Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [137]
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