Part 3 (2/2)

”Feeding time?” Caxton asked, appalled.

The vampire's eye brightened noticeably.

”This blue light we're standing in,” Caxton said. ”It must be some, I don't know, some wavelength vampires can't see, right? So she can't see us?”

”Actually she can see you just fine. She would see you in perfect darkness. She's told me,” the man in the lab coat said. ”She can see your life glowing like a lamp. This light is less damaging to her skin than even soft white fluorescents.” He held out a hand. ”I'm Doctor Hazlitt. I don't think we've met.”

Caxton tore her gaze away from the vampire's single, rolling eyeball to look at the man. She began to reach for his hand, to shake it. Then she stopped. His sleeve was rolled up to his bicep and she saw a plastic tube embedded in the soft flesh inside his elbow. A trickle of dried-up blood, perfectly black in the blue light, stained the end of the tube.

”It's a shunt,” he told her. ”It's easier than using a syringe every time.”

Arkeley squatted down to look at the vampire eye to eye. Her fleshless hands moved compulsively in her lap as if she were trying to get away, as if he terrified her. Caxton supposed she had every right-the Fed had once set her on fire and left her for dead. ”Hazlitt here feeds her his own blood, out of the goodness of his heart,” Arkeley announced. ”So to speak.”

”I know it seems grisly,” the doctor told her. ”We tried a number of alternatives-fractionated plasma and platelets from a blood bank, animal blood, a chemical the Army is trying out as a blood surrogate. None of it worked. It has to be human, it has to be warm and it has to be fresh. I don't mind sharing a little.” He stepped over to a workbench a few yards away from the wheelchair and took a Pyrex beaker out of a cabinet. A length of rubber tubing went into the shunt, its free end draped over the lip of the beaker. Caxton looked away.

”Why?” she asked Arkeley. ”Why feed it at all?” Her first instinct as a cop-to ask questions until she understood exactly what was going on-demanded answers.

”She's not an 'it'! Her name,” Hazlitt said, and stopped for a moment to grunt in moderate-sounding pain, ”is Malvern, Justinia Malvern, and she was a human being once. That might have been three hundred years ago but please, show some respect.”

Caxton shook her head in frustration. ”I don't understand. You nearly got killed trying to destroy her. Now you're protecting her, here, and even giving her blood?”

”It wasn't my decision.” Arkeley patted his coat pocket as if that should mean something to her. It didn't. He sighed deeply and kept staring at the vampire as he explained.

”When we found her at the bottom of the Allegheny, still in her coffin, we didn't know what to do. I was still in the hospital and n.o.body much listened to me anyway. My bosses turned her body over to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian said they would love to have her remains but while she was still alive they couldn't take her. They asked us to euthanize her so they could put her on display. Then somebody made a mistake and asked a lawyer what to do. Since as far as we know she's never killed an American citizen-she's been moribund like this since before the American Revolution-the Justice department decided we didn't have a right to execute her. Funny, huh? Lares was up and moving and showing signs of intelligence but n.o.body filed any charges when I put him down. Malvern here was half rotted away in her coffin but if I put a stake through her heart they were willing to call it murder. Well, that's how it goes. She had no family or friends, for obvious reasons, so they made her a ward of the court. Technically I'm responsible for her welfare. I have to clothe her, shelter her, and yes, feed her. n.o.body knows whether cutting off her blood supply will kill her but without a federal court order we're not allowed to stop.”

”She's earned her keep a dozen times over,” Hazlitt said. He was dismantling the siphon that had drawn blood out of his arm. ”I've been studying her for seven years now and every single day and night rewarding.”

”Yeah? What have you learned?” Caxton asked. The vampire's face curled up. Her nose lifted in the obscenely. She had smelled the blood.

of it has been

air and rippled ”We've learned that blue light is best for her. We've learned how much blood she needs to maintain partial mobility. We've learned what level of humidity she likes and what extremes of temperature affect her.”

Caxton shook her head. ”All of which helps keep her alive. How does it benefit us?”

For the very first time Arkeley looked at her with a light of approval in his eyes.

”We're going to find a cure, here.” Hazlitt came around a bank of equipment, his face sharp. ”Here, in this room. I'll cure her. And then we'll have a vaccine and that will benefit society.”

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