By Blood We Live

The man nodded imperceptibly.

Now the words spilled from Nita, like the scorching lava that had formed the mountains. "I tried to tell the others. I told them that he could not be ancient. That he was not responsible for catastrophes. That the gods had not returned his wife to him. I explained that my grandmother who kept him, she was his wife. They would not believe me."

"What did you do?"

"After the sun set, I cut his chain and took him far from the village, up into the mountains, a night's journey by foot. I gave him food I had brought home with me, liquid food with nutrients, some blood because he was used to that, but other beverages, because he had not eaten solid food that I knew of. I tried to feed him grains but he could not digest them. And then I pointed to the much larger village just over the mountain peak and told him to go there, to begin a new life. That he was free. I told him that he would be caged no more."

Nita shook her head. Tears streamed down her face and though her voice wavered, she needed no encouragement to finish her story. "I returned to my village the following day. My grandmother was furious with me. She struck me and called me a fool, ranting that I had brought down the curse and put them all in danger. The villagers were angry and afraid. Some wanted to run away, others found weapons to defend themselves. One suggested I take the place of the

vechi brbat in the cage, as if that would make things right. I told them they had nothing to fear, that the old man, the vechi brbat, was gone for good, and they were all free now. Just as I was free from the life that had awaited me. No more wrong legends to rule their lives, or mine. I could return to the university. I would not have to marry the vechi brbat, or spend my life taking care of him.

"But the people were not pleased by this; they were so enraged. And terrified. My grandmother struggled to keep them from hurting me."

After a moment, the man said, "And then what happened?"

"He returned. Two nights later. He murdered people in their beds, outside their homes, as they fled into the forest. Women, children, men-even the strongest who tried to fight him off. My…my grandmother. He had been strengthened by the nourishment I'd provided, and he took blood until he became bloated, and then took more. He killed everyone, and it was my fault!"

Her body trembled uncontrollably. The room had become icy. The colors surrounding her, even the white, paled as if glaciers had formed over everything, and the opaqueness that reminded her of the

vechi brbat's eyes as he stared into hers began to spin and swirl like a snowstorm.

"But he didn't kill

you," the man said.

"No," she gasped. "He spared me."

"Why?"

She stared at him, watching his grey features shift and twist and the shape of his face change from human to animal then change again from animal to something dark and otherworldly until the images that formed petrified her.

"Nita, they found you covered with blood.

You, not the vechi brbat. You killed the villagers, because you felt trapped there, destined to a life you did not want."

Her head jerked from side to side.

"Nita, if there were a

vechi brbat, why wasn't he found? Where is he now?"

She screamed, "I-don't-know!"

"Take it easy. You're safe here."

But his words could not quell the horror that gripped her heart. "He disappeared. And I remained with the bodies, the blood-red bodies, stained by color that seeped into the hungry brown soil as if it were a mouth that had longed for this nourishment. The land of my foremothers, of the villagers, those who imprisoned the

vechi brbat. Don't you see? The blood went back into the earth. Where it should have gone centuries ago! Because they imprisoned him!"

Her raised voice brought Dr. Sauers storming into the room. "What's going on here? You're upsetting my patient!" She hit an intercom button on the wall and told a nurse to hurry with an injection.

"No! No more drugs! Let me be free!" Nita jumped to her feet. "Remove these chains! I did nothing to you, why are you holding me prisoner! Help! Someone help me!

Vechi brbat free me, as I freed you!"

But Nita's cries faded soon after the needle pierced her flesh. The world around her receded, the colors dimming and fading to nothing, until she could neither see nor hear those outside her with their demands and judgments and limitations. But she clearly heard the

vechi brbat, for now he could speak and he spoke to her, calling her his bride, assuring her that he would be with her always. That she would not be a prisoner forever. "One day," he promised, "you, too, must dance with me."

The Beautiful, The Damned by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kristine Kathryn Rusch's most recent novel, Diving into the Wreck, will be published by Pyr Books in November. She is the author of more than fifty novels, including several in her popular Retrieval Artist series. Many of her novels belong to the mystery or romance genres and are published under the pen names Kristine Grayson, Kris Nelscott, and Kristine Dexter. Rusch is a prolific author of short fiction as well, much of which will be collected in the forthcoming book Recovering Apollo 8 and Other Stories. She has been nominated for the Hugo Award thirteen times, wi

Rusch describes this story as a kind of sequel to The Great Gatsby-with vampires. "For some reason, I reread The Great Gatsby every two or three years whether I need to or not," she said. "Like Nick Carraway, I am a child of the Middle West, a person who has moved away to a land that's not quite familiar and people who are a bit strange. I have always seen ties between vampirism and alcoholism (and I am the child of two alcoholics). I dealt with that tie in my novel Sins of the Blood, a vampire book, and I deal with it here too."

On one rereading of Gatsby, Rusch realized that the characters were metaphorical vampires, and that was all the inspiration she needed to come up with the tale that follows.

Chapter I

I come from the Middle West, an unforgiving land with little or no tolerance for imagination. The wind blows harsh across the prairies, and the snows fall thick. Even with the conveniences of the modern age, life is dangerous there. To lose sight of reality, even for one short romantic moment, is to risk death.

I didn't belong in that country, and my grandfather knew it. I was his namesake, and somehow, being the second Nick Carraway in a family where the name had a certain mystique had forced that mystique upon me. He had lived in the East during the twenties, and had had grand adventures, most of which he would not talk about. When he returned to St. Paul in 1928, he met a woman-my grandmother Nell-and with her solid, common sense had shed himself of the romance and imagination that had led to his adventures in the first place.

Although not entirely. For when I a

He died while I was still learning the art of the cold call, stuck on the sixteenth floor of a windowless high rise, in a tiny cubicle that matched a hundred other tiny cubicles, distinguished only by my handprint on the phone set and the snapshots of my family thumbtacked to the indoor-outdoor carpeting covering the small barrier that separated my cubicle from all the others. He never saw the house in Co