Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [136]
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