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No, I decided, he wasn't what I was waiting for.
But he would do.
"Per." Karma almost spat the word. "Go away."
"Oh, no." My smile widened, if that was possible. It was precisely the reaction I'd expected. Hunters are rarely so predictable. "Is that any way to treat an old friend, Jack?" My tone dropped, even more intimate. "Or do you want to die with that mark on you, mein kleiner Jager?"
The little apprentice, his aura already showing the sparks and spikes of those among you who wield belief, dropped back two steps. His hand twitched, as if he wished he had a gun, too. Stolid, but ready to do battle.
I could already tell he was going to be fun.
"Son of a bitch." Jack was losing the purity of his Berliner accent. He must have been already speaking English again in preparation for crossing the Atlantic. Not that he would reach the Americas, of course.
But his apprentice would. At the very least, I'd see to that.
"You could invite me in." My lips closed over my teeth. I slid on my somber mask. "We have much to discuss, you and I."
PRIMACY
Much later
I thought I had learned everything your flesh had to teach me, and I despaired. Well, at least a little. Then Mikhail Tolstoy, the cub become wolf, took an apprentice in his fading years. He brought her to the Monde Nuit.
I had tried, you see, to re-create some of the breathless years just after my un-father stepped into your world for the third time, in the year of your Lord 1918: cabarets, heedless abandon, and the like. I prefer my nourishment flavored with the gasping, intense explosion of asphyxiation and orgasm combined, but without a certain . . . ferment that my quasi-father's presence had spurred. A frothing, a yeasting, like the beer Jack Karma drank. I did my best with what I had, a shipwrecked mahogany bar and a bartender--Riverson, one of your kind, a man whose filmed gray eyes were not blind. I merely borrowed them every once in a while--with his consent, of course.
Always with your consent.
Mikhail came to question me about a certain case. They fancy themselves Polizei, the hunters. Bra
ve sheriffs of the nighttime. Tin stars and ten-gallon hats, or maybe that was the sand talking. Of all the places Mikhail could have chosen, he settled on the desert. Sand, poison, and venom, blinding salt-pan days and icy nights. Hot and cold, no middle ground.
Just like her. His apprentice. At last.
Dark hair, threaded with those silver charms. A mismatched gaze--one brown eye, one blue. Modernity is kind to male creatures--it has given us leather pants, skintight T-shirts, and waterproof kohl that rings a woman's eyes. The old Russian wolf dropped his hand to his gun. He did not have Jack Karma's grasp, but advances in firepower had made their job, such as it is, easier.
"Now now, tovarisch." I wagged my index finger back and forth, the past bending over onto the present like one of your ingenious paper fans. Muscovite Russian is so fluid; it drips from the tongue like honey. I had expected him to go home, but maybe he thought he could wipe out his past here.
All the Caucasians who flooded the Americas thought so. The indigenous population knew better, but who thought to ask them?
"Hellspawn." He chose English, and his apprentice--in the long leather coat that copied his, and copied Jack Karma's, and had become a sort of uniform for them despite its origins--did not even look at me. She looked past, at my brethren on the dance floor, waltzing demurely to the stylings of a trio of siblings who had traded with me for singing voices to rival the birds.
All it cost them was their hands, and their obedience. I am, always, a patron of the arts.
It was her blue eye, I realized. The thought that she had visited my home for even a short while pushed a frisson through me, from tip-top to toe and out through every invisible part as well.
"Watch yourself," Tolstoy continued, tapping the butt of his right-hand gun once, twice. His English was not native, but it was passable. "You have lovely nest here. I would hate to have to burn it."
That brought her gaze back to me.
"Charmed," I replied, and congratulated myself for wearing the blandest, softest version of my skin today. She would underestimate me. They all did. "Well, what is it to be, Gospodin? I am, as ever, your servant."
I knew he had been visiting practitioners of the darker arts, looking for a way to remove the mark from the inside of his right thigh. It was the grandest joke of all, placing it there. We propagate, too, but not in the way of flesh. We take, and sometimes make, children of the . . . you could call it the heart, the spirit. Even soul, though that is murderously imprecise.
He told me what he wanted, and I gave him just enough information to be helpful, but not enough to solve the tangle for him. He would have been suspicious if it were too easy.
She drank the shot of vodka my not-blind barkeep poured. On the house, as always, for my darlings. My hunters. I knew that if I just waited long enough, one of Jack Karma's children--for hunters make them as we do sometimes, to transmit their battle-weariness from old shoulders to new--would possess the requisite temperament.
Patience will bring a male, even one of my kind, everything he needs.
