SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (43 page)

This heartless treatment seemed alien to Mentor. Men had progressed for two thousand years, their sins too many to number, but for a family to throw out a child as if he were garbage in these modern days was unfathomable.

However, Justin proved resilient and lived. He never prospered, but he became cunning at survival. That is until the fateful night he was making his way past the closed doors of vendors' carts in an old marketplace, looking for some safe place to sleep. He was snatched by a rogue vampire, one of the scruffy, half-mad beings who, like Mentor when newly changed, didn't stop to consider the age of a victim. But something went wrong, the murder was interrupted, a policeman having come around a corner and spied the adult vampire latched like a leech to the young child's throat. When Justin fell to the street, his attacker having absconded, his heart still beat, and he was already recovering from the attack. Even as he had survived the pitiless abandonment in the desert as a younger child, his tremendous will to live now drove his heart to fill anew with blood and take up a slow, irregular rhythm.

As he struggled, as his heart beat erratically, the cavity filling with the last of his blood, his will came to the fore and forbade him to give up. Unbeknownst to him, a minute amount of blood left behind was tainted with the vampire's own, and it was already working the magic of transference, the sickness of infection. It was even now sending him straight into the hands of the Predator-Maker in the death dream. Had he died, he'd have been spared, but living out to the end, he teetered into the world of vampire.

There he was at the moment of his greatest despair, lying in the arms of the policeman in the real world, dying, but in the supernatural world he faced the giant Predator who swooped down through a dark wood, a full bloody moon at his back.

Justin's cry echoed and found Mentor's ears. Mentor swiftly took to the skies, traveling so high that below him the Earth turned. He came down again in Greece, in a sultry Athens night, and speaking to the policeman in a mesmerizing tone, took the dying child from the other man's arms. Together they disappeared, or so it would have seemed to the officer, who woke disoriented from a small trance.

Mentor had Justin firmly clutched to his chest, moving rapidly down moon-bathed stone stairs and into a crypt in the shadow of an old pagan temple. He went immediately into the nightmare world where each of them died to the real world and woke into the new. He was with Justin in the dark wood, advising him to run, run away from the Predator-Maker, if his soul allowed it. Did his soul truly wish to rise again into a life of murderous intent? Or did he wish to be nearly his human self again? Or at the very least, did he wish to listen to the Craven Mistress and embrace a life of darkness and sickness?

Justin was but one of the many thousands Mentor had given this same advice, offering counsel about the choices involved, but the fight never failed to give him the fright of his life, each and every time. He and Justin could see the Predator, large as a comet approaching landfall, rushing down on the boy in fiery glory to make him into one of his own. The struggle went on for hours on that other plane, when in real world time only minutes might have passed. Had anyone seen them, the old vampire with the white unruly hair, head bowed as if in prayer, holding a dead child in his arms, they could not have guessed the two were in serious combat with the Predator-Maker and the ancient Mistress of the Craven.

Justin, as Mentor had hoped, disavowed the eternal life of a Predator, forgave the Mistress for hoping to convince him to be born again as a Craven, and turned into Mentor's arms, choosing at the last to be a Natural when he returned to life. He would from then on live as man lived and he would pass as human, doing no harm, spending all his many lifetimes in service to, and for the benefit of, mankind.

When Justin, having chosen his way, woke from the death dream, Mentor laid him gently on the stone floor in the near darkness and said, "I'll leave you, but don't fear. In a while the paralysis will wear off and you'll be able to leave this place and find the Master of the Blood here who will supply you on credit until you can pay."

All this Mentor said without speaking, mind to mind, and saw the boy's now open eyes increase in understanding. He could leave him and not worry for his soul or his future. But there was something Justin wished to tell him, so Mentor paused at the door and listened quietly.

Again, mind to mind, the boy said, "Thank you for saving me."

Mentor nodded and was about to continue on his way when Justin said, "There is a place you need to go to see about little children."

Curious, Mentor turned and retraced his steps. He stood over the boy, looking down on his still face and vibrant eyes. "More children like you who need me?" It was astounding to think there might be a whole slew of little vampire children, newly made, awaiting him in Athens.

No, not vampires, Justin said, projecting his thoughts quickly now. They're like me. They were abandoned because they're different.

Mentor's attention was drawn to the small boy's deformed foot. He couldn't fix it. It had been formed when Justin was a fetus, and now it was a permanent disfigurement.

Yes, like my foot. Some of them have something wrong. But most of them have something wrong in the brain. You know how my brain is not as good as yours . . . you were in it . . . you know it's . . . broken.

That was how Mentor came to cross Athens and find the sacred place no one would ever have thought existed. Going by Justin's directions, he found the building, a square, squat place made of white stone, the windows darkened for the night. Entering an open window, sensing already how full the building was of children, feeling their soft breaths and hearing sounds of muffled weeping, he found them congregated together in a ward of metal cribs with tall sides. Standing stock-still, frozen in place, Mentor gazed around the big open ward and his heart sank within him. Hundreds of children, all of them imprisoned in their cribs, tied with white gauze by ankle or wrist. The ages ranged from one year to a full-grown man of thirty-five, but most of them were under twelve.

They'd all been put here by their families. They'd all been given up as no good. Mentor knew all about them in an instant. Why they had been put here and forgotten. Why their poor mothers gave them up. Why they were crowded this way and kept in cribs, kept bound so they wouldn't crawl out or fall to the hard tiled floor. They were all to some degree or other mentally diminished. Some also had physical handicaps added to their problems, as did Justin, but for the most part it was their minds which were in disarray rather than their bodies. They received no comfort or personal attention, as there were not enough staff people to care for so many abandoned children.

Mentor moved swiftly to a crib and reached in to take the hand of a little girl, four years old, who lay awake, sensing him and beginning to cry, frightened of the intruder. She calmed and the tears dried. She looked up at him, smiling sweetly.

For one terrible moment Mentor imagined himself leaning over the sides of the crib, taking the child's slim neck into his hand and lifting it to his mouth. He could vanquish this life for her, he could steal it from her and release her from bondage.

But no. It was not what she wished and not what he wanted. She'd been given life, as lowly as it appeared to be, and it was hers to live, however small and circumscribed.

It was then Mentor knew this place, as horrible an institution as it was, filled with as many tortured souls as the eye could see, was as sacred a place of peace as any he'd ever discovered in his global travels. There was no hatred here, no remorse, and no ego. Ambition had never existed, lies had never been uttered, and these little ones had never meted out pain to another.

The children knew on some level they were in a small prison that measured no larger than the sides of their metal cribs, but they hadn't the capacity to hate their caretakers or even the parents who abandoned them. They did not know what hate was or how to muster it. They knew no vanity and when despair came, it vanished just as quickly, the shells of their minds rejecting it as easily as a bovine will shake off the flies on its swinging tail. They were as perfect in goodness as any newborn, untouched, unsullied by the vagaries of the world.

The girl, now quieted, let go of Mentor's fingers and tucked her hand beneath her cheek, shutting her eyes and drifting into sleep. Mentor slid down to the floor and sat with his own hands folded together in his lap. He soaked in the love that permeated this large populated room. The love came from the children who projected it, having no other emotion to give. They were lost children, pitiable in their tiny prisons, but they had made this place a haven, a sanctuary. To one another they communicated with their glances, with their sighs and grunts. None of them possessed a language, so they were rather like the vampires, able to project their simple thoughts to one another over the distance, mind to mind.

He heard a child with a deficiency in understanding ninety percent of the stimuli that came into his mind cooing to another child in a crib next to him, cooing that said it was okay, it was all right, he was not alone, never really alone.

He heard another speaking in thought symbols that only roughly translated to human language, yet it seemed to Mentor it was as pure an embodiment of the emotion of love as any thinking creature could distinguish. Everywhere Mentor turned his intelligence, he picked up the myriad mind sounds coming from the children, like susurrations of warm wind through palms, and it was like being led through a fantastic land where lollipops grew on trees and gingerbread cottages sprang up along strawberry lanes.

I am so happy here, Mentor thought, falling into meditation that drew him away from his life and the world he lived it in. These babies are imprisoned and alone with no mother or father or sibling to care for them, he realized, but they whisper about love and dream of heaven.

Often, the institution for children in Greece was where Mentor headed when he needed reminding of how precious life was, the bare breath of it. No matter how mean or distressed an existence a man or child lived, it was still imbued with a beauty untold. If, as the Buddhists believed, a man, a child, a stick, a leaf, a bird was not separate from one another, that all was one while being singular, then that was the complete reason for the children's survival. They were part of the whole. They served some purpose not even Mentor could decipher, but knew instinctively existed. He would not fall into the conceit that they existed solely to comfort him, but they did exist for some reason kept secret from him and he was sure of that.

So it was here, in Dallas, Texas, as he sat beneath the willow in Bette's small, enchanted garden that Mentor had found another Good Place. Without these places to retreat to, he thought the deep fire of his Predator nature might resume and become such a bonfire it would consume innocent and evil alike, child and mother, saint, Madonna, and demon. It was the garden—the pond in England, the monastery in Thailand, the children's prison in Greece, the Taj Mahal, St. Patrick's Cathedral and so many others he'd found over the centuries—which saved him from real destruction.

Here, in the dimming of the moon and the deepness of the night, he could release the fires which burned in him. He could let himself be no more than the white island rocks in the great shining sea of white gravel.

He didn't wonder if the woman recognized what she had created in the midst of an urban rundown minority neighborhood. He didn't wonder because he knew Bette Kinyo Star was a naturally gifted psychic. Guided by innate abilities Mentor did not understand when they were demonstrated by human instead of vampire, she had carefully carved out an oasis of peace with nothing more than shrubbery, small trees, rocks, and gravel. She'd done it for herself initially, and now, having found it, he shared the perfect magic with her.

~*~

Bette woke the moment she sensed Mentor entering her garden. She came from sleep to wakefulness in an instant.

Her eyes were as wide as they might have been if she'd just been slammed around inside of a car broadsided by a big diesel semi-truck. She lay still for some time, thinking about the great vampire who visited her garden. She always knew when he came. He always came at night when she slept.

She and her husband Alan had made a pact with Mentor. They knew another great vampire controlled one of Dallas' largest blood banks, and that he shipped much of that blood out of the city to other towns all over the southwest. Bette was the hematologist who supervised the testing of all blood supplies leaving Dallas, and she had come upon the discrepancy with Strand-Catel. That's when Mentor first came to her. He'd meant to wipe away her memories of the discrepancy, and then, when she was able to recall those memories, he made a pact that she and Alan never tell anyone what they knew.

What they knew for certain was the fact they were dealing with supernatural creatures who could tear their heads off their shoulders at a whim. They knew more than any other humans in America about vampires. And they had promised to keep that knowledge to themselves. If they didn't, they would have died long ago.

For more than three years the two of them harbored the dread secret. It wasn't hard to remain silent. The threat of quick and bloody death went a long way to insure it. Sometimes they talked about it in whispers, turning to one another in bed and entangled in one another's arms. Often Bette shivered uncontrollably, and Alan had to hold her tightly, soothing her with words of love. Knowing that thousands of vampires moved among mankind was like knowing there was a silent plague stalking the land, yet they had sworn never to speak of it to anyone else.

As Bette lay quietly in her bed, eyes open, senses all raising flags of alarm that assured her the vampire was nearby, she wrestled with the urge to go to him. It was not as if he called to her. He never did that. No, it was as if a strange, wild need rattled around within her brain, unwilling to be stilled until she went to him.