in California’s tax-supported university system.
A year later, when she finally started school, she made no real friends
because she had to keep waitressing and had no time for the
extracurricular activities through which college relationships are
formed. By the time she received her degree and launched herself upon a
program of graduate study, she had known at least eight thousand nights
of loneliness.
She was easy prey for Eric when, needing to feed on her youth as a
vampire feeds on blood, he had determined to make her his wife. He was
twelve years her senior, so he knew far more about charming and winning
a young woman than men her own age knew, he made her feel wanted and
special for the first time in her life.
Considering the difference in their ages, perhaps she also saw in him a
father figure capable of giving her not only the love of a husband but
the parental love she had never known.
Of course, it had turned out less well than she expected. She learned
that Eric didn’t love her but loved, instead, the thing that she
symbolized to himvigorous, healthful, energetic youth. Their marriage
soon proved to be as loveless as that of her parents.
Then she bad found Benny. And for the first time in her life she had
not been lonely.
But now Benny was gone, and she didn’t know if she would ever see him
again.
The Mercedes’s windshield wipers beat out a monotonous rhythm, and the
tires sang a one-note tune-a song of the void, of despair and
loneliness.
She attempted to comfort herselfwith the thought that at least Eric
posed no further threat to her or Ben. Surely he was dead from a score
of rattlesnake bites. Even if his genetically altered body could safely
metabolize those massive doses of virulent poison, even if Eric could
return from the dead a second time, he was obviously degenerating, not
merely physically but also mentally.
(She had a vivid mental image of him kneeling on the rain-soaked earth,
eating a living serpent, as frightening and elemental as the lightning
that flashed above him.) If he survived the rattlesnakes, he would very
likely remain on the desert, no longer a human being but a thing, loping
hunchbacked or squirming on its belly through the hillocks of sand,
slithering down into the arroyos, feeding greedily on other desert
dwellers, a threat to any beast he encountered but no longer a threat to
her. And even if some glimmer of human awareness and intelligence
remained in him, and if he still felt the need to avenge himself on
Rachael, he would find it difficult if not impossible to come out of the
desert into civilization and move freely about. If he tried that, he
would create a sensation-panic, terror-wherever he went, and would
probably be chased down and captured or shot.
Yet.. . she was still afraid of him.
She remembered glancing up at him as he followed her from the top of the
arroyo wall, remembered staring down at him later when she had been on
top and he had been climbing after her, remembered the way he had looked
when she had last seen him engaged in battle with the nest of rattlers.
In all those memories there was something about him that…
well…
something that seemed almost mythic, that transcended nature, that
seemed powerfully supernatural, undying and unstoppable.
She shuddered with a sudden chill that spread outward from the marrow of
her bones.
A moment later, topping a rise in the highway, she saw that she was
nearing the end of the current leg of her journey. In a broad dark
valley directly ahead and below, Las Vegas glimmered like a miraculous
vision in the rain. So many millions of lights shone in every hue that
the city looked bigger than New York, though it was actually
one-twentieth the size. Even from this distance, at least fifteen
miles, she could make out the Strip with all its dazzling resort hotels
and the downtown casino center that some called Glitter Gulch, for those
areas blazed with by far the greatest concentrations of lights, all of
which seemed to blink, pulse, and twinkle.