The Season of Risks (Ethical Vampire #3)

The Season of Risks (Ethical Vampire #3) Page 20

The next afternoon, we sailed into Cobh. Bags packed, Dashay and I stood on deck in the rain and said hello to Ireland.

Through the mist we saw row after row of brightly painted houses, red and blue and green and yellow, and on a hill above them a soaring cathedral. The air smelled different than it had in Brest-earthier, mossier scents beneath the prevailing odors of engine fumes and brine.

The ship slid toward a long quay, where clusters of people stood under umbrellas, waiting. My eyes scanned them once, twice, but could make out no one familiar.

"They're not here," I said. I felt nervous, almost relieved to not see them.

Dashay said, "Be patient."

Ropes thumped and chains clattered ashore and were made fast to huge iron cleats. The engine groaned and went silent.

Then a couple emerged from the terminal building, both walking briskly. Her long auburn hair flew behind her. He was buttoning his raincoat as he walked.

I saw my parents for the first time.

They easily were the most elegant figures on the pier. They seemed unconscious of the rain as they moved through the crowd to a spot near the gangplank and tilted their heads to look up at the ship. Then they waved at us.

We waved back. I felt shy, exhilarated, anxious, all at the same time. For a moment I felt too scared to move.

Dashay took my arm and propelled me firmly through the crowd, down the gangplank.

How do you say hello for the first time to the ones who've known you all your life?

With awkward hugs. Smiles and kisses. Platitudes about appearances, the ship, the weather.

And all the while, our eyes asking for mutual assurance that yes, we are who we think we are, in relation to one another.

Before anything else, my mother insisted on feeding us. A squat yellow hotel along the pier wore a banner promising FRESH L OCAL O YSTERS & M URPHY'S I RISH S TOUT, a combination that apparently appealed to her, because within minutes we were sitting at a table in the hotel restaurant. My father stowed our bags in his car, and by the time he joined us, the edge of strangeness wasn't quite so sharp for me.

Mae sat next to me at the table, holding my hand. As my father walked in, the other diners stopped talking to watch him. Tall, graceful, his dark hair damp, face glistening with rain, and utterly unconscious of the effect he had on others, he slid into a chair opposite mine.

"It's what the Irish call a soft old day," he said.

I must have looked confused, because he said, "That means we'll have a fine Atlantic drizzle with us all afternoon."

His voice, with every syllable it spoke, brought me a sense of peace and well-being. Later, when I considered it further, I realized that his had been the first voice I ever heard, as a baby. And now, it became the first to acknowledge my adulthood.

To my mother, I would always be a child. I learned that within minutes, my first day in Ireland. She hovered over me, ever protective, as if terrified that I might be snatched away from her. Dashay watched us, her eyes full of sympathy mixed with amusement.

After inhaling platters of oysters and pints of Murphy's-surely the most restorative food in the world-we climbed into my father's car, another vintage Jaguar. This model was dark green. Dashay and I sank into the back seat's tan leather upholstery. My mother half turned in the front seat to talk to us.

"I love your hair," she said to me.

"That was my doing." Dashay stretched out a hand to touch it. That day, she or my mother seemed to touch me every other minute or so. Later, they brought out a tape measure and recorded my physical dimensions, as if they needed to verify that I was real. "She looks like a different young woman now, doesn't she?"

My father's eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. He let me know that I was the same Ari he had rocked to sleep in his arms, years ago. He sent me that image as ballast, I think.

"What happened to your amulet?" Mae asked.

I didn't know what she was talking about. Her face fell. "It was an Egyptian cat," she said. "You wore it around your neck, for protection."

"They must have given it to the other one," I said. I didn't like the thought of her wearing my mother's gift. Had it given her any protection?

The long car seemed to purr along the narrow country roads, and I leaned my head against the back seat. It had been one of the most important days of my life, I realized. But with reunion came a degree of exhaustion.

I perked up as we came into the city of Cork, its streets crowded with pedestrians and buses and cars.

Dashay said, "Why are there so many vamps here?"

How she knew-without sun, without telltale absent shadows-impressed me.

"Ireland is cultivating a sizable vampire population," my father said.

We stopped at a traffic light. He glanced out at the street, where four young women in a group noticed him and began making rapid Mentori signs in his direction. He looked away and drove on.

"After the collapse of the Celtic Tiger-that's a name for the economic boom years in Ireland, Ari-the government had to be creative in its recovery strategies. Beginning in 2007, they began offering significant tax breaks and other enticements to immigrants-especially scientists."

I would have listened to his voice no matter what he was talking about. "Is that why you came to Ireland?" I asked.

"In part. The government offered me start-up funds to build the lab."

"Wait until you see the house." My mother's eyes glowed. "Can you imagine what it's like to live in a castle?"

Dashay said, "Cold, I would think. Damp."

"Not this one."

The castle was somewhere in County Kerry, I'll tell that much. Outsiders couldn't find it if they tried. It stands on a hillside overlooking water, not far from a town that has three pubs. Good luck to anyone trying to track it down.

As we drove into Kerry, the air changed yet again, growing fragrant with clover and cows. I opened the back window to breathe it in deeply. "Mae? Am I Irish?"

She smiled at me. "Yes, my grandparents on both sides came from Tipperary and Kerry. Why do you ask?"

"Because of the air. It smells like home to me."

The Jaguar swept up a long driveway. Then we truly were home.

I won't describe the castle's exterior, except to say it had turrets and stone walls partially covered in moss. But inside, my mother had outdone herself. She'd painted the walls of each room in rich, jewel-like colors. The living room walls looked like malachite, deep green with black veins. My room, in a turret, had been painted to look like chrysocolla, a wonderful blend of blues and greens. I raced from room to room, touching the glossy walls, knowing the names of the gems they emulated: yellow jasper in the kitchen, bloodstone in the library, moonstone in my mother's room, pale green beryl in my father's. He watched me run up and down the narrow stone staircases, heard me say the crystals' names.

"When you were younger, back in Saratoga Springs, you memorized a chart of crystals from a plate in our old dictionary," he said. "Do you remember that?"

I didn't remember. But I felt grateful that I recalled the names.

He gave me a brief tour of his laboratory, which occupied rooms in a long wing adjacent to his study. Here the walls were unpainted stone, lined with tables and equipment. Beige metal boxes-the DNA sequencing machines-and computer screens were prominent. Technicians in white coats looked up from their work to greet us.

"We have six research assistants working here," he said.

I couldn't be sure, but I suspected all of them were vampires. One, a young man with long hair, reminded me a little of Sloan. I wondered how his adventures with the goths were going.

The wing ended in a wall of glass. Beyond it lay green hills and a violet mountain range, their colors muted by drizzle. That's Ireland, I thought. Color rising to meet the rain.

To have a quarrel in such a beautiful place was close to sacrilege. Even though the kitchen was silent when I came in the next morning, I knew that my parents were in the middle of a disagreement. Words recently spoken had left a dull reddish tinge in the air, which smelled reassuringly of geranium oil and lavender, mixed with peat smoke from the fireplace that occupied most of one wall.

And somehow, I knew that I was the cause of their fight.

"You may as well tell me," I said.

My father kept silent, but Mae said, "He's going to ruin everything."

"I hardly think that's a fair way of stating it." My father passed me a rack of toast and a plate holding a slab of the yellowest butter I'd ever seen.

"How many years have I waited for this." My mother wasn't asking a question. "Finally I have my family together, and he wants to take it apart again."

"I don't see how you arrived at that conclusion." My father took a bite of his slice of toast and chewed it quietly.

"You want to interrogate her." She folded her arms on the linen tablecloth.

"I want to ask questions about what has happened, yes." He drank some coffee, as if this were a typical breakfast conversation.

"And then you'll leave us."

For the first time, he looked surprised, even confused. "Sara, the way you leap to such dire conclusions-I find the process more than a little alarming."

"But you will leave," she said. "I know you. You'll find out who's responsible for what happened, and then you'll go off after them."

"No," my father said. "I plan to talk to COVE."

The Council on Vampire Ethics is an advisory council that serves as a congress and court. Its decisions aren't enforced; they carry such great influence that the sects always abide by its rulings. Even the Colonists curbed some of their most barbaric practices in deference to a ruling from COVE.

Mae didn't like the idea of him talking to the council, either. The rest of breakfast featured her playing variations on the theme of division and desertion, my father and me chewing toast.

"If you tell them what happened, her new identity will be destroyed." Her eyes looked wild.

"COVE proceedings are kept confidential," he said.

"How can you be sure of that?"

She predicted that his testimony would make us a target for whoever had engineered my identity theft. We'd have to move again, and she didn't want to move, she loved being here-

"Sara," he said. "We won't have to move. I won't let that happen. I love being here, too."

Although part of me felt I'd known him fewer than twenty-four hours, I believed him.

It was nothing like an interrogation, really. I brought into his study the notes Sloan and I had made on the cruise. We sat in leather armchairs, and I read him the story we'd assembled. From time to time he stopped me to ask questions.

Midway through the morning, Dashay joined us, carrying a cup of tea. She looked at my father, who beckoned for her to sit in the corner chair.

"So," he said when I'd finished. "Someone made a replica of you to carry out a course of action that you would never voluntarily have undertaken."

"Is that even possible?" I asked. "To make an exact-well, nearly exact-duplicate?"

"Yes, of course." He leaned back in his chair, his elbows on its arms, hands clasped. "With synthetic hormones and artificial DNA, new life forms can be created in a laboratory. Using nuclear transfer, clones can be made. There's a fellow in Dublin who's been doing it for years."

"But that's creepy."

He flinched. I knew he didn't like words that were vague or emotive. "Certainly the procedures raise ethical questions that no one has sufficiently addressed yet. In any case, I don't think you were cloned. The process takes years. I think some other science was employed."

From her seat in the corner, Dashay said one word: "Duppy."

"What's that?" my father said.

"Spirit you call from the grave to do your bidding. That other Ari, that was a duppy. I saw it in her eyes."

He looked skeptical. The scientist in him had never quite come to terms with the existence of ghosts. Yet, to my knowledge, he'd seen at least two: the spirit of James Wilde, who'd haunted my mother's apartment in Savannah, and the ghost of my old friend Kathleen.

And that's when it came to me, a memory that became speculation that became certainty, all in less than a minute. "I think I know who she was," I said. "She was Kathleen."

Dashay said, "Who?" and my father said, "Ari's friend in Saratoga Springs. The girl whom Malcolm killed."

I opened my journal, turned to its last entries. "This handwriting, look at it. I knew I'd seen it before. It's hers. It's Kathleen's. The same as the writing in the notes she used to write me."

My mind, suddenly flush with remembrances, raced now, putting the pieces together. It made sense-the girl who had wanted to be me had actually become me. I looked down at the journal. A sentence jumped out at me: I want to take my place in the world, beside Raphael Montero.

I shuddered. What other horrors might she have provoked, had she lived?

But my father's mind raced ahead, faster than mine. "The physical approximation, that's the easy part. With plastic surgery they could make any body of similar height and build look like yours. The spiritual animation-Dashay's duppy theory might explain it. But the replication of knowledge, of memories-that's the part I can't answer yet."

"I've read about drugs that can block memories," I said. "Could there be drugs that transfer them?"

My father stood and walked over to his desk. He gave it a questioning look, as if he'd forgotten why he'd approached it.

"It might be done," he said slowly. "Imagine your memory cells mixed with a drug that could cross the blood-brain barrier, then say the drug was injected intravenously into another. Or injected into her spinal fluid. In the brain, the cells might proliferate and connect to preexisting neurons. Similar methods are used in the treatment of degenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease."

It was too much information for Dashay and me to comprehend.

But this line of thinking visibly entranced my father. "Yes, I see how it might be done," he said. "Of course, the ethical issues associated with such an experiment are profound. It's one thing to use technologies to cure or mitigate diseases, but quite another to use them to create duplicate beings or to bring back the dead. After all, who has the right to play God?"

Then I asked the question that my mind seemed to have been framing for weeks: "Do you think that whoever made her also destroyed her? Caused the plane to crash?"

My father rested his hands on his desk. "The authorities are still investigating the cause. The plane's black box hasn't been found."

"Or maybe she caused it? She didn't mention anything like that in her writing, though. Maybe someone put a bomb in her suitcase?"

"I need more coffee." Dashay left the room.

My father turned to me and held up one hand. "It's pointless to speculate about the cause until mechanical failure is ruled out."

I changed the subject. "Mae said that you're doing genetic work."

Then he told me about the Vampire Genome Project, aimed at determining the sequences of the base pairs that make up vampire DNA. Researchers were using the information to understand the causes of weaknesses-for instance, the genes that make vampires susceptible to sunlight and fire.

"The potential benefits of the research are vast," he said. "Not only for vampires. We're also looking at the genes that make us resistant to death and disease, hoping to develop therapies that will treat human diseases and extend human life spans."

He stayed by his desk. Suddenly his expression darkened. "And you, Ariella? How are you?"

I leaned back in my chair. "Dr. Cho said I'm fine."

"What does Ariella say?"

I shrugged. "Do I seem different to you?"

"You seem older, somehow." He picked up a stone used as a paperweight on his desk, looked at it instead of at me. "It's not the red hair or the green eyes-which, I admit, become you. It's something about the way you move and speak. There's depth in your eyes I didn't see before."

"Do you think I was given Septimal?"

He set down the paperweight. "Not likely. Dr. Cho told me she didn't see any evidence of Septimal in your blood sample. Only a trace of anesthetic, she said."

I kneaded my skirt with both hands. "So, what changed me, then?"

"I don't know for certain," he said, "but I'd bet that your brain has matured. Brains aren't static in mortals. The volume of gray matter changes. Neural connections are pruned."

The idea of my brain being pruned struck me as disgusting. "Are you saying it's the mortal part of me that's caused the change?"

"Most likely." He looked away, toward the window. "And the stress you've been through. The experience of stress generates hormones that affect the limbic system. Stress hormones affect memory, too."

Even though he was blocking his thoughts, I knew what he was thinking. If I was aging, at whatever rate, it meant that one day I would die.

"Not necessarily." Once again, I'd forgotten to block mine. He turned to face me again. "Who knows what sort of therapies may be available to you? Research in antiaging technologies for mortals has made enormous progress in recent years, and the genome project is very promising. It may be that your vampire nature will protect you. We simply don't know."

"And you don't know if I could have a child?" I'd been waiting for the right moment to ask him that question.

He folded his arms, as he always did when he felt uncomfortable. "No, I don't know. The vampire/human combination is relatively rare, and not enough study has been devoted to it. I suspect it would be a risky thing to attempt."

Dr. Cho had told me the same thing. One thing was certain: I was a complex being, all right.

"We've talked enough for one day." My father came over to me, put his hand under my chin. "You're back with us. That's enough for now."

I let the big worries slide away, then replaced them with smaller ones. "I need new clothes. Cruise wear doesn't seem warm enough here."

"I've already contacted Gieves & Hawkes. You'll have metamaterials gear in ten days or so. Sara gave me your new measurements. As for the rest, she'll take you shopping in Killarney. She enjoys that sort of thing."

From his voice, I knew that he had no interest in coming with us. I was leaving the room when he called me back.

"About your mother," he said. "See if you can talk some sense into her. You know I have to do something about Roche. Dr. Cho will come with me to testify before COVE. And your journal and notes will be invaluable."

"I'm going with you, too," I said.

"Your testimony would no doubt be useful." He crossed his arms. "But your mother will not approve."