“Uptown,” said Fet. “We need to go get Gus.”
NORA RODE IN the backseat of a town car, speeding through rainy rural New York. The upholstery was dark and clean, but the floor mats were filthy from foot mud. Nora sat all the way over on the right, curled up in the corner, not knowing what was to come next.
She did not know where she was being taken. After her shocking encounter with her former boss Everett Barnes, Nora was led by two hulking vampires to a building with a room full of curtainless showers. The vampires remained near the only door, standing together. She could have made a stand there and refused but felt it was best to go along and see what was to come, perhaps a better chance to escape.
So she disrobed and showered. Self-consciously at first, but when she looked back at the big vampires, their eyes were focused on the far wall with their trademark distant stare, lacking any interest in the human form.
The cool spray—she could not get it hot—felt alien against her bare scalp. Her skin was prickled by needles of cold water, and the runoff spilled unimpeded down the back of her neck and naked back. The water felt good. Nora grabbed a half bar of soap sitting in a recessed tile niche. She lathered her hands and head and bare stomach and found relief in the ritual. She washed her shoulders and neck, pausing to smell the soap right against her nose—rose and lilac—a relic from the past. Someone, somewhere had made this bar of soap. Along with thousands of others, and packaged and shipped it in a normal day with traffic jams and school drops and hurried lunches. Someone had thought the bar of soap with rose and lilac scent would sell well and designed it—its shape and scent and color—to attract the attention of housewives and mothers on the crowded shelves of a Kmart or a Walmart. And now that bar of soap was here—in a processing plant. An archaeological artifact that smelled of roses and lilacs and of times gone by.
A new gray jumper was folded on a bench in the middle of the room, with a pair of white cotton panties set on top. She dressed and was led back through the quarantine station to the front gates. Above her, on an arch of rusting iron, dripped the word LIBERTY. The town car arrived, as did another one behind it. Nora got in the back of the first car; no one entered the second car.
A glasslike partition of hard plastic separated the driver from her passenger. She was a human in her early twenties, dressed in a man’s chauffeur suit and cap. Her hair was shaved tight below the back of her cap brim, leading Nora to assume that she was bald, and therefore perhaps a camp resident herself. And yet the pinkness of her flesh on the back of her neck and the healthy color of her hands made Nora doubt that she was a regular bleeder.
Nora turned again, obsessing over the tail car as she had done since pulling away from the camp. She couldn’t be sure, through the glare of its headlights in the dark rain, but something about the driver’s posture made her think it was a vamp. A backup car, maybe, in case she tried to escape. Her own doors were completely stripped of their inside panels and armrests, with the lock and window controls removed.
She expected a long ride, but little more than two or three miles away from the camp the town car pulled off the road through an open driveway gate. Rising out of the foggy gloom at the end of a long, curling driveway was a house larger and grander than most any she had ever seen. It appeared out of the New York countryside like a European manor, with nearly every window lit warmly yellow, as though for a party.
The car stopped. The driver remained behind the wheel as a butler exited the door, holding two umbrellas, one open over his head. He pulled Nora’s door open and shielded her from the dirty rain as she exited the vehicle and walked with him up slick marble steps. Inside, he disposed of the umbrellas and snapped a white towel off a nearby rack, dropping to one knee to attend to her muddied feet.
“This way, Dr. Martinez,” he said. Nora followed him, her bare soles silent upon the cool floor down a wide hallway. Brightly lit rooms, floor vents pushing warm air, the pleasing odor of cleaning solution. It was all so civilized, so human. Which is to say, so dreamlike. The difference between the blood camp and this mansion was the difference between ash and satin.
The butler pulled open twin doors, revealing an opulent dining room featuring a long table with only two settings laid out, adjoining one corner. The dishes were gold-rimmed with fluted edges, a small coat of arms in the center. The glassware was crystal, but the silverware was stainless steel—not silver. It was apparently the only concession in the entire mansion to the reality of the vampire-run world.
