escaped, I have no idea, but we found the others, burned, broken … My people and I found them. We were coming for a visit, and we actually arrived before the firemen, which meant we were able to get control of them and see to it that they recalled this place as abandoned. When the fire was out, we cleaned up and covered up because we didn’t want the remains examined by the coroner. We searched the area for several nights, hunting for survivors and questioning the local humans, finding out what they knew and seeing to it that they only remembered things that wouldn’t expose or damage us. In fact, the neighbors didn’t know anything. So we didn’t catch the killers. We thought, though, that some of them might come back to enjoy remembering what they’d done. Criminals have done that in the past.”