SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (38 page)

"Mommy, can I have a marshmallow yet?"

Malachi spoke better than his peers at day care. Most three-year-olds were able to speak in a few completed sentences, yet often they communicated in fragments. Malachi had been speaking well since he was two. Dell expected that was because he was dhampir. He'd inherited half-vampire and half-human genes. He was more advanced than other children and would grow into a superior specimen of a human who inherited some of the vampire's exceptional abilities. But he was not immortal, and when she thought of the day when she would lose him to death, she grew so cloudy and blue that she often took to bed and turned her face to the wall.

"Mommy?"

Dell realized she'd not answered him yet. He was relentless until his questions were answered. She knew this was typical of a toddler. In most ways he exhibited all the usual absurdities she loved best about small children.

"Uh . . . no, don't eat the marshmallows yet. Just hold onto the bag. We're going to roast the marshmallows."

Malachi pulled himself into a lawn chair and hugged the marshmallow bag to his chest. His legs swung loose over the edge of the chair. He was being as patient as he could. He had never tasted a roasted marshmallow, but she knew he trusted her. If she said they would do something as incredible as take a white fluffy treat and actually roast it over a fire, he would wait.

"Now watch what I'm doing. This is an experiment." She placed a new roll of toilet paper into a large empty coffee can.

"An experiment?"

"Yes. I read about it in a book at the library today. Hunters make a fire like this to warm their hands when out in the woods hunting for deer. They can't make a normal fire because deer would smell the smoke. This fire makes no smoke or smell. Or at least that's what the book said. Let's try it."

"Okay, Mommy." Malachi's legs grew still and he leaned over his lap, squishing the bag of marshmallows.

"Now we pour a bottle of rubbing alcohol over the roll of toilet paper." Dell saturated the roll, then brought out a small box of matches. "We light it carefully. Once it's going, we'll put our marshmallows on sticks and hold them over the fire."

"We're gonna cook marshmallows? Over toilet paper?" He giggled. Covering his mouth.

"Oh, yes," she said. "You'll like them, wait and see."

The roll of toilet paper flared up bright and clean, burning without smoke or scent. Just as the book had said. It amazed Dell. There were so many things she didn't yet know—so much knowledge she hoped to learn. From the simple making of a hunter's fire to the intricate workings of the universe. It would take a millennium to find out even a tenth of what she longed to know.

Dell stood back, watching the fire burn for a minute. Fire always set off an alarm in her vampire brain. It could kill her. Fire was one of but two things that could.

"Wow," she said, shuffling aside the sudden little fear she always felt. "It works. I can smell it, but I bet a deer couldn't." As vampire, she had a heightened sense of smell that was better than any animal's, but that wasn't something she needed to explain to Malachi.

She broke two green branches from a flowering pear tree that grew close to the house. She stripped the leaves. She took the marshmallow bag from Malachi and speared a marshmallow on each stick, handing one to her son. "Okay, now hold it out over the fire until it gets all brown. After you eat that one, you can have this one to roast."

She showed him how. When the marshmallow browned, its skin rumpled and blistered, she blew on it to cool it before she plucked it from the stick and held it out to Malachi. He hesitated. "Go ahead, it's good."

"You've eaten it before, Mommy?" He wasn't convinced. "It looks like a caterpillar."

She laughed. "Sure, I ate them when I was a kid." Memory of consuming food was growing dim in her mind, but the taste of a hot roasted marshmallow remained. The burned skin crumpling sweetly in her mouth, the inner white soft cloud of marshmallow running between her teeth and coating her tongue.

Of course, since becoming vampire at seventeen, almost eighteen, Dell had never eaten food again, and did not miss it, but she always tried to remember her son was human and that there were treats in the world he should not miss.

Malachi took the proffered sticky mess from her fingers and bit into it. Dell watched his face, his eyes, and saw the delight there. "You like it?"

After swallowing Malachi said, "Umm, good!”

“See? I told you."

Having seen how his mother speared the marshmallow and held it over the fire, Malachi now roasted the second one she'd speared and did the same with a third, and then a fourth. While he roasted marshmallows over the coffee can fire in their backyard, Dell relaxed, basking in his enjoyment. Her little child was dark-headed with intelligent cocoa-brown eyes and a build like that of his father in miniature. Wide shoulders, long legs. He wore black cowboy boots, jeans, and a red pullover knit shirt with a little alligator on the pocket. To any observer he was completely normal.

But Dell knew he wasn't. Not only was his vocabulary beyond that of other three-year-olds, his ability to learn was enhanced. Show him something once—like how to roast a marshmallow—and he remembered and could do it forever. Read him a story and he never forgot a detail, repeating it verbatim back to you. He could hear better than normal, often surprising his father with how he knew a car was approaching the ranch house from the distant road before the engine's sound could be detected. His eye and hand coordination was superior, so that he was already playing skill games on their computer, racking up high scores before getting bored and moving on to another game.

He was also healthier, his immune system stronger and more resistant to invasion than any other child his age. He never came down with the usual childhood maladies, never had colds or the flu, never ran fevers or lost his appetite. Because it was state law for children to be inoculated before starting school, he'd been given baby shots and vaccinations, but hadn't really needed them. He'd been a perfect baby, giving his mother little trouble, and now he was a perfect toddler scarfing down roasted marshmallows like there was no tomorrow.

"Mommy, why don't you eat one? Why do I always eat everything alone? I thought you liked marshmallows."

Ah, there was the rub. She could not tell her son she didn't need food. Her sustenance came from the plastic bags of blood she bought from Ross and his blood bank in Dallas. She drank one a day—or night as it happened, for she didn't want Malachi to see her feed. Soon she would have to tell him the truth. She was not human any longer, though for many years she had been. She was less human than he was and not at all like his father, Ryan. Her body was, in fact . . . dead. The organs were renewed and sustained from the fresh blood, but she did not have to breathe, except when around humans, and the heart in her chest cavity was as still as a rusting bit of machinery in a closed factory.

She began to wave off his query. "I don't want anything right now, I . . ."

"Your mommy's sweet enough as it is," Ryan said, walking around the comer of the house. "Aren't you, Mommy?"

He bent down to kiss her, and she smiled against his lips. She sent him a mental comment. Thanks. It's getting harder to fool him.

Ryan straightened, walked near his son, and tousled his hair. "Can I have one, Champ? We might as well both ruin our supper together."

"Sure, Daddy. Here's another stick."

While Ryan pushed a marshmallow onto the end of the stick, Dell looked him over. It was her habit to search for any clue her husband might not be happy and content. Ever since they'd married, she'd feared he would leave her. He only thought he loved her, she was sure. How could a warm-blooded man love a cold, dead thing like her?

He was dusty from a day's ranch work. He hauled cattle to auction, rounded up herds and branded the calves, and helped the heifers during calving season. He gave the stock shots, watched for scours—a disease that could bring a cow down fast—inspected hooves, fed the herds, and generally made sure his employer's investment lived healthy and multiplied. It would be another two years or more before he earned his degree and could practice veterinary medicine. Until then he worked hard for a living, though he never complained.

Dell was afraid he'd tire of all the responsibility, that he would age beyond his years and resent her for it. She studied him now with Malachi. How he laughed and joked with their son. She inspected him to see if it was genuine. She could read his mind if she liked, but didn't do that unless he slept and was unaware of her intrusion. It was an invasion and he wasn't fond of it, but she told herself she had to do it to be sure. To be sure he loved her and Malachi. To have some certainty he wouldn't leave them.

"You made a hunter's fire," he said, jogging her from the reverie of her close inspection.

She smiled. "Yes, I read about it in the library today.”

“My dad made fires like this when he took me hunting and the morning was cold."

"The deer really can't smell it?"

"I suppose not. Dad took a couple of deer every season."

Dell didn't like hunting, so Ryan didn't do it, turning down his father's invitation each fall. She hoped he didn't miss it. The thought of shooting a helpless deer turned her stomach. She knew it was a Texas tradition. The meat fed some of the poorer families who lived in the country. But to kill for sport, whether the man ate the meat or not, if that man could afford to buy his meat at the grocery store it seemed to her he was just indulging a primitive killer instinct.

Like a Predator. Predator vampires killed wantonly, killed humans. Naturals like herself, and the Craven, a type of vampire who was always sick and weak and hidden from the world, declined to commit murder. They had all been human once. Nearly every vampire in existence had once been a man or woman first. It was against unspoken rule to infect a human and leave him alive to become vampire.

Each of them might have changed as a child or as an adult, but they had all been born mortal. The mutated human disease, porphyria, caused them to change, to die and to rise again as vampire.

How the Predators were then able to forget their humanity and murder when the hunger drove them was beyond evil. Dell thought if she had to kill in order to live, then she would welcome the orange-and-blue flames of the hunter's fire and let them burn her to cinders and the final death.

"You're awfully quiet this afternoon." Ryan moved from his son's side and came to her. "Did anything happen?"

She looked up at him, and love flooded through her. All the sad thoughts about her kind fled, all worries over how her half-breed son would fare in the world vanished, and all fear of being abandoned by the one man she loved disappeared. She smiled at him. "No, nothing happened. I was just thinking."

"About him?" he asked softly, indicating their son.

"Some," she admitted. They had talked about Malachi since before he was born, wondering what it might be like to raise a child who would be so different. They had to prepare him soon. They couldn't wait forever. He was dhampir. He was not completely human. He might even contract the disease, as it resided in his genes from his mother, and he could one day be like her. Porphyria's mutated gene was like a twisted, hookworm latched onto the DNA chain. Some of the Naturals worked on research, secretly trying to discover just where the gene resided, hoping to manipulate it out of existence. One day maybe they'd be able to do that in living humans with a family history of the mutant gene. Until that time …

Mentor, the counselor to the vampire nations, and the wisest reformed Predator anyone knew, had told them chances were Malachi would never be infected. The odds were against it.

But still—just dealing with his enhanced abilities was going to be difficult. He'd live in the world and die like his father, but until then he would be more than human, enjoying supernatural talents, and how he used them would determine the state of his very soul.

"Don't worry so." Ryan pulled her by the hand from the lawn chair. "Let's make the champ some dinner."

Together they put out the coffee can fire and led Malachi into the house to wash his sticky face and hands. The farmhouse was old but comfortable, and Dell loved it. All the rooms, except for the old-fashioned kitchen, were large, with high ceilings. There was a fireplace, hardwood floors, and a wraparound porch on the front where Dell sat at night and watched the stars. When she and Ryan married right after high school graduation, his grandfather deeded the old house and the two hundred acres to them as a gift. They were eternally grateful. They both worked so hard to pay Ross for her blood supply and for the Internet tuition for college classes. If they'd had to pay for rent, too, they wouldn't have had two nickels to rub together left over. She didn't know how people managed to live. It surprised her that more of them weren't on the street or living under freeway overpasses.

Ryan turned on lights, as Dell often forgot, never needing illumination in order to see. In the small kitchen they worked together to make a pizza from scratch, rolling the dough, chopping up pepperoni and vegetables, grating cheese. In the living room Malachi, all washed up, and with his boots removed, sat in the middle of the floor playing with Legos. He built fantastic buildings, tall, futuristic, some of them standing beneath domes, as if he could see a Martian landscape in his imagination. He could be trusted to sit quietly and build things for hours and never clamor to watch television like other small children might. They let him watch cartoons on Saturday mornings and some educational shows, but she and Ryan were so busy in their lives with work and study, the television was rarely turned on.

"So what's up?" Ryan asked, pressing pizza dough into a pan.

"You know what it is." She didn't really wish to get into it. She was so tired lately. Despite the fact she never fell ill or complained, the psychic energy it took to maintain a believable humanity when out in the world doing her lowly job at the library seemed to sap her life force. It took the night—and the blood—to keep her moving.