Schatten

Of course Eve is delighted. "Darling, she sounds scrumptious! So she's blackmailing you?"

"It's not funny," Adam replies, discomfited by the amount of glee in his wife's voice. "I'm not in the mood to try and find an alternate source and my pet zombie really isn't up to acquiring one."

"Certainly not," Eve knows enough about Ian to not to smirk, but her voice is light. Indulgent. "So you're considering her offer, yes?"

"No." Adam works hard at sounding firm but he knows it's coming across as a sulk, particularly when Eve merely looks at him in that loving way of hers.

"Well it's up to you of course, but I'd suggest you re-consider. It's been a long time since you Created, and we both know what a boost the process gives your music."

He can't deny that. Eve is as always, perceptive. She cocks her head, waiting, and Adam gives a harsh sigh. "You think this will be good for me," he accuses.

This time Eve nods. "Yes," comes her simple reply. "If she's perceptive enough not only to figure you out, but also to set terms, then she's definitely worthy. And try as you may to deny it, some companionship will do you good, my love. I may even come out to visit once the deed is done, you know."

This cheers him, and Adam gazes longingly at the screen. "Don't tease."

"Not teasing," Eve promises. "And give it another think-through. For me."

She ends the call and lies back, feeling a sense of lightness in her chest. Goodness, it's been years since anyone tried to negotiate, and the cocky challenge of that already endears this unknown woman to her.

If Adam has any sense at all, he'll come around, Eve thinks. He needs a good challenge once in a while.

He does as Eve asks because she so rarely asks for anything. In all their time together Adam knows his beloved is proud to be independent, and holds onto her freedom with quiet pride. She'd told him once of her flesh life, and how she'd been bought and sold six times before leaving behind mortality. How the painful memory of an uncertain future shaped her into what she is now.

Adam admires her serenity, her ethereal grace. It drew him to her ages ago and still enthralls him even over the distance and centuries. Eve faces triumph and disaster with the same calm philosophy. He's tried to emulate it, but can't pull it off, not really. Triumphs make him suspicious, and disasters only draw a weary resignation from him.

She's right about the companionship as well. Alone, Adam knows he's a jaded figure, cynical and often unable to change his mood. Eve lightens him, reminds him that in the long view, the good still manages to triumph most of the time. Eventually. "We get to see legacies my darling. The vindications and victories."

He misses her terribly.

But the deed necessary to draw his love from her Tangier nest . . . Adam isn't sure the payoff is worth it because Doctor Schatten is, well, nearly everything Eve isn't.

She's not tall, not slender, not blonde, not aristocratic and not patient by any means. He'd have never met her if Doctor Watson hadn't 'retired' unexpectedly. Even now, the memory of slipping into the hematology lab and finding a stranger at the microscope irritated him.

A stranger who had spoken over her shoulder without even looking up from the lens. "Doctor Watson told me to expect you. Your O negative is right here." A low voice, smooth and certain.

Adam remembers the moment of panic, the debate of an instant whether to flee or fight. And then the woman rising and moving to the cabinet for the canisters, her manner unnervingly nonchalant.

"Who are you?"

"I'm the person who's set up a hematology account for you. Also . . ." She had turned and held out a stethoscope to him.

A newer one.

But the Need was still there, and he didn't have a backup plan, damn it.

"Where is Doctor Watson?"

"Doctor Watson has prudently left our facility to practice in Florida, where there are more casinos and fewer IRS agents interested in under the table income," the woman in the lab coat had told him.

Her hair had been a shade out of a Titian painting and excessively curly, Adam recalls. Almost obscenely sensual against the pale blue of her lab coat. Her name tag read Schatten. She also had café au lait skin, freckles, the strong, sturdy frame of a farm girl and flecked hazel eyes that watched him closely.

Adam remembers feeling a rise of something within him, something edged with irritation and indefinable. "And you're . . . taking over his end of the arrangement."

She had arched an eyebrow at that.

She'd loaded the bag, tucking the stethoscope in it and he had handed her the bills; she stopped him, trying to hand back two thirds of it. "Too damned much. A pint runs about one twenty; less if it's over a week old. Plasma's only forty if you prefer that."

"Keep it," Adam remembers trying to back away with dignity, but she'd reached over and tucked the money into the breast pocket of his lab coat.

"Nope. See you around . . . Doctor Varney."

Unsettling. He'd driven home not sure if he was fuming or afraid. Not of her, but the shift in arrangements. Wright was a known quantity; a zombie with a specific weakness for lucre. This one . . .

But he doesn't want to go back to predation. It's messy and dangerous and . . . disorderly. Adam doesn't like unpredictability. He prefers the civility of pouring the good stuff rather than killing for it. Eve's influence again, and one of the aspects of modern life that he's grown to appreciate.

Easier to pour and sip than pounce and rip.

He frets over it for a week, debating on whether he can find some alternative, but by the time Adam's down to his last pint, he knows he's going back.

That's the start of it.

She's not curious—or if she is, she's hiding it well. Adam braces himself each time for questions, for a quick escape if necessary, but for the first two months the transactions are unbelievably smooth. He even takes the receipt Doctor Schatten hands him along with the flasks, amused that the billing is for an obscure bioresearch facility in Royal Oak.

After the first three times, Adam stops trying to overpay her; she keeps handing back money and shaking her head. It's odd to pay . . . well, fair market value for something so precious to him. And the quality is better than the stuff he'd gotten from Watson, who more often than not sold him batches that were within days of spoiling. Schatten's flasks hold prime stuff that's a pleasure to drink.

The cynical part of him wonders why she's doing this. It's clear she knows what he is, but she doesn't seem to be particularly afraid of him. Initially Adam considered she might be one of those zombies in love with the concept, and hoping to be bitten. There had been plenty of those through the centuries, and early on he'd been obliging, if only for the amusing convenience.

But she's never flirted or made overt conversation, even though she's looked him over now and again. He's returned the favor because despite being into his sixth century Adam still retains more than his share of testosterone.

It amuses Eve, this drive of his. They can go years, decades at a time without making love, but when they reunite, the passion flares so hotly between them that they can do little else for weeks at a time. Part of it is their own soul-intimacy, forged over the centuries, and the other part, Adam knows, is his own masculine hunger. Eve has never begrudged him other women, and he's rarely reached out for them but occasionally the need is there. (Oh how she teases him about Mary Shelley, even now.) Adam suspects there have been other men in Eve's life as well, but he understands too how easy it is to fall under her enchanting spell.

They've lived long enough to embrace the fluidity of their lives and loves, and that itself is an enduring testament to their marriage.

Still, Adam can't deny that there's something about Doctor Schatten that is getting under his skin; something not quite definable. Perhaps it's her acceptance, her matter-of-fact attitude, which is rare among the enlightened zombies.

She seems to respect him, too, which is doing things to lift his depression. The musician in him longs for that, even if he does work at creating layers of mystery and privacy around his work and persona. A performer needs an audience: the more immediate, the better. Adam has no idea if Doctor Schatten likes music, but she's attentive and that's a start.

And she's lush. Over the centuries Adam's seen the standards of beauty shift from one end of the spectrum to the other. In his flesh life, the idea beauty was rounded and curved, with a soft belly and dimpled knees. That template still lingers in his memory, and overlaid on Doctor Schatten, it's a good fit. The hair, too, is within that realm with its crimson-bronze dangling curls.

Ohh, she's especially enticing when menstruating, and Adam makes it a point to stay back from her when she is. Doctor Schatten's faint copper-rose perfume whets his appetite on those weeks and he makes his evening glass a little fuller after those visits.

So it goes for the next five months, through the changing seasons. They continue to meet each week, and he allows himself to wonder about her. The week she has a black eye bothers him, especially when she shrugs it off. "It's nothing. Failed purse snatching."

Adam looks for a wedding ring, photos on the desk, any clues at all about this woman and finds very little, which piques his curiosity even more. From what he remembers about zombies, they love talking about themselves. It's as if they know how short their lives are, so they're determined to share theirs with anyone showing a passing interest. Ian is a great example, and Adam already knows far too much about his personal assistant—from his favorite lunch ("Mac and cheese with little bits of burnt bacon, man!") to his lacrosse triumphs in high school, his opinion about the Detroit music scene and a hundred other boring, pointless bits of information.

Zombies tend to leave their personal information like a trail of rat droppings, in Adam's dry opinion, and the fact that there aren't any obvious signs about Doctor Schatten is . . . bothersome.

He wonders what she's got to hide.