Everything worked out as Lucy had predicted. Szandor's English improved enough for him to ask her whether he might visit her at home, once a week or so, and Mina readily agreed. Marcian dropped in too, about once a month, as much for a chat as a feed. In August he mentioned to her that the club had moved, but he didn't give her a card with the new address.
Soon after that, Lucy announced that she was moving to a senior position in the Treasury where, as she blithely put it, she could "really get a grip on the nation's purse-strings".
Mina breezed through the interview panel for Lucy's job, so the farewell party was a double celebration. She told Szandor all about it when he visited her the following Sunday. "It'll be a big hike in salary," she said. "I've been meaning to buy a house for ages, and even with all the expense of buying a whole new wardrobe every few weeks I've got enough for a tidy deposit. You could move in if you wanted to - it might be more convenient."
The vampire bowed politely. "Sank you very much," he said, "but I sink not."
Mina had no idea where Szandor lived, or whether he had a job of any kind. She thought she knew him well enough by now to ask.
Szandor's gaze, though still exceedingly fond, became slightly troubled. "I cannot tell you vere I liff," he said. "Ve do not in jops belieff. Ve are communists - true communists, not like the old Soffiets. Effer since... " He broke off.
"Ever since what?" Mina prompted, assuming he was thinking about something that had happened after the collapse of communism, in Bosnia or Chechenya or wherever he had recently come from.
"Effer since the Stone Age," he said. "Ciffilisation vos a ferry good idea, but ve vere neffer a part of it. The vorld of cities, of housses, of jops... is not ours."
Mina was on the point of asking him what "true communist" vampires did for money when she realised that she didn't have to. It was obvious. They obtained their money as they obtained their blood, from their sapient groupies - not in weekly handouts, obviously, but at intervals nevertheless adequate to their peculiar needs. Perhaps they were content to wait until their groupies were used up - who else, after all, was a vampire-lover likely to appoint as her heir? - but it was just as likely that they simply bided their time until they had groomed their pets sufficiently to win them jobs appropriate to their lovely appearance, inexhaustible energy and mental acuity. After all, the other women she had glimpsed at the After Dark had not been page-three models; they had been superwomen. Now she, too, was on her way to being a superwoman. With Lucy in the Treasury, and the cabinet filling up with young women for whom the glass ceiling was mere cellophane... well, vampires could afford to be patient, and had certainly had abundant opportunity to acquire the habit.
Now she understood the cost - not merely to herself, but to the world. But what, after all, had the world ever done for her?
How many groupies, Mina wondered, had Szandor had before her? Far more, she guessed, than she had had hot dinners of her own... that being, at the end of the day, what she was.
It wouldn't be appropriate for him to move in with her, she realised, for exactly the same reasons that it wouldn't be appropriate for her to move into a battery cage or a veal crate.
"Szandor," she said, as he wiped his mouth aftter finishing his meal, "do you love me? Do you really love me?"
"Yes, my darlink," the ultrasapient said. "I loff you ferry, ferry much."
Mina knew that it was true. He loved her, not as a human child loved the mother at whose teat he sucked, nor as a farmer loved his prize cattle, nor as saps were obliged by their carefully-selected hormones to love one another, but freely. He loved her in his own unique way, as only a vampire could love a member of his sister species, who provided the substance of his life in a miraculous stream.
When her lover had gone, after kissing her hand as any overpolite European might have done in saying au revoir, Mina went to the full-length mirror that she had brought only the previous day, and stood naked before it to make a critical study of the skin that sagged loosely about her ten stone two pound frame.
There was still a way to go, but she was getting there.
Her skin would tighten up in time; it still had enough adaptability to continue tightening its grip on her compacted flesh. She would never reach perfection, but every day, in every way, she was getting better and better. How many saps could honestly say that?
Mina realised that she had come a long way in a few short months. She was an entirely different person, not merely a great deal better-looking but a lot wiser. She understood what the relationship between the two human species was.
She understood that human history, ever since the end of the Stone Age, had been engineered and managed by the patient ultras, even though they had never shown themselves, being content to remain in the shadows, the substance of myth and mystery and threat. She understood that the grand plan was entering into its final phase, because civilization had now achieved its goal: it had enabled humans to become numerous, and it had enabled them to grow fat. The time had come for the ultras to harvest the crop that they had sown.
When Lucy had first told her that the vampires weren't quite ready to come out of hiding, although they were making discreet diplomatic moves at every level, Mina had actually felt sorry for them, as if they had somehow been reduced from the status of proud predators to mere parasites, feeding on the miserable, ugly women that human men didn't want - but it wasn't like that at all, really.
The green revolution that had changed the fortunes of humankind was a red revolution for vampirekind: a deluge of rich blood, drawn from self-renewing wells who already had a firm grip on public purses and walked the corridors of power in four-inch stilettos.
She, Mina Mint, was exactly the kind of woman that ten thousand years of careful husbandry had been intended to produce; there was a new world in birth and she was at the heart of it: a prize cow, whose welfare and productivity was all-important to her vampire lover.
The old Mina had yearned for the love of a handsome man, and had tried with all her might to shed weight in the hope of winning it; the new Mina knew what true love really was, and exactly what it was worth. It was symbiosis: free-market economics at its finest.
She closed her eyes, and thought of Szandor's wonderful, youthful, soulful eyes.
"Master!" she whispered - not worshipfully, but admiringly, as if in awesome contemplation of a fabulous work of art.
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