The Green Memory of Fear. B. A. Chepaitis

      They’d worked together for over six years, been very good friends for at least five, and slept together once. Just once. Enough to tell them both that kind of interaction wasn’t something to take or leave lightly.

      A few months had passed since then, and the only agreement they’d reached was to go neither forward nor backwards. She’d been aloof, and he’d been polite and distant. They were engaged in a complex dance on a trembling plane, waiting to see if the earth would stop its tectonic motion any time soon, or if they could find new footing on it.

      For his part, he’d also been watching for her fur to settle after the intensity of their last encounter, which had served to save both their lives. He approached her as he would any wild thing, with slow and deliberate care. She needed time to know she could negotiate the turf of what would be a totally new geography of the emotions for them both. And right now, she needed to know what he knew about Greenkeepers.

      She stretched her legs out, the material of her long, loose dress rippling like water over them. Her gaze was open and clear as ocean, and just as impossible to fathom. Her silence was extravagant and complete. She was waiting for him to come up with something. He obliged.

      “The Greenkeeper,” he said, “is a deceptively gentle name for modern North American vampires. They were first written about after the Serials, when quite a few of the earliest murderers brought in claimed they used ritual rape and murder to regenerate themselves physically. Nothing proven, of course, but theoretically Greenkeepers can use energy transfer, blood, or sexual fluids to trigger cellular regeneration. They prefer children, because they’ve got more of the right stuff than adults. The name,” he concluded, “is from the response of regenerative biochemicals to lab experiments.”

      He took her hand and lifted his teacup over it, pouring a stream of green tea to pool in her palm. “When isolated, they turn green.”

      She stared at her palm, then tipped it to let the tea flow into the saucer under his cup. She closed her eyes and pressed the index finger of her right hand against her lips, tapped them as if sounding morse code. Alex waited. When she reopened her eyes, they were still neutral.

      “Pedophiles were some of the earliest ritual killers during the Serials. So how do you tell the difference between a pedophile and a Greenkeeper?” she asked.

      “Is that a riddle?”

      “No. I’m asking. How?”

      That was an unexpected question. He searched his rather extensive memory to see what emerged. Jonathan Post, in his book Unparticular Magic, said early 21st literature that romanticized vampires reflected the larger cultural attraction to pedophilia. Other historians noted that rates for child abuse were higher previous to the Killing Times than at any other time in history. They calculated how many of those abused went on to become abuser, who were released from overcrowded prisons just before the violence erupted.

      But pedophiles were a dime a dozen, while even Davidson admitted that Greenkeepers were rare, if they existed at all. They either had to be born with the inherent capacity to access regenerative material, or transformed into that skill by another Greenkeeper. And unlike any other psi capacity, they never turned out well.

      They were an anomaly, born to evil in a universe that preferred the good. And their relationship to pedophiles was, theoretically at least, complex.

      “While all Greenkeepers are pedophiles,” he said, “Not all pedophiles are Greenkeepers. Greenkeepers have lots of psi capacities—Telekinesis, shapeshifting, hypnopathy, Protean change—and pedophiles don’t. Of course, one Greenkeeper can do damage on a scale beyond the pedophile’s wildest dream, because theoretically they live as long as they keep feeding. And they rarely transform those they feed from. They just bind them at an energy level so they’ll go on to become destructive, but without the powers of their master. That means pedophiles could be former victims of Greenkeepers, bound but not transformed.”

      “What happened to the ones brought in during the Killing Times?” she asked.

      “You mean the ones who claimed they were Greenkeepers?” he amended.

      “Yes,” she agreed. “Those, if you insist on reasonable doubt.”

      Alex held his hands palm up. “They disappeared.”

      She nodded, as if she expected this answer.

      “That doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “You disappeared, too. More than ten million people disappeared, one way and another. Everything was in chaos.”

      The Killing Times they’d both survived—she as a teenager, he as a young man—left the major cities of North America in upheaval for years. The rise in serial killing from which it derived its name was followed by uncontainable violence, domestic terrorism, burning and death. Keeping track of mythical Greenkeepers was the last thing on anyone’s mind.

      “Besides,” he added, “even Davidson admits there’s no actual proof of their existence. All the evidence is anecdotal. Like ghost stories and UFOs.”

      “Sexual abuse stats plunged like a rock after the Killing Times,” she said, “and now they’re climbing again, along with incidence of violent crime in children.”

      As usual, she knew her facts. In the last year New York state alone put ten children on trial for murder. He’d sat on two committee meetings to discuss whether juvies should go to the Planetoids. Jaguar said they should send the parents up instead.

      “Are you suggesting a Greenkeeper’s responsible for that?” he asked.

      “I’m speculating about possibilities, great and small. Does Davidson offer any ideas for capture or cure?”

      “No cure. There is none. And capture is difficult. Theoretically they can regenerate wounds rapidly, so bullets won’t work. If you keep one locked up long enough without feeding maybe they’ll dissipate for lack of energy—a kind of starvation—but try keeping them locked up if they really can shapeshift. Stories say salt burns them—a bad interaction with their biochem—but it won’t kill them. Also they fear snakes because systemic poisoning makes quick regeneration difficult. But according to Davidson the only viable way to deal with them is your ancestor’s treatment.”

      “Which one?”

      “Rip their hearts out,” he said. “Basically you have to do enough damage rapidly enough that they can’t regenerate. Getting as close as you need to do that without being killed is the tough part. You only get one shot at a Greenkeeper.”

      “Right,” she said. Then, “How do you happen to have all this information at your fingertips?” she asked. “Idle curiosity?”

      He was going to try that answer, but since she’d anticipated it, he went for the truth instead. “About a week ago I picked up Davidson and read it through,” he answered. “I don’t know what impelled me, but it did seem important at the time.”

      She raised an eyebrow at him. He understood the question in her face, which asked whether this was from Adept space, a precognitive sense that this knowledge would be needed soon. In the absence of a definite answer he merely shrugged.

      She accepted that in silence. She stood and walked over to the window, where she stared out over the replica city of Toronto, built to mimic the original for this zone of Planetoid 3. The sun was dipping over the horizon, the buildings washed in soft gold.

      “I still want to know why you’re interested,” he noted. “If you think your current prisoner shows tendencies that way, that’d be important.”

      “No. Nothing like that. Just—the book fell off the shelf.”

      He supposed that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else, but he understood. Empaths were trained to pay attention to small signals. When books leapt off shelves at your feet, you picked them up and read them, even if there didn’t seem any reason to do so. Later, you might find out that part of the shelf wasn’t level. Or you might find this was exactly the information you needed. Either way, knowing