Stephen Leather - Once bitten

"That's not possible and you know it," I replied.

"It's possible," she said.

"How?"

"That's part of knowing the full truth, Jamie. First you've got to decide if you can handle it. If you really want it."

"Didn't Greig Turner want it? Didn't he want to stay with you for ever?"

Her hand clenched on my leg and I felt the nails bite into the cloth of my trousers and pinch the skin underneath. "I didn't leave Greig because he was getting old. He left me. He was the one who betrayed me, he's the one who couldn't keep out of other women's beds. I loved him, I begged him not do it, but he wouldn't listen. He threw it away. And by the time he realised what he'd lost, it was too late. He wasn't trying to get me back, that's not why he hired Blumenthal. He found out that I'd been paying his bills at his nursing home in Big Sur. I think he suspected then that something was wrong. He didn't want me back, Jamie. He just didn't want to die."

"Nobody does, Terry. Shit, do I still call you Terry, or what? What name do you use?"

"Terry is fine."

"What was your original name?"

"The first?"

"Yeah, the first."

She laughed. "It was such a long time ago," she said and then she said something that sounded like "Malinkila" and I asked her to repeat but I still couldn't make my mouth form the sounds.

"Egyptian?" I said and she nodded and we both knew then that I'd reached the point of no turning back.

"You're ready?" she said.

"Yes."

"You're sure?"

"Yes."

"Then ask." She settled back in the sofa and waited while I tried to get my thoughts in order.

There was so much I wanted to know. I wanted to know who she was, how old she was, who had killed Matt Blumenthal, why she had been found with his body, and what she meant when she said she wanted to be with me forever.

"How old are you? What are you?" I asked.

"I'm not quite sure, that's the answer to both questions, Jamie. I think it's been between four and five thousand years, but for a long time I wasn't counting, if you know what I mean. Time didn't have the same meaning back then. I was just living, surviving. Moving from place to place, from country to country."

"But you were born in Egypt?"

"Yes."

"Four thousand years ago?"

"Or thereabouts. I remember the Great Pyramids being built at Giza, and the Sphinx, and I guess that was about 2,500 BC. It took me a long time to get my head straight too. You can imagine what it was like, when all around me were getting older and I stayed the same, exactly as you see me today. For centuries I lived as an outcast, scared to live near people for too long because they always turned against me in the end." She said it the way I once told a nephew that I remembered the days before colour television and push-button telephones. That piece of news was greeted with an eight-year-old's gasp of amazement but that was nothing to how I felt at her matterof- fact revelation. "As to what I am, I'm not sure how to describe it."

"Vampire?" I said and she threw back her head and laughed. Her neck was long and pale white, unlined and unmarked. The neck of a child.

"Jamie, do I look like a vampire?" she asked.

I looked at her flowing black dress, her black eyes, the white, perfect teeth and the glistening hair and a small voice inside said yes, that's exactly what you do look like, and what else do you call someone who's as old as the pyramids and who was found over a corpse in an alley with blood on her full, red lips?

"Well?" she pressed.

"I guess not," I said.

"There are gaps in what I remember," she said. "That's why I'm a bit vague about actually how old."

"You remember your parents?"

"Sort of. I remember that they'd have nothing to do with me after my twenty-third summer.

People had shorter life-spans then, and they aged faster. I never got sick, and I showed no signs of aging. They made me leave. I don't remember what they looked like, but I remember how it felt to be rejected by them. I've never forgotten."

I shook my head in bewilderment. "Four thousand years," I said. "It doesn't seem possible.

How did it happen? How many more like you are there?"

She shrugged. "I don't know how it happened. Genes, I suppose. It's a mutation. As to how many more there are, just a handful, I think. I know of six. It's not hereditary, if that's what you're getting at. My mother and father and my four brothers were all normal. They all died before they were forty."

"The others, are you all in contact?" I was aware that the questions I was asking weren't following any logical progression, I was asking things at random. If I was going to get anywhere close to understanding her and what she was I was going to have to take a more scientific approach.

God, I wished I had a tape recorder with me, or at least a notebook.

"Not all the time. You have to remember that it's not easy for us to live in normal society, Jamie. We have to keep on moving, we can never stay in one place for more than ten years in case we are discovered. And once we've moved on we have to wait at least fifty years before we move back. But yes, we do meet, we do help each other whenever we can. We have to. We're all we've got."

"You say you had to keep moving. Where have you lived?"

"God Jamie, you'd be better off asking me where I haven't lived. My first memories are of Egypt, then when Egypt went into decline I moved to Greece and then to Rome. When Rome was sacked, and that was what, 476AD, then I moved to Byzantium. I was in what's now called the Middle East round about 800AD, then went to China and on to Kiev when it was the cultural centre of the Slavic empire. I moved out when Ghengis Kahn moved in, I was in Constantinople when it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. I was in Florence during the Renaissance, in London when the Great Plague swept through Europe, in Paris during the Revolution, in Switzerland during the First World War and I've been in the States since the 1920s."

"And how many identities have you used?" The questions still had no logic and I knew that I was asking them just to keep talking while I tried to get my mind around the basic premise that she'd laid before me – namely that Terry Ferriman was immortal. By asking questions, no matter how banal, I was at least helping to convince myself that she was telling the truth. But still the question that lurked uncomfortably at the back of my mind was what the hell did she plan to do with me, and was I going to end up like Matt Blumenthal lying flat on my back in an alley somewhere, drained of my lifeblood?

She laughed and shook my shoulders. "Jamie, for God's sake, how should I know? It's only in the last few centuries that I've had to keep records, and you saw how much space they took up in the filing cabinets. Hundreds, thousands maybe. In the old days, in the real old days, all I had to do was to move to another country or even just another town and change my name. This business with assuming new identities and applying for passports and driving licences and social security numbers and bank accounts is relatively recent."

"And you've never been sick?"

"Not even during the Great Plague. Never. But you saw how I'm allergic to sunlight. We all are. And we do have another what you might call a weakness."

"A weakness?"

"We think it's connected to the gene that makes us immortal. We are missing the enzymes in a couple of crucial biochemical pathways, which means we must periodically ingest certain proteins which we are lacking."

Realisation broke over me like a tropical cloudburst. "Blood," I said. "You have to have blood.

Human blood."

"Not necessarily blood, but that's just about the most efficient way of ingesting them, yes."

I stood up and felt my knees buckle slightly. I didn't know if it was the fear or the brandy, but I locked my legs and fought to keep my balance. "And you say you're not vampires? What else would you call it? You live forever and you drink human blood? Oh God, I don't believe this, I really don't…"