SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (41 page)

"And the future?"

"I don't want to lie to you, Dell, but I don't want to alarm you either. Let the years pass. Watch for him, question your child if he seems unhappy or scared."

"And wait," she said. "That's what you're saying, isn't it? We have to wait."

"It's all we can do unless Balthazar moves against you or the boy. But he won't come or send anyone for a long time—if he ever does. Rest easy now. It's been a difficult night, and you're spending all your energy."

She did feel suddenly burned out. She said good-bye to Mentor and went to pick up Malachi from the sofa. She held his bundled figure close to her chest and gazed on his innocent face. Her boy must grow to understand the vampire nations and accept them. He should have no reason to want to hurt Balthazar or the Predators. But no matter how it all turned out, she would never let anyone do Malachi harm, no matter what. He was her child, flesh of her flesh, her only son.

Through the darkness, shadows draping over her as she moved, she carried Malachi quietly to the child-sized bed in the shape of a racing car they'd put into his room. She settled him into it; smoothed his hair, and tucked the cover around his body.

Then she returned to the chair in the darkened living room and sat rocking throughout many hours, worrying over the prophecy. It was fine for Mentor to reassure her, but he had never been a parent. He didn't know you couldn't put aside a real threat just because it wasn't standing on your doorstep yet. What if she failed to raise Malachi in a way Balthazar approved of? He'd be back. He was obsessed with Malachi. With no real reason at all! There were other dhampirs, why not threaten them? He must be really insane.

Thoughts of the dreamscape and the silver wolf who walked in it were enough to keep her up till dawn. By the time the sun rose, she had made a decision. She'd tell her family. She'd ask them all to help provide a protective circle around Malachi to watch over him. Her mother, her father, her brother Eddie, even her grandparents. They were all vampire and, together, they'd find a way to insure her son's safety.

Chapter 4

Dolan sat in the dark on Mentor's sofa near the dead fireplace. Mentor didn't bother to open the door. He merely went through it and transformed in the center of the floor. Dolan glanced up at him, unsurprised. "That didn't take long," he said. "I thought I saw you here a little while ago and then you vanished."

Mentor sat in an easy chair and reached over to turn on a table lamp. Electric light was something Mentor liked very much. He had lived through the days before its invention and still recalled the thick greasy pungency of kerosene and, before that, of whale oil and stinking animal fat. "It wasn't as much of a crisis as I first thought. But I had to go back and see about something else. I'd just gotten here and was recalled."

"Ah." Dolan fell into contemplation. Mentor sat in the silence, resting from the day, thinking his own thoughts.

Finally Dolan said, "Why did you want me to come here? I'm not suicidal this time. You don't have to keep me in your basement, chained to the wall."

"No, but you have ambition, Dolan, and that won't do around the Cravens."

"I'm Craven."

"But you border on being Predator, as I told you before. That places you between worlds, between the clans. You don't quite . . . fit."

"Oh, great, just what I need. Lost in limbo." A sad chuckle escaped him.

"That's why I asked you here. I need some help.”

“You? The Great Mentor, the Master Psychiatrist to the vampire nations?"

"There's no call for sarcasm. I'm trying to help you."

Dolan looked down at his hands. He pressed the knuckles of his right hand with his left thumb, massaging the bones. "I'm sorry. I'm just disappointed my plan to bring together the Cravens was shot down so fast. If only we could join our forces, we could elevate them."

"That's just it," Mentor said. "Cravens don't want your help. They can't see having the same ambition and energy you possess. In that, you're more like me."

"Like a Predator, you mean."

"Just so."

"All right, I'm convinced. What kind of help do you need? I'd rather work for you than sit around that dark house one more day."

"It wouldn't be working for me," Mentor said. "You'll be working with me. Our numbers are growing. Either I'll have to partition off part of my southwest territory and find someone to watch over it, or I have to have help doing it all myself."

"Wait a minute, you're saying you want me to do what you do? Are you nuts?"

"Sort of what I do. I think you'd be good at it."

Dolan laughed. "I'm a Craven. Who would listen to me? I'll be laughed at."

"Maybe at first," Mentor admitted. "But once you've been around a while, trust in you will build. They'll know I sent you."

"Well . . . what about the fact I don't know how to do what you do, Mentor? I can't guide new vampires through their mortal deaths. I can't counsel them once they're vampire. I can't hunt renegades and save suicides and deal with . . . with Ross."

"I'll always have to handle Ross. You're right, he's quite a handful. But I can train you to do some of the other work. Like tonight, when I was called away, when the alarm came and I was needed. You could learn how to handle minor disturbances such as that."

"I don't know . . ." Dolan had stopped rubbing at the knuckles of his hand and was now scrubbing at his cheeks in nervous worry.

"Relax," Mentor said. "You won't be sent out on your own for some time. You'll accompany me for a while, learn on the job, as it were." Mentor stood, crossed to the other man, and touched his shoulder. Dolan instantly lowered his hands from his face and was calm.

"How'd you do that?" he asked. "I was suddenly at peace, just from your touch."

Mentor smiled. "I'll teach you all the tricks. Just trust in me."

Once Dolan was settled into the spare bedroom, the heavy covers over his head to block out any morning light that might leak through the window shades, Mentor left the house again, soaring into Dallas' night sky. He came down again in a poor minority neighborhood, lighting on a concrete bench in a small backyard Japanese garden. Moonlight gleamed from the two large white stones placed in a sea of white, carefully raked gravel. Small conifers and holly bushes ringed the yard and a small stand of bamboo grew in a corner, errant breezes ruffling their long spiky leaves. Behind Mentor, a large old weeping willow drooped its lacy branches over his hunched shoulders. It amazed Mentor that the largest portion of Texas consisted of desert, but from Dallas or San Antonio all the way east to the Louisiana border a great variety of plants grew in the temperate climate and rich earth. Except for Thailand, which he loved very much, he felt the eastern parts of Texas were his favorite places in the world.

She lived here and had created the beauty he now beheld. Bette Kinyo, the Japanese-American hematologist he had saved from Ross' hands. She was married now, a woman of thirty-two finally wedded to Dr. Alan Star, the man Charles Upton had hired a few years in the past to find him real vampires. Star had been Upton's specialist in Houston, where Upton had the headquarters of his international oil and shipping company.

Mentor had formed a pact with the couple—with Bette, really—who convinced Alan to go along with their wishes. Bette and Alan would stop investigating the shipments of blood leaving the Strand-Catel blood bank run by Ross. Though they knew there were vampires, they would never speak of them or reveal the secret. It was either that or be at Ross' mercy. And Ross had no mercy. Given half a chance, he would have split both Bette and Alan asunder and drained them dry of their blood.

During the days when Mentor had dealt with the couple, he'd unintentionally fallen in love with Bette. He'd entered her mind three times to wipe it of memories to keep the vampire nations secret. While immersed in her mind he had found her as good and decent and without malice as any human he'd ever encountered. But it was not just her inner spirit he began to love. He loved her small stature, the delicacy of her hands, and the porcelain skin of her heart-shaped face. He had lost himself in the depths of her fine dark liquid eyes.

She reminded him in some ways of his small Scottish wife, Beatrice, whom he'd loved so much that he hadn't been tempted by a woman in more than a century and a half. Beatrice, too, had been a superior woman, her heart as pure as a saint's. She had never raised her voice to another living soul. She had never harbored envy or longed to have more earthly possessions than her neighbor. To him, she was the embodiment of love, and from her, he had learned what it was like to put another person first in his life.

Bette might suspect he loved her, but they didn't speak of it. He tried not to see her, knowing it would be unforgivable if he were to interfere in her human life and the love she had for Alan.

Still, when he was overly tired from the work he did with other vampires, or when he was particularly burdened with all the memories he carried with him from centuries of living on Earth, he came to the little manicured garden and sat beneath the willow.

Staring at the gravel sea he was able to imagine white-capped waves breaking against the island rocks that rose from the "waters." All vestiges of his complicated life fled as his soul emptied, giving him respite. His consciousness floated on the white moonlit sea, free of encumbrance.

He had found other sacred places of peace during his sojourn on Earth, some of them just as necessary to him as Bette's garden. When he had first sickened and changed into vampire, he had gone nearly mad. No . . . he had actually gone mad. There was no point in lying to himself.

He lived then in a superstitious age that did not admit there were beasts such as vampires, but readily accepted the idea of demons from hell walking the land.

All the people around him who carried the same mutated genes as he only knew a terrible disease had afflicted them at first, carrying them inexorably toward death. They had no name for this disease then, and most often thought it was demonic possession. As the disease progressed, they weakened, their faces grew stony, they festered with sores, and sunlight gave them pain. Then some of them died, dying as naturally as all mortals, their breath ceasing, their pulses going silent. But they came back. Hours after death with rigor mortis already setting in and the body beginning the long process of final decay, some of them returned to themselves with a hard gasp. They flailed at the air as if fighting off avenging angels that would carry them to a bower of rotted meat and maggots watched over by things with hungry teeth.

They couldn't talk, couldn't walk, sometimes could not even move, just suddenly opening their dead eyes on their assembled loved ones gathered for the wake. The mourners would scream and beat their breasts and make the sign of the cross to ward off this sudden, inexplicable invasion of evil. The dead should not return. The dead should not open their eyes and rise up to walk.

It was not as if this had not already been going on for thousands of years. The first apelike human to stand on his two legs had lived in South Africa a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Mentor believed the genes in those people held the precursor of porphyria and the mutation that would manifest into vampire. But the people among whom Mentor was born and raised knew nothing of those vampires who lived in other lands far away, too far for even tales of their debauchery and murder to travel. So when it happened to Mentor, who was a young man in his prime, though shriveled on his frame from the debilitating disease, his family ran from him into the streets of the medieval city of London. They cried out that the devil had come to Earth, walking now in the guise of their beloved dead son and brother.

Mentor had fled, climbing from a window into an alley filled with bawling cats and scurrying hordes of rats. He elbowed aside two inebriated men who tried to halt him, feeling his strength return, gaining more strength than he'd had before becoming ill. It was as if molten energy coursed through his body, giving him the strength of ten men and ten wild horses.

He hid himself from mankind, going down into the cellar of an abandoned brick building, closing the broken doors behind him and shutting out the world. That world now abhorred him and thought him the master of hell. He wanted nothing to do with people if they were that ignorant. Didn't they know the misery he was in? Didn't they know he'd had a dream that would make any man appear mad? In that dream he had embraced . . . something cold . . . something older than the world . . . something eternal. Since his family could not embrace him back into the bosom of their love, he would hide away from them until they came to their senses.

But after a short time down in the dark of the old building, the hunger came. It was like a fire in his gut and in his brain and in the very tips of his fingers. When his hunger pushed him past all endurable limits, he crept back up the lichen-covered, slippery stairs to the city night and went on a hunt. He knew what he needed and he would have it and no thought of the death it might bring could deter him from his mission in the slightest. When a man is hungry, he will eat, he reasoned in his mad way. He will kill an animal, tear up a vegetable from the soil, and he will even turn on his brethren if circumstances leave nothing else upon which to feed.

And so he did. He loosed his hunger on the populace. For no meat or vegetable now could he imagine going into his mouth or stomach. He turned to men and women, with their rich red blood, and he took them with abandon, some nights just dropping one horribly drained and bloody corpse onto the muddy street before grabbing another victim to fulfill the cold, driving need.

It was months before this madness abated and Mentor sat in the twilight darkness of the cellar, alone, the bones of victims strewn about him like so many sticks of kindling. He seemed to come to himself, the self he'd been before the illness and the pain and then the strange death dream, which came to make him into a Predator vampire.