Chapter 10

"I feel giddy" Barnabas confessed to George.

"As you should. After all, it is not every day that you great great great great granddaughter gets married."

"Yes. Even that makes her a distant relation, still... Still I like to pretend she's my daughter."

George nodded.

"I still don't know how to handle it. It is not easy yet for me to establish a relationship. I think that she is friendly towards me, and can feel warmly, but she does not think of me as family..."

"Well, Maybe you ask too much of her."

"Yes. I should not complain. After all, I do have a son. And so do you."

"But still Tammy got under your skin."

"I guess that I still have guilt feelings about her... You know, I did get rid of a lot of them. But these still remain. And I probably will carry them for a while... Same as the rest of the country, working out what proper race relations should be. " he sighed. "the difference is that most people can say that they had noting to do with slavery themselves. I can't. That is something that does not leave me."

Violet was surprised to find out how easy it was to get to Collinsport. Jake had told he so, but she had not believed it.

She saw the way to her sister's house. She wanted to go there, but remembered Jake's warning. That would be the first place they would look for her. If they had discovered her missing, then they might be in wait for her already.

No, it was better to do as Jake and her had planned it. Go to the Old House, and hole up in there. She had enough food with her for at least two weeks, and she could raid the pantry at the Old House, during the daytime, when Urien was away and Barnabas was sleeping...

She just had to wait.

Megan's smile could not be more cordial. It was almost fawning as she greeted Richard.

Well, it was to be expected, given Richard's history. She only had to play as being awed by him.

"I heard so much about you." she told him.

"I heard about you too." he answered smiling.

And how much of it had he passed to his handler?

"I hope that what you heard of me is good."

"That if anyone can help me, you can."

"Yes. I got a reputation for that. Getting people out of trouble. But you are not in trouble now, are you?"

"Barnabas told me that you introduced him to Doctor Verhoff, and the children."

Yes. Good thing that Verhoff and the children had relocated already. "And that interests you? "

"Not him, specifically. I don't think that I am the type of patient Verhoff takes on. But he might know somebody who might talk to me, get me accepted.."

"Accepted? By whom?"

Maybe she should just kill him now, and damn the consequences. He was determined to find as many vampires as he could, to deliver them into slavery. It was because of this that she had Roxanne executed. She would execute Richard too.

Except that they needed to find the handler.

"Other vampires. You may not believe it, but until I moved to Collinsport I never met anyone else. Apart from Cosmo, who... transformed me, I never met anyone who shared my condition."

"No one?"

"I did not look for them, precisely. I never thought of them as 'my people.' My people were the Jews.. And it stayed that way for a long time.

Was it true? Well, it could be checked, by finding out where he had operated, and asking the locals for information on him.. Had he never ran across the local vampires in his missions? Did he ever look for them? How much damage had he done already? How bit a file on vampires did Mossad have? How many had been forcibly recruited already?

She did not want ever to become a Mossad slave, any more than Verhoff or any of the others

"But now that is changed..."

"I find that I have less in common with the people I work with... They get old and I do not. And they are replaced by young people who do not understand what I talk about. For them it is history. For me,... for me it is something that defines me..."

"So..."

"So I finally decided to take a good look at who I was and what I was doing I recalled the original idealism that was the founding of Israel. It is not there. Israel has become a country, like another country. And its people, are not my people, not in the sense they were in 1948. I have been a Jew, and a Holocaust survivor this long, and for a while it was enough. But I got to think that I am going to live a long time. And that I need to meet people who know and understand what I am."

"You decided it was time to learn how to be a vampire?"

"Yes. It is not a question of learning how to feed, and how to blend in... I need to look on someone and say "Yes, this is my people. I belong with them."

"There is a problem, though., which may keep you from being accepted."

'What is it?"

'You worked for the Mossad, didn't you?"

'Yes."

"We are wary of those who work for spy agencies of any country, no matter what the motivation."

"Why are you ?"

"Because we are afraid of being forced to work for them too."

"I see... You know, I do not think that Mossad knew what I was."

Megan managed not to laugh. Ridiculous! Of course, Mossad knew. Was Richard taking her for a fool?

Still, there was something about he way he spoke. Call it a feeling, an intuition, but somehow she felt as if he was telling the truth... at least what he knew of it.

...Maybe he really had not sought out other vampires. Maybe they had avoided him, maybe he had not shown any desire to contact them. And maybe Mossad had given up on him delivering any more vampires to them, and just kept him as the highly efficient killer than he was.

But Mossad knew what Richard was, and maybe it was using him, unwittingly, to flush out others...

'You think it would be wise if I did not go to the party?" Iris asked George.

"I would not say that."

"You think that it is safe?"

"No. I am going to ask you to be bait. We do not know where she is or where she may be going. We looked around Delia's house, but she's not there. She may be hidden in one of the summer cottages. They do not have any heating, but she could bundle up in there. We try to find any smoke coming out of any chimneys there,.. The point is that it may take us a while to find her. On the other hand we know that she is coming after you. We will keep you and Peter under guard, but I think we may have better luck if you lure her to come after you."

Iris sighed. :"I guess I do have to be bait. I do not like it, but this waiting is getting on my nerves."

Coming to Collinsport had been a shock to Richard, thought he managed to hide it. Julia had changed. He should have expected it, but it still shocked him. She was not anymore that little girl who clung to him, seeking reassurance in a frightening world. not the young woman who pored into books, seeing the pride in his eyes with her achievements, nor the budding scientists who confessed to him that she was trying to find a cure for his condition... Now she was married, about to become a mother, and she did not look at him anymore with starry eyed wonder.

Time passed for her too. And he risked being left behind.

It had been a shock to find out about Barnabas. And Megan, and the others... He had thought at one time to look for more people sharing his condition, but he had been unable to... And then, what would they have to talk about? His experiences were not like his... And they would remind him too much of Cosmo...

And yet... it was as if he was being given a chance, as if he could finally close one painful chapter of his life, and begin another...