Teeth_ Vampire Tales - Ellen Datlow [138]
“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