Free I Travel by Night by Robert R. McCammon Page B

“I’m going to wrap myself up again and go back to sleep. If you’ll leave me alone, I’ll wake up around sundown. Then we’ll talk some more. Agreed?”
    “No.” Her gaze studied the black curtains. “Why aren’t you sweating?” she asked. “And why are you…sleeping in the daytime, wrapped up in those?”
    “A long story,” was the answer.
    “I have time. So do you.”
    “No, I really don’t.” He managed a grim smile. “You see, I’m in pain right now. It’s still manageable…but I’ve got to get covered up. My skin. It’s not suited to the sun. The longer I stay exposed—even in this shade—the worse the pain becomes.” He paused to let that sink in. “Will you show me a little understanding?”
    “I don’t understand any of this,” Ann said. But then some of the hardness left her eyes and she lowered the six. “You’re very…strange,” she offered.
    “Strange. Tired. And hurting.” He removed the Stetson and began to fold himself back into the black wings. “Please don’t take it on yourself to go any further from here. You need me more than you know.” It had occurred to him that though the citizens of Nocturne were also nightwalkers and were surely in their own cocoons and hiding places until sundown, there might be snares in the swamp left ready to trap the unwary daytime visitor, be it a curious logger or a politician’s daughter. He would hate for someone as pretty as Ann Kingsley to wind up with a faceful of metal spikes. “Swear it,” he added.
    “I’m not swearing anything.” Even though she’d said it with force, she immediately softened her tone. “I said I’m not letting you out of my sight. I meant it.”
    “That’s good.” Lawson had almost submerged himself into the shroud again, except for his goggled face. “I hope you enjoy fighting off mosquitoes until sundown. If I were you, I’d go back the way you came and leave this to me.”
    “I’ll stay,” she said, “and fight.”
    “No doubt you will. You might want to get some sleep, if you can. It may be a long night.” So saying, he folded the curtains over his face and left Ann Kingsley to her own designs.
    He slept in the way of vampires, one part deeply tranced and gathering strength for the night, another part on edge, senses questing, fearful of the pain of sunlight like a darktime insect. He’d had much time to think, and considered that this pain was as much mental as it was physical; it was the pain of a body losing its fluids and withering up toward the death in life, yes, but it was also the pain of separation from light and life, and the more religious the person had been the more the shame and agony of what he or she had become.
    Lawson shifted in his edgy trance, his senses telling him that time was moving and the sun also but that Ann Kingsley was still there, dozing in her skiff and swatting with a gloved hand at the bugs that bit her face. In the haunted halls of his own memory he saw the little ruined town where the creatures had taken him that night after the battle at Shiloh. He saw the farmhouse where they took him down into a root cellar and roped his wrists and ankles to an iron bedframe and a thin, gore-stained mattress, and standing back they allowed the evil angel in red to approach with a single candle that illuminated her vulpine face. Sitting beside him on the mattress, she had traced with a fingernail his jawline and the slope of his nose, and she had leaned forward and whispered in his ear in her French-accented voice of dead reeds and dust, “I am called LaRouge, and I have lived for a very long time. Do you know how long?”
    Of course he couldn’t answer. He had been nearly bled dry already. He made a noise like the bleat of a sheep, but no sense.
    “One hundred and forty-one years,” she’d said, defying the fact that she appeared to be no more than twenty. Her bruise-colored tongue had emerged from her mouth, shivered like the tail of a rattlesnake and