Blood Rites Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t know the words but the meaning was clear. “If I were only younger,” he’d said.
    —When the time comes, give him that.—
    Startled, Helen looked at her lover, then back at the gypsy who had turned to play another song for another table.
    “Leave a gift for what you take,” Stephen said softly. “Then the ones you use remember only what you’ve given.”
    Later the old man joined them, sharing Helen’s wine and food, telling stories about his children, all but the youngest grown and gone. As the patrons in the café dwindled to a few stubborn hangers-on, he joined Stephen and Helen outside, walking with them to the river that ran behind the café.
    “You looked at me so strangely inside. What were you thinking?” Helen asked through Stephen.
    “Of a woman I used to know.”
    “Do I resemble her?”
    “No, but there’s something about you.” His old love’s features formed in his mind, and with no real effort, Helen trapped his thought and directed it back to the day he had first made love to the woman under his wagon and the stars. Now he seemed to fall asleep where he stood and Helen lowered him slowly to the ground.
    He smelled of sweat and wine but they were only undertones to the heady, perfect scent of his blood; his breathing scarcely a ripple compared to his pulse. She dreamed with him of love and youth and need, then, at the moment when she uncertainly thought she should drink, felt her pendant pressed in her hand. Stephen guided her, showing her where to cut.
    At first she gagged, then relaxed as his life filled her. She became one with the man, yet still herself, viewing his life with an artist’s eye. She shared his love for his family, his music, these magnificent mountains, the distant barren planes. Her lips shook as she pressed them against the wound. Sucked. Drank. All of it felt so odd, so beautiful she would have kept on forever but Stephen laid his hands on her shoulders and carefully pulled her away. As carefully, she unwound her mind from the gypsy’s.
    They left the old man sleeping on the riverbank. Later he would wake and watch the town’s lights play on the moving water, thinking of Helen and the vivid dream he’d had of his first love, never guessing that, for a moment, both had held him.
    The next afternoon, Helen painted the scene most vivid in her mind—the old gypsy in his café, his twisted ancient fingers on the strings and bow, his young dark-eyed soul surrounded by the lines of age.
    In the weeks that followed, Helen painted six more scenes from the old man’s life. What critics would one day call the Andalusian Series was complete.

    She began directing their late-night hunts, leading Stephen through the dark and silent Chaves streets, her mind moving outward, listening to the motion behind the stuccoed walls, seeking souls best suited to an artist’s brush. They would crawl softly through open windows, stealing blood and visions. Helen lived a dozen lives in a matter of weeks, painting their desires and nightmares, their pasts and the futures they feared.
    And Stephen went with her, quietly guarding her, watching her become so much a part of her new world yet so human in her enthusiasm. What he never sensed and she never revealed was her obsessive need to touch everyone she met, to open them and store their lives; and her fear that her human mind could not contain this much experience without bursting. She wanted to stop the hunts or at least slow down. She didn’t know how. People had become her addiction, a way of holding on to the part of her that was rapidly slipping away.

    IV

    In the weeks after her changing, she wrote long letters to her uncle and young cousins in Ohio. She described the cities, the countryside, the firm, her work with an aloof and obsessive fixation on details.
    Her uncle read them to his children. Carol, older, would sit entranced by her cousin’s new life and the descriptions of the people, unfolding the hurried sketches Helen