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“That’s me.”
“Well, go ahead, dear. I expect you know the way.” She looked doubtfully at Simon but held her tongue. He stared back at her, a defiant young punk, his defense mechanisms at work again.
Zoë tugged at his sleeve. “Come on.” What was he up to? Was he going to make a scene?
He broke eye contact with practiced indifference. Quite an actor, she thought, remembering his distres
s only moments before. She could hear the nurses in the staff room now—“It’s the stress,” they’d say. “It brings out the devil in them. She’s hanging out with hoods to get attention.” It made her smile. If only they knew.
The smile faded when she came to her mother’s door and got no response to her gentle knock.
The lights were low, and her mother just a huddled lump in the bed. A surge of terror made her rush to the bedside, but the steady movement of breathing quelled her fears. She lowered herself to a chair. Her mother’s slippers lay half under the bed, looking flat and empty. I guess there won’t be any conversation tonight, she thought.
Simon, liquid with ease in the muted light, pulled a chair up beside her. He looked at her mother with interest, all the nervousness smoothed from his face. “Hence your beauty,” he said.
“But she’s not like she was.”
“I can still tell.”
She wasn’t sure how to answer, so didn’t.
I could shake her, she thought. I could wake her up. She almost reached out, but her mother looked so peaceful. Zoë crushed beneath her thigh the hand that wanted to touch. Let her sleep, she argued. She needs it. She has to grab what she can. But Zoë’s lips were tight with disappointment. Why did she call if she was tired? I thought she wanted me here.
Simon gazed steadily at her mother’s face. It was impossible to guess his thoughts. They made a strange pair: the dying and the undead. Is he wishing he could die too? she wondered. Is life forced on him as much as death is forced on her?
A thought suddenly struck her. Could he change her? Could he give her his blood like Christopher had given his? Surely they could find a way to get her the blood she would need without killing anyone. She would have time for her art, time for her family, all the time in the world. But would he do it?
“Simon,” she whispered, “if a sick person became a vampire, would he heal?”
He twisted to look at her, horror on his face. “Would you wish that on someone?”
“Just tell me,” she begged.
“Since I was changed, I have remained a youth—never growing, never aging. Wounds I have sustained since then have always healed rapidly. They repair and leave me as I was before.” He tried to keep his voice low, but anger grew as he spoke, strangling his words. “If someone were to change with cancer in his body, the body would not alter too much, I think. The cancer would still be there, but the body would heal itself as fast as the cancer ate it away. In effect, that person would probably be in pain forever. What would that do to a person’s mind, do you think?”
Zoë stifled a cry with her fist. Tears started to her eyes.
His voice softened. “The change can do terrible things to a person, Zoë. It’s unnatural. Look at Christopher. At least I was allowed to grow up first, but he’s trapped forever in the body of a child, and has a child’s anger. His body whispers to him the secrets he will never know, because he can’t quite hear them. I think that’s why he kills so brutally. I could never turn anyone into something like that deliberately.”
He was right. She knew he was right, but it had seemed a last gleam of hope, and now it was gone, almost as soon as she’d thought of it. And there he was, throwing Christopher at her again. “If he’s so terrible, why don’t you stop him?” she snapped.
It took him aback. “But I’ve tried.”
His urgent, hushed tones reminded her to lower her voice. “So try again.”
They argued in fierce whispers.
“He’s stronger than me. He always outsmarts me.”
“What are you frightened of? The fact he’s your older brother? You’re bigger than him; surely you’re stronger than him?”
Simon clenched his fists. “What makes you so concerned with my problems?” he hissed.
“Your problems?” Zoë rose to her feet without realizing it. “You came to me, remember? You made me concerned. But it’s not just your problem—it’s everyone’s problem. You’ll be stopping him from killing others. Christopher brings death. This is death.” She stabbed a finger in her mother’s direction. “You can stop death.”
Her mother groaned and stirred, and Zoë’s breath left her for a moment. Had Mom woken? Had she heard? But her mother’s body took on the rhythm of sleep once more, and Zoë relaxed. She sat down again.
Simon pulled the sheet up and carefully replaced it around the sleeping woman, as gently as if tucking it around his own lost mother. Death had taken her, too, Zoë remembered. No, not death, Christopher. “You’ve got to stop him, Simon. For your mother’s sake.”
