He looked up at it. It was all aglow, like a real woman asking you to feel a real baby.

"He's kicking, he's very very strong. And Sarah says he's robust. That's the word she uses - strong. And Sarah says he's robust. That's the word she uses - robust robust. We're going to have a son, Paul!" What bulls.h.i.t. You couldn't make a baby with a creature that wasn't human. "You're a liar," he said, barely disguising his contempt.

They left, then, all except Leo, who stayed watching him. She had the gun, Paul could see it stuck casually into her belt. This was a tough kid, this Leo. She looked like a cross between a punk rocker and a schoolgirl. She was stationed right in front of the door.

Even if he hadn't been shackled, he was probably too weak to do anything at the moment. But he wasn't real concerned. He'd get his a.s.s out of here soon enough. He looked at Leo, and she looked back at him.

Here was a question: Was this pretty kid, this Leo, a vampire or not? You really could not tell with these creatures. They were that good. He needed to know because he needed to know what kind of physical abilities he was dealing with. His instinct was that Leo was not a vampire. She was a hanger-on who knew the score. A very sick puppy, this Leo.

Paul tried an indirect approach, an interrogation technique he'd used a thousand times. Let the subject a.s.sume you know more than you do.

"So, Leo, what're you in it for? Drugs? Dough?"

Leo looked at him.

"Love."

"Oh, yeah, that. You love the monster. You ever f.u.c.k it?"

"Shut up."

"You know, I don't get you people. I mean, you're not a vampire, but you tolerate it. You go along with it."

"Miriam is a beautiful and ancient being. She deserves our support."

"Oh, I see! see! I guess Ellen Wunderling would agree with you. h.e.l.l, yes!" I guess Ellen Wunderling would agree with you. h.e.l.l, yes!"

"Sarah took her, not Miriam."

He stopped. He thought about it. Sarah had come after him with some kind of an instrument, not her sucker mouth.

Could it be that she didn't have a sucker mouth, but that she still fed on blood? If so, was there more than one species of vampire? Meaning, more vampires than he thought?

"Ellen wasn't the right kind of food for Miriam's species, or what?"

"We're blooded. Miriam gives us her blood, and - it's a miracle. You stop aging. You get incredibly healthy. You live for - well, a very long time."

Paul stared up at the ceiling. Now it develops that Miriam can make ordinary people into vampires. Jesus wept! wept!

Then Paul had another, equally chilling thought. Maybe this baby bulls.h.i.t was not bulls.h.i.t. If this blooding thing was real, maybe the two species were closer than anybody thought. If he'd given a vampire a baby - He uttered a carefully contrived chuckle. "I can't believe that I knocked her up. Like, I'm human!"

Leo came over to the bed. She had the gun down at her side, hanging there in her hand. One step closer, and he could reach it. "You're not human," she said. "You're a Keeper - or half a Keeper."

It hurt, but he laughed. He really got a good laugh out of it. She was quite a bulls.h.i.t artist.

"Okay. So, when do I feed on my fellow man? When I'm asleep?"

"You're something that isn't supposed to exist. They were trying to create a line that would live forever like they do, but not have to eat human blood. A better version of themselves."

He remembered them in their lairs, their sneering, contemptuous faces. "They have utter disdain for the human species," he said. "They don't care whether they eat our blood or not."

"They only hate those who kill them!"

"You're a liar."

"They do what they have to, to live. But there's no hate in it. Just hunger."

"You're lying through your teeth! They hate us and they love to kill!"

"You think so? You remember when your dad died? The way he just suddenly disappeared?"

The words seemed to come from a very long way away - echoing, strange words, terrifying words. Because there was no way she could have known about that unless - Bellowing like a stuck bull, he rose up out of his IVs and his monitoring cuffs and his oxygen line. She backed away, but he lunged at her - and collapsed against the shackles. He was a helpless pile of rags.

She stood over him, the gun expertly braced. Somebody had taught this lady how to make a mag work exactly right.

"Don't you f.u.c.king move," she screamed."Don't you f.u.c.king breathe breathe!"

He stared up at her. "You lying b.i.t.c.h." But he knew she was not lying. She knew something, all right. He hadn't ever told any of these people about his dad.

"Your father was killed because he was a part of a failed mutant bloodline. We think you must have been overlooked. Unfortunately, because now you've gotten Miri pregnant with G.o.d only knows what."

"The baby's okay?"

"The first ultrasound's in two weeks."

During his outburst, she'd obviously tripped a silent alarm, because Miriam and Sarah came blasting in. They all had magnums. This place was hatching guns.

They got him rearranged in the bed.

So, Paul thought, Paul thought, I guess this is a setback I guess this is a setback.

Over the next few days, Dr. Sarah Roberts methodically showed him things about himself that he had never even dreamed. She took his blood and showed it to him under a microscope. He could see the strange cells that had been in the past attributed to a benign deformation. Then she drew blood from Miriam before his eyes and showed him the two samples side by side.

He was not blind, but he still did not want to believe. He clung to the idea - which in his heart he knew to be ridiculous - that this whole thing was a coincidence. Because he could not not - no d.a.m.n - no d.a.m.n way! way! - have their blood running in his veins. - have their blood running in his veins.

Sarah created a chromosomal map and showed him how his own nineteenth chromosome differed from that of a normal human being in the area known as 19a22.1. She showed him smaller differences in sixteen of his twenty-three chromosomes. Then she showed him Miriam's chromosomal map. It was different in every single place that his was different, as well as in three more places.

Those three places represented the need to consume human blood, the great brilliance, and life eternal.

Paul's grandfather had lived to a hundred and eleven. The whole family was like that. Supposedly there had been a Ward back a couple of centuries ago who'd made it to a hundred and nineteen.

She demonstrated to him that, because of the chromosomal differences, he would probably never be able to have a child with a human mother, but that he could indeed fertilize Miriam.

Finally, he had to face it. He He was one of was one of them them. He wanted to crawl out of his own skin. If he'd been able, he would have put one of their d.a.m.n guns in his mouth.

His dreams became nightmares. He hungered for death; he begged G.o.d to kill him. But he did not die. Instead, he kept getting stronger and stronger, throwing off the injuries the way he always did. Only now he knew why. It was because of his d.a.m.ned, accursed, evil blood! blood!

Often, he would awaken and find Miriam gazing at him. She changed his dressings and cared for his bedpan, brought him his food and asked after his pain. Once in the morning and once at night, Sarah would examine him. Always she was cool and detached. Often, when they were alone, she would threaten him: "If you hurt her, if you break her heart, I will kill you with acid, I will rip your living heart out of your body."

His response was always the same: "Same to you, b.i.t.c.h."

He came to loathe himself. He'd fallen for Miriam because he was one of them one of them. As the days pa.s.sed, he got lots better. He also began to lay precise plans for the destruction of this household. He had to win their trust, first. It would not be easy, but Miriam - dear Miri - was totally smitten by him. That would be his opening.

So when Miriam came to him and sat gazing at him, he started to play little coy games with his eyes.

Miriam would twirl through the house singing "Caro Nome," and laughing, all the while feeling the baby within her. They took a year to gestate, and giving birth was very hard. But the baby - the baby was fine! "No indication of a problem," Sarah kept saying.

She really didn't know. She didn't even know for certain that Miriam was pregnant. She'd given her a urine test, but who knew if chorionic gonadotropin levels in a Keeper would be the same as in a human female. Probably not, in fact. Maybe their placental tissue produced another hormone altogether.

Unspoken in the household was the fact that the date of the first ultrasound was approaching. They would know then for sure, then and only then.

Miriam sang to her baby, she sang to her friends, and when Paul started smiling at her again, she sang to all the world.

Miriam had never before been so happy. Her household was thriving. Her body was glowing with health. She sensed that the baby was growing beautifully. And her new husband was slowly coming round.

"You know, Paul, I think you need to see it from our viewpoint, morally."

"Try me."

"We didn't make ourselves. Nature made us."

"That's what the CIA says."

She was quite interested in this. He'd never referred to what his employers might think of her before. "How so?"

"You're not murderers; you're predators. You have a right to kill us, and we have a right to defend ourselves. That's the basis of a policy statement they're working on." "Well, that's exactly my point." She just ached to kiss him, he was so luscious. But he had not so far been willing to do that again.

Tomorrow, she was going to surprise him. He was finished with the infirmary. Her hope was that he would return to the marriage bed. She was going to be as sweet and as tempting as she knew how.

She got Sarah alone and said to her, "It's time to take off his cuffs."

"It'll never be time for that."

"Do it."

"Miri, it's crazy!"

"Do it."

Sarah went to him. She locked the door behind her, then produced her key.

"Hey," he said.

As she unlocked first the ankle cuffs, then the wrists, he watched her. She did not like his eyes, hadn't liked them from the beginning.

"Well," he said as he rubbed his wrists, "that feels a whole lot better."

She backed away from him as she would from a spreading cobra, with care and sick fear.

He smiled.

She had been made what she was by Miriam. She was thus weak and vulnerable, the victim of inevitable imperfections. But he had been made by nature, and there was something she did not trust about nature. Perhaps it was because of something she had seen in her scientific work, that nature did not appear to be blind. The wildness of nature, the ruthlessness, was the outcome of thought.

Because of this, no matter how tame he seemed, how compliant, how much at ease, she would fear him and hate him. She knew a secret about nature, and she sensed that Paul Ward was an outcome of this secret. Nature, she knew, had a great and terrible mind.

TWENTY.

The Love Child The vampire was partial to him, so he would use that. Every hour that pa.s.sed, he was closer to the moment when he could kill them all.

She loved him, but they were d.a.m.n careful anyway. They watched him on video cameras, every move he made, and they kept the infirmary locked. His approach was to go along with it. He didn't even try to get out. He sat up in his bed reading War and Peace War and Peace and listening to endless opera CDs. and listening to endless opera CDs.

He ate lots of rare steak, which had always been his comfort food. Sometimes he asked for Thai cuisine. Everything he was given was beautifully cooked. He wondered if it was also drugged. With the steaks would routinely come bottles of wine worth thousands of dollars. Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 1945, Chateau Latour 1936.

He smiled at his captors. He was affable. When Miriam came in, shining and beautiful, he let her kiss him, as much as he could bear. When she put his hand on her belly, which she imagined even now to be a little distended, he would smile at her.

"As much as he hates the Keepers," Sarah said to Miriam, "when he found out what he was, you'd think there would have been more of a reaction."

"Sarah, the man is in love. He's realized that he's one of us. He sees the moral situation. Even his agency sees it. His hate is dying. That's why he's so quiet. It's a very thoughtful time in his life."

"I just think you need to be very d.a.m.n cautious when you let him out of there."

"Oh, come on. You're too careful."

"I thought you were the one who was too careful, Miri."

"He's my husband and I want him in my bed. I want to have him in me again, Sarah."

"That's unwise. This whole thing is unwise."

"What do you think, Leo?"

"I think he's a really cool looking guy."

On the afternoon of the release, they came down with a cake. They made a party of it with a thirty-year-old Yquem and the Lane cake, made after a sumptuous eighteenth-century recipe, with macerated fruits and cognac. Miriam joked by carrying a cherry to Paul in her mouth. He took it with his teeth and chewed it sensuously.

Miriam gave him the run of the house, all except the attic.

Sarah waited and watched. She tried to enlist Leo, but Leo was little more concerned than Miriam. Leo was a young fool, in Sarah's opinion. Sarah noticed a subtle change in her own personality. A certain realization came upon Sarah that was similar, she thought, to the kind of a.s.sumption that comes to dominate a man's mind in a terrible battle. It was the a.s.sumption that there would be no escape, that what Miriam was doing was so foolish that it could not lead to anything but destruction.

How could it be, though, that somebody who had clawed their way through so much life and so much danger to have a baby would, upon becoming pregnant, put at risk both her own life and that of the child?

Miri was a dear and familiar friend. Sarah knew her every mood, the meaning of every expression that flickered in her eyes, had lived with her in deepest intimacy for two decades and more. She knew Miri's fears and her joys, had drawn her to extremes of s.e.xual intensity and observed her with a lover's fascinated dispa.s.sion as she lost herself in pleasures. She provided friendship and love and loyalty. But Sarah thought now that they had come to an extreme edge, a strange country of the Keeper mind into which her understanding could not penetrate.