SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (110 page)

“Let me take you out of here so you can get help,” Malachi said.

“What…what are you?”

Malachi heard his fear and smelled it, too, a scent stronger than the decaying of his gangrene leg. “I’m not a monster, that’s all you need to know. Here, put your arm around my neck.”

Malachi lifted his arm and placed it around his own shoulder, then took the man in his arms. The man screamed as his leg was moved, but there was nothing else that could be done.

Lifting from the floor of the tunnel, ascending without help of stair or ladder to the iron grill checkered with sunlight, Malachi reached up and pushed it aside. Once he had the man out of the tunnel, he lay him close to a building. “Someone will find you here. Your leg will heal. You’ll live now. What were you doing in the tunnels?”

The magical flying that took him from the floor of the dark tunnel up the shaft and into the light of day caused the man to lose all power of speech. He spluttered in awe, his eyes wide. He was covered with dirt and his own filth. His leg, most of the maggots still clinging to it, was a mottled blue and red thing swollen twice its normal size.

“Never mind,” Malachi said. “Don’t try to speak. But do me a favor, will you? Don’t tell anyone where you were or how I took you out. I’ve saved your life. Do this favor for me in return. All right?”

The man must have been forty or older, but he looked as frightened as a little child. He couldn’t stop staring at the vampire whose incisors were lowered in warning. When it dawned on him that he was dealing with an extremely dangerous being, the look in his eyes bordered on insanity. Then Malachi shook him roughly and he snapped back to himself and nodded vigorously.

“All right,” Malachi soothed, patting him on the shoulder and stepping away. “I’m glad you understand.”

Malachi deliberately vanished, moving so quickly the man never saw him leave. At the iron grill entrance, he seemed to materialize. He waved at the poor bastard lying next to the building and again vanished into the tunnels, pulling the grill over his head.

He didn’t want the village people coming down into the tunnels to search for him. They’d only get killed trying to avoid the mines. Since the man he’d found had been down there quite a while and he had a broken leg despite the fact he hadn’t set off a mine, Malachi realized he had been attacked and dropped into the tunnel. They’d locked him down in the darkness after beating him senseless and breaking his leg.

Malachi shook his head in consternation at the evil men did to one another. Many of them were worse than a rogue vampire preying on innocents.

Malachi just needed to get away. He wanted solitude and darkness and rest from his long journeys. He was tired of the world, not turning his back on it this time the way he had tried to hide in the blocks of ice.

He skimmed just above the floor of the tunnels to keep from setting off the mines as he moved farther and farther from the entrance and into the bowels of the earth. Men could not come here. Vampires had been ordered to leave him alone. With luck he should be able to find a dry bit of tunnel floor and sit and wait for his mind to empty.

He was as tired as he had ever been. Above him the little village rumbled distantly with life. Down here he might be hungry and alone, but at least he wasn’t hounded to death to take on the mantle of leadership he still refused to carry.

As he flew down the winding and twisting tunnels, his clothes rustling with his passage, he began to breathe in the darkness until he was filled with the black night of the underground.

Here, far from his worries, he would rest.

~*~

She ran her hand along his naked thigh. A thrill went down his chest to his groin and seemed to peak, like electricity grounding. He put his hand over hers and guided it between his legs. She was so perfect, so beautiful. Her skin was soft and silky, like running his hands over ripe wheat. She felt like a furnace, warming him wherever their bodies touched.

Some women, Malachi thought, were more beautiful clothed. This woman was a goddess naked. Clothes hid all her beauty—the lovely skin, the soft swell of breast and hip, and her nipples as brown as walnuts.

“Danielle,” he whispered past her hair into the petite whorl of her ear. “Danielle, I love you.”

“I love you more, Malachi.”

He couldn’t wait any longer. He slipped on top of her and entered slowly, his eyes open to watch her expression, to gauge her response, and to time his movements. He worshiped this woman and their union. Every time they made love, he realized he was the luckiest man in the world, the most beloved man, with the sexiest and most beautiful wife.

Her face guided him and he moved faster, rocking her into the mattress, holding his weight on his elbows and upper arms to keep from crushing her. She was exquisite, a rare flower opening to him.

She was perfect…

He closed his eyes, losing himself in the hot, sweet moment. A hand pressed at his chest and he halted, thinking she wished him to wait. Or to change position. Or to…

He opened his eyes and saw Sereny’s face inches from his own, floating above him like a harvest moon. “Malachi,” she said softly. “Are you all right?”

His ardor died immediately and his whole body shook at the realization he had been dreaming. Only dreaming.

His perfect woman was dead. His love was gone. Danielle had come to visit him in his sleep, but she had been merely a ghost.

He sat up on the earthen floor and turned his face to the wall, gathering his wits. He was still hard. His flesh was warmed yet by the vivid dream love.

A groan escaped him. If he could cry without blood tears, he would have. He swallowed hard, wondering that a full vampire possessed saliva.

“I’m sorry I followed you, but the others are worried.”

He wanted to speak to her, but didn’t trust his voice. He nodded his head to show he understood.

Then suddenly he didn’t understand anything, but his loss. He squeezed tight his eyes. He felt Sereny’s hands massaging his shoulders and he shrugged her off. “No,” he said.

She removed her hands and, by extension, her invitation. She knew he had dreamed of sex and longed for a woman. What she did not know was the only woman he wanted was buried in the ground. There could be no replacement. Not now and maybe never.

“I’m sorry,” she said, moving away from him to sit at a distance in the tunnel darkness. “I only wanted to help.”

He swallowed again, letting the last of the dream leave his mind. “It’s all right.”

“I shouldn’t have come. We were…we were afraid to leave you alone.”

“Is Jeremy here too?”

“No, I left him in the village.”

“The rest of them, are they up there with him? In the village?”

“Not yet. I told them to stay away until I called for them.”

“Don’t call. I don’t want them here. I came to figure a few things out.”

“Did you? Figure them out?”

He shook his head.

“Do you want me to leave?”

He hesitated and the answer was evident. He heard her rise, her skirts rustling like the wings of bats.

A panic bloomed in his chest. He didn’t really want to be alone, not after the intimate dream. He felt so lonely even his bones cried out for companionship. “Wait,” he cried.

He stood and moved close to Sereny. “I’ll come up with you for a while.”

He saw her face only as deeper darkness, but he thought that she smiled. “That would be nice, Malachi.”

He passed ahead and the two of them skimmed the floor of the tunnel, following winding paths back to the entrance they’d both taken down the iron grill.

No one saw them exit. They moved too swiftly for human eyes. Once in the street, Sereny sent out a mental call for the child, Jeremy, and finding him, led the way.

It was full dark, even late, the moon riding low in the east. Few villagers moved about the streets. Once Sereny turned to Malachi and whispered, “He’s feeding.”

She said it with some alarm and Malachi grimaced. He hadn’t killed in days and the hunger was a live coal in his stomach, but the thought of murder caused him to recoil. Jeremy was a little murderer. A marauder. From the innocent, orphaned child Malachi had brought home with him from West Texas, Jeremy had changed into a wolverine. His appetite was becoming legend among the vampire nations. Despite the fact he was a child in body, his hunger was stronger than any Malachi had known. It was his murdering need that had driven him out of Ross’s house and made Sereny stay with him to exert some kind of control.

They came upon Jeremy inside a ground floor apartment in the poorest part of the town. He stood in the darkened house in the bedroom where he’d dispatched a couple right in their bed. He sat back on his haunches, his mouth dripping blood. His smile was wide as the ocean, and evil.

“Jeremy!” Sereny rushed to haul him from the bloodied bed to his feet.

Malachi, caught up in the scene, suddenly smelled younger blood than had been spilled in this room. He turned and hurried toward the scent. In a second bedroom he found two children dead. In an alcove off the living area he found two more.

He sighed with distress even as he touched each small throat to be sure no life remained. He couldn’t let Jeremy leave one alive to become vampire.

When Sereny and Jeremy found him, Malachi hissed, “Little monster.”

“It was you who taught me,” Jeremy said.

It was true he had taught him to feed on blood, but it was the blood of animals. He had never taught this boy to kill humans. Children! “How could you do this?”

Jeremy shrugged, but he showed no remorse.

“He can’t help it, Malachi.” Sereny always defended the boy. She had adopted him as her own and her mother instinct was as fierce as anyone’s could be.

Malachi made a scoffing sound and walked out of the house of blood. He wasn’t even tempted to taste it. The boy’s murder spree made his stomach turn.

Outside Jeremy rushed to his side and took his hand. Malachi threw him off. “Get away from me. You don’t even try to control yourself. Why did you have to take the children? Four children, none older than ten!”

“I was hungry,” he whined.

“Not that hungry. You’re a killer, plain and simple. I have no use for you.”

“Malachi!” Sereny hissed this time.

He didn’t care if she thought him cruel. He only spoke the truth. He had come to despise the boy he’d saved for the vampire life. Mentor and Ross should have let the boy die a natural death or dispatched him into the void themselves when they’d come to the place where he lay in the red dream of death. Look what they’d all unleashed on the world. A child who had grown old in his mind while remaining small and cherubic in body. A machine killing whoever he could at every opportunity, man, woman, child, saint or sinner, deserving and the undeserving.

He was an abomination.

“Send me away this time and I won’t come back unless it’s to bedevil you,” Jeremy said, standing frozen in the street, his small hands balled at his sides.

“Bedevil me?” Malachi laughed but his laughter dripped with sarcasm. “You’ve picked up some quaint Victorian speech, haven’t you? Do you think that makes you a man? A worthy opponent? For
me
?” He turned fearsome eyes on the boy. He lowered his head like a bull and looked from beneath stern brows. “If I see you again, I’ll kill you myself. Now get the hell out of my sight.”

“Oh, Malachi, don’t.” Sereny stepped forward to take his arm as if to waylay his anger.

“No, I mean it. I’ve overlooked his ravenous nature too long. He gives us all a bad name. He makes us into monsters and into legends told to naughty children to make them behave. He’s worse than a rogue because there’s no excuse at all for him. Get him away from me.”

Jeremy scowled back, his vampire teeth showing in a snarl. “I’ll be back,” he threatened.

“You’d better bring an army with you.”

“Are you coming, Sereny?” he asked the woman who had become his mother surrogate.

She looked between the boy and Malachi, seemingly at an impasse. Malachi finally realized something. Sereny was fonder of him than she had ever let on. He thought of her as a woman swayed by circumstance, taking to the man of the moment who gave her the greatest advantage. He had even heard she’d once slept with Charles Upton, though he couldn’t feature it. Lover of Balthazar, mistress of Ross, adoptive mother of Jeremy, yet now she vacillated between leaving with the child she’d taken to herself and Malachi. It touched him so deeply that his face softened toward her.

“It’s all right,” he said, waving her away. “Go with Jeremy. Try to make him see what he’s doing wrong.”

“But…”

“No, really, go.”

Jeremy ended this exchange by stomping off down the empty street, his fists still swinging at his sides. His little shoulders were squared and he carried his head high. Malachi would have pitied him, as he’d done for a long time now, except for the carnage he’d witnessed in the peasant apartment just minutes ago. It was a heartless beast who had murdered a family of six, sparing no one.

Malachi no longer pitied Jeremy. He probably should have flown at him and pinned him to the ground and ripped off his head. If he’d had the heart for it, that is what he should have done.

He watched the woman rushing after the boy stalking down the center of the sleeping village. He remembered Sereny’s touch in the tunnel, the delicate massage of his shoulders that signaled an offering of herself. He shook his head and turned back to the street and to the tunnel entrance.

He had not yet thought about what he should do. He could sense other vampires all around. He couldn’t see them, but they were there, hiding on rooftops, in groves of trees at the village edge, and even beneath floorboards in abandoned houses. Despite admonishment, they’d followed him. He sighed to himself at the way no one obeyed his wishes.

Stay away, he warned them telepathically. Stay away and leave these people alone!

He didn’t want to be responsible for bringing more death to this place than he already had with Jeremy’s massacre.

As he dropped into the tunnel, he realized this was the first time in months he had gone for any length of time without thinking of Jacques. At least that was a sort of blessing.