Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [107]
“Did you ever have your portrait done?”
“I—” If he says “I forget” again, she’ll smack him. But a shadowy look passes across his face.
He did. People have drawn him, sketched him, even painted him. Maybe a student in a garret did a quick charcoal sketch of him asleep. Maybe a girl sitting in a garden somewhere tried to capture him in watercolors, a parasol shading her face.
He’s waited too long. He knows she knows. He doesn’t answer. He points at one of the knockoff purses.
“Look at that. Why would anyone in their right mind want anything in that color? It looks like how I feel with a hangover.”
Does he get hangovers? He did have a cold once, for a couple of hours. He said he picked it up on the street. And that people should be forced to wear tags on their collars saying, DON’T BITE ME, I’M DISEASED. He was fine the next day. If she could shake off a cold that quickly, she wouldn’t complain! He doesn’t drink, or eat anything regular, really. When they go out with her friends, he takes sips at his beer, but she always finishes it for him. He likes it when she drinks; he says it helps him sleep better. He’s learned to sleep at night, sort of. If she’s next to him. If she’s breathing slowly and deeply. Soft and warm.
His hair is long, and always smells a little of fresh snow.
She locks the door because she has a research paper due. She needs her sleep, and she needs her strength, and he’s hard on both of them. He leaves little tributes outside her door, iron-rich things like spinach salad with walnuts in takeaway boxes from the fancy bistro, and half bottles of red wine. Once he even left a steak, nicely cooked, wrapped in tinfoil.
She has no idea where he sleeps when he’s not with her. She really doesn’t want to know. Maybe he doesn’t sleep at all. Maybe sleep is another sensual luxury that he indulges in just for the pleasure with his lovers, like sex.
The truth is, she’s mad at him right now. She’s banging her brains against the library every night, reading through microfiche and digging around in books she needs to wear special gloves to open, trying to find out what happened to a nascent rebellion when the river froze, and wolves came down from the hills—or at least to make a reasonable argument that her theory about sumptuary laws and printing presses is correct.
But her arguments are stupid. Her theories have holes in them. Giant, fact-sized holes. The documentation’s just not there.
And so she spends day after day combing through files, and night after night poring over printed texts and unedited letters of people with bad handwriting and lousy crummy ink that fades after a mere three hundred years or so, most of it insanely boring. Looking for something that might not even be there, for evidence of a fact that may never have existed in the first place.
It’s not that she wants to be famous, or even to prove anything to anyone else, really. That would be nice, but that’s not it. She loves knowing about things that are gone. She wants so badly to know the truth.
And he knows. She knows he knows. He was there.
There’s his hair, for one thing. It’s about the right length for the period she’s researching, and it stays that way, captured, like the rest of his body, at the time of his transformation. Whenever he tries to cut it shorter—and of course, he let her try it once herself—it grows right back, almost overnight.
“I’m a self-regenerating organism,” he says proudly. Proud of his vocabulary, proud of his scientific factoids. Those, he doesn’t have any trouble remembering.
Was he a scholar, before? She can bet he wasn’t a peasant. Not that a peasant couldn’t have been born smart, and educated