He was beautiful. A beardless, angelic face staring at her with the palest blue eyes she’d ever seen.
The bare hint of color all-but faded against his impossible, porcelain skin and the perfect waves of chestnut hair that tumbled down beside it. Sitting there, across a greasy truck stop table in the 3am fluorescent light, he was unreal. A ghostly face from a dream, a Baroque nobleman exiled from a lost age of excess.
“There’s no nobility in it,” he said. “We are cruel. We are few. And we do not weep for the loss of the sun, any more than we court the romantic affections of adolescent females.”
She looked down at her coffee, cold and untouched in the mug. Her hands were still trembling.
“You kill,” she said, barely above a whisper.
It was a plain fact. She’d seen it. Every horrific instant. Burned into her senses. The sight of human flesh shredded, the screams of desperate agony, the smell of blood and innards on oily pavement only a few hundred feet from the booth where they now sat.
“Is that not in the nature of any predator?” he asked.
The waitress paused beside them. “Still not hungry?”
He shook his head.
The woman paused, looking down at him as if the sight of her faded polyester uniform would encourage him to reconsider. After a beat, he raised his eyes. He stared through her. She turned and left.
“Go on,” he said.
“Is that all there is?”
“Would you ask such a question of a lion, or a cobra?”
She realized she wasn’t even sure. What to ask of the man who had only moments before saved her life? A man who had appeared out of nowhere, who’d put a hell of a shock into that drunken crowd of a half-dozen redneck fuckers that had dragged her into the vacant lot behind the latrine. A moment before he killed every last one.
To feed on their blood.
“How old are you?” she asked.
His smile showed pointed, yellow canines. Traces of blood glistened along the edges. “Impossible to say.”
“You can’t recall?”
“I remember everything,” he said, as though more a failing than a triumph. “All that can be recalled, at least. My birth was not recorded. Such things were not memorialized in the same fashion during my youth.”
“So you have no idea?”
“It was my tenth summer when we first heard that the legions were marching in force. Our king boasted that we would resist them until none were left standing. His prediction was somewhat ill-considered, but very correct, nonetheless.”
“Is that how you became–?”
“The way that I am? You need not fear to say it. There are no secrets between us now.”
“Yes.”
“Not then, I was merely a child. The cruelties of the Twelfth Legion were reserved for my elders. My life as a Gaul died the day that Vercingetorix laid down his sword, but my humanity died a slower death. The next two decades taught me deeper cruelties than the will of Caesar.”
“Caesar? As in … Rome?”
“That was where they took me. As we tally the years today this would have been about 50 BC. Give or take.”
“What a sight it must have been.”
“I saw little of it. Old men in dark, old palaces had a fondness for young boys in those days.”
“Some things never change,” she said. “Is that why you saved me from those–?”
She trailed off, unable to finish. He answered for her.
“Men.”
“Rapists.”
He shook his head. “Their deaths were merely incidental.”
“But you knew what they were going to do to me?”
“I give no more thought to the aspirations of my dinner than you do.”
“Then why didn’t you have me too? Why did you show yourself instead?”
“There is more than one reason why a killer bares his fangs.”
She looked at him, studied him there, sitting motionless as a statue. His long, thin fingers tipped with silvery nails. His lean, lithe limbs. His eyes so pale.
“But you didn’t kill me.”
He reached out, gently but with uncommon speed. He lifted her sleeve, baring the underside of her arm and the splotchy track marks etched into her skin.
“You’re already dead,” he said.
She recoiled.
“How long have you been using?” he asked.
Although she knew how obvious her addiction was to anyone who looked at her for more than a moment—twenty pounds underweight, permanent gray circles under her eyes, stringy hair and rotting teeth—she could barely bring herself to acknowledge it.
“Since I was about fifteen.”
She looked up, directly into his ghostly face. As peculiar as his gaze was, she recognized the expression. Concern, maybe even sympathy. Not something she wanted to discuss. Even with him. “Listen, I appreciate your help, really I do. I’ve tried to get clean. It’s just not in the cards for me.”
He nodded. “You haven’t heard my offer.”
“What’s that?”
“You die a little bit every day. Would you like that to end?”
She started to get up. His hand was on her arm in a split-second. His touch was icy. It sent a chill through her.“Look, I owe you for what you did back there, but–”
“Perhaps you would rather die just once. Tonight. And then live forever after.”
She sat back down.
