you’re as persistent as a truffle hunting pig. What difference does it make which vampire?”
“It’ll tell me what I have to worry about. For instance, if you’re researching Windigo, a Native species, it’s probably for ritual purposes and my level of concern remains low.”
“Windigo aren’t Mertec. My people had a different name for it.”
“I’m aware of that. But Davidson doesn’t have a section on the earth-eater. In fact, I might be the only white man in the world who knows about it.”
She reached across the table and traced a star on his forehead. “Consider it a gold one,” she said. “And if I’m interested in Lamias?”
“You’re not, are you?” he asked.
She retreated into herself, stirring her tea. He reached across the table and touched her wrist as he let his thoughts slip into hers.
What is it? he asked, subvocally.
He felt her sharp retraction, and quickly, courteously, he bowed out. But not before he retrieved a piece of information he’d been seeking.
He leaned back in his chair, picked up his tea. “Why are you interested in Greenkeepers?”
“The Adept at work,” she muttered.
She considered his precognitive capacities the most manipulative of the empathic arts and continued to distrust them, with feeling.
“I don’t think I’m the only one working, chant-shaper,” he answered.
She kept her gaze away from his. He tapped his spoon against the table. She raised her head and lifted a corner of her mouth in a smile. Deliberately neutral, except for her eyes, which studied him hard.
He knew that look. She was waiting to see his next move before she made any of her own. Her ego allowed her to make very few false moves. And right now, it was entirely possible that she was afraid of him, for the same reasons he was afraid of her.
No. Not afraid of her. Afraid of what he felt about her.
They’d worked together for over six years, been very good friends for at least five, and slept together once. Just once. Enough to tell them both that kind of interaction wasn’t something to take or leave lightly.
A few months had passed since then, and the only agreement they’d reached was to go neither forward nor backwards. She’d been aloof, and he’d been polite and distant. They were engaged in a complex dance on a trembling plane, waiting to see if the earth would stop its tectonic motion any time soon, or if they could find new footing on it.
For his part, he’d also been watching for her fur to settle after the intensity of their last encounter, which had served to save both their lives. He approached her as he would any wild thing, with slow and deliberate care. She needed time to know she could negotiate the turf of what would be a totally new geography of the emotions for them both. And right now, she needed to know what he knew about Greenkeepers.
She stretched her legs out, the material of her long, loose dress rippling like water over them. Her gaze was open and clear as ocean, and just as impossible to fathom. Her silence was extravagant and complete. She was waiting for him to come up with something. He obliged.
“The Greenkeeper,” he said, “is a deceptively gentle name for modern North American vampires. They were first written about after the Serials, when quite a few of the earliest murderers brought in claimed they used ritual rape and murder to regenerate themselves physically. Nothing proven, of course, but theoretically Greenkeepers can use energy transfer, blood, or sexual fluids to trigger cellular regeneration. They prefer children, because they’ve got more of the right stuff than adults. The name,” he concluded, “is from the response of regenerative biochemicals to lab experiments.”
He took her hand and lifted his teacup over it, pouring a stream of green tea to pool in her palm. “When isolated, they turn green.”
She stared at her palm, then tipped it to let the tea flow into the saucer under his cup. She closed her eyes and pressed the index finger of her right hand against her lips, tapped them as if sounding morse code. Alex waited. When she reopened her eyes, they were still neutral.
“Pedophiles were some of the earliest ritual killers during the Serials. So how do you tell the difference between a pedophile and a Greenkeeper?” she asked.
“Is that a riddle?”
“No. I’m asking. How?”
That was an unexpected question. He searched his rather extensive memory to see what emerged. Jonathan Post, in his book Unparticular Magic, said early 21st literature that romanticized vampires reflected the larger cultural attraction to pedophilia. Other historians noted that rates for child abuse were higher previous to the Killing Times than at any other time in history. They calculated how many of those abused went on to become abuser, who were released from overcrowded prisons just before the violence erupted.
But pedophiles were a dime a dozen, while even Davidson admitted that Greenkeepers were rare, if they existed at all. They either had to be born with the inherent capacity to access regenerative material, or transformed into that skill by another Greenkeeper. And unlike any other psi capacity, they never turned out well.
They were an anomaly, born to evil in a universe that preferred the good. And their relationship to pedophiles was, theoretically at least, complex.
“While all Greenkeepers are pedophiles,” he said, “Not all pedophiles are Greenkeepers. Greenkeepers have lots of psi capacities—Telekinesis, shapeshifting, hypnopathy, Protean change—and pedophiles don’t. Of course, one Greenkeeper can do damage on a scale beyond the pedophile’s wildest dream, because theoretically they live as long as they keep feeding. And they rarely transform those they feed from. They just bind them at an energy level so they’ll go on to become destructive, but without the powers of their master. That means pedophiles could be former victims of Greenkeepers, bound but not transformed.”
“What happened to the ones brought in during the Killing Times?” she asked.
“You mean the ones who claimed they were Greenkeepers?” he amended.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Those, if you insist on reasonable doubt.”
Alex held his hands palm up. “They disappeared.”
She nodded, as if she expected this answer.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “You disappeared, too. More than ten million people disappeared, one way and another. Everything was in chaos.”
The Killing Times they’d both survived—she as a teenager, he as a young man—left the major cities of North America in upheaval for years. The rise in serial killing from which it derived its name was followed by uncontainable violence, domestic terrorism, burning and death. Keeping track of mythical Greenkeepers was the last thing on anyone’s mind.
“Besides,” he added, “even Davidson admits there’s no actual proof of their existence. All the evidence is anecdotal. Like ghost stories and UFOs.”
“Sexual abuse stats plunged like a rock after the Killing Times,” she said, “and now they’re climbing again, along with
