ECHO

by Apache

Content:
Het
Vachon/Tracy
Implied or Graphic Sexual Situations
No Violence

To prequel "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know"

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

Oh dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;
Where trusting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again tho' cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long, long ago, my love, how long ago.

Christina Rosetti

~ ~ ~

"Angel, we have definitely met before," said the entrancing young man.  His hair fell like a black waterfall to scatter against his shoulders, and his brown-black eyes glowed from under thickly arched black brows.  He had bumped into a young woman on her way out of a VR High Flight parlor in the mall.

"No," giggled the tall girl whose blonde hair was of a color and consistency to make his memories tumble forward unchecked.  "But it's awfully nice of you to lie that way."

"Let's meet now," he said playfully. 

"Mmmm, maybe," she allowed.  "I'm only allowed to know nice people.  Are you nice?"

A knowing chuckle came from the young man.  He pursed his lips briefly.  "Don't I look nice?" he said back.  His voice cracked humorously, and as she met the question with a silence, his eyes opened wide.  "You're wounding me to the quick."

The girl grinned.  "Yeah, right."  Now the voice as well as the hair pulled echoes from his memory.  "Bet it would take a pickaxe to wound your heart."

The man grinned, enjoying the challenge.  His face turned mock-solemn.  "Not even then, actually," he said.  "It's a pretty tough heart."

The girl giggled again.  "But your heart," the young man pursued, his eyes suddenly those of a poet, "has the exquisite delicacy of ...." 

"Yes?" said the girl, enraptured.

"I'm thinking," the man said.  "The dust on a butterfly's wings?  Mmmm, dew...on...a...freshly opened...?"

The girl made a wide-eyed, lip-twisting mocking face followed rapidly by a friendly grin, and the years revolved around the young man again.  "Who are you?" he said abruptly.

"Wow, just ask why don't you?" she said.  "Katherine, my name's Katharine.  Call me Kath."

"Kath," he said, and took her hand to kiss it.  She pulled it back rapidly.

"Well, this butterfly's gotta flutter," she said.  "I'm about to be late."

"An assignation?" the young man feigned hurt.  "You abandon me for another so soon--?"

The girl giggled and cocked her head back boldly.  "I'm on my way to see the very best person in my life," she said.  "Cheery-bye."

"Wait!"  The archness was gone.  A small desperation asserted itself that surprised the young man even as he yielded to it.  He had lost this smile before... "A number, a name? -- A date, a place?" 

"Really?"  The girl was genuinely flattered for the first time.  "OK."  She reeled off a string of numbers.  "Let's see if you call."

~ ~ ~

Two weeks later, the pair were walking at night on the girl's campus, and she said once again she had to go.  "So now you will go and be faithless with that other fellow..." the young man said, feigning hurt again.

"The very best person in my life?  You want to see that person?  OK, I'll show you.  But you'll have to come with me."  The girl had a teasing smile of her own now, laced with knowingness.

"Lead on, fair damosel," said the young man, swallowing hungrily.

"J.D., you do Renaissance better than anyone I've ever met," the girl laughed. "Follow me, thou knave."  She led him to her car, hovering quietly at a multilevel parking spot.

"With a good will, my lady," murmured the young man, and she threw him another wide smile over her shoulder.  Again time stood on its head.  He hadn't been in this city for a very long time, and the strangeness of this reincarnation of his last stay had compelled him to call this little girl over and over, to visit her, picking her up outside her college dorm to walk and talk, just to see that strange echo of a smile that had bothered  his dreams for decades.  And in the sadness of it, he never, never touched the girl, never responded to all the obvious signals of a teenager in the throes of a crush on a slightly older man.

A minute later she was opening the door of a big, comfortable suburban house that dated back seventy years.  "Gra-am, you here?" 

"Of course I am," said an old voice, tinged with asperity.  "And I'm not deaf, either."  A tall, upright old lady walked into view slowly, her posture assisted by a distinctive silver-headed cane.  Her white hair was pulled back from a face whose collapsed features made all the more visible a pair of china blue eyes over strongly marked cheekbones and a wide jaw.  

"Here's the best thing in my life," the teenager said gaily.  "J.D. Valencia, meet my Grams."  The young man and old woman, both of whom had been enjoying the playful high spirits of the young girl, glanced at each other momentarily.

In the next second, the teenager was gasping, "Call an ambulance!" and holding up her tall old grandmother, who had lost consciousness as her cane clattered to the floor.  But the young man with the Renaissance face was gone.

~ ~ ~

The cat on the bed mewled and stretched, and the old woman woke out of the light sleep of great age.  A figure stood in outline against the drapes, lights from the garden outside showing a man's form with fashionably flowing hair.

"You came back," the old lady said in a voice of gentle discovery.  "I wondered if you might.  But you knew who she was...?"

The figure shook its head.

"No?  Funny, I imagined sometimes..."  The old woman sat up against the headboard of the bed.  "I thought perhaps you weren't so far away."

The figure bowed its head in assent.

"Well, you haven't gotten over being coy!" the old woman snapped with a sudden access of energy.

Now the man laughed and came forward.  The laugh was exactly what she remembered, a young man's small sound of amusement at being told off.

The Hon. Teresa O'Brian shifted against her pillow, trying uselessly to ease a back that would never feel easy again.

"Madame Mayor," said the dark figure mockingly.

"Beautiful boy," said the old woman.  "How have you been?"  She snapped on the light.  Javier Vachon was standing in her bedroom, wearing a fashionably partial shirt, and a simple, timeless black coat and jeans. 

Vachon stood and studied her.

"Gonna kill me this time?" said the old woman with unconcern.

Vachon laughed again.  He canted his head and mouthed "No," exactly as he had done sixty years before. 

"Planning to give me eternal unlife, maybe?" the old woman rapped out.  "Hah! that's it, isn't it?"  She laughed with a youthful freshness.  "And I thought -I- hated to lose an argument."

A silence.

"Well, that settles that.  You know, after meeting you, I had to believe in God again.  That's pretty inconvenient these days."  The old woman searched the vampire's face.  "Though it did the city some good.  Come sit down," she patted the bed, "and let's visit."

"That's it?  Your answer?"  The vampire's voice cracked with incredulity.

The old woman smiled at him.  "You thought ... this close to the end, I'd have to want it?  No, dear."

The brown-black eyes looked over at her with a mild perplexity she had remembered exactly across the decades.  She smiled gently.

"Poor old demon, still afraid," said the old lady.  "God's most fearsome being, the dark angel, suffering the terror of death.  Well, I'm full of fears too, but not that one.  Not like that."

Vachon was baffled, and amused, and struck with a species of joy.  At the end of her long life, his golden Tracy Vetter still had a surprise or two left for him.

Golden Tracy...  had turned into a dessicated old woman.  Graceful, even elegant for what she was, but a creature of collapsed curves, sunken planes, lines, withering, and fadedness.  The once luscious lips that framed the wide mouth had gone thin and pale, the golden eyebrows were tiny white flecks against dry white skin.  And the blue eyes...they had changed too, but not for the worse.

Those eyes studied him.  "Death... it's not so terrible."  Then came a fat, wise chuckle that only an old woman could know enough to produce.  "Of course, you've been on the wrong end of it all these years... "

Vachon stood there silently, watching the strong eyes, weaving this old woman into the memory called Tracy, with that china-blue direct and candid gaze as the linking thread.  "C'mon Vachon, say something," she challenged him.  "You're scaring me with that strong, silent creature of the night bit."

"Don't lie.  You were never afraid of me," he said immediately.

The old woman emitted a laugh.  "I was always afraid of you, Vachon.  Fear just couldn't be the most important thing."

Vachon closed his eyes to the wreck of hair, skin, lines, features in front of him and remembered the slim golden tower of a girl who had not even bothered to scream before trying to arrest a vampire.  Eyes closed, he reached for her--

and his arms closed in a passionate embrace around a frail structure riddled with small resistances, awkward stiff points--

"Ouch!"  The woman slapped lightly at Vachon.  "That's nice of you, but my neck, my back... I'm a bit arthritic, dear."

The vampire let the old form subside onto its pillows, watching as the old woman adjusted them, then adjusted them again, trying to find comfort for her back.  It took a minute before she looked back at him, perched with the lazy grace of youth on the edge of the bed beside her.

 "How old are you now, Vachon?" she wondered, trying to add.  "If I'm 86... you were 491 sixty-one years ago..."  He let her do the math.  "Five hundred and fifty two."  Shaking her head, she squinted a little to look at him.  "But you're still 25, aren't you?"

She reached out to run a hand along his face, but it was a kindly touch, not a caress. "The older I got, the better I felt I knew you... eventually I even thought I knew why you lived in that ridiculous old church."

She looked over at him.  "It was entertaining, and mostly you didn't care, right?  When you've been around for a while, it doesn't matter what you own, where you sleep?"

His eyes wandered. "Yes.  Partly."  He looked back at her. Looking in her eyes, his hand came up and tugged at a lock of the pulled-back silver hair, worked it loose, pulled it forward as he had the first night they'd met.

"How do you do it-- seem 25 all the time?  I believed it completely, and now, sixty years later, so does Kath."

"I'm used to it," he said distractedly, his eyes fixed on the long strand of snowy hair he was running through his fingers.

"Used to eternal youth?  Funny thought."

He made the effort then-- she saw it-- to drop the layers of artifice that allowed him to move among mortals, among his prey.  He met her gaze and the look of the centuries flooded forward in his eyes; even his posture changed slightly, lost some of its laxity.

"There you are," she said softly.  

"Here I am," he said.  He swallowed as if nervous.

"Are you still worried I won't like you?" the old woman chuckled.  "I wanted to know you."  The old eyes studied the older eyes in the very young face.  "You wouldn't let me."

The vampire's eyes flushed with humor and became young again; they rolled and his eyebrows climbed.  "I can't imagine why," he joked.  "It might have had to do with the fact that you fainted every time--" 

"--or threw up," the old woman prompted.

"-- y-yes, that," the young face agreed, "every time you learned anything real."

She smiled. "You never took me flying-- remember?"

"I remember you dismissed me from your service that very same night," he said.

She smiled at the gallantry, then her eyes blurred as she remembered the night she had watched Vachon's flesh catch fire, and in fear and horror and the need to deny her desire she had ordered him away forever.  A command he had chosen to accept, even when in his rage and pain she had thought he would simply kill her.

"Let me take you now," he said flirtatiously, not even sure what taking he meant.

She lost her breath, and said the first thing that came to mind.  "I always wanted to know how often you killed people."

Vachon's breath hissed out.  The wordless sound that followed it was heartbroken, outraged, and in other circumstances had been the last thing mortals heard.

"Not often," he said without affect. It was pure giving, a pure act against his will. "But once or twice -- three or four in a night." 

The elegant old lady wavered, but she probed into the inexactitude of the answer.  "Not often?"

He snorted.  "We live on -- Red Cross rejects," he said wryly.  She nodded. "The Raven, Point Pelee, in your day," he said. "Once the communication age hit, we couldn't live like we used to."

"The good old days," the old woman said.

His eyes opened wide, his eyebrows climbed, and his face took on a little smile.  "Yes, they were," he said without a trace of irony.

She bent a look on him, her eyes shockingly identical to what they had been sixty years ago. "So -- not often."

He sighed.  "When I knew you -- three or four a year, OK?  Maybe twenty, counting people who were dying anyway.  That's in Western cities.  In the Third World, in war zones, plague cities... " he saw the nausea swimming into the old face, "...well, the rules were-- are-- different."

The old woman looked at him, not quite unshockable, but not the hurt innocent of sixty years ago.  He pressed on, willing this one woman in all of his eternity to know him whole.  "If I were somewhere I could -- in the old days -- every day, Tracy.  You can't imagine..." he swallowed, his eyes holding hers.  "Better than every mortal pleasure.  And also," he admitted, "a need you can't fight, a hunger beyond any mortal urge." 

He was beginning to think of -this- face as Tracy, this lined, collapsed face with the powerful eyes.  He went on, "And there are some of us who don't... who don't like it."

"Don't like to kill?  For moral reasons?"

He nodded, realizing abruptly that these were the first vampires Tracy Vetter had been able to imagine being.  "My fledgling-- child," he said.  "Urs.  She quit entirely after awhile."  He smiled, remembering.  "I called her my little vegetarian."

More surprise, then shock as she figured it out, then acceptance.  "Funny thing," she said.  "You a parent, like me."

"Not like you."  Now the voice was rich with irony.

Tracy swayed, responding to some message from her back, and he reached out to touch her, both for the pleasure of it and to help her.  Just touching her elbow at first, then running his cool hand up the loose flesh of her arm, the sharp, exposed curve of the bone at the shoulder, a finger following a clavicle...

He held her again, sliding forward to take the old body into his arms carefully, imagining it strong, supple, lithe.  "Tracy, please," he said into her cheek.  "Please."

"Vachon," she said.  "Let go."

"Tracy... you let go.  Say yes to me.  Just once, tesoro."

"Would it make me young again?"  A tiny flare of real interest lit up the old woman's face as she canted her head backward to look at him, moving her neck carefully as she did so.

Vachon shook his head, very slowly, holding her eyes.  "No. Strong, but not young."

"Strong," she mulled.  "You want to go through all of remaining history with a strong old woman on your arm?"

Now the vampire mouthed 'yes,' and the old woman laughed. "Fraud."   He looked at her, and blinked.  "You don't understand," he said aloud.

"Don't I?  You waltzed in here tonight with my 19 year old granddaughter-- not her 52 year old mother, and not her 86 year old Gram."

For an answer he burrowed his head into the join of her neck and shoulder.  But she was right, it was eerie.  He had given death to old women hundreds of times over the years, but never offered one life -- or love.  This close, the sound of the old heart, with its whispery beat and small dysrhythmias, maddened him.

And the old head was shaking, no, no.  "I will remember you forever, wherever I am," she said.  "But that has to be it."  A few small tears broke against the deep lines that ran down her cheeks and around her mouth, and she sniffled.  "Imagine getting to say this at my age," she laughed weakly.  "I feel like Juliet."

"Juliet died--" It was a whisper.

"And so will I...  my treasure, is that what you called me?" Another sniffle.  "Romeo dies too, remember?  But what I wish for you is to live-- and be good."

She leaned back and looked at his beautiful, ancient boy's face.  "I mean really live, Vachon.  To see Kath walk in here with her boyfriends -- she's so wonderful, and she doesn't even know herself yet.  I wish I could watch her whole life.  No, not literally," she added.  "Have this, Vachon.  Have love forever, after all."

"What a sentimentalist you are," said the vampire.

"Guilty as charged, officer," chuckled the old lady, then her face became serious.  "And you know what?  You too.  You loved me.  It took me decades to know it.  It was kind of amazing to figure it out... At the time, I didn't have a clue."  Her eyes narrowed. "And you didn't mind leaving me in the dark about it, either, did you?"

"I love you."  Simple acknowledgement.  Present tense.

She shook her head.  "That girl is sixty years gone."

"Tracy."  He stroked one cheek with the back of his hand, but the lover's light went out of his eyes, and the look of centuries returned.  "What you see is not what I am."  He frowned, and his gaze wandered around the room, looking for words that accorded oddly with his young body.  "I like a woman's beauty.  I always will.  I will always look at young girls as a man does.  But..." he stared at her, thinking.  "Those are mortals.  Not us.  In our community, what I am... is neither boy nor man.  What you will be... is not an old woman."

The old woman pursed her lips.  "So I go through eternity as a strong old lady AND I only get to hang around with vampires?"

Tracy was defeating him again, he felt it.  How could this mortal beat him so devastatingly?  Even now, when the strength of a single one of his fingers would suffice to crush the life out of her?  He had stayed out of North America all these years, only to trip once again over this mortal woman whom his heart had recognized as its destiny-- and who refused to be.

"Tracy..."  He sighed.  "It's a matter of..." his eyes ran around the room, "the right... mate."  He hated the word even as he said it. 

The old woman snorted.  "Oh yeah... undead Mayor O'Brian and her eternal gigolo... "  But her eyes were saying something else entirely, something kinder though just as final.  She slid forward in the bed, and got up, reaching for the silverheaded cane.  She took a step or two away from where he sat on the bed, and turned to face him as if to insist he see her fully.  But when he looked at her, he saw simply blue... 

He realized what it was about her eyes that was capturing him-- they were like vampire eyes now, full of years and yet youthful.  They were Tracy's eyes as he had imagined them with her as his immortal lover, eyes that had become capable of seeing him completely.  But they were looking at him out of an old woman's face and refusing him, even at the brink of extinction.             

And yet, he would swear it, there was just as much desire screaming against the denial as there had been that night so many years ago when she had ordered him to go.

And there was so much she willfully refused to know...

Now the feel of the centuries seeped into his voice as well; it became serious, almost scholarly.  "Please believe this:  you do not understand.  I can't make you understand without bringing you across.... And if you tell me no, you will not know what it is that you have refused. You simply choose oblivion."  His face was as severe and pure as his voice, and the old woman was transfixed.  "There are colors you cannot see -- literally.  There are kinds of beauty and pleasure you have no idea of, and no, they are not evil."

"You must believe me, Tracy:  there is a life you know -nothing- of.  If you think of it as an endless series of murders, you are wrong.  Do you think I would wish a life of infinite cruelty on anyone?  On someone I -loved-?"  The authoritative voice dropped to near inaudibility.  "Do you know me so little as that?" 

"I wondered why you didn't just do it to me," she admitted quietly. "If you were such a fiend, why you didn't just... have what you wanted." He reached forward to touch her hand gently, but didn't offer an answer.

"Vachon--" She clenched her teeth, but the dreadful, leaky, involuntary tears of old age started in her eyes anyway.  Propped on the silverheaded cane, the old woman wavered, but with emotion, not weakness. Vachon read the old face, saw the impending failure of a mask as difficult as his own.

"You are afraid."  Sure of his discovery, and yet tinged with a question. He stood up to face her.

The straight old figure wilted a little.  "Just sometimes.  But then-- terribly," she whispered, swallowing.  "Not of death, but of the dying.  But... that's it.  Our lives, this is it.  It happens to everyone."

"Not to me." Vachon's voice was flat.  "And you..."

The old woman sighed, recovering her equilibrium.  "I can't.  I don't want to... it's just the weakness... I don't want to die.  I never did.  I'd rather be 26 again, but 26 looking forward to 30 and 40 and grandchildren...  do you understand?  Can you understand?"

"And pain," Vachon said.

There was a pause, but the voice came out suddenly strong and sarcastic.  "Thanks for the reminder, Vachon."

"No pain, Tracy," he leaned forward to whisper into her hair.  "No death.  Tracy-- just once, yield to me."

"Vachon..." she said in the strong voice.  The vampire backed off.  "Crosses still burn you?"  He answered with silence, and she stared at him.  "Remember me?  A cop, a cop's daughter?  Who became a cop's wife and a judge's Mom?  What other choice is there for me?"

More silence.  The vampire's face took on its youthful, protective mask again, and Teresa O'Brian, mayor emerita of Toronto, was looking at an insouciant young man with an impenetrable heart, exactly as she had perceived him in her own youth.

"Go on," she said quietly.  "GO."

The two figures stood frozen for a long moment, as if neither of them believed she had said what she had, a softspoken echo of words she had hurled at him in horror and misery so many years before.  Then, as he started to move around her to the garden door, she said suddenly, "Vachon... wait."

He came back.  "I have to tell you," she said.  Now she couldn't meet his eyes.  "What you were to me.  Are."

She looked at her hands:  they were thin, transparent, palely freckled bone lattices, slightly knobbed with arthritis.  She swallowed nervously.  "It's funny, now that I'm old I believe in something that I didn't believe in sixty years ago."

"You were the love of my life."  Her eyes filled with tears, but looked up to meet his.  "Vampire and all."

He touched her again, and the cold hands made her shiver.  "I never told anyone.  No one knows your name," she said.  "But I had the tape."  She put a hand on his shoulder. "Remember, the time you posed as my snitch?  The tape was confiscated as evidence, and I borrowed it from the lockup one night and dubbed it.  Look..."

She moved to her desk, taking support from a chairback as well as her cane along the way, and instructed her computer to engage.  The screen came alive, and she reeled off a string of nonsense syllables, ending with "Javier."  Javier, his name that he had never before heard from her lips, uttered in the thin, high-pitched voice of an old woman.  The screen activated.

Vachon watched, entranced... there she was, Tracy Vetter, babe cop, lips glossed almost to white, eyes outlined in black, the golden hair piled on her head and well over six feet tall in spike heels, grinning and full of fun as she recited lines from a Bogart movie.  And there he was, entirely the same, saving her life so that she could live to stand in this bedroom on this night...

"Trace," he said, and came up behind her.  She leaned her head back against his face and neck. "It's odd, but you don't age inside in some ways," she mused.  "You look at the mirror and see a stranger, some person who's getting on, not you at all."

"My husband was a good man," she continued thoughtfully, looking at the ceiling.  A moment later she produced another of her knowing-old-lady chuckles.  "So was my lover."

Now Vachon was truly shocked.  "You cheated?  You?"

Putting a hand on his shoulder for balance, she turned to him and made a face that was a weird echo of her self-mocking moue of sixty years before.  "I got even," she admitted.  "Later... I wasn't proud of it, but at the time it hurt so much...."

"I'll kill the man who dishonored you," Vachon said flatly in a voice that came straight from the sixteenth century.  It struck Tracy Vetter silent with awe, but she shook it off a moment later.

"You're too late, my hero," she said wryly.  "Prostate cancer did it for you twelve years ago."

Vachon took the bony old hand from his shoulder and lifted it to his lips for a courtier's kiss.  The old woman smiled, but it was indulgent rather than tender, and the vampire felt a desire to break through her genial elderliness.  His other hand came forward to slip around her waist.

"Vachon, don't.." she started.

But the vampire didn't obey.  He simply lifted the long, thin form into his arms for an embrace that could have been crushing, but was careful instead, bringing the old body against his like an eggshell, lifting her effortlessly to hold her close.

"Ohhhhh," said the woman.  She bent her head to the young shoulder.  "Don't."

"Teresa."  He said it in the Spanish way.  "Tesoro.  Perla. Azulita de los mechones dorados, mi siempre, mi eterna, angel, angelita..." [treasure.  pearl.  blue-eyed girl with the gilded locks, my always, my forever, angel, little angel] 

 "Oh God, don't," she whispered.  "Don't make me be a woman again." 

But he held her against him, her frail warmth against his cold strength, his nose burrowed into the pallor and small fragrance of her white hair, his ears filled with the weak music of her heart.  One hand slid up her back to undo her hair, which slipped down around the old woman's thin shoulders; the hand spread the hair and stroked it, and the thin body began to relax against his.  Her arms gave up their pointless effort to push away, and slid around the line of his body, wrapping themselves around his back.

"This is awfully nice," she said from inside his embrace.  She nuzzled at the long black hair, scratched her papery skin against his unshaven cheek, and leaned back a bit to smile at him.  "Old ladies don't get to fondle pretty young men very often in this world."

A playful whisper.  "Come and do it forever."

Now she gave him a different smile.  "No.  But there is something I want from you," she said.

"Anything."  Not playful.  Absolute.

"Come to me again."

"Here?  I won't leave," he said.

She chuckled. "Oh no, nothing that easy."  She looked at him from under thin white eyebrows.  "After."

He stared at her.  "You think you're going to Heaven?" he mocked. "You want to see me there?  You're crazy."

She looked at him.  Gnawed on her thin lower lip as she had as a girl.  Reached a hand up to grasp at his jaw, the rough unshaven beard exactly as it had been sixty years before.

She nodded.  "Heaven?  I don't know... but yes, I have the strangest feeling that I'm going... somewhere."  The strong old eyes underlined the truth of what she was telling him.  "If you start working on it now... who knows, in a few hundred years you may have it all straightened out."  The old woman smiled with playfully young eyes, and his breath caught in his throat.  "I'll even wait for you, Vachon."

~ Go to sequel "Distant Thunder" ~

~ Return to "Forever Knight" ~

~ Return to Apache's Archive ~