“Will you tell the story?” Edythe asked. I turned to see Carine’s reaction.
She met my glance and smiled. “I would, but I’m actually running a bit late. The hospital called this morning—Dr. Snow is taking a sick day. But Beau won’t miss anything.” She smiled at Edythe now. “You know the stories as well as I do.”
It was a strange combination to absorb—the everyday life of a small-town doctor mixed up with a discussion of her early days in seventeenth-century London.
It was also kind of unsettling to realize that she probably was only speaking out loud for my benefit.
With another warm smile, Carine left the room.
I stared at the picture of her hometown for a long minute.
“What came next?” I asked again. “When she knew what had happened to her?”
She nudged me over a half-step, her eyes on a bigger landscape. It was done in dull fall colors and showed an empty meadow in a gloomy forest, a black mountain peak in the distance.
“When she knew what she had become,” Edythe said quietly, “she despaired… and then rebelled. She tried to destroy herself. But that’s not easily done.”
“How?” I didn’t mean to say that out loud, but I was so shocked, it slipped out.
Edythe shrugged. “She jumped from great heights. She tried to drown herself in the ocean. But she was young to the new life, and very strong. It is amazing that she was able to resist… feeding… while she was still so new. The instinct is more powerful then, it takes over everything. But she was so repelled by herself that she had the strength to try to kill herself with starvation.”
“Is that possible?” I asked quietly.
“No, there are very few ways we can be killed.”
I opened my mouth to ask, but she spoke before I could.
“So she grew very hungry, and eventually weak. She strayed as far as she could from the human populace, recognizing that her willpower was weakening, too. For months she wandered by night, seeking the loneliest places, loathing herself.
“One night, a herd of deer passed beneath her hiding place. She was so wild with thirst that she attacked without a thought. Her strength returned and she realized there was an alternative to being the vile monster she feared. Had she not eaten venison in her former life? Over the next months, her new philosophy was born. She could exist without being a demon. She found herself again.
“She began to make better use of her time. She’d always been intelligent, eager to learn. Now she had unlimited time before her. She studied by night, planned by day. She swam to France and—”
“She swam to France?”
“People swim the Channel all the time, Beau,” she reminded me patiently.
“That’s true, I guess. It just sounded funny in that context. Go on.”
“Swimming is easy for us—”
“Everything is easy for you,” I muttered.
She waited with her eyebrows raised.
“Sorry. I won’t interrupt again, I promise.”
She smiled darkly and finished her sentence. “Because, technically, we don’t need to breathe.”
“You—”
“No, no, you promised,” she laughed, placing her cold finger against my lips. “Do you want to hear the story or not?”
“You can’t spring something like that on me, and then expect me not to say anything,” I mumbled against her finger.
She lifted her hand, moving it to rest against my chest. The speed of my heart reacted to that, but I ignored it.
“You don’t have to breathe?” I demanded.
“No, it’s not necessary. Just a habit.” She shrugged.
“How long can you go… without breathing?”
“Indefinitely, I suppose; I don’t know. It gets a bit uncomfortable—being without a sense of smell.”
“A bit uncomfortable,” I echoed.
I wasn’t paying attention to my own expression, but something in it made her suddenly serious. Her hand fell to her side and she stood very still, watching my face. The silence stretched out. Her features turned to stone.
“What is it?” I whispered, carefully touching her frozen face.
Her face came back to life, and she smiled a tiny, wan smile. “I know that at some point, something I tell you or something you see is going to be too much. And then you’ll run away from me, screaming as you go.” Her smile faded. “I won’t stop you when that happens. I want it to happen, because I want you to be safe. And yet, I want to be with you. The two desires are impossible to reconcile.…” She trailed off, staring at my face.
“I’m not running anywhere,” I promised.
“We’ll see,” she said, smiling again.
I frowned at her. “Back to the story—Carine was swimming to France.”
She paused, settling into the story again. Reflexively, her eyes flickered to another picture—the most colorful of them all, the most ornately framed, and the largest; it was twice as wide as the door it hung next to. The canvas overflowed with bright figures in swirling robes, writhing around long pillars and off marbled balconies. I couldn’t tell if it represented Greek mythology, or if the characters floating in the clouds above were meant to be biblical.
“Carine swam to France, and continued on through Europe, to the universities there. By night she studied music, science, medicine—and found her calling, her penance, in that, in saving human lives.” Her expression became reverent. “I can’t adequately describe the struggle; it took Carine two centuries of torturous effort to perfect her self-control. Now she is all but immune to the scent of human blood, and she is able to do the work she loves without agony. She finds a great deal of peace there, at the hospital.…” Edythe stared off into space for a long moment. Suddenly she seemed to remember the story. She tapped her finger against the huge painting in front of us.