Variations Three Read Online Free PDF Page A

grin fading,
eyes fogged; I pulled his collar wide.
    Michael’s skin is ivory, shadowed with
indigo along the sweetly defined muscles, absolutely without
blemish. Whoever had drunk of Sula had not tasted Michael. I
straightened his collar and stepped back.
    "Hot date tonight, Michael?"
    Pale blue eyes blinked, focused. The grin
flicked on like a blare of demon sunshine. "Hot is not the word,"
he said with a laugh and strode on past, wiggling his fingers at me
as he went. "Don’t wait up!"
    "I won’t," I murmured, and continued down
the hall.
    Amy and Chris were in Amy’s studio, a tangle
of sweat-gilded limbs atop the spring-shot day bed. I Spoke their
names, stroked them apart to search, then released them to their
exercise.
    Quill was before his easel, so concentrated
upon the work that I need do nothing but part his collar, search,
and leave.
    I met Fortnay on my way upstairs and lay the
trance upon him before he had a chance to speak. No marks of the
Kiss here.
    It would begin to seem that Sula had met her
misfortune during one of her frequent trips away. This did not mean
my herd was secure, given the ability of my kind to trace any human
one has tasted. However, I might not be in such immediate peril as
I had at first feared.
    I stepped away from Fortnay, who smiled in
his vague way and pushed his glasses up his nose.
    "Going for something to eat," he said,
looking just beyond my shoulder, which is Fortnay’s way with his
fellow humans, also. "Want to come along?"
    "Another time," I said softly. "I’ve just
now eaten."
    "Right." He nodded at the wall behind my
shoulder and continued downstairs, walking heavily in his spattered
tennis shoes.
    In the hallway upstairs, I found Nikita’s
door locked, the studio beyond dark. I stood just inside, breathing
in the smell of turpentine, oils and Nikita’s own scent, then went
to the end of the hall and into Jon’s studio.
    He was lying in the center of the floor, the
slab of dressed granite that had been his latest project a
wonderworks of stone shrapnel, scattered all about.
    He had been dead a very little while; I
could smell the effluvia of fresh blood over the dust in the
air.
    Jon himself was dry as dust, white as dust.
Drunk dry and with casual violence thrown away, much as a human boy
will smash a soda bottle when he’s finished his treat, and for the
same joy of wanton destruction.
    I looked at him, my sculptor, dead and
drained among the broken bits of his passion, and I was angry. How
dare some--interloper--some new-made, blood-crazed Visigoth--come
into my place, take food from me, destroy what was mine?
    The thief would pay for this outrage. I have
not existed for more than two centuries without knowing how to
answer impertinence.
    I searched the room and found what I
expected to find--no sign of an intruder. Vampires are subtle, our
powers many. Jon may never have seen his doom; he doubtless died in
a dream of such rapture he barely noticed his own passing.
    There were mundane tasks to attend to, then.
I have found that the death of one distresses the balance of the
herd, even if the one who has died was not especially beloved of
his fellows. It were best that all trace of Jon be gone before the
morrow, which bit of housecleaning consumed most of my nighttime
hours.
    I then visited my remaining artists and lay
briefly with each, whispering into their dream-minds until I was
satisfied that Jon was shrouded in the fog of far-away memory.
Likewise, I persuaded each to believe that the studio at the end of
the top hallway was a storeroom. That it had never been anything
else.
    Each, I should say, but Nikita, who did not
return to her rooms until sunrise forced me back to mine.
    * * *
    IT WAS TO her door I went first, when
twilight released me: It was locked, the room dim, the enormous
window Nikita prized so highly muffled in yards of sable fleece. I
fingered the soft stuff, then stepped ’round to the easel.
    A painting was in progress--a sweep of
orange