Page 10 of Hunger

I sleep harder than I have in months.

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Farkas

The stone takes me three hours to find.

I walk the creek bed two miles south of the farmhouse with my eyes on the bottom of the water. The creek is half-frozen at the edges and slow in the center. I move through it with my coat pulled close, looking. The stones I want are dark and smooth and shaped by the water. There are a thousand of them. I'm particular.

I find the one at the third bend, where the creek runs over a flat shelf of rock and slows. The stone is the size of a robin's egg, dark gray that goes nearly black when it's wet, smooth on every face. I pick it up and turn it in my hand. The water runs over my fingers. I've spent a long time being indifferent to cold. The cold of the creek finds me anyway.

Back at the farmhouse, I polish it. I don't have many things. One is a soft cloth I've kept for centuries — the kind of thing a man doesn't throw away, because it's been with him so long it has stopped being a possession and become a piece of his own continuity. At the kitchen table I work the stone with the cloth for an hour. There's no need. The water has already done the work. But the motion of my hands on it is its own thing, and I want to give her something I have touched.

She drives a 1976 Ford Granada the color of rust. I know this. I've watched her drive it five nights now. I know the angle shetakes coming out of the lot. I know the spot she parks in. I know the way her headlights sweep across the lot when she pulls away.

I drive a van. The London firm acquired it for me along with the farmhouse. It's a dark, ordinary thing, the kind of vehicle no one looks at twice, with windows that have been blacked out from the inside. I park it half a mile from the mall in a turn-out by the highway and I walk in across the field.

The lot is empty in the late afternoon. The wind has scoured most of the snow off the asphalt and left it banked in low ridges along the curb. I cross to her car and stand beside the driver's side. The hood is dusted with old salt. I take the stone from my pocket and set it carefully on the metal, just behind the windshield wiper, where she'll see it the moment she comes around the front of the car.

I look at the stone on the hood. It's small. It's almost nothing. But it's the first thing I've given to anyone in over a millennium and the weight of that isn't in the stone.

I walk back across the field.

I wait through the rest of the daylight in the back of the van. The sun is no friend to me. It doesn't burn but it weighs. I lie on the floor in the dark of the cargo space and let the hours pass. When the light fades through the windshield, I rise and walk back to the mall on foot.

The lot is busier in the evening. Cars come and go. I wait at the edge of the trees beyond the dumpsters and watch.

At nine forty-five, she walks out the back door.

I don't move. I watch her cross the lot. She slows when she sees the stone. She stops a few feet from the car. She looks around the lot — slow, searching — and her eyes pass over my position without finding me. The dark is generous.

She steps closer. She picks up the stone. She turns it over in her hand. The light from the lot lamp catches her face. She doesn't smile. She doesn't frown. Her expression is the careful blankness of a person who's feeling something she doesn't know what to do with.

She closes her hand around the stone and puts it in her coat pocket.

She gets in the car. The engine starts. She pulls away.

I wait in the trees until her taillights are gone. The cold of the night feels different in my chest than the cold of the creek did this morning. There's a warmth somewhere beneath it that I don't have a name for.

I begin to walk back toward the road. The footpath cuts behind the loading dock, past the dumpsters, and out to the access lane that loops behind the mall and connects to the service road. The lighting back here's poor. I pass a man before I see him.

He's walking the other way, toward the loading dock. He's in a security uniform. He has a flashlight in one hand, swinging at his hip, and a thermos in the other. He doesn't see me at first because I'm in the deeper shadow and he's looking down at the ground. When he does look up, his face goes through three expressions in less than a second. Confusion. Recognition that something's wrong. Then the beginning of fear.

He doesn't get to finish the third one.

My hand closes over his mouth and the thermos hits the ground. I pull him backward into the alcove beside the dumpster. His back arches against me. His flashlight clatters against the concrete and rolls in a half-circle and goes still.

He's bigger than the others have been. Heavier. He fights with the strength of a man who's used to being the largest bodyin a room. It doesn't matter. I've been strong for a thousand years and he's been strong for thirty.

My jaw opens. His eyes go wide. I bite.

The blood floods my mouth and his body sags against me. His memories spill into me.

I hold them back. I reach.

The fluorescent lights of the mall. The food court. The hallways. The faces of teenagers he has chased out of the parking structure. The mall corridors. The bright box of Mr. Burger.

Jenny.