Mildred perched on the other side of the bed, Ryan knowing it was her from the faint whispering of the beads in her plaited hair.
“How about the eye?” she asked casually. “They do anything for it?”
“No.”
“They try anything while you were drugged?”
“No.”
“How can you be sure?” J.B. asked, “if you were out colder than a snow bear’s dick?”
“I’m sure, is all. Just what the fuck are you getting at, anyway?”
“Nothing. Settle down, Ryan. They said they could help you to see again. So it’s not unreasonable to ask you a question about what they did and how you are.”
“Yeah, I guess Sorry.” Ryan could hear J.B. take off his glasses and start to polish them, which he often did when something had embarrassed him.
“So, what did they do, Dad?”
Dean was leaning on the end of the bed, making it rock back and forth in a distinctly irritating way. But Ryan held his temper.
“Nothing. Like I said, they drugged me. But I was conscious all the time.” He fumbled for a believable and convenient lie. “I think they did try to do something with my eye. They rubbed some kind of grease on it and stuff like that.”
“But it hasn’t helped, lover?”
“No.” He decided not to mention the odd flashes of light and color that he thought he might have seen, not wanting to raise anyone’s hopes, not wanting to raise his own hopes.
“Your pants are buttoned up wrong, Dad.”
“What?”
The room was flooded with stillness.
Ryan could feel everyone stopping whatever it was they were doing, all looking at the front of his pants, where Dean was pointing.
“Boy’s right, lover,” Krysty said, her voice calm and cool. “Buttoned up crooked and one of them’s not done up at all. Surprised you didn’t feel the draft.”
Ryan reached down, his fingers clumsily putting things to rights.
“Stupe,” he said. “Must’ve happened when I went for a piss on the way back from the attic.”
“Up the stairs on the top floor?” J.B. sounded excited. “They took you there? What was it like? What did you ? Oh, dark night! Sorry.”
“What did I see, old friend? That your question? Answer is, not a lot.”
“Looks like they got some of that grease you mentioned on the front of your pants, Ryan.” Krysty’s voice moved remorselessly from cool to cold.
“Yeah. I can just feel it with my fingernail.”
He hastily changed the subject. “What’ve you all been doing today? While I was out of it?”
It took some time to tell him everything, culminating in Doc and Mildred’s theory.
“VAMPIRES.”
Krysty patted him on the leg. “Nobody tried to suck your blood, did they, lover? I mean, like that Mary Cornelius didn’t try to suck your blood?”
The pause was slight enough, but Ryan heard it. Everyone except Dean heard it.
He tried to ignore it, clearing his throat. “No, she didn’t, Krysty.”
“Good. Glad to hear it, lover. So, what do you think of the theory?”
Ryan lay back. “Sorry. Felt a bit sick again.” He closed his eye. “I reckon it’s possible. Like Mildred says, they aren’t old ghostly vampires. I believe they don’t exist. I don’t believe they ever existed.”
He heard someone walk across the room and tug back the draperies. From the lightness of the feet, it had to be Jak. But there was a shaft of brightness that Ryan saw.
Really saw .
This time there was no mistake about it. But he still kept quiet.
They sat around the bed, talking animatedly about what they should do.
There was a general acceptance that the Family wasn’t a force for good, therefore it made sense to get away from their house as soon as possible.
“Dawn,” J.B. said.
“Agreed.” Ryan looked blindly around the room. “Watch yourselves at supper and keep close. No wandering. I’m not sure that the Family is completely finished with us yet. No. Not by a long country mile.”
EVERYONE WENT back downstairs, leaving Krysty and Ryan with some time alone.
He heard the door close with mixed feelings, hoping that the subject of precisely what he’d been doing with Mary Cornelius might not be raised.
“You fuck her, lover?”
So much for a vain hope.
A part of the cement that held Ryan and Krysty together was honesty. However unpalatable the truth might be, and however much it might harm their relationship, it never occurred to Ryan that, faced with a direct question, he should lie.
“She fucked me.”
“While you were drugged and tied hand and foot to the bed? Was that it, Ryan?” The bitterness of betrayal rode at the front of her voice.
“It was just like that.”
“Sure it was. And I just bet you hated every moment of it, didn’t you?”
Again there was the temptation to shift sideways and sort of skirt around the truth.
“I hated the way they made me do it.” He coughed to clear his throat. “I hate anytime that anyone makes me do anything beyond my control.”
“But you didn’t actually hate it when it was going on. That what you’re saying?”
“Not really.”
She copied his voice, mocking it. “Not really. Oh, no, Krysty. I hated being fucked. In fact it didn’t work because I never even got an erection.” She changed back to her own voice. “You get a hard-on, lover?”
Ryan turned on his side, away from her, but she grabbed at his arm and tugged him back. “Don’t you fucking do that to me, Ryan! Not ever!”
“Sorry, I told you. They drugged me. There were three of them there. At least three. Thomas and Elric, as well as the woman. They’ve got strength that And I was blind. Krysty, I swear I couldn’t have stopped them. It was as close to rape as it can get for a man.”
“All of a sudden, my heart bleeds,” she said bitterly. “What happened to the blaster?”
He sat up, staring blankly at where he thought she was, wondering with a small part of his mind whether he was imagining seeing a spark of sunlight burning off her bright red hair.
“The blaster never left my holster. You can’t imagine what it was like. If you’d been tied down and forced to have sex, I wouldn’t behave like this. Blaming me. Hating me. Hurting me even more than I’m already hurting.”
To his dismay, Ryan found that his voice was breaking and his right eye was brimming with unshed tears.
The silence stretched on and he felt Krysty stand up from the bed and walk across the room.
“Think running away’ll change anything?” he shouted. “Because it fucking won’t!”
The sound of boot heels on the carpet stopped. “I wasn’t running away, Ryan.”
“Wellwell, I guess that’s something. So, where were you going?”
“To look out the window. Sort of gather my thoughts together. Work out just how I was going to tell you that I was sorry for behaving like I did.”
“Krysty.” He stretched out his hand toward where he thought she was standing.
“What is it, lover?”
“Just wondering”
“What about?” She moved back and sat again on the edge of the bed, her fingers clasping his hand.
“I was wondering.”
“You just said that, lover.”
“Wondering how you felt about taking off some of your clothes and climbing into the bed for a while?”
“I feel like that’s the best offer I’ve had for Well, the best offer today.”
They made love three times before a gentle knock on the bolted door told them that supper was ready.
Chapter Thirty-Two
When Krysty led Ryan down the long sweep of stairs to the dining hall, through the large vaulted doors, he felt her start with surprise.
“All here,” she whispered. “Thomas, Mary and Elric. And another one. Older. Looks real sick.”
Norman was at their elbow, smelling of patchouli oil. He nudged Ryan in the ribs from the other side. “Honored, you should be. First time I’ve seen Mel-moth Cornelius down here for a meal in must be thirty or forty years.”
Doc heard the muttered message. “Melmoth?” he said in his deep, booming voice. “Melmoth was the wanderer, was he not? Are you, too, a wanderer, sir?”
The voice was as dry and dusty as a windblown papyrus, so quiet it hardly seemed to stir the air. “I have not been more than fifty miles from this place all my life, Dr. Tanner. It is you who should be called the wanderer and not I.”
“How so?”
Ryan could feel the crumbling health of the man. The room was brimming with the flavor of the tomb, a scent of the solitary damp of the graveyard.
“How so?” repeated the head of the Family. “We had access to all manner of data. And your name featured among it, Dr. Tanner.”
“What data? You mean on disk up in the redoubt? What sort of stuff and nonsense would they have about me?”