Page 59 of The Undead

“Ready to dump this bozo and let a real man show you around?” Cal asked. She patted his cheek and shook her head. “Okay, babe, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Hey, Adam, you want me to signal Joey to switch out?”

“I suppose you could talk me into it. Let me get my ears on first, though; I’ll take over at the break.”

“Yo, man, I’ll alert the press.” Cal grinned, and waved to us as he walked down the bar to refill a tray of beer pitchers. We took a table near the stage, close enough to see the strings vibrate on the guitars, and I poked around at my beer. Sylvia drank hers in steady, careful increments. Adam didn’t seem to drink his at all. When I pointed to mine, he shrugged.

“Camouflage,” he said, words nearly lost in the bright wash of music. “You can drink it—but your body will reject it. Can’t process it now.”

“Couldn’t before,” I murmured moodily. “Who did you bring me here to meet?”

Adam’s eyes scanned the small crowd and settled on a face. He smiled, obviously returning someone else’s overture, and rose to wave. I twisted around and saw two people stand up and walk slowly in our direction, weaving around tables, chairs, and dangling coats with an ease that amazed me once I realized the significance of the woman’s cane.

She was quite blind. She was also quite beautiful, with the kind of long-boned elegance that models either had or would kill to possess. The man following her was the one that had responded to Adam’s wave. He looked oddly out of place here, too well-dressed, too carefully groomed; he reeked of money, even half-glimpsed in the dark. And he didn’t seem to much enjoy the music.

“About time you got here,” he said bluntly when we were within hearing range. He guided the blind woman to a chair between me and Sylvia and pulled a seat up next to Adam. “I’ve been waiting for you for days.”

“I was tied up,” Adam said; if he noticed the man’s hostility, he didn’t bother to respond to it. “Dan Patton, this is Michael. Mike, this is Colleen Grandview. I think everybody knows Sylvia.”

“Hello, Michael,” Colleen Grandview said, tilting her head slightly in the direction of Adam’s voice. Her eyes weren’t hidden behind dark glasses, and they were milky white in the flickering muted lights of the bar. Next to the rich coffee-and-cream of her skin, they were especially vivid, and especially disconcerting. Colleen’s voice was smooth and Southern-cadenced, and it put me in mind of fine malt whiskey. “I’m happy to meet you.”

I reached out and touched her hand in acknowledgment; her head swiveled again, following my movement. Before I could draw back, her fingers spread over my wrist and lingered there. Her smile widened.

“I think you already know me,” Colleen continued softly. Without vampiric hearing I never could have separated her words from the music, and she knew it. “I donated a pint of blood to Adam’s bank earlier. As an experiment.”

Without my conscious direction, my fingers turned and closed around her wrist, hunger waking as suddenly as lust and far more powerfully. I made myself let her go—but, oddly, I hadn’t frightened her. I felt her pulse jump, mingled with the subsonic pulse of the music, but it hadn’t been from fear. It had been anticipation.

“I’m sorry,” I found myself saying. She smiled in my direction.

“I’m not.”

Adam had been watching, even though he’d been apparently listening to Dan Patton’s sharp series of complaints. His eyes had a tinge of red, but that might have been the flickering stage lights or my own imagination. I didn’t think so.

“… Cal doesn’t tell me anything,” Dan continued bitterly. “I ask him, When’s Adam coming? and all he tells me is hell get here when he gets here, and I can’t even get a phone number out of him to give you a call—”

“No phone numbers, Dan, I told you that,” Adam cut in, soft and deadly. “You don’t need to know anything more than what you already know. Stop trying to dig or I stop showing up altogether, understand?”

“Okay, okay, but you might try sticking to your schedule a little better, you know? I have too much to do to sit around this dumpy little shack five nights a week waiting on you.” Dan straightened and looked at me with cool, assessing brown eyes. He was younger than I’d first thought, maybe twenty-three, and as I looked into his eyes I knew that his bad temper was mostly a front. He was scared. Scared to death.

“I’ll try” Adam assured him. The band broke into a wild thrusting finish, screaming sax and trumpet vying for superiority. The trumpet won, by sheer volume, and the silence afterward was deafening. The applause was small but heartfelt; the band took bows and deserted the stage to make a run on Cal and the drinks lined up for them. Adam’s eyes seemed to light up as the piano player got up from the bench and drifted past, intent on the bar. “Listen, I need to get my fingers limbered up. We’ll talk later; Dan. All right?”

“I—shit. All right. Sure.” Dan made a helpless gesture to the general heavens and took a deep swig of his beer. Adam slid out of his chair and walked up the stage stairs to the piano. Someone out in the audience began applauding. He looked up, surprised, and smiled. It was a real smile, unforced and delighted and human. He bowed and sat down, fingers drifting down unerringly to caress the keys in silent homage. He bowed his head for a moment, but his eyes were open. Open and blind.

Without a change of expression, his fingers began to move, a slow graceful dance, one note melting effortlessly into the next. There was a perfect sadness to it that seemed to hang in the air with the smoke, and I saw a change come over the dub, over the regulars and over the college kids. Over Sylvia, like the touch of a dead lover’s hands. Over Dan Patton, whose tough self-interest suddenly melted under the cool pressure of the notes.

It took me a moment to realize that Colleen Grandview was weeping.

Adam played like no one I’d ever seen. He stared off into space, face open and more expressive than I’d ever seen it, and those long white hands seemed to be grafted to the keys, knowing exactly what force to give to each note, what shape, what length. There were no flaws. Not one.

When the misty sad beauty of the song finished, no one moved. Adam’s head slowly came up, and tears glittered in his eyes. His red eyes. He closed them, and the tears rolled down and around the rims of his glasses, glittering in the light of the spots. His hands were shaking. He folded them together and bent forward to the microphone set on the piano.

“That was for Julie Gilmore,” he murmured. Colleen Grandview gave a little cry of pain and bent her head. “Thanks for your silence. I know you will all remember her.”

Sylvia slowly bowed her head. Her lips moved soundlessly. Colleen’s sorrow spilled out in uncontrollable waves of weeping; Sylvia readied out to her, but Colleen readied across to me, fingers trembling. I took her hand and held it.

The hunger was so difficult to push away, so very insistent …

Adam played again, a Mozart sonata I recognized from Maggie’s recitals, and then he drifted off into improvisational jazz on the themes. I caught my breath and wished instinctively that Maggie could hear him. I could feel her delight, her wonder, as if she sat next to me there in the dark.

“You’re sad,” Colleen Grandview whispered in my ear, wiping at her face with a tissue. I nodded and looked down into my untouched beer. “Well, I’m sad too, so we make a happy couple. Listen, can you walk me back to the rest room? I’m not sure I remember the way.”

---