One Must Hide

Acceptance

“So.”

David put enough force in the word to stop Robin in her tracks. She stood stock-still, wet and getting wetter. Her clothes were drenched, clinging soddenly to her slender frame; her hair slicked dark and glossy to her head; rivulets of water tracked paths down her face. She should have made a pitiful sight. She didn't.

“So you decided to come back after all,” he said.

Robin's emotions bunched tight; a fist of anger that smote him with its intensity. “You knew I would.”

“Did I, now?” he mocked.

“Why else would you still be here?”

David laughed, and she glared up at him through the rain, but his mirth was for himself, for underestimating her. “Robin, you had your chance.”

A stab of fear tinged her feelings, ragged as a dull knife. “I changed my mind.”

“And why would you do that?”

She raised her head, and her grey eyes were fierce with more than anger. “Because I saw you die tonight.”

David froze.

“I saw your film, and I saw you die, and...” Robin halted, looking sharply away, as if to hide her face.

David didn't need to see her expression to feel her distress. Part of him, a bigger part than he cared to admit, wanted to comfort her. Ruthlessly, he strangled it. “Then you think you know what we are?”

“Yes,” Robin said. “And I'm not afraid.”

“You should be,” David said.

He allowed her an instant of comprehension before he sprang.

Robin got her hand up, but not in time to stop him. David pinned her left arm, laid bare her neck, and loosed his fangs. He felt her claw the side of his face once before he closed his teeth gently, softly, but relentlessly on her throat.

How long he held that contact he didn't know; long after Robin went limp in his arms, long after he'd fought off the bloodlust; long after his jaw began to ache with the strain of holding back. He kept her there as the rain hissed down all around them, his fangs locked onto but not into her neck, far longer than he needed to, in the heady realisation that this was unlike anything that had ever gone before.

It hurt to release her, like silver in the gut, like sunlight in his face. It hurt more to stay in fang and passive. She weighed so little in his grasp, as physically fragile as she was mentally tough: light-boned, slim-built, delicate enough for a careless vampire to break. He wasn't careless, but he thrust her away from him as he set her down, scarcely trusting himself. “You should be,” he said again, in his vampire's harsh voice.

Robin put her hand to her neck, took her fingers away clean of blood. Then she looked at him, at his wickedly extended canine teeth, at his inhuman eyes, at the shifted bones of his face, and no fear tinged the rawness of her feelings. She reached out to feel his face, where David realised she had scratched with blunt fingernails, and the acceptance in that touch disarmed him. He sheathed his claws, withdrew his fangs, let his true face melt into the mask he wore by choice, and all the time the part of him that remained very much a man lurched with reaction.

“You've never hurt me, David,” she said softly, wonderingly. “Even though I hurt you.”

She didn't know everything. She didn't understand what she was getting herself into. But he would test her no more tonight. Nothing he could devise could test her more than she had already pushed herself. She was so proud, and that she had bent that stiff dignity so far already was enough. He wouldn't have her break it on him. “You had to come back yourself, Robin,” he said. “You had to choose to come back.”

“I thought you'd gone.”

The force in her accusation was no sullen yap of resentment, but an assertion of outrage, of indignant affront, with all her weight behind it, fanged and clawed like a vampire in truth. It made something soar in David's chest. “We were never far.”

Robin's eyes narrowed, as though she were trying to decide if that should placate her or make her angrier. “You complete bastard,” she said at last.

“Get used to it,” David said, showing her his teeth.

She rose to the challenge, as he'd known she would. “Why should I?”

David laughed. “Because you came back!”

“I did.” Robin looked up at him. “Didn't I?”

He felt an instant of disquiet. She had so nearly not returned. David had been sure, absolutely sure, that she would. She's not yours yet, a little voice suggested in the back of his mind.

“You're cold,” he said. He stretched out his hand to her. Take it, Robin. Take it. Don't make me...

Robin didn't hesitate for more than a moment. David wrapped his fingers around the hand she put in his, and stepped back, drawing her into the doorway. “Didn't you notice it was raining?”

Robin gave herself a little shake, scattering raindrops. “Not really.”

David could feel her shivering. “You'd better come in.”

He didn't have to prompt her to warm herself by the fire. Robin went straight to the hearth, putting both hands on the old oak mantel and closing her eyes as the heat washed over her. In profile, the kind firelight almost concealed the signs of weariness and anguish that marked her face. She'd suffered, David judged; heart wrestling head, instincts clashing with common sense. Heart and instincts had won. I know the feeling.

Robin spoke without opening her eyes or moving from the fireplace. “Where are the others?”

“Out,” David said. Then, deliberately, he elaborated. “Hunting.”

She turned her head to look at him, but didn't speak immediately, as if searching for the words. “Who will they kill?”

“Anyone they don't think will be missed,” David said. “Anyone who's up to no good. And anyone who pisses them off.”

“That doesn't narrow it down much.”

“Perhaps not.” David paused. “We don't kill women or children.”

Robin appeared to consider that. “Bad luck if you're a man, then.”

He wondered if she were ready to digest a little more truth. “Do you remember your friend in the bar?”

“My friend?” Robin frowned, then grasped his meaning. “The guy who grabbed me.”

“Yes.”

Robin looked back into the flames, but David could sense the turmoil as she tried to reconcile her growing acceptance of vampires with her human morality. “He didn't do me any harm.”

“Paul has a very special loathing for men who lay their hands on women.”

She didn't reply; only shook her head slowly.

David let her absorb that they'd already killed for her, that one man was now dead who would have been alive if not for her. He hadn't been the first, and wouldn't be the last, but David thought Robin might need a little more time to swallow that much.

She was still shivering, as much from relief and reaction as from exposure, but water dripped yet from her hair and clothes. It couldn't be good for her. Remarkable Robin might be, but that made her no less likely to catch a cold. “You're drenched. Come with me.”

“Why?”

Always the questions. “Come with me.”

He walked away, knowing he wouldn't need to wait for her this time. Robin left the heat of the fire without hesitation to follow him. Hooked. David didn't let himself smile.

“This place isn't really big enough for us,” he said over his shoulder as he led her up the wide oak-banistered stairs.

“What happened to the vampires who lived here before?”

David stopped on the landing. He turned around. Robin had halted a couple of stairs down. “They picked the fight. Not us.”

“You said vampires are territorial,” she pointed out.”You were the invaders, weren't you?”

“They could have let it pass. We weren't looking for trouble.” He looked down at her. “We were looking for you.”

Robin slowly climbed the last two stairs to face him. “You keep saying that.”

“Do you think I don't mean it?”

“I think you mean to flatter me.”

He smiled. “This way.”

She'd regained her poise, he observed, or at least a good enough semblance of it to obscure her feelings from him again. Nothing leaked so freely as anger and distress, and Robin had been boiling over with both. Now that she had them under control, David found it much harder to read her. The challenge invigorated him.

But he led and she followed, and David threw open the door to the room he'd been using. He stopped on the threshold. “After you.”

He watched her intently as she stepped into his personal space. Did she see the previous occupant of the room in its understated décor, its simple, blocky furnishings? Did she notice how the absence of familiar clutter reflected the discipline of its current user? Did she look at the bed and wonder if David intended to seduce her? And well she might. Let her wonder.

“Well?” he asked, at length.

Robin regarded him thoughtfully. “It's not what I was expecting.”

He nodded at the bathroom door. “Why don't you take a hot shower, and I'll get you something to wear.” When she looked askance, he went on, “Did you think we don't wash, Robin?”

“I suppose I hadn't really thought about it,” she said slowly. “Thank you. I will.”

As she turned away, she gathered her wet hair at the nape of her neck with one hand, and a surge of bloodlust hit David like a physical blow. Teeth and vision sharpened at once, and the hunger he'd sated only the night before returned in full force. All the time and effort he'd spent pursuing her, courting her, winning her, paled in comparison to the overwhelming desire to bite.

But he didn't.

He caught her arm, instead, and pulled her to him, and kissed her with all the passion he had and all the care he could muster, so very different to a bite, and so very much the same. Her fingers dug painfully hard into the muscles of his back: a pain he welcomed, a pain he'd missed. Her kiss was sweetness and sustenance and he knew he could easily be lost to it. Liberating as sunset, thrilling as moonrise, dangerous as dawn. Robin Stephenson was all three, and David knew how tightly he, even he, must hold to himself.

Robin broke the kiss, but only for air, and as she stood breathing hard to recover herself she never took her eyes from his face, or moved from the possession of his arms. This is she, David thought, and he could have laughed with the euphoria of that knowledge.

He disguised the effort it took him to step back. Robin almost closed the gap again, then checked herself. So very proud.

“I'll be waiting,” he said, and withdrew.

Very deliberately, he closed the door behind him, and then he stood for a moment outside, energised, exhilarated, and certain beyond the slightest doubt that he was playing with fire. He moved away, step by step at first, and then with more purpose. He'd promised Robin clothes, and clothes she would have.

The farmhouse they'd taken over from the local rank was too small for David and his followers. The under-rank hadn't started complaining yet, but with eight of them sharing three rooms, it wouldn't be long before their discontent filtered up from Lucas via Marko to David.

Kae usually shared space with Alexander, on the basis that he was the only member of the under-rank who wouldn't bother her. They'd set wards on their room. David broke them without a second thought and went in.

He took a pair of Kae's jeans and one of her blouses from the pile of clothes she'd left at the foot of her bed. I need to put her back in her place. He'd indulged the only female member of the rank ever since she'd joined them two years ago, disinclined as he was to meet his needs with mortal women, but that would have to stop.

He left the garments where Robin would find them, outside the door of his room, and went back downstairs. In the kitchen, he got himself a beer from the refrigerator. Then he settled himself in an armchair in the sitting room to wait.

How much to tell her? He smiled to himself. How often had he made that decision – each time cutting the truth into finer and finer pieces, each time offering her just the slivers he wanted her to have, the scraps of knowledge that would satisfy her thirst, and withholding the rest.

She needed to know more of who she was to them, why they'd come so far to find her, why they'd been so persistent. That mirror-shard of truth had always been one of the most dangerous of all, jagged no matter which way they handled it. And a stack of bad luck if it shatters. But she had to know.

He'd rousted the Lost Boys out of Santa Cruz en masse three times in the last five years. They'd lost two from the under-rank the last time, and almost lost Paul. David wouldn't think of them as failures so much as learning experiences, rehearsals for the real thing. And this had to be the real thing, with all he'd already risked for it.

We'll fight before we leave. Dwayne's visions were consistent only in their obscurity. David never asked for the context he knew his right-hand man couldn't offer, and it had given him plenty to think about over the last few nights. He sensed a clash himself, in his own indistinct fashion, but the Lost Boys were hardly strangers to violence, even if not always by choice. Predicting conflict was like predicting rain: sooner or later you'd always be right.

The slightest creak of a floorboard from above made David cock his head to listen. The Boys would be back soon. Idly, he wondered if he could delay them, then dismissed the idea as dangerous. He could wait. He already had. Time was one thing any vampire had in abundance. And patience was David's speciality.

It could have been anyone's bathroom. Towels on the rail, soap in the dish, half a tube of toothpaste in the mug. Everything was so immaculate it took Robin a minute to notice the one glaring omission. There was no mirror.

The reminder sent a thrill rippling through the calm that had come over her, and she touched again the place on her throat where David had closed his teeth. It burned, a slow throb she couldn't ignore, didn't want to ignore. He'd bitten without biting, left his mark without breaking the skin, claimed her as a vampire and kissed her as a man. And electrified her with both. He'd shown her the face he would never see himself, and though a piece of her reeled at the otherness of him, the larger part was captivated.

As the actor who had played him resembled David without matching him, so the make up and prosthetics approximated his vampire face without duplicating it. Far subtler was the sharpening of his features, less bestial the line of his brow; his eyes were golden rather than yellow, his fangs pronounced but not exaggerated. In dim light she wouldn't have marked any difference. And here, surrounded by the small and everyday things that grounded David in the world Robin knew, she felt they had more in common than they had at odds.

Except that he kills people and drinks their blood.

She didn't deny the diffident little voice in the back of her mind. David was a killer by his own casual admission; a predator to whom the whole human race was no more than prey. But she had turned the idea this way and that in her mind, and handling had blunted the sharp corners. Disquiet her though it might, it couldn't quite shock her, and however great a threat David represented, he wouldn't hurt her. If he'd meant her harm he'd have acted on it by now.

Robin took a deep breath, feeling her head swim with the staccato beat of her own pulse. She still had questions, and she suspected David had answers to spare. But for the first time since she'd fled the Lost Boys four nights earlier, Robin felt she was back on track.

She undressed rapidly out of her clammy, damp clothes, piling them neatly on the floor. The spotless condition of David's bathroom demanded a certain degree of tidiness. In contrast to the draughty and mildewed curtain in the bathroom at C-block, this shower had a proper glass cubicle. Robin reached in to turn on the water, and a fierce spray needled down, heating to just short of a painful temperature in no time at all. She ducked into the shower: gingerly at first, as the force of the water beat down, and then throwing her head back with relish at the heat and intensity. Power shower. There is a god. Showers in hall were miserable affairs: short, because someone was usually waiting outside for their turn; feeble, because water pressure was virtually nonexistent; and lukewarm, because there was never enough hot water for more than about half a minute. This was a Sunday dinner after a week of beans on toast: an indulgence she'd learned to do without, but craved nonetheless. No shampoo that she cared to use – the bottle of stuff on a shelf looked a bit manly – but plenty of soap.

Robin only turned the shower off when she felt her fingers begin to shrivel. She stripped the water out of her hair with both hands, then reached out for the closest towel. It was a bit rough – maybe fabric softener was for wimps? – but bigger and thicker than the ones York University supplied.

She couldn't see anything like a comb or a brush, so she disentangled the worst snarls from her hair with her fingers. Without a mirror, she couldn't see if she'd done a good job or not. I bet there's a comb in Dwayne's bathroom. The thought made her grateful for the missing mirror, because she suspected that the grin she felt spread across her face would make her look demented. But after four nights without the Boys, and the visceral horror of their on-screen deaths, Robin was looking forward to seeing them again: solemn Dwayne, and playful Marko, and even sulky, sullen Paul. Again, the little voice remarked, Killers, and again, she thought, I know.

Robin wrapped the towel around herself and, taking her sodden clothes with her, opened the door back into David's bedroom. Like the bathroom, it was spotlessly clean, inhumanly tidy. She guessed he couldn't have brought much with him from Santa Cruz , but no possessions of any kind cluttered the room, not even a shirt on the back of a chair, or a cigarette lighter on the bedside table.

The deep pile of the carpet was soft underfoot as she padded across the room; another comfort she'd almost forgotten. The curtains hung from ceiling to floor with length to spare. Robin pulled them back and found that the windows had been boarded tight, with neither crack nor gap to let the sunlight in. Another reminder, not only of what David was, but that this place had belonged to vampires before the Lost Boys had claimed it.

She couldn't see the clothes he'd said he would get her, so she eased open the door. Of course. Robin grabbed the garments David had left in the corridor and retreated back inside.

She thought hard as she dressed, feeling as clear-headed as she had all week. If she wanted to get answers out of David, she'd need to be persistent. He was too good at deflecting questions and changing the subject, too expert at using Robin's curiosity against her. And barefoot as she was, with hair still damp, in borrowed jeans a bit too long and borrowed blouse a bit too big, she was hardly in the strongest position to bargain with David. One question, then; one direct demand for the answer she coveted most of all.

I'll be waiting, David had said.

And Robin felt something tighten in her chest that had nothing to do with questions or answers or vampires, and everything to do with David himself, whose magnetism had already overcome every fear she'd been able to muster. Does that mean he makes me brave, or just stupid? She wasn't sure it mattered.

She left his room, walked back along the corridor and down the stairs. The warmth of the ever-burning fire radiated from the open double doors of the lounge, but a different beacon called Robin.

David met her gaze unerringly as she stepped into the doorway, as though he'd known the exact moment she would appear there. He rose from his place by the fire without breaking eye contact, and he was like nothing else on the Earth. “Come to me, Robin.”

“I need to know, David,” she said, and wondered if her voice shook as much as she thought it must. “Why me?”

“Because you belong with vampires,” he said. “And because…”

He stopped, and his eyes went distant for a moment. Robin seethed with frustration. “Because what?”

David said something either obscene or blasphemous under his breath.

The front door banged open with a force that shook the farmhouse, and Marko marched into the lounge, looking disgusted. “Houston, we have a problem.”

Alarmed, Robin looked at David, and thought she saw a flash of such intense fury on his face that she nearly didn't believe her own eyes. “You brought him here?”

“He was sniffing around…well.” Marko shook his head. “Guys, you'd better bring him in here.”

Robin heard the sound of something heavy dragging on the ground, and then Dwayne and Paul appeared in the doorway.

And dumped on the floor before her a limp, broken, and very dead body.