Fevre Dream Page 0,81

who laughed at his voodoo and promised to teach him greater, darker magic. Serve me, the bloodmaster had promised, and I will make you one of us. Your scars will heal, your eye will see again, you will drink blood and live forever, never aging. So the mulatto had served. For almost thirty years he did everything he was bid. He lived for the promise. He killed for the promise, was taught to eat warm flesh, to drink blood.

"Until finally his master saw a better opportunity. The mulatto, old and sickly now, became a hindrance. His usefulness passed, so he was discarded. It might have been merciful to kill him, but instead he was sent away, upriver, to fend for himself. A thrall does not go against his bloodmaster, even if he knows the promise made him to be a lie. So the old mulatto had wandered on foot, living by robbery and murder, moving up the river slowly. Sometimes he earned honest money as a slave catcher or laborer, but mostly he kept to himself in the woods, a recluse who lived by night. When he dared, he ate the flesh and drank the blood of his victims, still believing it would help restore his youth and health. He had been living around New Madrid for a year, he told me. He used to chop some wood for the woodyard man, who was too old and feeble to do it himself. He knew how seldom anyone visited that woodyard. So... well, you know the rest.

"Abner, your people can learn much from mine. But not the things that he had learned. Not that. I felt pity for him. He was old and hideous and without hope. Yet I was angry as well, as angry as I had been in Buda-Pest with the rich woman who liked to wash in blood. In the legends of your race, my people have been made the very essence of evil. The vampire has no soul, no nobility, no hope of redemption, it is said. I will not accept that, Abner. I have killed countless times, have done many terrible things, but I am not evil. I did not choose to be the way I was. Without choice, there can be no good nor evil. My people have never had that choice. The red thirst has ruled us, condemned us, robbed us of all we might have been. But your people, Abner-they have no such compulsion. That thing I encountered in the forest beyond New Madrid, he had never felt the red thirst, he could have been anything, done anything. Instead he had chosen to become what he was. Oh, to be sure, one of my own race shares the guilt-the man who lied to him, promised him things that could never be. Yet I can understand the reason for that, much as I might loathe it. An ally among your people can make all the difference. All of us know fear, Abner, my race and yours alike.

"What I cannot understand is why one of you would lust so after a life in darkness, would desire the red thirst. Yet he did desire it, with a great passion. He begged me not to leave him, as the other blood-master had done. I could not give him what he wanted. I would not, even if it had been possible. I gave him what I could."

"You tore his damn throat out for him, didn't you?" Abner Marsh said to the darkness.

"I told you," Valerie said. Marsh had almost forgotten she was there, quiet as she'd been. "He doesn't understand. Listen to him."

"I killed him," Joshua admitted, "with my bare hands. Yes. His blood ran off my fingers, soaked into the earth. But it did not touch my lips, Abner. And I buried him intact."

Another great silence filled the cabin while Abner Marsh pulled at his beard, and thought. "Choice, you said," he volunteered finally. "That's the difference between good and evil, you said. Now it looks like I'm the one got to make a choice."

"We all make our choices, Abner. Every day."

"Maybe that's so," said Marsh. "I don't much care for this one, though. You say you want my help, Joshua. Let's say I give it. How's that goin' to make me any different from that damned old mulatto you killed, answer me that!"

"I would never make you into-something like that," Joshua said. "I have never tried. Abner, I will live for centuries after you are dead