Free The Golden by Lucius Shepard Page A

a coy smile by lowering her head.
    “You’re
playing with me,” he said.
    She shrugged.
“I’m trying to persuade you to tell me what you were
thinking, but I’m not having a great deal of success.”
    “I’m
certain you know what I was thinking,” he said impatiently. “I
was thinking about you and me. I was wondering how it might be with
us.”
    “That’s
candid enough,” she said.
    “Of
course,” Beheim went on, put off by her neutral tone, “as
I said before, it doesn’t really matter, one way or another.”
    “And why
is that?”
    “Among
other reasons, in a few days we will be leaving Banat. I will be
returning to Paris, you to your home.”
    “I don’t
understand.”
    “What’s
the point of initiating a relationship when there’s so little
time to explore it?”
    She shot him a
searching glance, then gazed off toward the hole in the wall,
twisting a strand of her auburn hair about a finger. “A
relationship,” she said. “What a strange thing to want. I
want whatever I want without condition. I don’t worry what will
happen after I have it.” She glanced at him again. “Usually,
anyway.”
    His dignity
wounded, he said, “It’s probably just a symptom of my,
uh . . . what did you call it? My ‘time of
metamorphosis.’ ”
    “No, I
don’t think so,” she said, refitting her gaze to the hole
in the wall and the mechanical puzzle beyond. “Agenor said you
might be remarkable. It may be that he was right.”
    She seemed truly
confounded by him, or by something she felt that was somehow related
to him. He had the sense that he could influence her now, so long as
he did not overstate his case. “I can’t believe it’s
remarkable to want something good to last,” he said.
    “I don’t
expect it is. But I haven’t thought in those terms for a long
time.”
    There was a
silence during which he heard the lapping of water and saw something
small and black moving rapidly on the marble plain that lay beyond
the hole in the wall, coursing back and forth, becoming visible now
and again through the gaps in the machinery. He closed his eyes and
could feel her beside him, feel her warmth, the rhythms of her breath
and heart. The scents of orange water, her natural musk and sweet,
hot blood mingled in a heady perfume.
    “I’d
like to ask you a question,” he said. “One that may anger
you.”
    “I’ll
try not to be angry.”
    “The man
Kostolec killed. How do you reconcile something like that, the
acceptance of that sort of callousness and cruelty, with the
sensitivity—or should I say the humanity—you’re
displaying now?”
    He could not see
her face; she had turned her head a bit, and her hair fell across her
cheek, obscuring her profile; but he could see the question strike
her—the ligature of her neck cabling, a general tightness
affecting her posture. But when she answered him, there was no anger
in her voice, just a touch of hesitancy.
    “Naturally
I find it difficult,” she said. “You have killed to feed.
You understand the hypocrisy involved in considering those upon whom
we feed in an emotional frame. And yet many of us do exactly that. I
have done so myself. The guilt that eventually results from these
futile associations, I believe, influences us to treat all mortals as
animals, to reject them so that they cannot grow close to us.”
She brushed back her hair from her face and looked soberly at Beheim.
“When I came to visit you earlier tonight, my treatment of your
servant was, I would suppose, to some extent a defensive reaction.
And, too”—she darted her eyes toward him—“I
suppose I was a bit jealous of her. I’ve been attracted to you
for quite a while. But at the same time she disgusted me. Perhaps my
disgust was compensatory. Perhaps we only learn to despise them
because we must. Or it may be that we change too drastically to
respect them in any fashion. Yet sometimes I think we are not so
different from mortals, that the one true difference between