6

Garreth did not really sleep. He felt anything but sleepy and he wanted to be sure he was awake before Harry and Lien, so that he could sneak back inside. Sleeping outdoors during the day was one thing; discovering that he had slept out in a chilly night, even when he did not feel the cold, would disturb them. He rested, though—reminded of the times he had gone camping as a Boy Scout, except that this time he felt comfortable instead of wanting an air mattress between him and the ground—and while he rested, he considered solutions for the sleeping situation. A coffin was ridiculous, but he did need some kind of container for a layer of earth.

He sat up, thinking again of the Boy Scouts. An air mattress might work. As soon as possible, he would leave here and try it out.

In the morning he played with the eggs and toast Lien fixed for him, managing to look like he was eating without actually doing so. He drank only sugared tea and took the vitamins she forced on him.

"Since Harry is on duty today," she said, "will you come to church with me?"

The knot in his stomach came not from hunger this time—he no longer felt hunger, only lightheaded euphoria, a common feeling brought on by fasting, he remembered Marti telling him once—but from fear. Church! Well, he might as well find out how it affected him.

"Of course I'll go."

Lien drove. Garreth sat with his hands clenched in the pockets of his coat, his eyes hidden from her and the sun by the mirror-lensed trooper glasses. He could not remember the last time he had actually felt religious, though he still went to church with his mother and grandmother when he visited home. He had gone regularly as a child, sandwiched with Shane between his mother and Grandma Doyle, where he could be thumped on the head with a grandmotherly knuckle if he wiggled too much.

Lien's church was Roman Catholic, but it reminded him of the Episcopal one at home. Garreth could not shake the conviction that he should not be here, but sitting beside Lien, he felt no pain other than that of guilt. Lien touched him with holy water coming in and it did not burn. Would it if he had grown up Catholic? If anything, the light coming through the stained-glass windows and the rhythm of the Mass gave him a kind of peace. He had a feeling that if the tall priest had looked more like Father Michaels—a small, round, laughing man who smelled pleasantly of pipe tobacco and was continually relighting that pipe at the coffee period following Morning Prayer, from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of kitchen matches in the pocket of his black coat—Garreth would have been tempted to confess his vampirism and ask for absolution. Or was that cure for his condition pure myth, too?

Leaving, Lien said, "Shall we eat lunch at Fisherman's Wharf?"

His teeth rubbed against the inside of his upper lip, so loose they felt ready to fall out. He had no doubt they would, and that new, sharp ones were even now pushing through his sore gums. A need to be alone overwhelmed him.

"Another time, please? I think I'd like to go home and sleep." If she argued, he was ready to take off his glasses and use his power on her.

Though her forehead creased in concern, she did not fight him. "Call me if you need anything."

He walked her back to her car, then caught a bus for a shopping center, where he bought an air mattress and several bags of earth from the garden section. At home he slit the end of each section of the air mattress and poured in earth a handful at a time until he had a layer of earth an inch or so thick. Mending tape sealed the mattress again.

Garreth lay down experimentally on the resulting pallet. Ten­sion ran out of him like knots untying. The slightly lumpy surface felt as comfortable as the softest of beds. He sighed in satisfaction. It worked.

Before he let himself fall asleep, though, Garreth worried the loose teeth free. Pushing his tongue into the spaces left, he felt sharp points coming through the gums and shivered. Somehow the teeth sig­naled a watershed, a point of no return at which he could no longer doubt the thing he had become. The chill of that thought followed him into sleep.