The Night World

the night world 5

But he would only think of Jez.

Please, just a little, his body begged.

No! He had killed Jez; he deserved to die.

And still Jez lay without stirring.

You see? It's not doing any good. Why condemn yourself too?

I don't care, he thought. Even if we both die.

It was particularly cruel torture, like showing a drowning person a stream of bubbles, or dripping water in front of someone dying of thirst. But Morgead refused to take even one cycle of the energy. He wasn't even sure now why he was doing this. But he knew he had to give Jez back her life.

And then he felt her try to gasp under his lips and he hastily blew a lungful of air into her open mouth. Then he got out of the way and looked at her.

Her skin was baby fair again, the color of the palest luminescent dawn. Her eyes were moving under her eyelids as if she were dreaming. And her parted lips were rose colored.

It was all so beautiful that it wasn't until the world began to go cold that he realized he still wasn't channeling his life energy back into himself.

He remedied that quickly, and felt the blessed flow of life through his body.

And then he began to call Jez's name, barely realizing and certainly not caring that he was crying.

Jez

That idiot! He ought to be completely dead by now! Burning his life energy to heal her. No wonder he was in the state he was.

And why? Why would he want to save her so much that he was willing to die himself? Why?

And why did it make her feel like crying? Why did it give her a strange, melting feeling in her stomach?

The deep-down part of her knew why. But she still wasn't ready for any revelations from it. She was still too much of a child, whatever her age.

All she knew now was that Morgead had traded one dead gang member for another. At least, he was almost dead. And she wasn't going to make the same mistake he had. There was no way for them both to live on the energy currently flowing through her body. It might be enough to allow them to scream and yell at each other, but it wouldn't sustain them as vampires for long.

No-there was one thing a vampire needed, and that was mortal blood. It carried its own variety of life energy, and it could revive a seemingly dead vampire in no time.

There were only three sources of blood that Jez could think of. One was from some sleeping hiker-but those were more than rare; camping out was forbidden in Muir Woods and the gang very seldom ran into them. The second was Steven G. Vizner, who was somewhere in the woods with the rest of the gang-but how far away she had no idea. The third was the blood of an animal, like the white-tailed deer that lived in the wood. But all of them had been driven away by Morgead and Jez's yelling and fighting.

She was not going to leave Morgead here, in this state, and go hunting. Anything might happen to him.

Just then, though, a memory came back to her. Herself a child, "helping" Uncle Bracken with a carpentry project. The sharp edge of a screwdriver and a sudden pain and spurt of blood over her hand-and drops on Uncle Bracken's hand, too. Uncle Bracken absently licking his hand before helping her learn to close her wound with her mind-and giving her the oddest look. Shaking his head. Muttering something about "the best champagne" and going on to teach her. But she could see the change in Uncle Bracken's face, the smoothing out of wrinkles, the youthful flush, and she had wondered-could it have been her blood that did that? Vampire blood wasn't like mortal blood. It wasn't supposed to do anything.

Now, though, it would seem to be the only option she had. A desperate guess based on a ten-year-old memory.

"Here, Morgead," she muttered. He was lying very still, with his face white, but he was breathing, and he could follow orders-just barely. "Let's just get you this way, and me this way." It wasn't easy to align him with her neck. He was heavy. But by leaning him against a convenient tree, and then kneeling and putting his head on her shoulder, she finally managed it.

Now, drink, she told him with all the authority she could muster. Be a good boy, and bite and drink.

Morgead didn't seem to understand what was going on, and his thoughts were gibberish.

I said drink! Jez ordered, backing it up with the power of all her frustration and fear.

Still nothing. Morgead's mouth was near her neck, but he made to effort to turn his head to reach it.

Oh, for the Goddess-for all the little demons' in the Underworld's sake! This was pitiful. Was she going to have to feed it to him?

Then she remembered something.

She was sitting astride Morgead's body, which was propped up by the tree. Now she took him, not very gently, by the top of the head, and pulled so that his mouth was in contact with her arched-back throat.

Then she sent a telepathic stream, not of words, but of pictures, the way vampire mothers and fathers did to their children. Throat + bite = dinner. Now you try! she sent to him, and felt a distant response in his brain. A return to childhood maybe.

Just to make sure, she added a nursery poem remembered from her own early childhood, when she was just learning to hunt.

"When you see a pretty throat

Bite it and see what comes out!

Red as roses, sweet as dew,

Suck and see what comes to you!

And then, to her vast relief, she felt the sharp stab of canines and the flow of blood. And even more reassuringly, she heard Morgead swallow. That meant the blood was getting in. He wouldn't need much before he started coming to his senses, not if what Uncle Bracken had said was still true. Would she have to fight with him then, too, to make him stop? And was his brain permanently damaged from the time that he'd spent without oxygen?

Since she definitely wasn't resisting him, the blood-drawing brought no pain. Oh, there was the initial sting, but then, holding Morgead and feeling the throbbing warmth of her blood trickling out, felt good. Almost too good. It made her uncomfortable, this closeness, this sharing. She wasn't ready to understand her own feelings. She tried to distract herself from the warmth at her center, the smell of Morgead in her nostrils, the heaviness of Morgead's relaxed body against her own, the physical languor that always came after a fight.

Was she entitled to look into his memories again now? Just to see if he were okay? She knew she wouldn't want to be revived without a working mind. And to make sure it wasn't anything like the stuff she had been seeing, she would take him farther, farther back.