One Must Hide

The Lost Boys

The cold had turned biting by the time they pulled into the courtyard of the old farmhouse. As the Boys put their bikes away, Robin noticed the film of condensation freezing on her car windscreen. She hoped there was some de-icer left in the can on the back seat. Then she marvelled at the prosaic thought.

Paul led the Lost Boys inside. He and Marko made appreciative noises at the warmth, rubbing their hands together as they vied to be first to the fire. Dwayne followed with more decorum, but Robin saw him close his eyes, as if to better enjoy the warmth of the flames.

“You feel the cold?” she asked David as he took off his coat and hung it over the banister of the stairs.

“We'll get to common misconceptions and urban myths soon enough,” he said. “Introductions first.”

Robin followed him into the sitting room. David turned to face her, indicating with a casual wave of his hand the eight familiar strangers lounging on sofas and in armchairs. “Our associates.”

A lanky, nondescript fellow unfolded himself from his chair. He didn't quite stand to attention, but held himself with a certain conscious stiffness as he came alongside David. Nondescript was an unkindness, Robin thought, reviewing her first impression. Something of the Boys' keen vigilance and self-confidence reflected in this man's eyes, too. He suffered only by comparison to the Lost Boys themselves.

“This is Lucas,” David told her.

Lucas regarded her with interest, but made no attempt to offer a hand. Robin took her cue from David's expectant silence. She returned Lucas' curious scrutiny. “I've seen you around, haven't I?”

“Around and about,” he replied, breaking into a surprisingly open grin.

“You've been at the bar?” Robin guessed.

He nodded. “Sometimes we overlap.”

“And you're....” Robin stopped. The word still didn't taste quite comfortable.

“A vampire?” Lucas shrugged amiably. “Who isn't?”

“Lucas looks after our connections,” David interceded, as smoothly as only he could. “He keeps them in line.”

The jovial tone of David's voice convinced Robin that he wasn't joking at all, and she wondered at the carefully detached epithets. She looked beyond Lucas, and felt in David's associates that same lesser presence, as though the essence of what set the Lost Boys apart were dilute in those they didn't quite call their friends.

Lucas began to name names, and Robin listened as attentively as she could while still keeping half an eye and half an ear on David. Kyle acknowledged her with a sleepy nod that didn't fool her for a moment. Alexander, slight and dark, feigned disinterest, but his eyes kept darting back to her face. Carl blinked too much. Josh didn't blink at all. Tyler mumbled something unintelligible from around a badly-rolled cigarette. Don swept shaggy red hair out of his eyes to greet her but it soon fell back across his face. And Karen, known as Kae, the only girl, observed Robin with the air of one sizing up the competition.

They all looked to be in their twenties or younger, but otherwise the only characteristic they shared was a marked removal from the Lost Boys in attitude and dress. Design or coincidence? Design, Robin decided. David had put a clear delineation on the relationship between the two elements. It would have been presumptuous for these lesser vampires to dress and behave like the Lost Boys. She wondered who they were.

Introductions complete, Lucas looked to David. Robin didn't catch it, but David must have given some sort of cue. Lucas motioned with his head and the seven members of his retinue got up from their places, with varying degrees of alacrity. “Well,” he said to Robin, “we'll be seeing you.”

Robin worked hard to refrain from asking where they were going. She sensed that taking too great an interest would be inappropriate. But she couldn't resist, as Lucas brought up the rear of his group, saying, “Don't stay out too early.”

Several of the lesser vampires looked back at her, clearly surprised. Then Lucas laughed and nodded. “We won't.”

They sounded for all the world like any normal group of people going out for an evening as they wrestled with their coats and piled outside. Moments later the noise of engines – cars, not motorcycles – broke the isolated peace, and thin slivers of light showed at the edges of the heavy curtains. Car doors slammed, and then light and noise faded gradually into the distance.

“Now we have some peace,” said David.

He was lighting himself a cigarette. Paul already had one dangling from his mouth: he had stolen David's chair, and reclined in it, stretching out his long legs towards the fire. David offered the pack to Robin and she started to shake her head. Then she wondered if a cigarette might not steady her a bit. She accepted, and let David provide the light.

“I thought you didn't smoke,” he said.

“I don't. Doesn't mean I never have.” Robin took a long drag to prove it. Maybe it didn't steady her nerves, but it gave her hands something to do.

David seemed to accept that. “Why don't you sit down,” he invited. “Make yourself at home.”

Of all the things he'd asked of her that night, it seemed the least insane. Robin reclaimed her chair from before, careful not to trip over Paul's feet. “Lucas,” she said at last. “Who is he?”

“He's the leader of our under-rank,” said David, “but that's jumping ahead.” He paused, as if deciding where to begin. “There have always been vampires, Robin. Our kind has existed since human records began. Since before then, actually. Our own records go back farther still.”

“God, David,” said Paul, not opening his eyes, “you make this boring. Dwayne tells it better.”

To Robin's surprise, David accepted the criticism with equanimity. “Dwayne?”

Dwayne stirred from where he had been leaning against the end of the mantel. The firelight edged his handsome profile in gold. “Vampires have been around for a long time,” he said, with creditable brevity. “And so have vampire myths. Most of them are inaccurate.”

“Do the undead one,” Marko implored.

“Shut up, Marko.”

“It's pretty important, Paul!”

“Let Dwayne tell it his way.”

Dwayne went on. “We're not dead, the undead, the walking dead -”

“Dawn of the Dead,” Marko put in helpfully.

“Shut up!”

“Children,” David said mildly.

The look Dwayne shot Robin was tolerant of the interruption. “We breathe, we eat, we sleep. We sweat when we're hot and shiver when we're cold. But we don't age. We can't get sick. And we don't die easily.”

“Then you can die,” Robin said softly.

Dwayne's eyes tightened minutely. “Sunlight is death to us,” he said. “Silver burns. Wood through the heart is fatal. We can't recover from decapitation, and fire can destroy us beyond our ability to regenerate.”

“Holy water?” Robin asked. “Crosses?”

“Myth.” Then, without changing expression, he added, “Draw whatever theological conclusions you like.”

Robin shook her head, but she couldn't help smiling at the subtlety of his humour.

“There's one other thing,” he said. “We can starve.”

He elaborated no further, but let the words hang. Robin shifted uneasily in her place, struck again by Dwayne's exquisite dark looks. The observation seemed incongruous until she realised she was trying to imagine him as the killer he so obliquely implied.

“How often?” she asked finally.

“For us,” he said, “about once a week.”

Unasked, Robin's mind did the calculation. She tried to ignore it. “You...” She steeled herself to say the word. “Kill someone. Every week.”

The crackling flames seemed suddenly deafening in the silence. Dwayne's black eyes neither explained nor apologised.

“How do you explain it?” Robin heard herself burst out. “I mean, sixteen people a month. Sixteen! Why doesn't anyone notice? Why doesn't anyone realise?”

David spoke then, and Robin had to jerk her eyes away from Dwayne's, startled by the interruption. “There are many invisible people in the world, Robin,” he said. “Those who are not missed.”

Robin tried to sort out her feelings. Outrage, disgust...fascination. And as she acknowledged that last reaction, she realised that both outrage and disgust were thinly veneered on the same part of her that had accepted the sensation of flight as familiar. Her instincts recognised what her rational mind still struggled to comprehend. The disparity unsettled her more than anything the Boys had told or shown her.

“And if you don't kill?” she asked, though she knew that on some level she already had the answer. “What then?”

“We die,” said Paul.

He had opened his eyes. His cigarette hung forgotten from his fingers, trailing smoke. He sprawled in his chair, at once tense and relaxed, and stared at Robin with that inimitable hint of storm front.

“Eventually,” said David.

He began to walk the length of the room, hands clasped behind his back. When he got to the end, he turned, and said, “I saw what was left of a vampire who starved to death, once. He'd chewed the veins out of his own wrists.”

He said it not nastily, but with words chosen for their impact. The English student in Robin admired his vivid use of language, even as she recoiled at the gruesome image. “I understand what you're saying,” she said. “You don't have a choice.”

“We have a choice,” David corrected her. “We can choose death.”

“Some would call that the only moral option,” Robin said, taking up the argument almost despite herself.

“Morality is relative,” he replied. “The fragile construct of a complacent society.”

“Fragile?”

“When survival is at stake, it's the first thing to go.”

“Cynic,” she accused him.

“Realist.”

Robin bought herself a moment to collect her thoughts with a long drag on her neglected cigarette. “You don't feel any remorse?”

“You eat meat,” David pointed out. “Do you?”

“It's not the same.”

“Isn't it?”

She glared at him. “People aren't cows.”

“Aren't they?” he asked lightly.

He meant it. Robin perceived that at once. She studied him carefully, but his expression gave no more away. “If people are cows,” she said, “that makes me one of the herd.”

David dismissed that suggestion with a snort. As he walked off towards the hall, he said over his shoulder, “Hardly.”

Robin watched him go, wondering if he expected her to follow him. The others didn't seem to have reacted to their leader's departure. “All right,” she said slowly. “How many of you are there?”

“Vampires?” Marko asked. “Altogether? Dunno. Changes too much.”

Robin looked at Dwayne. He barely nodded to her appeal. “The safe ratio is something like one in five million,” he said.

“One vampire per five million humans?”

“Well,” he amended, “one of us per five million humans. Twelve hundred or so worldwide. That doesn't count Lucas' kind, but that population self-regulates anyway.”

Robin tried to untangle that meaning, and shook her head. “You've lost me, there. Lucas' kind? He said they were vampires.”

“Lesser vampires,” said Dwayne.

“You'd better explain,” Paul observed.

Dwayne shrugged fluidly. “Not much to it. When a new vampire is turned he goes one way or another: greater, like us, or lesser, like Lucas. Lesser vampires are –”

“Of little consequence,” said David.

Dwayne's eyes flicked sideways at the interruption, though neither Paul nor Marko seemed surprised by David's reappearance.

“That's why they attach themselves to greater vampires,” David continued in a conversational tone. “We offer them a certain amount of guidance. Protection.”

“From what?” Robin asked.

“Themselves,” he replied.

“And what do you get out of it?”

“Cynic,” he said, eyes gleaming.

“Very good.”

“Muscle,” David said, without missing a step. “There are times when numbers count.”

“Like when someone's trying to kill you?” she tried.

“Like then,” he agreed pleasantly.

A thump broke David's portentous silence. Marko looked from the chunk of wood he'd just thrown onto the fire to David and then to Robin, wiping his hands on his jeans and wearing an exaggeratedly innocent expression. Robin realised he'd done it on purpose, and wondered why. To lighten the atmosphere? To irritate David? Or to lend her some tacit support by interfering with David's expert manipulation of mood and tone?

“We're territorial,” said Dwayne, and something in the way he picked up his explanation made Robin sense that he, too, was on her side. “The established ranks mostly respect each other's holdings, but new ranks sometimes try to invade existing territories. Then we fight.”

“ Santa Cruz is your territory,” Robin said. When Dwayne nodded, she asked, “What's stopping rivals from invading while you're away?”

“ Santa Cruz is secure.”

His complete assurance told Robin that there was more to it than that, but she pressed on with the discrepancy she had noticed. “What about here? Doesn't this area belong to someone?”

Dwayne just looked at her. Robin looked from him to David. David had the tiniest smile on his face.

“Jesus Christ,” said Paul, in a voice heavy with disgust. “We agreed to cut this bull. Robin, we killed the vampires who were here before. This was their place. Now it's ours.” He came suddenly to his feet, scowling down at Robin. “And if you got a problem with that you shouldn't be here.” Then, as if taken aback by the vehemence of his own outburst, he turned and stalked out of the room.

“Chill out, bro!” Marko shouted after him.

Robin realised that her head hurt, the blood throbbing behind her eyes in pace with her heartbeat. Beer on an empty stomach probably hadn't been a good idea. But then neither had coming to a lair of vampires, or proving herself by stepping off a cliff. And yet she had, and she had, and instead of disbelief or panic or fear she just felt overwhelmed. Whimsy led her to wonder if the headache was a result of trying to take in too much at once: the information jostling for room. The Boys were clearly skating over subjects, and her mind jumped so quickly from question to question that she couldn't get a fraction of them out.

“The film,” she said at last, grabbing onto that conundrum. “What…I mean, how? Why?”

David took the seat Paul had vacated. “We were young,” he said, with a touch of indulgence for his youthful self. He raised his eyebrows. “As a race, vampires have been trying to keep a low profile for centuries. We wanted to buck the trend.”

“It made us a few enemies,” Dwayne said dryly.

“And a comfortable living,” David went on, “if you'll forgive the pun.”

Robin looked at him blankly for a moment. Then comprehension struck. “Royalties?”

David's eyes flashed. “Our box office cut alone has paid the bills for the last seventeen years.”

Funny, Robin reflected, how she hadn't even considered the question of where the Boys got their money. “But why aren't you recognised?” she pressed. “You're pretty conspicuous.”

“We're not recognised because we don't want to be,” David said.

“But…”

“Look at me, Robin,” he ordered her, and so compelling was the intensity of his gaze that Robin could not have disobeyed if she had tried. His eyes caught and held hers, the blackness of his pupils a night-time deeper and darker than any she had ever known.

And suddenly Robin was sitting opposite a stranger: a man she had never seen before, striking with his shock of bleached-blonde hair, but a stranger nonetheless. Robin stared at him, trying to remember what she was doing, how she'd got here, and most of all who this man was, but it was as though her mind and her memories couldn't connect.

“That's how, Robin,” he said, and abruptly he was David again.

Robin swallowed hard, and realised she'd been gripping the arms of her chair with both hands, her fingers digging into the leather. “What did you do?”

“He's just messing with your mind,” Marko said easily. “It's his party trick.”

“I told you,” David said. “There's more to being a vampire than you think.” He paused, regarding her with that calculating gaze of his. “Dwayne. Explain what we can do.”

The tall and dark Lost Boy flicked the butt end of his Marlboro Light into the fire. The movement reminded Robin of her own cigarette, and she hastily stubbed out an inch and a half of unsmoked ash. “Our abilities fall broadly into two areas,” Dwayne said. “Physical and mental. You've seen some of both.”

“Then flying is a physical ability?” Robin asked.

“No. Actually it's not.” Dwayne frowned fractionally, as if trying to choose words to define a difficult concept. “We heal fast. That's physical. We can see in almost pitch darkness; we have sharper hearing, a sharper sense of smell, than humans. We're stronger just by merit of what we are. Any lesser vampire has all of that. But lesser vampires can't fly, because flying isn't of the body; it's of the mind.”

The jingle of chains that accompanied Paul's return interrupted Dwayne's explanation. The tall blonde stomped unselfconsciously across the room and threw himself down on a sofa. He flung his head back and pretended sleep, but his brilliantly blue eyes betrayed him, gleaming azure.

“Just can't stay away, can you?” David said loudly. Paul ignored him.

“How does the flying work?” Robin asked Dwayne, determined to get at least a few straight answers.

“I can do this one,” Marko butted in. “Easy. You just make yourself lighter.”

“Less dense,” Dwayne corrected him.

There was a pun to be made there, but Robin was intent on the explanation. “How?”

Dwayne showed her a rare smile. “How does walking work?”

Robin blinked. “Well, you just put one foot in front of the other, and then…” She stopped, frowning, thinking about it. “Something to do with the way muscles and bones work together?”

He shrugged lithely. “We don't know either. We just do it.” He paused, and added, “Walking and flying.”

“But flying's harder.”

“Yes,” he said.

Robin thought about that. Then, slowly, she said, “You still haven't told me what David just did.” As she spoke, she noticed Paul sit up.

“Marko already has,” said David.

She looked at him, waiting for him to speak and, when he didn't, challenged him instead. “You control minds.”

“Ha.” David's eyes flashed cool green-blue. “Not 'control'. Convince.” He stopped, as if to savour the thought, and then went on, “It's all suggestion, Robin. Seeing things that aren't there, ignoring things that are... We can walk through Santa Cruz as ourselves, known as the Lost Boys, and no one connects us with the movie. We can make people forget, or remember -”

“And read their thoughts?” Robin accused, feeling suddenly defensive.

David grinned. “Sometimes,” he admitted.

He said no more, and his knowing eyes made Robin distinctly uncomfortable, until Paul abandoned all pretence of disinterest to burst out, “You're so full of shit, David.”

Marko sniggered, and even Dwayne had to stifle a chuckle, but David just laughed.”He's right,” he told Robin. “I can't read your thoughts. It's Dwayne you want to watch out for.”

Robin looked at Dwayne, startled, but the dark-haired Lost Boy shook his head. “Only emotions, Robin, and not often, not yours.” He hesitated, and then said neutrally, “Your defences are too good.”

It was a cryptic compliment, but a compliment nonetheless, and when Dwayne looked at David Robin sensed the change in the atmosphere. David slowly leaned forwards in his chair. “You're different, Robin,” he said.”You know you are.”

And that was it: the precursor to the proposition Robin had feared but not acknowledged from the moment she had even considered the possibility of the Boys being vampires. She drew herself up very straight and looked David directly in the eye. “No.”

His eyes flickered in what could have been surprise. “No?”

“No,” she repeated, more forcefully. “I don't want to be a vampire.”

He stilled, searching her face. “Of course you don't. Did you think I was offering?”

That threw Robin a bit. “Isn't that...” She let the sentence trail off, feeling foolish.

“What vampires do?” David shook his head, smiling. “Are you sure you haven't read Dracula yet?”

She folded her arms, irritated, and perversely disappointed. “What, then?”

David let the mirth fade from his face, and his words were a challenge and a seduction.”You're what we came for,” he said. “Be part of us.”

Later, Robin would remember how the world seemed to hold its breath in that moment, as though dependent on her answer. Later, she would recall meeting the eyes of each of the Lost Boys in turn: green, brown, black, blue. Only much later would she recognise the real implications of the decision she made in that brief, endless moment.

“I thought I already was,” she said.

For an instant the tension held. Then Marko snorted back a laugh, and crowed, “She's got you there, David!”

But Robin resisted the disarming effects of Marko's irreverence, keeping her attention on David. “It's true, though, isn't it?” she asked. “You made sure to suck me in and get me hooked before you let me get wind of what's really going on.”

“Then you are hooked,” he said.

It seemed such a redundant question, after everything Robin had done on David's say so, all she'd accepted at his word. But he seemed wholly intent on her answer, and Robin heard herself reply, “Would you believe me if I said I wasn't?”

“No,” he said, with a wolfish grin. “Not for a moment.”

His towering self-assurance should have been annoying, but it wasn't. Robin shook her head, as much at her own tolerance as at David's freshly smug demeanour. “I've still got questions,” she pointed out.

“Of course you have,” he said expansively. “You're curious by nature.”

“As I recall, that's what did for the cat,” she said, but the strain of the last few moments had evaporated. She felt light-headed, almost giddy with relief. Briefly, she wondered why she should, and then gave it up as a bad job. “God. I need another drink.”

He cocked his head to one side. “Anything else?”

Robin regarded him over the neck of her empty bottle, trying to decode the weighty implication in that question.

David lifted one hand with a flourish, and suddenly there was something small and silvery dangling from his fingers. “What about this?”

The earring flashed red as it caught the firelight. It was a dragon, tiny and perfect, each detail of sinuous body and lashing tail and fierce jaws meticulously crafted in the pale metal. Every tooth, every scale, glinted in fine relief, and its eyes, minute chips of topaz, gleamed balefully yellow. And as if looking up at the sky on a clear night and connecting the brightest stars in a constellation, Robin's eyes moved from the dragon in David's hand to the earring that hung against the hinge of his jaw. Marko's earring was a crescent moon; Dwayne's a long tooth in a setting of that same silvery metal that couldn't be silver; Paul's was almost lost in his hair, but still visible, shining dully.

“What is it?” Robin heard herself ask, from what seemed like a great distance.

Something in David's smile told her that he purposely misunderstood her question.”White gold,” he said. “Not silver.” The slightest movement of his fingers set the red-gold firelight dancing from the miniature dragon's eyes. “Do you want it?”

Yes, she thought, yes, I want it, but she felt a chill of premonition as she stretched out her hand to take the exquisite piece, and when David placed the earring in her palm a sudden shock of recognition made Robin physically flinch.

The dragon was heavy in her hand, impossibly heavy. She grabbed her wrist with her free hand, but the muscles of her arms already burned with the exertion, and she found herself short of breath. The world swam before her eyes.

And David took her by the chin, turning her head roughly to one side, his icy gaze calculating as he examined the dragon hanging from her left ear.

And Paul, propped on his elbow above her, touched it with one finger and asked her if she knew what she'd done.

And a sickening stab of pain lanced the side of her head as the dragon was torn from the flesh of her earlobe.

And it rang discordantly on the floor as she threw it violently away from her, and the dragon seemed to twist in grotesque fury as the heat of the flames melted away its features.

Robin thrust the dragon earring back into David's hands, snatching back her own. She could still feel the blistering heat of the molten metal searing into her palms, smell the sickly odour of burning flesh. “I can't!”

The flames crackled in the fireplace. A gust of wind rattled the shutters. Her own laboured breathing panted loud and harsh in the profound stillness.

“What did you see?” David asked in a low, avid voice.

Robin stared at him, incapable of articulating the terrifying breadth of sensations that had taken hold of her.

David surged forwards and seized her shoulders in an iron grip, shaking her as a wolf might shake a rabbit in his jaws. “What did you see?”

If he had intended to jolt her out of her distress he succeeded. Robin wrenched herself away and pushed back her chair, taking three steps away from the leader of the Lost Boys, realisation rapidly dawning. “What did you do, David? What the hell did you just do?” She could hear the break in her own voice; incredibly, she found she was near tears, but whether angry or hurt or afraid she didn't know.

“Nothing,” he said, and then, persuasively, “Tell me what you saw.”

“I don't believe you!” she cried, and stumbled another pace away.

David rose fluidly to his feet. “I don't know what you're talking about,” he said, with complete composure.

“I can't believe I trusted you,” Robin said, feeling her voice tremble with the force of her emotions. “Or was that just something you made me think, too?”

The crushing humiliation of that realisation was too much: she didn't even wait for David to reply. She fled for the door, snatching up her coat as she passed the stairs, fumbling out her car keys even as she dashed the betraying moisture from her eyes with the back of one hand. The recollection of the beer she'd had on a virtually empty stomach only gave her pause for a fraction of an instant before she got into her car.

The pursuit she expected didn't come. Robin swung the Orion around in a wide, careless arc before slamming it into first and driving at the narrow gateway without a tenth of the caution she had taken earlier. She was halfway down the lane before she remembered to put her lights on or clear the condensation from her windscreen, and farther still when she thought about putting on her seatbelt. A single thought had gained ascendancy in her mine: to flee, to fall back to the safety of the familiar, there to lick her wounds and plan her next step.

Which was – what?

No more thinking.

Robin kept driving.