The Report — Monday, 2 July 1990, 9:30 PM

Gary, Indiana — multiple locations

The letter had no name on it. Cream paper, old cursive, slid under the studio door like a knife between ribs. Your mother called the salon on Cottage Grove looking for you. She’s been calling every week. Someone told her you moved to Indiana. She has the Gary area code now.

Sable read it twice and put it face-down on the counter and drove to Miller Beach with a dead woman’s handwriting following her all the way east.

Victor met her at the front door. Not the side. The front, with the porch light and the drawing room and the prince’s acoustics designed to carry every whisper to every corner. New rules. All visits in the drawing room. Victor available. The side entrance and the private wing sealed off like a crime scene nobody had the nerve to call a crime.

Allicia sat in a chair by the window. Dark dress. Hair down. Thinner than Friday. The collarbone sitting wrong under the skin, the dullness that comes from a blood pool running on fumes. Sable sharpened her senses and read the room: dilated pupils, the sour scent of hunger, no fresh blood. Modius was withholding. Starving his childe the way a man turns off the heat in February — not to kill, but to remind you who controls the furnace.

Modius wasn’t home. No heartbeat upstairs. Just Victor at the sideboard and two Toreador women with a language nobody taught them.

“I’ve been thinking about hosting,” Sable said. “A small gathering. Do you think gardenias are too much for a summer evening?”

She talked about entertaining and guest lists and wine selection, and underneath the party planning she said: I know he’s starving you. I see what he’s doing. And Allicia, who had spoken six words in six months, used her seventh in a sentence about hospitality that meant: Guests can’t enjoy what they haven’t been given.

Victor polished a glass. Two women discussing dinner parties. The most natural thing in the world.

Allicia glanced at Sable’s wrist. One glance. Then away. The request was clear.

“Some courses need a private room,” Sable said. “Somewhere the kitchen staff doesn’t go.”

Allicia touched the clock on the mantel. Two taps. Touched the window.

Two. Outside.

Sable left at ten-fifteen. Fed on the west side — a man outside a bar on Broadway, the crying play, six blood points, left him sitting on the sidewalk looking like a drunk. Killed time on the lakefront road with the windows down and the lake flat and black and the dashboard clock counting toward something that would change the architecture of every relationship in the chronicle.

At two in the morning she stood on the shingle beach behind the mansion. The porch light was off. One window on the second floor glowed and died. Then Allicia was on the lawn — Celerity-fast, bare feet on the grass, dark clothes, shaking with the kind of hunger that lives in the jaw.

Sable undressed on the bluff. Not the Torch. Not performance. She let the blouse fall and stood in the moonlight and let the woman who hadn’t been touched gently in eighty years see her the way no one in the drawing room would ever be allowed to see her.

She stepped into the lake. The water took her to the waist. Cold and black and alive. She turned and beckoned.

Allicia dropped off the bluff and waded to her and pressed her mouth to Sable’s throat and drank.

Five blood points. The vitae leaving Sable’s body in a warm current that the lake pulled south. Allicia’s hands on her shoulders, grip tightening, the jaw clenching as the Beast fought for more and the woman underneath the Beast fought to stop. One success on the self-control. One. The margin between feeding and killing measured in a single die that could have gone either way.

She pulled away gasping. Red on her lips. Eyes bright with blood-high and the first step of a Bond that neither of them named and both of them felt — the fascination, the pull, the chemical gravity of one woman’s blood singing inside another woman’s veins.

Sable took her to the bottom. Fifteen feet of black water where the moonlight couldn’t reach and the silt rose around them like smoke and the city above was nothing — no mansion, no prince, no piano with the lid closed, no drawing room with a ghoul who listened, no letter on a kitchen counter from a mother who still thought her daughter was alive. Nothing but the dark and the cold and the weight of a body that didn’t need air finding another body that didn’t need air and the silence that exists at the bottom of a lake in a dead city at two in the morning, which is the only kind of silence where two women who have been owned by other people’s hands can finally put their own hands wherever they want.

They surfaced at three-forty. The mansion dark. The willow screen. Allicia’s hair flat against her skull, her eyes brighter than Sable had ever seen them. She touched Sable’s face. Traced the jawline. Turned and walked barefoot across the lawn.

She didn’t look back. Looking back would have meant stopping, and stopping would have meant choosing, and the choice was already made. It had been made on a winter night in January when a woman she’d never met walked into Elysium and didn’t flinch from her gaze, and everything since then — the snow globe, the photograph, the five words and the sixth and the seventh — was just the choice arriving at its own speed.

Sable stood on the shingle with lake water running down her body. Blood at seven. Dawn in two hours. The Park Avenue two blocks away.

She drove home. The Fifth Avenue studio. The letter on the counter. She picked it up and read it one more time. Your mother called the salon on Cottage Grove.

Denise Price. Hairdresser. South Side. The woman who raised Sable in a kitchen on State Street and taught her the price of everything and didn’t know that the price of immortality was never seeing your daughter again. Now she had the Gary area code and she was calling every week and someone in Chicago had told her where to look, and the someone was either a friend or an enemy, and Sable couldn’t tell which, and the letter sat on the counter next to the studio keys and the smell of gardenia and lake water, and the question it asked was the same question Gary asked everyone who tried to disappear inside it: how long before the living come looking for the dead?