Read Online Ad Eternum by Elizabeth Bear - Free Book Online Page B

are you to make that decision for me?”
    “I am making it for myself,” the wampyr said. “Call it selfishness. And a little charity. If you do not love yourself, as you are now, my dear Ragoczy, how little will you love yourself when a hundred years have refined you that much closer to your core?”
     

     
    When the party ended, there was dark enough left that the wampyr decided to seek out Ruth Grell again. Dark enough, he thought. Inside and out.
    He did not know where she would be, so he found the place in the park where he had left her. She was long gone, but he crouched by the roots of the tree she had leaned against and closed his eyes. He pressed his cold hand to the cold soil and sniffed deeply.
    When he opened his eyes again, he smiled. “Can I not find a wolf in this city?”
    He followed the scent like a hound—like a wolf—across the too-perfect squares of cement and the scraps of dirty ice that had collected in corners from the day’s melt. He followed her between the blown sandwich-wrappers and the cardboard pallets of the homeless, down the Boston Post Road and the channels of the gutter.
    He found her on a rooftop. Beyond the streetlights, the sky was growing shallow with false dawn, but though he could sense it, he could not see it.
    “You shouldn’t be here,” Ruth Grell said, without turning, from her seat on the parapet wall. “It’s rising morning.”
    “Hours yet,” he answered. It was only a slight exaggeration. He hitched a leg over the parapet and sat beside her.
    “So,” he said, when a few moments had passed. “Will you accuse me of cowardice now?”
    “Have you made up your mind who to be?”
    He shrugged, this time with slow intent. “I had thought you might help me decide.”
    “It’s easier,” she said, “when there is someone you very much would rather not be.”
    He didn’t answer. She touched his shoulder, finally, which was a good thing. It roused him from all those remembrances of all the people he had decided not to be, anymore.
    He said, “Will you stay in New Amsterdam?”
    “It was a long trip to come here,” she said. “But there are many places I have not been. And I…” She glanced away, coloring across the high bones of her cheeks. The flush warmed her skin. Her pulse speeded.
    “Finances?”
    “Not everyone has a lot of use for a retired Sturm-wolfstaffel Hauptsturmführerin,” she said. “And there wasn’t much of a pension.”
    He rubbed a fingertip across the gritty cement of the parapet. “Wherever you want to go,” he said, “I can pay for it.”
    She would have said his name in protest, but she didn’t know what name to say.
    “Don’t worry,” he said. “Money is no object. Consider it the just thanks for a grateful world for your service.”
    She frowned. She stared.
    He continued, “You can travel as you wish, and come back here. Or Paris. Or San Diego; it was lovely when I visited there with Abby Irene and Phoebe, and they will not still hold the war against you the way the English Americas will. There are wild hills for a wolf to run in—”
    She was not a shapeshifter, not like the werewolves of the stories. Rather, she was a creature out of a different legend, one of the Ulfhethnar. A wolf-shirt, a kind of mystic warrior. It did not make her any less a wolf clothed in woman’s mind and woman’s skin.
    “The sun—” she said, changing the subject.
    He shrugged. “What of it?”
    The sideways glance she gave him was stricken. “You don’t mean it.”
    “I don’t know,” he said. It occurred to him that with those words, he made himself more vulnerable to her than he had allowed himself to be to anyone in a millennium. Since he left Evie, his creator, or since Evie left him. He didn’t remember.
    But he remembered her dark hair, and the flash of her Mediterranean eyes. And the cold strength of her arms’ embrace.
    She’d chosen to burn. And such was the nature of things that he had not even known, until too much