“Enough!”
Sarafina gripped a handful of my hair and jerked my head away. And only then did I realize it had been her wrist at which I’d been so eagerly feeding. Her blood I had been drinking so hungrily. Even now, she pulled her forearm away, tugging a scarf from her hair and wrapping it tightly around the wound.
Horrified, I felt my stomach lurch, turning my head away from her and lifting my hand to swipe at my mouth.
“It’s all right, Dante,” she whispered. “It is the way the gift is shared.”
I looked down at my hands, red with the blood I’d wiped from my mouth. But alive. Strong. I moved my fingers, made fists.
“What is this?” I asked her softly. “What … what does this mean?” And even as I said it, the numbness was receding down my body. The feeling rushed back into my torso, my legs and my feet, with heightened intensity.
My senses prickled with keen new awareness. My skin tingled at the touch of the very air. My eyes seemed to see more vividly, more precisely, than ever they had. And strength surged through my veins.
She tore my shirt away, making strips of its fabric as she spoke. “It is a gift, young Dante, though the old one calls it a curse. It is a gift I have given to you. You will never die now. Never grow older. And though your family will turn against you, you will never be alone, as I have been. For I will be with you. Always.”
Looking over my shoulder at her, for she was now wadding the fabric and stuffing it into the wound in my back, which caused me immense pain, I shook my head. I did not understand. She tied several strips tightly around me, to hold the wads in place, then reached down, clasped my hand and helped me to my feet, and even as I rose, I saw the old man’s silhouette looming just behind her.
I opened my mouth to shout a warning.
Before I said a word, Sarafina turned with such speed she seemed a mere blur. The farmer’s rifle went sailing through the air, out of sight, firing harmlessly into the woods as it hit the ground. And Sarafina, the beautiful, gracious woman by whom I had been so entranced, gripped the farmer’s shirtfront and jerked him forward. Before I could even react, she had fastened her mouth to his throat.
I heard the sounds…. I saw, very clearly in the darkness now, what she was doing. Drinking … his blood. Gorging herself at his throat. At first the farmer pounded her back and kicked at her … and then … then he simply surrendered. I heard his sigh, saw him close his eyes and even wrap his arms around her. He let his head fall backward, and I saw him grind his hips against Sarafina’s as she continued to suck at his throat.
And then there was no life left in him at all.
She let go his shirt, and the corpse fell to the ground. Empty. A rag-poppet. Utterly drained.
With one of her scarfs, Sarafina dabbed delicately at her mouth as she turned to face me. I gaped at her, my mouth working soundlessly.
“Don’t look so shocked, Dante. Are you telling me you’re only just figuring it out? Hmm? We are Nosferatu. We are undead.” She licked her lips, tilted her head and smiled very slightly at me. “Vampires,” she whispered, and I swore the night wind picked up the word and repeated it a thousand times in a thousand voices.
Vampires.
A breeze from some unseen source made the candle flames leap and flicker. Morgan tore her eyes from the weathered pages and automatically looked behind her. But of course no one was there. Nothing was there. This wasn’t real.
It wasn’t real.
“Oh my God,” Morgan whispered. “This isn’t a diary. These aren’t memoirs. It’s … it’s fiction. It’s incredible, breathtaking fiction!”
Oh, maybe not to the man who had written it. The delightfully insane artist who had crafted this tale had, perhaps, even believed it. Imagine. A man who honestly thought he was a vampire. A man who had, in all likelihood, lived here. Right here. In this house.
Something scraped the window, and Morgan whirled, her hand flying to her chest as her heart leapt. But it was only a tree limb, bent and clawlike, scratching at the glass. Not some creature of the night who called himself Dante, come back to claim his diaries and his house. Of course not. Vampires were not real.
The sudden movement, the scare, left her slightly dizzy and made her chest pound. She waited for it to ease. The rush of breathlessness passed, as it always did. She drew a few deep, cleansing breaths and glanced at her watch. She had been sitting in the dark, musty attic for hours, lost in the imaginary world of a madman. When she should have been working on her own tales of intrigue.
God, how was she ever going to have a saleable script ready for David in three months? Especially now, when all she wanted to do was read more of this incredible tale.
Vaguely she wondered how long it had taken the imaginative Dante to pen his fantasies. Not long, she thought … if every journal in this stack were filled. And even then, she didn’t know how he had managed it all in one short lifetime.
He was dead, though. He had to be dead, because she had finally come upon a date, so there was no doubt. And his words, his tales … they just lay there, untouched. So vivid, so wonderfully written, it was almost heartbreaking that they hadn’t been shared with the world. God, if she had written something this good and it had never been seen, she would have been.
Oh.
Oh. The thought that just occurred to her! This could be her work. For all anyone else knew, it could all be her work. Who the hell would ever know the difference?
“No,” she whispered aloud. “It wouldn’t be right.”
Wouldn’t it? her mind argued. She had just decided it was criminal that this work hadn’t been shared. She had just acknowledged that if she had been the author, she would have spent eternity regretting that the work lay here, undiscovered. The written word was meant to be read, after all. Not hidden away but … shared. Experienced.
She knelt again in front of the trunk, licked her dry lips. What harm would there be, she wondered? Dante was long dead, and no one else could possibly know of the existence of these diaries. Could they? Of course not! If they did, these journals wouldn’t have been left here to molder in a dusty attic.
And there were so many of them!
“My God,” she whispered. “This is a gold mine. I’m sitting on an absolute gold mine here.” And as she sat there, staring down at the trunk full of stories, she knew that they were even more than that. They were the key to getting everything she wanted, to reclaiming everything she had lost. Wealth. Power. Fame. Her triumphant return to L.A. It was all right here. Almost like a gift … left just for her by some long-dead madman who’d called himself Dante and believed himself to be a vampire.
She took the first journal carefully, holding it to her breast like a lover as she straightened, and, turning, she carried it downstairs to her office.
This time, when she held her hands over the keyboard, Dante’s journal was lying open on the table beside the computer. And this time, the words came.
3
Maxine Stuart was watching JFK for about the twelfth time on the little VCR/TV combo in her bedroom, a copy of Catcher in the Rye in her lap, a half-dead can of Coke on the bedside stand, when she heard the sirens. The sound stabbed her in the belly like an ice-cold blade and brought her slowly to her feet, though she couldn’t have said why. She went to the window, pushed the curtains aside. She could see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles passing on the highway in the distance. Heading south. Her gaze turned in that direction, and she narrowed her eyes on the faint red glow in the distant night sky.
A familiar Jeep bounded into her driveway, and about a second later she heard the front door of the small house open, heard her mother speaking to Max’s friends as she let