HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (40 page)

This last path was
the hardest. A Predator lived by night, slept by day, and had no use
for a conscience. A Craven merely passed as a diseased human,
handicapped by sunlight, sick all the time, lost forever in the
despair of loneliness behind drawn shades, dependent on the charity
of Predators to supply them with life-sustaining blood. But a
Natural! He chose to walk in the day, converse and interact with
humans as one of them, keeping secret the stillness of his heart and
the cruelty of immortality. Naturals worked hard to earn enough money
not only to live as humans lived, but to pay the Predators for the
blood they needed. They were not killers like the Predators. They
hoped never to take life.

Dell's parents
worked very hard, harder perhaps than most humans. Her mother was a
payroll accountant at a car dealership in Dallas. She often worked
Saturdays, needing the overtime pay. Dell's father was a software
engineer, fighting for pay grade updates, and cost of living
allowances. Everyone in Dell's family worked long hours, some of them
working two jobs, and never complaining about it for they wanted,
most of all, to live in the world naturally.

At various times
some of the Naturals thought about setting up their own blood banks,
cutting the Predators out of the loop, but the supply chain had been
set up this way from the beginning and the Predators were not eager
to give up the power and profit they enjoyed. Rather than go to war
with them to win control of the blood banks, the Naturals bowed to
tradition and continued buying from the Predators. Working and
working and buying.

It was not true
that the blood went into their stomachs as had the food they'd eaten
as human beings. The digestive system never worked in the same way
again after the moment of death. All vampires took blood through
their fangs, which sped that warm blood, alive with living cells,
throughout their blood system, reviving them, keeping their skin
supple, brains functioning, and their muscles hard. Though they never
aged again, they were able to keep the body functioning for a normal
human lifespan of seventy to a hundred years. Then they had to
migrate to another body, preferably a youthful one.

The body, though
supplied with living blood, was still no more than a physical
specimen. As the years moved past, the wear and tear on that physical
form eventually caused the inner organs to fail, one by one, just as
they did in humans.

Mentor had lived in
so many bodies he hardly recognized his own face when he saw it
reflected from a mirror. In fact, the body he possessed now was
elderly. He would have to migrate in the next few years.

He mused on the
first time he had had to change bodies. There were but hundreds of
his kind then, a new race, and not many of them had realized they had
to or could change from one human shell to another. Mentor was one of
the first, sitting alone one night in a cold, drafty castle high up
in the Swiss mountains. He had hidden himself away from the world.
His wife, a human, had died in Scotland, a country he'd fled. Like
his wife's, his own body was aged and decrepit. He just wanted to be
alone and forgotten, if possible. He had reverted to his predatory
ways once his wife had passed. He swept down from the mountain
retreat into nearby villages, taking humans at will, leaving behind
drained corpses. He had no more care for humans and their world. They
were frail and they died so easily, just as his wife had.

Misery and grief
tore at him, robbing him of the humanity he'd been able to forge as a
beloved husband.

Then one night he'd
been on the prowl, sweeping in with a blizzard into a village, moving
swiftly toward fresh blood. He smelled it on the icy wind. He
following the scent, his hunger like a siren call in his veins.

He found the human,
a young man trudging through hip-deep snowdrifts toward a lighted
pub. Mentor appeared before him out of nowhere, halting his progress.

The human,
frightened out of his wits, began to stutter and tried to run away.
Mentor caught him by the coat collar and hauled him down to the
ground. Just as he was ripping into his victim's neck, something
began to happen. The blood suffusing Mentor's body seemed to stop
along the way and coagulate in dry, dead veins. The heart inside his
chest would not revive to life, the veins, arteries, and capillaries
began to break and splatter the new warm infusion of blood throughout
the old body. He was hemorrhaging all inside from hundreds of tiny
spigots of broken vessels.

Mentor's human form
was so worn out the veins and arteries had lost all elasticity. They
were shutting down or bursting all along the pathways from neck to
limbs.

Mentor fell back
from the young dying man in the snowdrift and gasped, blood dripping
from his fangs to spot the pristine snow. He knew what was the
matter. He had intimate knowledge of the inner workings of his human
body. He could feel the old arterial system failing. He looked about
wildly, the light from the pub a yellow beacon. But he could not go
there. He could not be saved by medicine or a surgeon, no more than
an ancient human could be saved. He fell onto his back next to the
young man and stared up into the frenzy of the white blowing
blizzard.

Where will I go, he
wondered. What will happen to me now? Will I be allowed to die and
meet with my beloved?

Even as he asked
himself these questions, he knew the answers. He would not die, but
the body he inhabited was going to. If he stayed in it much longer he
would be trapped, a living spirit inside a body that no longer
functioned in any way. He'd be a prisoner in the flesh. They would
come from the pub and find him, pronounce him dead, and bury him.

He felt like
shouting out his grief and horror at the snowy sky. He had to get out
of the old, decayed body with the burst veins and the hemorrhaging
system. He turned on his side to the young man who lay in the snow,
his arms thrown out at his sides. The young man was already dying.
Mentor reached over and slipped his old hand beneath the other man's
thick wool coat. He slipped it beneath the rough shirt and to the
man's chest. He felt for the heart. It beat erratically and the
breathing was shallow.

Mentor lay that
way, his hand on the man's chest, waiting. He dosed his eyes and
began to will himself away from his own dying form. The young man's
veins were strong and they would carry blood, even after his spirit
left the body. The young man would be a perfect vehicle.

All Mentor had to
do was wait for the moment of death for them both and find a way to
make the switch.

How? How was he to
do it? Why had it come to this, what manner of supreme being would
have devised such a terrible plot for his kind?

He forced his whole
being into an introspective trance where he seemed to pull and tug at
his spirit that was attached so steadfastly to the old body. He did
not know if it would work or how it worked. He only had faith that it
would. He could not imagine lying in the dead old body in a casket
for the rest of eternity, trapped by earth, brother to the darkness.

Beneath his hand he
felt the other man's heart cease, the breathing end. Now was the
time.

He tugged harder,
blasting with all his might against the structure of the inner body,
pushing against the still heart, the deflated lungs, willing with all
his might and soul to be set free.

The chaotic fury of
his will sent out a message that reached a vampire older yet than
Mentor. This being used the name Balatan, and he, too, had come to
the mountains of Switzerland to hide away and live a quiet life for
his own personal reasons. Mentor had known of him, but they'd never
met, both preferring their self-enforced solitude. They frequented
different villages, careful not to compete for territory.

Within minutes, the
Predator was at Mentor's side in the swirling snow. Mentor could no
longer open his eyes or move his limbs. He sensed the being nearby
and called to him frantically. What do I do? Save me!

Balatan seemed to
enter Mentor's destroyed body in order to help him release himself
from the boundaries of the flesh. Mentor felt him like a shawl over
the shoulders. His spirit was cold as an ice floe and dark as the
bottom of a mine. He screamed at him, "Let go! Step into the
void, and I will guide you to the other body!"

Mentor did as he
was told, insane with fear and the thought of the grave's entrapment.
He pushed harder and harder, willing himself loose from the tendons,
muscles, and flabby flesh, tearing himself from the dead meat that
had been his body since the day he was born.

He screamed
mentally, crying out in horror and despair, beating against the
material body with every ounce of his consciousness. Suddenly he
found himself free, light as the air, and Balatan had hold of him,
jerking him up and away from the snow. Once loose from the old man he
had become, Mentor could see the body below him, and he almost rushed
back to it, longing for the familiarity of that flesh and bone.

Balatan shouted,
"No!" and pushed him this time, sending his spirit flying
down toward the young man's form on the snow.

Mentor flung out
his invisible self, making it as wide as a blanket, and it hit the
dead young man's body like a wave crashing from high. He fell for
what seemed like ages through darkness, and then he opened eyes on a
new world.

Balatan hovered
over him in the air, dressed all in black wool. "Welcome to your
new body."

Mentor blinked. He
moved one hand, crushing a fistful of snow, and feeling how cold it
was. He managed to sit up and look down at his hands. They were young
hands, unmarried by life, the knuckles smooth and the skin tight. He
looked up at Balatan and realized he had disappeared.

So this is how it
is done, Mentor thought, rejoicing. We do not have to lie in old
bodies trapped in a graveyard. We move into another body and use it
instead. He doubted he could have done it without Balatan's help, but
he wasn't sure. He expected he would have struggled for as long as it
look in order to wrench himself free. Balatan had surely shortcutted
the process, however, and one day he would thank him.

The switch left him
momentarily confused, so that it took him some time to get to his
feet and stumble away into the night. He was hungry and deprived of
blood. His old body had taken most of what made the new body
function.

Before the night
was over, Mentor had taken a second victim, a drunk from the pub who
had wandered out to relieve himself in the snow. The killing revived
Mentor's youthful body and he was able then to get back to his empty
castle where he could sit by a fire and think over what it all meant.
A vampire had supernatural powers, some he realized he hadn't yet
discovered. One of them was the ability to take a new home.

~*~

Mentor tried to
explain things to Dell. Dell's aunt, Celia Widen, sat nearby. Celia
held onto Dell's hand and now and again patted it. Mentor said, "The
Cravens and Naturals, just like the Predators, also need fresh blood,
but their fangs only go into blood bags, not into the flesh of
humankind. Without new blood with living cells, a vampire perishes.
His veins collapse, the arteries shrink, the heart shrivels. Finally,
the muscles atrophy, the brain softens in the skull, and the skin
dries to crusty leather. I know this is graphic, but you have to
understand everything." He paused to see how she was taking the
information. She did not look as horrified as he expected. Probably
because she knew some of this already.

He continued, "It's
a horrible thing to see a vampire die of starvation. It's a
torturously slow process. Only lack of blood or fire can end a
vampire's life. If he loses a limb, his cells grew a new one. If he's
injured, the cells renew the flesh. As for crosses and holy water and
the silly ropes of garlic necklaces—well, that's merely myth
and superstition. There are far worse obstacles to contend with than
Stoker could have ever imagined for his infamous Count Dracula."

Dell smiled.

"Deprive a
vampire of new blood and he'll eventually dry to dust and be gone.
Burn him in an inferno and his cells have no chance to renew and will
turn to cinder. Otherwise, our kind, or at least our minds and souls,
are impervious to the effects of aging, death, and destruction."

As Mentor sat at
Dell's bedside, he knew she struggled to come back into the world as
a new being. That struggle was almost as difficult as facing her
death or choosing which path her soul should follow. He imparted his
strength to her, pulsing waves out from his own strong body to
surround her, in the same way a supernatural human healer cured the
ill by radiating energy through his hands. Soon he would have to
leave. Already he had telepathically received pleas for his
assistance from others going through the same process as Dell, and he
must be there to guide them. The cries were piteous and urgent. Save
me. Help me. Find me and take me from the arms of destruction.