Demon Moon

poetry. I don’t forget anything easily.” She worried her lip with her teeth, then added quickly, “But I’ll admit that I reread Frankenstein and The Vampyre after learning you were there. We’ve gone on a tangent: a century?”
    If he triumphed, he hid it well. “Auntie has lived here almost half that, and she still carries an accent.”
    “But her first language is different, and when she’s not hosting at the restaurant she’s talking to her friends in Hindi or Marathi. You speak English.” Was it possible that he didn’t talk to many people in San Francisco? Perhaps he only came into frequent contact with Hugh and Lilith—and more recently, those at SI.
    “That is true. I confess I prefer to speak English rather than American.”
    She rolled her eyes, smiling. Or maybe he was reclusive because he preferred his own rarefied company to the plebs’. “You are such a snob. You probably have Masterpiece Theater on all the time at your house. Do you call it a ‘telly’?”
    His shoulders shook. “No.”
    “At least there’s that, as televisions weren’t in development until the 1920s. If you did, it’d be proof of your affectation. You still say ‘bloody’ a lot, though.”
    “Given my lifestyle, it’s frequently appropriate.”
    Her laughter was cut short by a gasp as he whipped into an alley, plowed through a chain-link fence, scraped past a Dumpster, and accelerated onto a street, now headed in the opposite direction.
    Savi unclenched her fingers from his upper thigh and her door pull, and ran her palms down her jeans to wipe away the sudden perspiration. “Well,” she said shakily. “That’s one thing the symbols are good for: preventing scratches in your paint.”
    “I’d have warned you, but I rather like where your hand went.” He reached down beside his foot and fished for the IR detector that had flown from her grip.
    The vampires didn’t follow them through; she watched for them until Colin drove down another side street and her heart eased into a normal rhythm. “Gadgets, car chases, a suave British gentleman. I’m officially a Bond girl. I shall call myself Curry Delicious from this day forth.”
    He didn’t laugh; instead, he ran a slow perusal of her form. “The decorator and I performed the final walk-through of my house today. I have a new theater in the basement, and a collection of Bond DVDs. You should make use of me, Miss Delicious.”
    Her breath caught. “My Bond phase ended two years ago.”
    “My film library is ridiculously large. What is your newest obsession?”
    “A repeated one: horror noir anime. Why so extensive?”
    “I’ve little else to do during the day. My daysleep only comes upon me every five or six days, and I prefer to paint in the predawn hours.”
    “You can go out in the sun; you could leave your house.”
    “Yes, but it’s extremely uncomfortable.”
    Her brow furrowed in confusion. “In Caelum, you were out for hours.” For the first time she noticed she could think of Caelum without that familiar tightening in her throat, the dread of memory. Only a sense of wonder and loss.
    His tone echoed the same. “In Caelum, it was not painful.”
    She averted her eyes and studied the IR display with more attention than it deserved. The green blob wasn’t completely formless, she realized—it was the leather of his seat, absorbing his body heat.
    “Do you appear on any display? Film, digital cameras, video?”
    “No,” he said softly.
    Two hundred years, with nothing to confirm his existence but the gaze of others, his determination not to lose himself. Look at me . How many times had he asked her—begged her—to do that in Caelum? But she hadn’t…couldn’t.
    He obviously didn’t feel sorry for himself; so why did she suddenly feel like crying?
    She stared out the window, and asked nothing more the rest of the way.



CHAPTER 9

    It is not that the Rules exist, or that I must abide by them; my anger originates from the insulting and outrageous notion that he thought it necessary to remind me of them .
    —Colin to Ramsdell, 1816

    Auntie’s sat between a beauty salon and a laundry, its colorful awning stretching over the sidewalk. It was a restaurant without pretension; though the menu boasted of authentic Bombay cuisine, an outline of the Taj Mahal surrounded the restaurant name. The décor was a mix of old Hollywood and new Bollywood, unapologetically invoking a stereotypical, homogenized vision of India. There was