2

WHAT YOU HUNT

As human morality trended away from slavery and caste, a few vampires began to question our hunting practices. Modern forensic science persuaded more of us that it was too dangerous to feed full-tooth from strangers. Thus Sylvia, our Irish sister, founded a series of clubs to protect us—the beautiful, incestuous children of angels thrown from Heaven—from a similar expulsion from the world of men. The Quarries offer ethical consumerism and identity protection in exchange for eight thousand dollars and our once-potent solitude. I wonder what we’ll find to fear next.

I wash up on Manhattan’s most exclusive doorstep before twilight on Saint Patrick’s Day, beneath a snot-colored sky. The New York Quarry is introducing a new redhead in honor of the occasion, but after a month of hunting rogue, I don’t give a fig for novelty. I have come here to play it safe. I am weary, and seeking a familiar sin.

I slip the small brass key around my wrist into the club’s blood-red door whose matte black letters absorb all the sparkle of the city’s light. The door swings silently inward, and I step into a small reception room. It is comforting, at least, to be out of the electricity again.

A young man stands behind a desk bathed in unsteady candlelight. “Welcome,” he whispers, and with reverent hands presents a velvet-lined box to me. I take the ring from it and slip it over my right thumb. I turn its jewel to face him. He tenses, watching the band spin. The swirl of my damnation, like smoke in a bottle, clouds the red stone black. Why must our most basic rites be embroidered thus? Why can’t I still draw a curved line in the dust and be known?

The boy milks the retractable spike into a silver vial and wipes away the excess with a Kleenex. I am not meant to see him slip the tissue into the pocket of his tailored coat. “Okay, then.” He smiles too brightly. “The Quarry debuts a fresh fig at midnight, so in addition to the standard agreement, there’s a proviso page to sign, okay?”

He smells like the outside, like grass, or dill, fresh and green, with a deep masculine red beneath, the too-cheerful smell of blood and fucking. I hate him and his sunshine smells in my night city. He disappears behind his desk, and pops back up holding several printed pages, which he tidies and stacks before me. He twists his head at an unhealthy angle to read aloud the page facing me.

“While there is no additional fee for freshness”—I could help his neck to twist around a bit farther; vertebrae break quietly—“society members are reminded that evasion skills are learned over time.” He holds out a black fountain pen. “Initial please.”

I inscribe an ornate O where he points.

“I understand that there are initiate connoisseurs,” he whispers, “but for what you pay, I’m sure you want at least an hour of pursuit to work up an appetite.” He leans over the desk with a conspiratorial wink, and my fingers twitch to snatch the flicking lashes and rip. “No guarantees with the new recruits! Last month, Evelyn caught a debut male in ten minutes.” He shakes his head sadly. “That one didn’t return.”

I should go see Evelyn. Maybe she could cheer me.

He turns over another page of small type and blank lines. “This document allows us to auto-deduct the eight thousand dollars per hunt from the credit card you have on file, plus any fines that you incur. Initial please. Thank you.”

Another piece of paper defiled.

“This is the standard guarantee of disease- and drug-free blood, initial please, thank you. These are your restrictions, initial by each line please. To take no more than two quarts per fig per hunt, thank you. To leave no marks beyond a maximum of three sets of punctures, thank you. And to call the Quarry Recovery Line within an hour of first draw, thank you. Here’s a card with the Recovery Hotline phone number.” I take the card.

Modernity: Abandon all choice, ye who enter here. I push the door open and step inside.

The Quarry’s lounge is decorated like an old-world bordello, deliberately ironic but genuinely antique. Flocked crimson wallpaper and polished brass diffuse and glow in the flickering light of wall-mounted gas sconces. All the human smells are gone. Soon it will teem with the Undead, but it’s early still. I’m the only one.

Amidst the Victoriana, in the center of the lounge, lush, backless velvet sofas ring a huge, sleek, one-way glass aquarium. Behind its soundproof glass, six naked men and women await their hunters. But I see only the delectable Latina woman inches away. I push my marble fingers against the cool, slick glass. “Hola, Maria.” She can’t hear me.

I force myself to see the others in the covert. Opposite Maria, the new girl is easy to spot, rabbit soft, hair like a dying fire. She is the only one trying to conceal her body, hopelessly vulnerable. I walk around the covert to where she sits, trailing lifeless fingertips against the cold glass.

She’s terrified, but even the veterans like Maria are nervous every time. They never know who hunts them, and some of us like to play with our food, drawing out the pursuit as long as we can, or amusing ourselves with the unconscious shell, tasting the cooling body, the pliant muscles and unresisting apertures, the smells still clinging, the vigor of having fed building in us.

I ring for the quarrymaster.

“Get me Maria,” I tell him.

She is not redemption. I only drink her fear. But it is familiar, almost the same as love.

As my Maria is summoned and descends, I watch a powerfully endowed, muscular younger man leaning back in his chair with his deep-set eyes closed. A Rubenesque raven girl massages his meaty shoulders. Her full, red-tipped breasts roll rhythmically with her strokes. His hands curl loosely on his corded thighs, making no attempt to cover his long, exposed, but flaccid sex. Her fist-size nipples spiral hypnotically, and I wonder what it would take to make him hard. Maybe he would rather be hunted than massaged. Some desires require that.

The quarrymaster returns to say that Maria is dressed and ready. I follow him into the pen. Only its thin walls separate her mortal body from mine now. She waits, delicate chin resting in a cradle inches away. The bar slides back revealing only her green eyes. She does not blink. Her eyes fix deep in me, locating her within. I cannot fail to find her now. The window slides shut from the other side. Someone tells her “Go!” And she is gone.

The farther she can run before I follow, the longer the hunt will last; but I’m restless, and the quarrymaster smells of fried chicken and fear. I circle the building scenting for the exit she used. I sense her eyes again as I pick up her trail and follow it, holding myself to a walk. I am hungry.

The Quarry is on the edge of the restaurant district, and she’s gone deeper in, mingling with the club-goers and first dates, scenting sex and anxiety. She’s learning. I pass the bar where I cornered her last time. She had hidden in the back, near the kitchen, trying to mask her fear-scent in the smells of food. Tonight, she has gone toward the busier streets. But she misunderstands; it’s not an olfactory scent we take when the bar slides back between our eyes.

Hunger heightens my angelic senses, and I isolate her trail amongst the hunters who seek only a human connection, flavored with a longing she does not possess. I follow, trying to shorten my powerful stride through my growing anticipation and rage. Adam will be among these throngs tonight.

The entertainment district ends abruptly at an elevated highway, despite repeated civic attempts to reclaim the darkness on the other side. Car exhaust and dirt on the ascendancy, blood and anticipation declining. Maria, where are you? The rules require that she stay on foot. I reach out for a trace of her. I’ve overshot, and retreat.

I track her to an all-night service station. She’s gone inside and vanished? No. Here’s a trace, terror masked in gasoline, moving north. She’s taking risks. A human woman walking alone under the overpass at night tempts devils who have signed no contract. I will kill anyone I find threatening her. I almost run, but stop myself, like choking back a laugh.

She’s alone. I see her now, walking briskly north. She, too, has learned not to run. I shorten the space between us too soon, pressing down need and anger. Shall I let her hear me? No.

She turns, sensing the shadows moving. She’s wearing a mechanic’s greasy coveralls. Clever girl. But her tender heart rate is rising. Now she knows it’s me. She struggles not to run, looking hard over her shoulder. Does she hope for a different ending? Does the Quarry hint that the hour we have to hunt them is a limit on us, a chance of escape for our prey? How could she believe that? Could she try so valiantly if she did not?

Disciplining my strength into grace, I shadow her beneath the overpass. I’m almost touching her, breathing the slippery smell of her fear. But the thrumming beat of her, visible through the warm flesh of her throat, summons me. My pulseless fingers reach out for the hammering vein and feel it pound swifter against them. She makes a strange noise and runs.

I watch her strong body straining forward for as long as I can, before I slide in behind her. Magnificent, striding flight, her legs stretch, and mine shadow. I rein myself back as her endurance fails. Her blazing lungs and her tearing heart echo through me. I could so easily overtake her, drive my teeth into her now, but she will exhaust herself soon and have to stop. And then…

Then I will take her. Let her run until she no longer can.

But she’s very fit and can’t bring herself to surrender, so I touch her again, circling a fragile wrist, giving her a focus for her fear. She flails, and I step behind her, pulling her against me. She can’t breathe from running. Fear spikes, mindless struggles, held to my still body. My lips graze the place of first puncture, across the last hunt’s wounds healed to bare bruises; and I taste her with my tongue. She’s not allowed to scream, but can’t throttle the half cry. She fights to control the impulse, which would end her career with us, even as I whisper to her.

The cars fly over us rhythmically carrying their own light, but only their shadows spread beyond the highway, down the concrete, to me. I transfer Maria’s wrists to one hand and glide the other across her hip bone, pressing into the softness it encircles. Her breasts are small, tapering into her chest below a collarbone that I can’t see without wanting to snap and suck. My fingers press hard into it, not to bruise, no, I can’t leave even a finger-mark in the flesh there, the castrating bastards of the Quarry all be damned for their godless fear and mortal caution.

She’s motionless against me now, except for the ragged breathing. Dragged from collarbone to jaw, my cold fingers finally tip her chin up. She shudders, knowing. My lips open against yielding flesh. My mouth stretches even wider, and I allow my tongue to stroke her pulsing skin again. A warm release, deep in the bones of my jaw, presses the sharper teeth through, lengthening as my lips and tongue work until, at full extension and achingly hollow, my feeding teeth catch against her. I force myself through a single ragged breath, pressing my lower lip hard against her human warmth. Then I flex, pulling my mouth away. My upper lip curls, my jaws unhinge, and I strike. I pierce, and sink into her full-tooth. The blood strikes the back of my throat in spasmodic cardiac bursts until I can pull and swallow, draw her into me. Maria is rigid, locked in pain, or horror, or ecstasy. But she will soften.

Beneath the freeway, time groans and gives way. My throat is slippery with the distortion of seconds into years, and I pull myself from the rising blood dreams to turn her toward me. Her face is extraordinary, pale stealing the flush of her running. Her swimming eyes lose focus, meet mine. I shouldn’t, but I let her look, cradling her head with my warming fingers, holding her against me. She gives the weight of her body into my hands. Below my lips, her scent is fading, heart slowing.

I strike again. My mind deepens and I drink the flood of images and moments that aren’t mine across my tongue. Her mother—black hair, outdated clothes, a lover, a wasteland, a child. The sweet blood dreams. I drink her, am her. I am open to the whole thrum of thought and life and desire, of things made and things dreamed, of each person unique, each droplet alone in its current. And none of them mine.

———

Dominic pierced the hotel’s cocoon of wealth reluctantly. Any place, temple or tearoom, where the rituals of rank and riches were strictly observed brought out an ancient, impudent impulse in him. He wanted to take off his shirt and stand on the furniture. He wanted to run. On the pillowy hotel lobby carpet, getting his bearings, Dominic stood full Bengali despite his stylish jacket.

His rogue imagination was swift to provide a rich contextual history behind physical sensations as simple as lushness underfoot, but he had learned not to challenge these unwelcome fantasies too closely. He was, in some indisputable way, tiger hunting. He shifted his laptop bag to his left shoulder and began to track silently across the luxurious rug toward the restaurant, but his elbow was immediately captured.

“Dr. O’Shaughnessy, I’m Megan, Ms. Wright’s personal secretary. Thank you for coming.”

“My pleasure, Megan. Did I speak with you on the phone?”

“No, that was Tibby.”

Brisk, blond, and competent, Megan steered Dominic away from the restaurant where he had been asked to meet Madalene Wright, and down a broad flight of marble stairs. “I’m Ms. Wright’s personal secretary. Tibby is the foundation’s. Ms. Wright heard you speak today at the conference. I believe she has some questions for you.”

Megan brought Dominic to a wary halt before an unmarked but highly polished wooden door. “Are you surprised to hear that?” she asked, and rapped at the door.

“I was surprised to hear from Ms. Wright at all. She has a reputation for being more difficult to meet with than the Wizard of Oz.” Dominic tugged the cuff of his jacket self-consciously. Megan’s slender hand had pulled it up enough to reveal the tattoo that bore an embarrassing testament to his tumultuous adolescence.

“I’ll let Ms. Wright know you’re here.” Megan turned fluidly toward the equally stunning woman who had opened the door. “Lucy, will you show Dr. O’Shaughnessy to Ms. Wright’s table?”

“With pleasure.”

Dominic’s elbow was transferred from one silky hand to another, and Lucy escorted him deeper into the belly of San Francisco’s most exclusive dining room. He felt, with every cushioned step, less like a predator and more like prey.

Dominic had been seated only moments when Ms. Wright, elegant and ageless, swept into the dining room in a crimson dress, flanked by her two vestal secretaries, and trailed by a cantankerous-looking man a few years younger than himself. Dominic rose, grateful that the fabled Ms. Wright triggered nothing in him. He grinned too broadly at the grande dame out of sheer relief.

“Dr. O’Shaughnessy, how very nice to meet you.”

“Ms. Wright, I am honored. Call me Dominic, please.”

For once, Dominic’s aberrant knowledge of historic minutia proved useful. He did not extend his hand and recognized the flicker of approval in the regal face across from him. Nor did he take his seat again until she, smiling now, invited him to.

“This is my son, Harold.” Madalene nodded toward the hulk of resentment settling itself into a chair. “Harold, unfortunately, did not hear you speak this afternoon, but I very much enjoyed your lecture.” Madalene ignored the flurry of radiating activity as secretaries and waiters, sommeliers and servants poured and fetched. She fixed her keen gaze on Dominic. “So, there’s been a changing of the guard at MIT? My old acquaintance Dysart stays home and sends forth his brave young Turks. Need I fear for his health or his dedication?”

“An old general knows the value of young blood,” Dominic replied.

Tibby’s mouth contracted as though her teeth had turned to salt. Megan transmitted a subtle frown, but Dominic caught the flicker of a smile in the glittering eyes of their mistress. “I thought I caught a whiff of something,” she said. “So tell me, Dominic, are you really as good as the journals say?”

“You read the Lancet article?”

“I have more than a passing interest in neuropsychiatry, and I try to keep abreast of developments in your field. I fund quite a lot of them.”

“I am well acquainted with your generosity.”

“You are not.”

“Then I should like to be.”

Tibby blanched.

Madalene arched a sculpted brow. “My, you are quite the young tiger, aren’t you?”

“My mother is a businesswoman, Dominic.” The lumpish son heaved himself forward to interrupt. “She invests our foundation’s money in promising enterprises that are likely to win big.”

“I was under the impression that the Wright Foundation took advantage of its unique position as a private fund to support the kind of radical research that makes corporate sponsorship gun-shy,” Dominic replied. “You have a reputation for poaching the big ideas that hover on the outskirts of mainstream science.”

“So you admit that the mainstream takes exception to Dysart’s work?” Harold smirked.

“I’ll admit it’s exceptional.”

Watching the junior Wright’s face deflate, Dominic was reminded of the antique medical notion of the four humors. Presented with such a perfect example of an excess of bile, Dominic suppressed an impulse to inquire after the younger man’s spleen.

“Are you hungry, Dominic?” Behind her elegant, erect back, Madalene’s matching secretaries discreetly shook their manicured heads no at Dominic with a fearful symmetry.

“Very.”

“Ah.” Ms. Wright paused, unperturbed. “Please order something.”

A waiter materialized from the staff orbiting Ms. Wright like bees drawn to the golden pollen of wealth. He hovered, waiting for a command he could obey, but Ms. Wright’s menu remained untouched. “At a certain age, women’s bodies lose the ability to metabolize food at all and convert it directly into thigh,” she informed Dominic. “I am too old to eat.”

“Ms. Wright, I find myself in an unenviable position,” Dominic confessed. “I’m afraid that if I don’t eat something, I shall be very poor company, too addled by hunger to think clearly or answer your questions accurately. You will be forced to form an impression of me as a well-mannered young fool. On the other hand, I’m the son of a southern lady who raised me to eat with good manners or starve—Sparta, Georgia’s ‘with your shield or upon it’—so I cannot order if you do not intend to eat.”

Madalene’s laughter surprised everyone but Harold, who clearly ate whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, metabolism be damned.

“My mother never takes dinner,” he said, enjoying Dominic’s predicament, while his mother’s attendant bevy swarmed uneasily.

“Do you take tea, Ms. Wright?”

“That sounds lovely.”

“Tea, please,” Dominic said.

“With”—Ms. Wright inclined her precision coif slightly toward the waiter’s napkined forearm—“perhaps some of those nice little quiche and a few finger sandwiches?” She smiled frankly at Dominic, the first authentic expression he had seen on her expensive face. “Mustn’t disobey Mother?”

“Never.” Dominic returned the smile and took a risk. “Tell me what kind of work you’re interested in supporting, Ms. Wright,” he asked bluntly. The doyen across from him enjoyed toying with her food, but his tea and sandwiches would be arriving soon on starched white waves, and Dominic wanted time to digest both food and information.

“My foundation supports innovation,” Ms. Wright said. “Your lecture today suggested the possibility of a psychiatric cosmetic surgery. If I understood correctly—and you may correct me if I did not”—Dominic nodded polite assent—“you’re postulating a technology to identify the locations of specific thoughts or memories, with the ultimate goal of disrupting only those targeted neurons to functionally erase the memory.”

“We believe that memory is basically a change in synaptic strength or organization,” Dominic explained. “It’s a genetic adaptation with enormous benefits to creatures needing to recall precisely where they stumbled across a den of tigers, or a poisonous snake. But it’s a lot less helpful against contemporary dangers.”

“Hence PTSD.” Madalene nodded.

Dominic watched the tea things land with profound gratitude. “The brain can’t tell the difference between the memory of an old trauma and a fresh instance of a recurrent one,” he said. “The pathway is reinforced every time an event is relived in imagination or experience, but we’re learning to identify the memory trace—the specific grouping of neurons that represent a memory—and we’re finding these traces aren’t simply the environments in which a memory is formed, but actually hold the memory itself.”

“That’s fascinating, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”

Madalene Wright did not look fascinated. Dominic poured himself a deliberate cup of tea, playing for time. Something she had heard in his morning lecture had intrigued her enough to summon him to a hotel they didn’t share for a meal she didn’t eat. What did she want?

“We’ve found beta-blockers which, if given within a few hours of the inciting traumatic event, can almost eliminate the risk of PTSD,” Dominic said. “I could imagine similar therapies for phobia, monomania, and OCD.” Not a flicker of interest from across the table. Ms. Wright sat, demure hands in her lap, expressionless.

“Can you foresee a benefit for delusional patients?” she asked.

Dominic’s body’s pulsed an adrenal alert. He glanced at the old lady’s son. Young Harold rolled his piggy eyes in weary disgust and tucked his chin into folds of neck. He had heard this before. Dominic relaxed and ate a finger sandwich.

“Delusion is different from memory,” he noted neutrally.

“But would a delusion or a false memory create a similar memory trace?” Ms. Wright leaned forward until the table pressed into her silk-clad arms. She reminded Dominic of a puppet, the way her upright body leaned and turned without ever releasing her hands from their place beneath the table.

“Delusions are thought disorders, but there’s certainly a larger confabulatory component to memory than courtroom lawyers would like us to know about.” Dominic grasped for levity but missed. “And we remember the past and imagine the future from subsystems of the same core network.”

Ms. Wright’s wealth and influence were massive. She leaned her tailored torso against the table, and the gravity of her power inexorably drew Dominic toward her, accreting his intellectual prowess and scientific skill to her private purpose. Eager to capitalize on this first sign of interest, Dominic dug into his private research for an illustration, and whether low blood sugar, the adrenal burst of grant money slipping away, or the manifest failure of his endocannabinoid experiment was to blame, made the only reckless mistake of his logical, calculated adult life.

“Now this isn’t neuroscience, just psychiatry, but let’s take, for example, an outgoing, imaginative child who believes in monsters,” Dominic extemporized. “Maybe this girl is involved in a traumatic car accident. Her parents are killed, and she is thrown from the car.” Now he had Madalene riveted. “The child recovers physically, but the emotional pain is so severe that she begins to dissociate. She might pretend to be incapable of suffering.” Madalene nodded encouragement. “The girl might start to believe she’s a monster and responsible, somehow, for the death of her parents.”

Madalene was pale, and even dull Harold looked alert. Dominic’s rouge imagination stretched itself. “The little girl, guilty and frightened, remembers being thrown from the car and the taste of blood, and she imagines herself a powerful, flying, insensate monster.”

“A vampire…” Madalene whispered.

“Sure,” Dominic took the suggestion readily. “This confabulation, tied to a trauma-related identity disruption, could become so foundational to her self-image that she might lose her ability to taste food. She starts sleeping in a coffin, develops a phobia of mirrors or crosses or wooden stakes, and becomes immune to physical pain, all in service to this explanatory story that helped her escape intolerable suffering as a child.”

“That’s nuts.” Harold collapsed back into his cushioned chair. “Immune to physical pain? Bullshit.”

“Actually, pain insensitivity in patients with psychosis isn’t unusual.” Dominic dissected a miniature quiche, sheltering in the formal, clinical language of his work like a eunuch in a power suit. He was rattled. What was the cost, he wondered, of having fallen within Madalene Wright’s heady orbit, her public event horizon?

“In fact,” he lectured Harold, “schizophrenic patients have died from a common side effect of clozapine without ever complaining of pain from the constipation that killed them.”

The fat man shuddered, and Madalene’s hovering assistant flock seemed to sink, their wings weighted by such unspeakable language.

“Schizophrenics can hear things that aren’t there, but can’t feel things that are,” Ms. Wright quipped.

“Something like that.” Dominic returned her intelligent smile. He could not tell how old she was. Her lineless face, the territory of age, from which all landmarks had been removed, was taut with surgery and glistened with unguents.

“I would like to speak privately with Dr. O’Shaughnessy.”

To cover the turbulence this announcement caused in her support staff field, Ms. Wright sacrificed a secret. She reached a jeweled hand across the table and poured herself a cup of tea. Dominic repaid the confidence by looking away. Her hands would betray her age. He did not even steal a glance.

When the lumbering son, the secretaries, the waiters, and their minions had all dissolved, Madalene leaned toward Dominic again, eyes twinkling. “You’ll have to excuse Harry. He has what I call ‘chauffeured child syndrome.’ ”

“He’s been driven all his life?”

“That is correct. He has no drive of his own at all.” Madalene made a subtle beckoning gesture toward the back of the dining room. “While you, I hear, walked to our little rendezvous.”

“The convention hotel is just on the other side of the hill,” Dominic shrugged. A waiter materialized beside them.

“Bring me your best Syrah and whatever Chef Humm feels Dr. O’Shaughnessy might enjoy with it.” The waiter vanished. “We’re alone, Dominic. No need to stand on formality. I’m sure your mother would say exactly the same as I.”

“My mother,” Dominic said with complete sincerity, “has never said anything remotely similar to anything you’ve said tonight, Ms. Wright.”

“Call me Madalene.”

She acknowledged the arrival of the sommelier, whose experienced hands trembled with the honor of serving such a bottle to such a patron. His private ecstasy shone undarkened by the cloud Dominic had conjured of everything unspoken between a parent and a child. Madalene savored a sip.

“For such an energetic and ambitious young man, you have extraordinary tact. I can see why Dysart dispatched you in his stead.”

“I wasn’t aware that you and the professor knew one another.”

“I know him as one knows anyone to whom one entrusts a significant sum.”

The woman seated across from him had the kind of money that could open almost any door and discover any secret. Dominic reached for his wine, but stopped himself. He would not betray his discomfiture, despite a mouth of sand and stone. He was well trained against acting on impulse. Reason and science revealed the correct path, not instinct. He needed to think.

Madalene’s expensive face gave nothing away. “Let us just say there are questions I would be interested to hear you address,” she said. “But this is not the time.” She raised her glass. “To the present,” she toasted. Dominic gratefully mirrored the gesture and drank.

“Herb-roasted Saddle of Elysian Fields Farm Lamb with Gnocchi à la Parisienne,” murmured the starched gentleman who appeared on Dominic’s left. For a moment, the underpinnings of Dominic’s world loosened. Whispered descriptions and artfully arranged plates swirled and eddied. When the human tide receded, Dominic glanced up at Madalene again.

“You have quite a feast there, Dominic. May I suggest that you dig in?”

Dominic happily complied.

“I am prepared to write six- and seven-digit checks beginning tonight and proceeding indefinitely, if you can convince me that your research is applicable to my needs.”

Dominic glanced up, but returned his gaze to his lamb at once.

“Don’t misunderstand me.” Madalene continued, “I am interested in the public weal, but I have a very specific personal interest in your work as well. A very private personal interest. Do you understand?”

Dominic rested his knife on his plate’s edge. He met Madalene’s piercing eyes and nodded.

“I suspect you have some skill with secrets?” Although pronounced like a question, Dominic recognized the threat.

“You have already complimented my tact.” He reclaimed his utensils meticulously and began to eat.

“Let us return, for a moment, to your illustrative example of the unfortunate child who is thrown from a car and subsequently cherishes the delusion that she is a vampire. Could you, conceivably, surgically or medically remove that memory?”

“Theoretically, in time, if we’re right. If a memory is made with a specific network of neurons, and we can parse out which neurons are involved in a given memory, and selectively delete those specific neurons, then yes, we’re talking about memory erasure.”

“And if you were able to pinpoint and remove the memory of the accident, would that destroy the vampire delusion?”

Why did Madalene keep returning to his ludicrous vampire example? Way to go, D. Couldn’t have used alien abductions or dead presidents, could you?

“Ms. Wright, I think I chose a poor example.”

“And I think you chose an uncanny one. What do you know about Renfield’s Syndrome, Dominic?”

Dominic registered the familiar constellation of sensations that indicated activation of the sympathoadrenal system’s four Fs: fright, flight, fight, and sex, the old neuroscience joke went. She had lured him with his department’s financial future and snared him with his personal past. Rage pricked Dominic, but he ruthlessly suppressed it. “Why do you ask?” he said with brutal neutrality.

They eyed each other, the tea twisting in his stomach. Dominic felt his center of gravity drop, his weight collapsing in on itself, as his mind prepared for combat.

“Empty your mind, be formless, be shapeless,” a nasal whisper hummed below the conscious level of thought. “The hands do not leave the heart. The elbows do not leave the ribs.”

“My goddaughter is ill.” Ms. Wright interrupted the instructions Dominic dully realized had been thought in the Yueh dialect of Mandarin. “A few years ago, I moved her to New York to be with me. Now she spends all her time, and a good deal of my money, in the city’s goth bars and boutiques.”

Dominic relaxed. This wasn’t about him, only another of his bizarre coincidences. A warm relief bathed him. He took another sip of wine.

“At the moment,” Madalene continued, “the tabloids are treating it like a fashion statement and a novelty. They’re having quite a lot of fun with the ‘virgin vamp.’ But I’ve spoken to her, and I’m afraid it’s quite a bit more serious than lifestyle. She believes she is a vampire.”

Madalene shuddered imperceptibly. Dominic picked up his knife again to spare her the discomfort of being observed. His appetite had recovered from the terror that had momentarily killed it. His body was still a young man’s.

“She, of course, doesn’t recognize this as a delusion. I’ve tried to convince her to seek help, but she’s not interested. She’s convinced that she was born this way—a sanguinarius she calls herself!

“I need you to learn as much as you can about this sort of delusional thinking and use all your research and science to develop a treatment. I’m happy to support whatever additional research MIT wants to pursue simultaneously in order keep the vampire component invisible to the media, but Dominic, I can’t run the risk of dying while my only two heirs are both insane.”

Dominic drained his glass. Poor Madalene, it must be terrible to lose a child to madness. He had, at least, spared his mother that.

“And her parents?”

“They died some time back. I adopted her to solve inheritance difficulties. I would like to write two checks tonight, Dominic.” Madalene was more beautiful as a suffering mother than she had been all night, through her various incarnations as aging socialite and influential power broker. “I would like to underwrite Dysart’s new Brain and Memory Lab, and I would like to fund some fieldwork. We must start with clinical and laboratory studies right away.

“You will need research subjects, but you cannot recruit in New York or Boston. Any hint that my money is at work in that subculture would risk undoing the progress I’ve made reestablishing a relationship with the child. There are one hundred and thirty-eight so-called vampire covens in the states, and only twelve in Western Europe, so I think the UK might be the best place to acquire test subjects for our purposes. You would have to contend with a language barrier anywhere else. Or do you speak French?”

“Yes, but Madalene, I’m not a sociologist. I’m not even a trained clinical psychiatrist. I’m a researcher, a scientist. I work with brain chemistry, neurons—the tiniest parts of people. I would be a terrible choice for fieldwork.”

“And yet you are my choice.”

A soundless beauty surfaced to refill his wine glass, and retreated into the dark periphery of the dining room. Could it be that his recent experimentation with dopamine reuptake had raised his monoamine oxidase levels enough to decrease risk-aversion? He was stronger now than when he first dropped out of school at eighteen to chase memories he thought he had of an ancestral home, but was he actually considering, for Christ’s sake, re-exposure to Ireland’s insanity and hell?

“London has six covens, the highest concentration of such places.”

“Ireland might be better,” Dominic said softly. If he could study the institution and its inhabitants clinically and dispassionately, if he could stay sane in that insane place, then he would know—and perhaps, for the first time since he turned thirteen, really know—that he was not ill. That he would not be a danger to anyone he loved.

“I have people in Dublin,” Madalene said.

“The place I’m considering is not in Dublin,” Dominic answered. “And it would require me to check myself into the asylum of an eccentric, aging billionaire. As a patient.”

“An asylum?” Madalene smiled. “That’s a very old-fashioned word.”

“It’s an old-fashioned place. The hotel—that’s what he calls the place, ‘the Hotel of the Damned’—is literally underground, and everyone is required to profess some sort of terrible ancient curse to gain admittance. I’m not at all certain I could even get in there again.”

Madalene was too skillful to show surprise, but her momentary silence betrayed her. “This is very interesting. You’re already familiar with a remote society of vampires so well hidden even I have not learned of its existence?”

Divining that he wouldn’t eat again that night, a legion of waiters swept plates, glasses, and crumbs from the table. In the few seconds it took them to return the pristine tablecloth to an unbloodied battlefield between him and a woman who unbalanced him like nobody since his last visit to Ireland, a cold, sober certainty seized Dominic. No amount of expensive wine or false fund-raising confidence could shield him from the full biochemical cascade preparing him to fight or run away.

“Not all the residents are vampires,” he said. “And my association with the hotel is years out of date. It may have closed. I haven’t kept in touch—”

“Dr. O’Shaughnessy, you’re prevaricating. It’s decided. Dysart will get his new laboratory, international press, and a chance to make a significant difference in the lives of others. I will rest more easily knowing that everything in my power is being done to help a child who is like a daughter to me, and you, Dominic, will have landed a tremendous fund-raising coup. Don’t think that won’t be a factor when you apply for tenure.” Madalene held his eyes and took a deliberate drink from her glass. “I’m curious,” she said. “What ‘terrible ancient curse’ did you invent to gain admittance?”

“I cobbled reincarnation to the Prometheus story, except my progenitor stole not fire, but pattern recognition.”

Madalene laughed, a pleasant, honest sound. “Dominic”—she shook her elegant head—“ever the scientist.”

“I guess so. I claimed to be from a race of titans who gave humanity the ability to see the kind of patterns that make constellations out of stars. The recognition that showed us that all living things die, and, if we are alive, we will surely die.”

Madalene’s smile wavered.

“So as punishment for introducing mortals to their mortality, my race lives and dies and is reincarnated lifetime after lifetime. At adolescence the memories of all our past lives wake up and we start experiencing the horror of the never-ending cycles of living and dying, of loving and losing, keeping forever, lifetime after lifetime, the memory of every lost love, every past death.”

Madalene looked at Dominic from eyes that could see into horror. “And now you are going back for me.”

“Let me make myself clear, Ms. Wright…” Dominic’s fingers reached for the strap of his shoulder bag beneath the table.

“Let me be clearer, Dominic.” Madalene’s keen eyes shot into the dark reaches of the room and returned to hold his. “I have told two people about my predicament—my personal psychiatrist and you,” she said. “I have no intention of telling another soul. You must go back to Ireland. It is the only way that I can keep my secrets”—Madalene Wright stood—“and that you, dear boy, may do the same.”

Madalene’s tribe of aides materialized around her. Tibby, slipping her fingers into the hollow of Dominic’s elbow propelled him behind the exiting retinue. At the very spot where Megan had picked him up, Tibby released him.

“Here’s my card, Dr. O’Shaughnessy.” The pretty foundation secretary smiled, but when Dominic couldn’t make his fingers take the paper rectangle, she slipped it into his jacket pocket. “Ms. Wright departs in the morning. You can call me anytime between now and nine tomorrow morning. I’m very glad you’ve signed on to help the Wright Foundation.”

“I haven’t signed anything.”

The girl smiled indulgently. “Are you always so literal, Doctor?”