I can move almost noiselessly and very fast, but not as noiseless and sudden as he apparently could. Before I could prevent it, I spun around wide-eyed. There he stood, less than three feet from me. He was expressionless, but when he spoke now his voice, actor trained, I thought, was very musical. “Daisha Severin, I’m sorry. I’ve made a bad start with you.”
“You noticed.”
“Will you come with me — just upstairs — to the library? We can talk there without the rest of them making up an audience.”
“Why do we want to? Talk, I mean.”
“We should, I think. And maybe you’ll be gracious enough to humor me.”
“Maybe I’ll just tell you to go to hell.”
“Oh, there,” he said. He smiled. “No. I’d never go there. Too bright, too hot.”
“Fuck off,” I said.
I was seven steps up the stairs when I found him beside me. I stopped again.
“Give me,” he said, “one minute.”
“I’ve been told I have to give you my entire life,” I said. “And then I have to give you children, too, I nearly forgot. Kids who can survive in full daylight, just like me. I think that’s enough, isn’t it, Zeev Duvalle? You don’t need a silly little minute from me when I have to give you all the rest.”
He let me go then.
I ran up the stairs.
When I reached the upper landing, I looked back down, between a kind of elation and a sort of horror. But he had vanished. The part-lit spaces of the house again seemed void of anything alive, except for me.
Juno. I dreamed about her that night. I dreamed she was in a jet-black cave where water dripped, and she held a dead child in her arms and wept.
The child was me, I suppose. What she had feared the most when they, my house of Severin, made her carry me out into the oncoming dawn, to see how much, if anything, I could stand. Just one minute. What he had asked for, too, Zeev. I hadn’t granted it to him. But she — and I — had had no choice.
When I survived sunrise, she was at first very glad. But then, when I began to keep asking, “When can I see the light again?” Then, oh then. Then she began to lose me, and I her, my tall, red-haired, blue-eyed mother.
She never told me, but it’s simple to work out. The more I took to daylight, the more I proved I was a true sun-born, the more she lost me, and I lost her. She herself could stand two or three hours, every week or so. But she hated the light, the sun. They terrified her, and when I turned out so able to withstand them, even to like and. want them, then the doors of her heart shut fast against me.
Juno hated me just as she hated the light of the sun. She hated me, loathed me, loathes me, my mother.
About three weeks went by. The pines darkened and the other trees turned to copper and bronze and shed like tall cats their fur of leaves. I went on walks about the estate. No one either encouraged or dissuaded me. They had then nothing they wanted to hide from me? But I don’t drive, and so there was a limit to how far I could go and get back again in the increasingly chilly evenings. By day, anyway, there seemed little activity, in the house or outside it. I started sleeping later in the mornings so I could stay up at night fully alert, sometimes until four or five. It was less that I was checking on what went on in the house castle of Duvalle than that I was uncomfortable so many of them were around, and active, when I lay asleep. There was a lock on my door. I always used it. I put a chair against it, too, with the back under the door handle. It wasn’t Zeev I was worried about. No one, in particular. Just the complete feel and atmosphere of that place. At Severin there had been several who were mostly or totally nocturnal — my mother, for one. But also quite a few like me who, even if they couldn’t take much direct sunlight, as I could, still preferred to be about by day.
A couple of times during my outdoor excursions in daylight, I did find clearings in the woods, with small houses, vines, orchards, fields with a harvest already collected. I even once saw some men with a flock of sheep. Neither sheep nor men took any notice of me. No doubt they had been warned a new Wife of Alliance was here, and shown what she looked like.
The marriage had been set for the first night of the following month. The ceremony would be brief, unadorned, simply a legalization. Marriages in most of the houses were like this. Nothing especially celebratory, let alone religious, came into them.
I thought I’d resigned myself. But of course, I hadn’t. As for him, Zeev Duvalle, I’d been “meeting” him generally only at dinner — those barren awful dinners where good manners seemed to demand I attend. Sometimes I was served meat — I alone. A crystal bowl of fruit had appeared — for me. I ate with difficulty amid their “fastidious” contempt. I began a habit of removing pieces of fruit to eat later in my rooms. He was only ever polite. He would unsmilingly and bleakly offer me bread and wine, water. Sometimes I did drink the blood. I needed to. To me it had a strange taste, which maybe I imagined.
During the night, now and then, I might see him about the house, playing chess with one of the others, listening to music or reading in the library, talking softly on a telephone. Three or four times I saw him from an upper window, outside and running in long wolflike bounds between the trees, the paleness of his hair like a beam blown off the face of the moon.
Hunting?
I intended to get married in black. Like the girl in the Chekhov play, I too was in mourning for my life. That night I hung the dress outside the closet and put the black pumps below, ready for tomorrow. No jewelry.
Also I made a resolve not to go down to their dire dinner. To the older woman who read novels at the table and laughed smugly, secretively at things in them; the vile man with his bread cloth in the glass. The handful of others, some of whom never turned up regularly anyhow, their low voices murmuring to one another about past times and people known only to them. And him. Zeev. Him. He drank from his glass very couthly, unlike certain others. Sometimes a glass of water, or some wine — for him usually red, as if it must pretend to be blood. He had dressed more elegantly since the first night, but always his clothes were quiet. There was one dark white shirt, made of some sort of velvety material, with bone-color buttons. He looked beautiful. I could have killed him. We’re easy to kill — car crashes, bullets — though we can live, Tyfa had once said, even a thousand years. But that’s probably one more lie.
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.