Chapter 8:
Lunacy
"A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any
other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps."
~ Carlos Casteñeda, The Teachings of Don Juan
Romania, Year Eight
"Just what we needed!" Mike's voice boomed before Remus could even enter the compound. "A botanist!"
Remus sighed as he pushed through the grasses and made his way to the grad students' pavilion, watching Mike dig through his bag for something. He was impatient; it was two days until the full moon, and he didn't want Vlad -- or what was worse, Vlad and his vampire crony -- preying on unsuspecting Muggles when he'd be worse than useless himself.
"Look at this!" Mike ran forwards, bearing in his hands a grapefruit-sized fungus. It was green on the top, with a ring around the stem like a fairy-sized miniskirt and a bulbous golfball base.
Magical flora, he could do. "Amanita phalloides," he said simply. "One bite is certain death."
Mike dropped the mushroom on the ground, holding his hands away from his body as if the toxin could leap onto him from his tainted fingers.
"It has certain uses," Remus continued. "Repelling flies and mosquitoes. Identifying silver objects, which the mushroom will tarnish."
"Really?" Mike looked skeptical, kicking the poisonous growth with distaste. "I'll stick with DEET. And there are other ways to recognize silver."
"Indeed," said Remus. "Which reminds me… I came to warn you all to stay away from here at the full moon."
As he'd hoped, Lamia, sitting several yards away, heard these words and approached with curiosity.
"What?" Mike exclaimed. "What are you talking about?"
"Haven't you ever heard silver called the lunar metal?" Remus wondered with partially feigned surprise. "Anyway, the purpose of my visit was to tell you about an exceptionally strong spring tide that is occurring this month. It will lead to enormous swarms of root moths, which bats will feed upon before they seek caves in which to hibernate." He took a deep breath. Some of this was based on slightly modified facts from the Muggle newspapers (it was good that he always read the parts about animals), but most of it was just made up. "It is important not to disturb the bats in August, because they need to eat as well as find a roosting place." This much was true, but bats didn't like to fly about at the full moon… they didn't need to know this.
Holding his toxic hands out like a sleepwalker, Mike still had to be difficult. "So we stay out of the caves at the full moon, the bats eat and sleep, and everyone's happy?"
"Er… yes," said Remus, knowing it was stupid and glancing towards Lamia for help.
"How do you know it's exactly at the astronomical full moon?" Mike demanded. "The moon can be 97 to 99 percent illuminated for several days -- "
"I know," Remus interrupted with some impatience, hardly needing to be lectured by a Muggle about his most and least favorite celestial body. "But -- "
" -- The tide doesn't hit its maximum until the astronomical full moon," Lamia continued, betraying nothing. "It's at the very peak that the insects swarm. I know about this; we'll have to protect the equipment."
"Yes," Remus agreed. "You can cover everything to protect it from dead moths and bat guano… apart from that -- "
" -- I want to make sure it's safe from any wild animals that might be roaming around," she interjected meaningfully.
"Dunno…" Mike was a tough customer. "We're nowhere near the ocean, so where are these bugs coming from? Lakes and rivers don't have lunar tides."
"The Black Sea," Remus and Lamia said at once.
"Really? We're near the Black Sea and you didn't tell me?" Mike would've given Lamia a playful nudge except that he was afraid to touch anything. "Let's go to the beach one of these days, give Gamberi the slip… you probably look great in a bikini with that diet you've been on."
Remus scowled to himself. Lamia seemed ready to go along with his plan; he expected that, since she knew what roamed the mountains at the full moon. Mike was a harder sell and the other two students, trance-like in front of their computers, hadn't even looked up.
"You'll have to protect the equipment and, well, it's probably a good idea to spend the night in Rosu because... the bats are noisy all night," Remus said haltingly. "I've checked and there's room at the inn there."
"Aw," Mike said dismissively, wiping his hands on his shirt and then thinking better of it, "a little noise never bothers me. I was an undergrad at Columbia -- talk about noise all night, try living in Harlem."
Very little of what Mike said made sense, but Remus continued anyway, "And there's a big festival in Rosu, the annual Garlic Festival." Mike nudged Lamia in the ribs and she looked mildly irritated. "They're showing some American films, too." Remus was getting desperate now, thinking back to a poster he saw on the wall when he stopped by the inn to check on a room. "Eastwood something or other."
"Dirty Harry!" came a garbled shout from Taofang who looked up from his work excitedly. "Fistful of Dollars! High Plains Drifter!"
The Chinese student's babble was incomprehensible to Remus, but Mike got excited, saying, "Go ahead, make my day!" which provoked idiotic laughter from Taofang. Vijay looked as confused as Remus at this exchange, while Lamia maintained an impassive scowl on her face.
"What is it that you two are talking about?" Vijay asked after some of the laughter had died down.
"Man, oh, man," Mike sighed contentedly. "Clint Eastwood...you're gonna love this, buddy."
________________
"C'mon, Lamia, the parade's started!"
Mike dragged her through the crowded main square of Rosu as if she were a rag doll. Of course there would be a parade; there always was.
People milled around dressed in mixtures of what looked like 'city' clothes and 'mountain' clothes. The former were drab and cheap-looking, while the latter dazzled with their intricate, colorful embroidery. The bright clothing reminded her of a childhood in Tirgoviste which she hadn't thought about for a long, long time. Amazingly, the costumes of the mountain folk hadn't changed much in seventy years.
But the crowds. Too many humans in a small space made her anxious, ready to pounce. Mike did not believe her protests of wanting to spend the afternoon reading in their room at the inn. If she humored him and watched the parade, perhaps she could slip back to the room later.
"Hey, guys," Mike bellowed as their fellow students came in view, "Look who was trying to study. Jeez!"
Vijay and Taofang grinned at her. Even the normally dour Chinese student seemed relaxed today, looking forward to cowboy movies later on, no doubt. They were all standing on the sidewalk in front of the town hall, a drab concrete building made festive for the day by a colorful banner draped over the gray block proclaiming the health of Communism as well as the festival. The town was a mixture of old and new like that; the old white-washed church in the square was flanked by centuries-old, graceful stone buildings, but these new concrete monstrosities, like the town hall, sprouted alongside like weeds in a garden fallen on hard times.
The Rosu Garlic Festival had a parade, as festivals always did. Mike eagerly explained about parades from his childhood in the Italian neighborhood in New York City where his grandparents lived. Lamia was thinking of similar parades from when she was a girl. She would be dressed in a starched white dress with ribbons in her hair, not the tee-shirt and jeans she sported today. Better not think about that, she scolded herself. The contrast was too great and, after all, she wasn't even human any more.
Instead, she concentrated on the people marching in the street in front of them, just coming into sight: a mayor, a little old priest from the church, dozens of school children, a brass band and dancers in colorful costumes - brilliant white trousers for the men overhung with dark tunics and swirling skirts for the women held up with lavishly embroidered belts. All sported braids of garlic around their necks which bounced cheerily as they marched arm-in-arm.
"So, what did the guy at the hotel tell you about this thing?" Mike shouted as the band passed directly in front of them.
Lamia smiled tightly, more like a grimace, and said, "These festivals have crafts, food, contests. The food will be full of garlic which I'm sure will please all of you." The others laughed, knowing her dislike for garlic. "You can probably get your fortune told. There will be dancing." She gestured at the flushed faces of the young men and women marching before them. "Young men traditionally pick their wives by how well they dance. Quite simple, no?"
"Yeah," piped up Mike brightly, "and since the girls are all wearing garlic necklaces, a guy can make sure he's not marrying a vampire, right?" Everyone but Lamia laughed heartily. For some reason, she did not find it funny.
Lamia shut the heavy wooden door of their room at the inn and stood leaning against it, relieved to be out of the crowds. The room had turn-of-the-century feel to it, reminding her of her grandmother's room (yes, she did have a Romanian grandmother) at her parents' home in Tirgoviste. Lace curtains covered the windows, flanked by heavy embroidered drapes. Large, dark furniture filled the room: a tall dresser and an even taller wardrobe, a small writing table, a nightstand with a ceramic pitcher and basin. The large bed was a four-poster with a gauzy white canopy floating above. There was a sofa, too, where she volunteered to sleep.
Only one room had been available at the inn, the fanciest one which locals probably couldn't afford. The cost was next to nothing for them; graduate students from the West were rich in comparison to Romanians. The owner of the inn had been particularly happy to receive hard currency: lira instead of lei, the local currency.
She closed the windows and drew the heavy drapes shut, but could not block the cacophony of music and crowd noise. Of course, the ubiquitous smell of garlic could not be avoided, either. Outside, people wore garlic necklaces and ate special dishes loaded with the stuff.
Garlic was one of the few things the other three grad students could agree on, since they rarely agreed on physics or anything else. In spite of coming from completely different cultures, Mike, Vijay, and Taofang all loved to cook with garlic. Back at the camp, she usually spent meal-times in her tent. She didn't need to eat, and the smell of whatever they cooked up made her weak and irritable.
She felt irritable now as she paced the room. She tried reading, first a text book, then a magazine. From the wall, Ceaucescu, the leader of the country, smiled at her grimly in a badly done portrait (which was probably required to hang on the wall). Coincidentally, he grimaced at her from the pages of her magazine, The Economist.
She thought about getting a degree in economics once, but the magazine subscription was all that remained of that enterprise. It hadn't worked out, probably because she spent too much time while at the London School of Economics cutting classes so that she could roam the streets of the city at night drinking blood. That was before she realized that she would have to give up human blood if she wanted to study any subject seriously.
According to her magazine (and the portrait on the wall), Communism still held the country in its tight fist, even in the summer of 1989, and it seemed certain to continue into the next century. All that meant little to her. She had never been affected by Romanian politics. The castle, where she lived for thirty years, had been too isolated. After leaving it for good, she tried to forget her native country, quickly discovering that the West held nearly infinite possibilities for a vampire who wanted to better herself.
All she wanted now was to get a degree and then a position doing research -- Switzerland or California would suit her. She could remove herself entirely from the larger world of politics, as well as from the realm of wizards and vampires, in favor of the captivating world of particle physics.
And that brought her back to the current worry, the one causing her to pace restlessly around the room. She needed an uninterrupted summer to make those measurements back in the caves. Professor Gamberi, her research director at the university, was suspicious of her, and made it clear that she'd have to go to greater lengths to prove herself than the others. Maybe he didn't trust women; maybe he didn't trust that overly glowing recommendation from Professor Mannheim at Stuttgart (who had been trying to get rid of her, after all, before there was a scandal).
The work had to go on this summer and if some of the students on the project were injured or if some of the equipment in the caves was damaged, it might bring a halt to the project.
The English wizard Lupeni knew something was going to happen in the caves tonight and it wasn't moths or bats. Judging from his familiarity with what attacked Mike back in May, werewolves would be running loose at the camp. She had always feared those monstrous dogs, mostly as a result of thirty years at the castle, hearing them howl insensibly at the full moon. She surprised herself greatly by fending off the two wolves attacking Mike. She felt confident she could do it again, as long as there weren't too many of them. She shivered as she remembered that werewolves usually ran in packs in these mountains.
An idea occurred to her. There were spells for repelling werewolves and she still had a wand. She hadn't used it in years, but had come across it recently when looking for that zoology book Mike asked for. With a wand she could...
What was she thinking? Did she actually mean to go back to the camp?
It seemed the only way to protect the equipment. The idea of a pack of werewolves bumping around the cave upset her terribly. Why they would do that, she didn't know. They were mindless, vicious animals, after all. She remembered the howls that used to surround the castle at the full moon, sending the newer vampires running for cover and the older ones into sneering fits of laughter. Who could fathom the behavior of a pack of wild dogs?
Without consciously deciding, she knew she was going back. She rummaged through the others' bags, looking for the keys to the Jeep, but the search was in vain. Mike, who seemed to feel that as an American it was his right to drive, must still have them. However, the journey from Rosu back to the camp wouldn't take very long for a bat, although it would be tiring because the sun was up. Even though she hadn't used a wand in years, there were other things she kept in practice. Flying as a bat was simply too handy to give up.
Would she meet Lupeni if she went back? she wondered as she searched for paper and pen to write a note. He remained a mystery: not a hippie, not a botanist, more than a foreign wizard on holiday. Why was he here? Why was he killing vampires? Certainly his coolness at disposing of Emil meant that he had killed others.
A brave crusader from England bent on making a reputation as a vampire killer? No. Gyro Idle -- if that was his real name -- was a perfect example of how one would get famous in that line of work. But Lupeni was too educated, too intelligent and well-spoken to be here simply to make a name for himself.
An exile? A criminal? Not quite, but there was something of those things about him. She detected a fragility in him; under the steely calmness, he kept a dark secret at bay.
Well, she had a rather large dark secret herself...
She perched on the edge of the bed with pen and paper, but couldn't focus on the simple note she needed to write. Instead she thought, he kills vampires and if he knew what you were, you'd be the next one executed.
It was funny that she didn't seem to mind if Lupeni rid the mountains of other vampires, like Cuza, for example. She shivered at the thought of their last meeting. She wanted nothing to do with any of them; she longed to be gone from these too familiar mountains and free from her past.
Would Lupeni understand that, she wondered. Would he believe that a vampire could go against her nature so completely? No. Of course not.
She swore at herself. Writing this note was taking far too long and one of the others might come back to check on her soon. She applied herself and finished, explaining in it that she had left one of her lab notebooks back at camp and found someone who was going in that direction to give her a ride. She should be back by morning. Perhaps if she could remember a few simple protection charms, she could get back sooner. The others probably wouldn't discover she was gone until long after dark anyway.
If she met Lupeni at the camp, she'd deal with him. He was a wizard; after all, he should understand that she could and would protect herself from werewolves.
When was the last time she even spoke with a wizard, a living one? Had it really been over fifty years? After she left the mountains twenty years ago, she had been afraid to get too close to any witch or wizard, for fear her secret would be too obvious.
And Lupeni killed vampires.
She tried not to think about that, instead remembering when he came to fix Mike's arm, hearing again that startling conversation about Greek poetry and more besides. He was an odd one, though not really like Odysseus; he had none of the ruthless deviousness of the man from Ithaca.
But perhaps Lupeni had not been far off the mark to connect her with Calypso, the nymph who held Odysseus prisoner for love and would have made him immortal so that he could stay with her forever. He might have been describing a vampire. But vampires never loved anything except their next victim.
Lamia stood, flinging the note on the bed, and tried to focus on the task at hand. The instruments at the cave needed guarding and that's where she was going.
"You're really missing some awesome stuff," Mike boomed as he flung open the door. He stumbled over one of the bags in the dim interior of the room, but kept talking as he found his own bag and began pawing through the contents.
"This old lady told our fortunes and I think Vijay's gonna get a Nobel Prize or something. Get this: a tall, dark stranger will make trouble for me. Can you believe it? They always tell you that sort of stuff. Probably Professor Luca trying to fail me out of quantum field theory."
Mike pulled off an extremely mud-stained shirt and struggled to get into a clean one, chattering non-stop.
"And they had this contest for catching sheep. I only entered 'cause Taofang said I couldn't do it. Looked easy -- they were in a little pen -- but, oh, man... Maybe I had too much of the local beer. I dunno, but those suckers can run pretty fast. I'd make a lousy shepherd. Really took a dive into the mud getting that stupid -- "
He was speaking to an empty room and finally woke up to that fact.
"Lamia? You in here?" Mike cast around the dimly lit room, as if she were hiding behind the furniture or the thick curtains blocking the windows. Noticing that the bathroom door was closed (the fanciest room at the inn came with a private bath), Mike pounded on the door, shouting, "Hey, you OK?"
Since his yelling and hammering brought no response, he rattled the door knob and barged in when he found it unlocked.
"What the hell are you -- " Mike stopped short. There was no place to hide in the small, empty bathroom. Festival sounds drifted through the tiny open window over the old fashioned claw-footed tub.
Well, she didn't just fly out the window. With a scowl, Mike stomped back into the room and roughly flung open the curtains. He didn't understand what was going on and that always made him mad.
Finding a note from Lamia did nothing to calm him down.
"She's nuts," he muttered to himself as he crumpled the note and sent the wad whizzing across the room. "Wolves, spiders, bats. What a crazy country." He jingled the keys to the Jeep in his pocket.
"Seems like I'm gonna have to protect her..."
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With one glance to the east and one to the west, Remus figured he had just under twenty minutes of being human left. He'd seen the graduate students leave in their Muggle vehicle this morning, and he knew they had a room at the inn in town, but he decided to make one last-minute fly by their camp just to make sure there was no one around.
He was so sure there'd be no one that he didn't see her until she moved. Coming to a screeching halt on a broomstick isn't possible, so he swooped around and dropped from the air in a sudden motion that might have impressed even James. Stashing the broom in a pile of leaves in case there were Muggles around, he dashed forward into the camp.
"Lamia!" he cried, running up to her at one of the computers in the pavilion. The others were still covered with plastic, but this one was completely unwrapped and she was settled in with a big notebook and a variety of pens and pencils, clearly intending to stay the night.
"Lupeni," she responded calmly, not looking up.
"But you shouldn't -- it's not safe -- "
"It's werewolves, isn't it?" She looked pleased as he flinched, and showed him the seven-inch holly and dragonstring wand among her writing implements. "I grew up in these hills; I scarcely need an English wizard to tell me about those monsters."
"But -- " He didn't have time for subtlety. "There's a werewolf I've been hunting," he explained in a rushed breath. "He knows I'm after him and threatened to eat the graduate students at the caves. He is not a very skilled wizard, when human, but when he's a wolf -- "
"Perhaps you are concerning yourself overmuch with our monsters," Lamia replied somewhat coldly. "Romania has had vampires and werewolves for thousands of years, and you, a foreigner, take it upon yourself to eliminate them?"
"No, no, it's not that at all," Remus exclaimed, any more complex sentences beyond him at this point. "Really, be careful! I have to go now," he added, turning and running for his broomstick as he felt the ache in his bones that signaled the change.
There was a rustling in the leaves as Remus left, and the quiet murmur of a hushed voice. Two observers had been watching the scene with great interest. Cuza slapped his hand over Vlad's mouth as he saw Lamia raise her head to listen, and reached into his pocket for a dagger that he pressed into the werewolf's hand.
Vlad looked puzzled, but quickly caught on as Cuza gestured towards the seated graduate student. With a swift pounce, Vlad planted himself behind her and held the blade to her throat.
Lamia screamed.
Remus, no more than ten yards away, did another Seeker-like plunge to the ground, this time catching his foot on a tree branch and falling on his face. Did he dare go back? Obviously it couldn't be a werewolf attacking her, since he was still human himself. Maybe a vampire.
That last thought made up his mind. She'd promised she knew how to drive off werewolves, and if it was a vampire, Moony could help. Turning to run back into the camp, Remus was caught by the moonrise before he even had a chance to take off his clothes.
Five large bounds took the gray wolf back into the camp, where the first thing he saw was Vlad.
Moony hid behind a clump of tall grass, watching his enemy. He didn't think to ask himself what had happened minutes before to cause the screams, but his fur bristled at Vlad's behavior. The black wolf was circling Lamia and growling, not attacking her, though she wasn't holding a wand. His snaps were half-hearted, his tongue lapping occasionally with disgust and even fear.
Not wolfsbane; Moony had let James and Sirius practice repelling him enough times to know that. His instincts screamed for him to attack the human, but caution held him back -- it would take powerful magic to make Vlad act that way.
He never got an answer to his question. As he stayed hidden in the undergrowth, growling softly, there was a roar of tires, a screech of brakes and a Muggle vehicle tore into the campsite. The man who jumped out was plenty tasty, and Moony and Vlad paused only briefly to snarl at each other before they flung themselves at him.
"Help!" thundered Mike, pushing himself against the Jeep's grille as Vlad swiped him with a huge paw. "Lamia! Why did you come back here?" he cried reproachfully, barely dodging a clash of jaws.
Lamia grabbed her wand and held it out in front of her, thinking fast. It had been a terribly long time since she'd had to repel werewolves intent on attacking a human. While they could and did gut vampires, the Undead were not their favorite prey, and they would back off quickly when injured or frightened. It was much harder to make them surrender a chance to bite or devour a person.
Finally she gave up on the idea of a specific charm, and started hurling balls of green fire. The first caught the black one in the rump, and he sat back and rolled in the grass, howling.
The gray one was smarter. She could see the calculating intelligence in his eyes as he anticipated each fireball and deftly sidestepped it, getting his body behind Mike's and pinning the American to the ground.
Fortunately, the other wolf helped her out. After easing the sting of the fire, the black one leapt for the gray one, fangs planted firmly in his neck. In this position Lamia was able to send a ball of flames at both, burning the black one's nose and setting fire to the gray one's whiskers.
They yelped, pawing at their faces and dragging their snouts along the ground. She thought she'd seen the last of them and was about to check on Mike, when the wolves -- half-blinded by fire and seeking cool and shade -- chased each other into the cave with all the apparatus.
This was precisely why she'd come back here tonight. Forgetting her fellow student, bleeding and perhaps bitten in the dirt, she tore towards the cave after the animals, wand ready.
The werewolves couldn't have caused more damage if that had been their intent -- and perhaps it was; she didn't know what the creatures thought about, and was still struck by the cleverness of the huge gray and brown animal who dodged her fireballs as if they were playing tag.
She quickly set about surveying the apparatus: most critically, the rubber lines running from the argon tanks had been chewed through, releasing gas into the air. Low-oxygen sensors throughout the cave were sounding, their high-pitched wail no doubt what had driven the wolves away.
Argon is harmless, an inert gas, except when it begins to replace oxygen in an enclosed space. Humans and animals can't sense the absence of oxygen, only the presence of carbon dioxide, and so will breathe pure argon without any feelings of breathlessness or pain until they fall unconscious and die. This was why the caves had to have oxygen sensors, in case an argon leak caused the gas to build up to dangerous levels. They had all been carefully trained to run from the cave if the sensors sounded, and not to return until they had stopped beeping.
Fortunately, Lamia wasn't alive. The shrill cries of the alarms bothered her intensely, but she couldn't shut them off, because she had no other way of knowing when it would be safe for breathing creatures to enter the cave again.
She stuffed cotton balls into her ears and got to work -- shutting off gas tanks, looking for the lines that had been chewed and digging around for replacements among the many partially-unpacked cardboard boxes strewn around the cave. Surely low oxygen would kill a werewolf? she wondered idly, as the lower frequencies of pained howls filtered through the cotton. It was hard to tell location with her ears plugged; the animals could have been deep in the unmapped recesses of the caves, trapped and suffocating. Or perhaps the argon wouldn't travel that far into the minor passageways: this was a purely intellectual exercise to someone who hadn't needed oxygen for fifty years.
Lupeni will be proud of me if the wolves die, she thought suddenly, but quickly got back to business. Replacing the gas lines wasn't hard, but then she had to boot up all the computers, which had been shut down for their trip to the village, and monitor the argon pressure in all of the six-foot-by-three-foot-by-three-foot boxes that were stacked in the center of the caves. She wasn't sure which of the boxes, if any, had lost gas, and she had to make sure that there were no leaks apart from in the lines.
If they came back from the village and found her in here with the alarms going… Well, almost better to be revealed as a vampire than expelled from graduate school again. This was her fourth try at a PhD, and she'd gone all the way back to the first year of university to provide herself with a respectable physics background before applying to this program. The undergraduates in physics had accepted her, at least, which was certainly more than she could say about the first time through as a psychology major.
"Accepted" was too strong of a word, though. The physics undergraduates had silently tolerated her presence in study sessions in which no one spoke in anything but equations, there was rarely any food, and the greatest possible accomplishment was to call your colleagues morons and not get upset when they did the same to you.
The perfect field of study for a vampire.
But that was why she had avoided "hard" science for so long: it would prove to her that she had lost everything that went into being human. After rejecting the cold, merciless, gossipy Undead society, she had hoped to find, somewhere in herself, something that could connect with people and recapture some emotion, some warmth. She didn't find it in psychology, where her fellow students speculated endlessly about her -- Anorexia? Depression? Dissociative Personality Disorder? -- or in sociology or economics, where she'd despaired at her lack of inspiration and lapsed once more into drinking human blood. By way of scandal or simply boredom, she had always left, off to another school where she could use only her most recent credentials to hide a history that went back many decades.
Mike, Vijay, and Taofang didn't ask why she never ate. They were impressed by her lack of emotion (even when she had papers rejected!) and too intimidated by her command of nine languages to press for details on how she had acquired them. If she could manipulate Maxwell's equations and solder a busted circuit board, she was one of them.
So she was determined to prove herself now. The argon wells were soon sealed and filled once more, their pressures equalized, and neutrino capture events registering dutifully. The data were noisy, though: had the wolves torn at the shielding as well?
She pulled aside the remains of the plastic they'd put up to protect against "bat guano" and checked the metal rods that encircled the containers of gas. Sure enough, several had been knocked free, and she struggled with them-eight feet long and unwieldy, they were a job for two or three people, and it was a couple of hours before she had put them all in place again.
Once more she went over the gas lines, electronics cables, everything that snaked across the floor for an animal to trip over or gnaw. The cables to one of the oscilloscopes had been dislodged, this was easy to fix… As she fired up the equipment around it to make sure everything worked, the oxygen sensors abruptly stopped their piercing wail.
With a sigh of relief, Lamia removed the cotton from her ears. She no longer had to worry about anyone coming in, and everything she knew how to test was operating perfectly.
But now she heard another sound: a far-off howl, and the scrabble of paws on rocky soil. So the werewolves were still alive, one of them at least -- and a look outside the cave showed the full moon edging close to the horizon.
It was the black one who emerged from one of the narrow corridors of the cave, his rear still charred from the fire and his muzzle and paws dripping blood. She pointed her wand at him and blocked his exit before he could get near any of the equipment again; she wasn't going to let him run, he had to follow her slowly over the wires and out the main entrance…
She breathed a huge sigh of relief as the gas continued to flow and the oscilloscopes to flicker, her mind hardly registering the eerie sound of the werewolf's triumphant howl, followed by the sounds of footsteps in the leaves. Human footsteps, so the wolf must have transformed.
It was only after checking and double-checking all the cables and tubes that she thought of Mike.
Had her fellow student spent all night outside the caves? If the werewolves had bitten him, it didn't matter -- Muggles died of werewolf bites. Still, she couldn't just leave him for dead. Cautiously, she left the cave and saw in the light of the setting moon Mike's body, lying pale and still near the Jeep. A cold ground mist crept through the camp, extending ghostly tendrils toward the lifeless body.
Several things were wrong. The moon was still up, so the wolf could not have regained his human form; yet how could the human she'd heard in the leaves have come so close to a werewolf without being attacked? And why would the animal ignore a perfectly edible human, even a dead one?
Mike was not dead, she found as she approached him and took his cold, bloodstained arm. He had been bitten by a vampire. Again.
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Deep down in the Petrosna caves, about three feet into the collapsed area, Moony growled with rage as Vlad's triumphant cry claimed the territory. They had been chasing each other and fighting all night, but as Moony had been there only once -- and then only into one of the passageways, and under the influence of the Wolfsbane Potion -- he had come out by far the worst. He was lost in the twists and turns of the cave, with no idea how to get out except by digging through the cave-in he'd caused two months before. His bruised and bitten muscles rebelled at the slightest movement, sending constant jolts of pain that obscured the ones that signaled the dawn.
After he transformed, Remus lay a long time without moving. Not having claws made it harder to dig, and he was bigger and stronger as a wolf than as a person. Worse, his human self felt panic and apprehension that an animal could not: how long could he live, lost in a cave without water? Did he even know which way was up?
He remembered what he had found last time he was here: a skeleton, a human skeleton. He'd accidentally crawled over it in the dark, feeling its rounded rib cage, its jutting jaws, the last scraps of its decaying meat.
Was Sirius dead now, too? Had his bones been consigned to the waves off the Scottish coast… or did they just burn the body like that of a plague-riddled vermin? Remus felt cold, much too cold to move, his fingers turning to ice; the tears welling in his eyes froze his lashes like pellets of sleet. He wondered if there would be something familiar and recognizable about the skeleton of a best friend, or if it would be just another pile of bones.
As if in answer to his thoughts, a face emerged from the darkness, leering into his own. Just enough flesh remained on it for it to be called alive, but every bone and sinew stood out in horrifying relief, the specter all the more hideous for its resemblance to the laughing boy that had been Sirius Black. "I almost got them both," it hissed in a low voice. The eyes were sunken and depthless, like a vampire's. "Severus -- always following me around -- I could see he would be dangerous in the future. Cruel and bitter though he was, he refused to join us. And Potter…" The face twisted into a rictus of hatred. "Perfect Prefect Potter. I didn't want him killed, oh no -- but if he were caught transforming ... " He gestured off into the distance, as if towards a movie screen.
Remus saw James, head bowed in shame as his wand was snapped in two, trudging away trying to hold back tears at being only the third student expelled from Hogwarts in fifty years.
______________
Up in the caves, Mike slept peacefully at Lamia's feet as she recorded and analyzed data. She didn't dare keep her eyes off him again, because a vampire Mike -- even of the pitiful, sun-fearing and flightless sort that Muggles made -- was not a pleasant thought. At least it looked like the werewolves hadn't bitten him, though they'd certainly scratched him up pretty thoroughly. It was probably the smell of fresh blood that had attracted the vampire, who might have started licking from the wounds before making his own in a spot opposite that of the first vampire to feed on this unfortunate American physicist.
Unless, she thought grimly, the vampire had been here the whole night, watching or waiting for something, Mike's wounds just a lucky midnight snack. The footsteps she heard just before moonset must have belonged to this vampire, which explained why he wasn't attacked by the werewolf… and there was only one vampire she knew who dared to hunt at the full moon. The same vampire who had already been here once, who wouldn't give up easily on the thought of getting her back. Who might even sink so low as to consort with a dog, if it suited his purpose.
Cuza.
Her thoughts were interrupted as faint howls and moans from the cave suddenly turned into clear English syllables. She thought at first it was Vijay -- just what she needed, two bitten Muggles in one night -- but the accent wasn't quite right, and after a few sentences she knew.
"No!" the voice cried, with anguish that was unfathomable to one who had felt little emotion for fifty years. "He didn't do it on purpose… He didn't…"
Lamia's face hardened. So Lupeni had gotten lost in the caves, no doubt after that werewolf he was hunting. That's why only one had come out. She hated and feared Cuza, and despised werewolves, but somehow neither was as bad as the thought of a half-mad Englishman lying in wait like some kind of wizard Captain Ahab. Was he trying to escape his own darkness by killing all monsters? Such a philosophy could go too far.
She had a good mind to let him die there, but the cries grew more piteous, and grated on her nerves if they didn't tug at her heart. If all of the equipment was OK, and Mike looked stable, she might just poke around in the passageway and find out what was going on.
___________
"Moony, old pal." The words were Sirius', but the tone of hard evil was not, and the hand he extended to grip Remus' shoulder was a bony claw.
Remus was too numb with cold to feel it, nor could he feel the icy tears running down his face, except when they stung the burns left by Lamia's ball of fire.
"Even if you said you wouldn't join us, there's no escaping what you are," the demon-Sirius continued, its horrible arm elongating like rubber as Remus pulled away from it. "You're evil, old buddy, and you wanted to kill Severus even more than I. I knew you'd be useful one day." Here it stopped to throw back its head and laugh, showing yellow teeth. "Surely you weren't foolish enough to think I was your friend?"
Remus pressed his hands over his eyes, but that didn't block the vision, and his cry of "No!" came out just a whimper.
When he suddenly felt a touch on his face, it seemed as soft and warm as a kitten's paw.
"This place is full of Dementors, Lupeni," Lamia said matter-of-factly. "I can't drive them off, but I can drag you out of here."
The words meant little to him, but he didn't protest as she took his wrists and started pulling him after her up the narrow passageway. In his demented state he wasn't sure if she was a continuation of the vision, or a Patronus, or a real person, or even if he was truly being moved or if he was still huddled in the cave waiting to die.
When they were in the main cave, Lamia let go of him and he collapsed in a heap. She glanced around, seeing no one but the unconscious Mike (who would be out for days, this time).
Did Lupeni spend the night in the caves? Did the werewolves attack him? What an idiot, she murmured as she grabbed him under the arms, forcing him to stand. "You can't sit here like this, everybody's going to come back soon. This way -- and don't trip on the cables. It took me all night to fix them, after those wolves got through tearing around. I should have let you finish them off -- "
Something stopped her in mid-sentence, as she snaked her arm around his waist, guiding him through the racks of equipment and toward the mouth of the cave. Blood from deep puncture wounds smeared her shirt -- his blood, and it was not entirely human.
Realization lurched into her head as they stumbled out into a heavy fog which must have crept in at dawn as often happened on the mountainside. Lupeni hadn't been attacked by werewolves. He was a werewolf, the gray one, the one with the spark of cunning in his yellow eyes.
He knew a lot about werewolves because he was one. Knowing this caused more confusion in her mind, not less, and she was struck with a crazy impulse to laugh. Werewolves were the lowest class of Dark creature: mortal, uneducated, unpredictable and vicious, with an animal shyness of humans at all times except the one night per month they tore them apart. She couldn't reconcile her few encounters with "dogs" with this confident, articulate English wizard.
He had been bitten on a hunt, she guessed. Perhaps he even continued to kill other werewolves the way he did vampires. Certainly he did not consort with them, since he had come to warn the students, a clear betrayal of his kind. This would explain, too, why he could not return to his home country, a single night of carelessness forcing him into perpetual exile.
He moaned incoherently, something about being serious, and struggled as if fighting off an imaginary enemy. She forced them both down the path and into the fog.
"Come on," she urged, not sure of exactly why she was rescuing someone who should be her enemy. High overhead sunlight danced through scattered clouds, the last pink of dawn just fading. Around them, however, a thick mist swirled through the trees, obscuring all but the closest parts of the path.
She was rough with him, forcing him to keep moving, although he seemed too weak and insensate to go on. In spite of the frosty cold of his skin, he felt alive beneath her fingers, like any other human. But werewolf blood flowed in his veins. Did it matter? She had sworn off human blood, after all.
A battle raged inside Lamia. The old fear of werewolves, the ever-present lust for human blood, and the desire to be free from her past all clashed, making her as confused and muddled as if she had been drinking human blood. She needed to get him cleaned up, dressed, and on his way before things got more complicated.
Once in the camp, she pulled him toward a wooden tank with a green rubber hose coiled next it. She turned the spigot up full blast and sprayed him with cold water, removing blood and dirt and making the long gash on his chest start bleeding again. He stood without making a sound, and she was gentler when she got to his face, turning down the water pressure and brushing off the smear of mud and tears with a light touch.
"Where are your clothes? Your wand? Your broom?" she asked, turning the hose on top of his head to rinse his hair.
He shook his head to indicate he couldn't remember, not even able to make sense of all the words.
Lamia sighed, looking at him with exasperation. A naked, bleeding guy should have been a vampire's fondest wish, but his blood was about as appealing as a can of dog food.
"Come on," she said roughly. "You can stay in my tent until you make sense; I don't want to have to explain this to Muggles."
She got him in motion again, leaving him at the entrance to her tent where he swayed unsteadily and shivered violently. After laying a plastic tarp across the tent floor so he wouldn't bleed on everything, she shooed him inside and promised to borrow some clothes from Vijay.
Remus' teeth were chattering, and it was an immense effort to speak. "If you have a… some chocolate," he managed. "The Dementors…"
"Oh, is that your problem?" she exclaimed in surprise. "I forgot -- "
She didn't finish the thought, but went away only to return five minutes later with a set of clothes, a blanket, bandages, and a 250-gram bar of Cadbury's dark chocolate lifted from Taofang's tent. The Chinese student had a secret passion for decadent western goods, including chocolate bars sent to him by a cousin in Canada.
Remus sat alone in the tent, shivering and stunned. He had barely been conscious of the journey out of the caves. Under attack from the wild Dementors, his mind retreated to a distant and terrifying country where Sirius' familiar laughter mocked him.
Someone yanked him back and had forced him to walk when he knew he didn't have the strength. Someone guided him down the path with strong arms that kept him from stumbling. Outside the caves, gray mist pressed in on him, the same as in that place where Sirius laughed harshly and cruelly and where he could almost hear the shrieks of Lord Voldemort.
Each step carried him farther away. By the time they left the trees, he knew where he was. The tents of the students' camp emerged from the fog, recognizable as part of what he considered the world of reality. He knew who held him, who had pulled him from the caves before he sank into the madness of the Dementors.
Lamia. She must be a powerful witch to have beaten back those terrible, soulless creatures.
Free from the frigid grip of the Dementors, pain washed over his body like a tidal wave, submerging his newly returned consciousness, nearly overwhelming him. The pain grew worse with each step, until it exploded like a missile of pure ice when Lamia sprayed him with cold water. He began to shake violently as she pushed him toward her tent. A request for chocolate was the only intelligible thing he managed to say; even that seemed to take more strength than he had.
Alone in the tent, he drew his knees in with his arms wrapped tightly about them and tried to make sense of anything at all about the present situation. He fought Vlad in the caves, he was sure of that much. (He only hoped that the other werewolf was in as much pain this morning as he was.) After the moon set, he was attacked by Dementors and rescued by the mysterious witch who pretended to be a Muggle.
Part of his mind hoped desperately that things would make sense soon. He looked around the tent, trying to get some bearings in the physical world. A red dome of some Muggle fabric stretched tautly overhead. What little light filtered through from outside gave the interior a murky, underwater feeling. The tent seemed designed for two people at most. Not surprisingly, books were stacked everywhere making him feel hemmed in and confined. Other senses began working, too. He smelled her odd perfume strongly and underneath it, the hint of something sickly sweet and familiar.
Vampire.
He didn't want to believe it: his senses told him that there had been a vampire in her tent. He worried about her being attacked by a vampire last night, he remembered now. Moony and Vlad had both seen a vampire; he was sure of that, too. But Lamia certainly would not have had the strength to pull him from the caves if she had been bitten by a vampire. He felt a great sense of relief at that, but remained confused about what had happened.
He heard her footsteps approaching. She hummed to herself in an odd, tuneless way that was at once alien and familiar to Remus. He puzzled as she crawled into the tent, pushing several cloth bundles in ahead of her. By the time she was inside the tent and had wrapped a blanket around him, he knew.
He knew what she was, but this brought him no closer to understanding anything.
"Here," she said curtly, handing him a piece of chocolate.
He closed his eyes and ate it, feeling warmth start to seep into his arms and legs, as well as into his sluggish brain. When he opened his eyes again, she was staring at him with those eyes of hers, the violet of an intense amethyst, not the dark void of a vampire. Up close, however, something lurked there, something ready to emerge...
He had a thousand questions for her, but all he could get past his chattering teeth was "Why?"
"Why am I here?" she said casually as she laid out squares of gauze and noisily ripped pieces of white tape into precise lengths. "To protect valuable equipment from rampaging werewolves, of course."
"No," Remus shook his head from side to side, and couldn't control the shaking that started from his shoulders and moved downward. "Why did you save me?"
"Why did you lie to me?" she hissed at him through clenched teeth. "You're a werewolf! You didn't want to protect any of us. You just wanted to run loose in the caves with your disgusting pack of wild dogs!"
Her fury beat against his muddled brain, oddly giving him some clarity and focus. "Vlad is not… one of mine," he said firmly. "Yes, I was hunting him. He attacked my pack last month, and even his own has deserted him."
This didn't placate her in the slightest. "Your pack?" she sneered, sounding even more appalled than Alexandru.
"The strongest and best organized in the mountains," he replied calmly. "You have been less than truthful yourself, Lamia," he added, a hint of something -- anger or betrayal or surprise -- creeping into his tone. "You're a vampire."
"And you're a vampire killer, aren't you?" she said in response, drawing away from him quickly. "Emil wasn't your first victim, was he? What makes you do it -- just your filthy instinct, wanting to roll in something dead?"
Remus would have responded angrily, but the way she flinched at his slight scowl stopped him. She expected him to act like a beast; well, he would show her there was one dog who could keep his cool no matter the phase or the circumstance. "You could have left me to die in the caves," he observed coolly, unable to penetrate the turbulent mix of emotions that he heard in her voice and saw in her face. "You could have killed me easily any time since then. But you didn't. Why, Lamia?"
She didn't answer; instead she turned her attention to the array of gauze and tape she'd laid out on the tarp in front of him.
"Here," she said, holding a bandage in one hand as she roughly pulled his arms down to expose his chest, "I'm going to put a bandage on this wound. It's the worst one." She smoothed the gauze and applied some tape to hold it in place. She bent her head down, not meeting his eyes.
"Why?" he repeated, that question taking in a multitude of things which troubled him about her.
She stood suddenly and moved behind him without replying. He heard her rummage through some clothing, then complete silence. She could be preparing to strangle him even as he spoke, but he didn't think so. Something hid behind the brittle fences with which she surrounded herself; something struggled in her darkness, trying to be free; something he recognized.
"What are you?" he breathed into the absolute stillness of the tent, catching a glimpse of her in his mind's eye and fearing that any loud noise would drive her away.
"I don't know any more," she replied slowly and cautiously after a long pause in which the sound of his breathing alone filled the space between them.
Lamia was silent for several more minutes, staring at Lupeni's back and clutching the filthy, bloodstained shirt she'd just taken off. What was she? Why had she come back? An hour ago, even ten minutes ago, she might have known the answer to those questions, or thought she did.
What was he? She thought she knew who he was, too, but that kept changing. If he had a pack, it meant he kept company with other werewolves, had probably been one for longer than she suspected. The realization hit her suddenly, painfully, that if she could only figure out who he was, she might know herself again.
But that was crazy.
She threw the disgusting shirt outside the tent and put on a clean one, struggling to free her hair where the shirt tangled on her hair clip, a heavy gold piece she had gotten from an old gypsy in Bucharest years ago.
"I was -- am a vampire, it's true," she said harshly as she stood and returned to face Lupeni, huddled beneath the blanket and regarding her with that same intelligent cunning she had seen in the eyes of the gray wolf last night. "But I don't want -- I didn't come back for that...I want something different for myself -- "
She broke off, unable to meet his eyes, and knelt to collect the scraps of tape and paper wrappings, crumpling them noisily into a hard knot in one fist and then tossing the wad aside. She picked up the pile of Vijay's clothes and shoved them toward him roughly.
"You'd better go," she said, desperately trying to add some note of finality to her voice. She was afraid now, afraid of what might happen if he stayed.
"Yeah," he mumbled and tried to stand. His head brushed the roof of the tent as he swayed unsteadily, holding onto the clothes as if they could support him. He almost toppled over, but she stood quickly, grabbing his arms and pulling him down again. He didn't resist, but continued to stare at her, his tangled and matted hair falling all around his face.
He looked like a wild animal, all of a sudden, and somehow she needed him to look human. Gently she pushed the wild mess away from his face and gathered all the snarled strands togther, letting them rest over one of his shoulders while she undid the clip from her own hair. Her hands glided over his neck as she fastened the gold piece in his hair. Those eyes of his were fixed on her own. Beyond the gray vortex, he waited.
Remus raised a tentative hand and stroked her cheek. It felt smooth and cool. Was it what he expected? Surprisingly, her lips were warm when he kissed her a moment later. Perhaps they shared all the warmth they had between them as they clung together.
Remus cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. Her skin felt cool, like the liquid marble of a statue who came to life just for him, tossing back her hair and sauntering slowly off her pedestal, arms open wide...
His fingers were rough, weatherbeaten, although his touch was gentle. Those hands had killed vampires. How many? Lamia wondered. Those hands had held a stake, probably driven it home. Those hands could kill her, but stroked her cheek instead.
No other hands held the promise of so much, either pleasure or oblivion. Fear mingled with desire, such as she had not known in fifty years.
He wanted to surrender to her, but struggled against a craving to bite her, sinking his teeth playfully the way he did with Liszka, the only other woman he'd ever known in this way. Where Liszka was hot and muscular, Lamia felt cool and sinuous; he was mad with a desire to give her all his warmth, until he would be left a cold and lifeless husk.
Was this what the victims always felt? Remus thought about poor Stefan, screaming, fighting against him, clawing the floor, just to reach what he had now.
He felt the wolf growl inside and then almost succeeded in banishing the beast as she pulled back from the kiss slightly and ran her tongue lightly along the line of his jaw, under his ear and down his neck. He plunged his fingers into her hair which was redolent with her perfume. The long, dark strands slipped through his fingers like fine sand at the beach.
Lamia tasted him, knowing again the hunger to consume, to fill up the void within which could never be satisfied, only nullified by some final death. His blood did not taste bad, but not-human in a way that sent alarm bells shrieking in her head. She avoided his wounds and gently lapped his jaw, ear, neck.
"No tooth marks here, Lupeni," she murmured as she made her way down his neck and caressed his collar bone roundly with her tongue.
"Mmmmm," he chuckled lazily, letting his hands fall and throwing his head back, "Vlad always goes for the right side. Wolves attack in really predictable --"
"You think too much," she whispered and brought her lips back to his.
A wizard and a werewolf. She searched for signs of both in his kiss, finding that he was different from a Muggle or another vampire. She could taste him and draw him inside her without that agonizingly intense rush of blood which made her insensible with humans. He could never know the void, could never experience the emptiness that two vampires felt in coupling as a way to feign life in the moment of orgasm.
She still didn't know what he was, and this drove her on with a desire that she thought had died a long time ago.
Her kiss intensified and pushed away any analytical thoughts he might have had, bearing down on him as when a wave overtakes a rock on the shore, crashing into him and then retreating.
His hands traced the outline of her shoulders, sinking down her back, harder now. He needed that solidity, needed to feel that she was real and not likely to vanish into the mist. Through the thin cotton shirt he felt her bones, tracing the arc of her spine with one hand while cupping her shoulder with the other.
Was all her skin so cool and perfect, he wondered and answered his question by bringing his hand up under her shirt, sweeping across the smooth, flawless skin, pushing the shirt toward her chin to reveal her small round breasts with pale, almost colorless nipples.
"Can't think any more," he breathed softly as he laid his cheek against her breast and explored one nipple with his tongue. The wolf within him growled again, backing away from the human part with its ears pressed flat, as if to say that he was on his own if he wanted to eat dead things. Remus felt lost, dizzy with loneliness, so he clung to her even tighter.
She made a soft, sighing sound and pulled the shirt over her head, shaking her hair out slowly. His hands slowly stroked the small of her back, following her every movement, defining who she was in some way.
How could he be an animal? She brushed his hair with her fingertips, then twined her fingers through the brown and gray strands... the same colors as the wolf who had looked at her with such intelligence and consciousness that it confused her last night, and confused her now.
Human or beast? She had seen both; suddenly she knew who he was.
He looked up to see her smiling at him, a secret smile of invitation. He didn't know how she made her eyes stay that gem-like violet color -- a Muggle trick, perhaps -- but was glad not to see the dark abyss behind those glittering jewels.
Without taking her eyes from him, she rose slowly and gracefully, allowing his cheek to slide along her chest and belly. She unsnapped her jeans, languidly in the liquid time which seemed to extend out to infinity. His hands circled her waist, then glided down her hips, thighs, and calves, pushing the fabric away from her to reveal the graceful curves of the nexus where hips met thighs.
Closing his eyes, he drew his hands up, fingertips brushing her legs. Her hip felt cool against his cheek. Her smell jumbled and confused him - the familiar scent of the vampire mixed with her perfume and with something else that was uniquely and achingly Lamia .. like nothing else in his experience.
He forgot about what she was and stopped listening to the confused messages from his senses.
He sighed, a feeling of warm breath against her hip rather than a sound. She forgot about who he was in the instant it was revealed to her. Now she only wanted to have him inside her, to go beyond the physical to a place she remembered from dreams, from a time when she was human and had the capacity to dream.
His hands settled around her hips, gently at first. As he clasped her hips tighter, he felt a wave of desire beating inside him...desire such as he had not felt in a long, long time.
And not for Liszka - they owned each other somehow (the way in which the members of the pack owned one another when the moon was full). How could he hunger to possess what he already owned? How could she excite him and make him feel what he felt now? Even when the moon was not full, Liszka touched the wolf within him but not the human.
Years ago there were women he secretly longed for in this way -- a teacher at one of the places he worked, a waitress in a tea shop he used to visit -- but that desire was all mixed up with shame and fear. They would find out what he was and laugh or scream or both. He would hurt them, unable to stop the wolf inside.
When he held Lamia's hips in his hands and pulled her down towards him, wild desire exploded within him. No barriers. No fear. No shame.
He lay back, still holding her hips, and she knelt over him. Wordlessly -- for the human within him had no vocabulary for this and the wolf had fled -- he arched his back and entered, joining her in a place beyond words and almost beyond what emotion could convey. Here he was human and he found the part of her, long buried in darkness, that remained human, too.
Lamia gasped, a human gasp of pleasure from one who no longer drew breath. She opened up for him, not wanting to devour him, but to find him, to hold him, to never let go.
They clung to each other, adrift in an angry sea, buffeted by rolling waves and dark thunder. For an instant of intense pleasure, the clouds ripped apart to let loose a shaft of sunlight -- a gift from the gods -- to light up their lonely struggle and banish darkness for some length of time beyond human comprehension.