SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (87 page)

The vampire paused and frowned at a corner in a far wall. Jacques peered inside and saw the SIR sitting upright on a stool there. Evidently the girl had turned the SIR off, as his eyes were glazed and he was not moving at all. He was probably there as a guard for the girl. It was her unlucky night to have chosen her privacy over safety.

It happened then in a flash. Jacques stuck his head over the sill to ogle. Upton seemed to be next to the window and then he was at the bed instantly without Jacques having seen him make the distance. He took the girl by her shoulders, clamping his bony hand over her mouth to keep her from crying out, and he lifted her as if she were a feather from the bed into his arms. The buds popped from her ears and flew across the bed to the floor.

The way the struggling couple was turned sideways to the window allowed Jacques to see the deed as it was done. He found himself licking his lips just as if it were he taking that firm pale neck with his lips and drinking from the pounding vein.

The girl was off her feet, dangling in the vampire’s arms. She kicked, her bare feet striking against her attacker’s legs. Her arms flailed about, her fists balled and thumping the vampire about the head and shoulders. Not a sound came from her mouth clamped behind the vampire’s hand.

Jacques could not see her blue sunlit eyes, but he expected they were as great and round and bulging as eggs.

The legs and arms ceased their thumping slowly, as if she fought right to the end when the life energy had been stolen completely away. She hung limp in the vampire’s arms, her head over to the side, the vampire’s face buried in her neck, her golden hair trailing down her back.

Upton dropped her. Her body, lighter since it was stripped of most of the blood within it, made hardly a sound. Upton stepped back and straightened. He turned only his head on his neck to stare first at the silenced SIR and then at Jacques. His face was pink with new blood; his eyes shone like liquid pools of darkness. He smiled and Jacques saw his teeth were still covered with her blood.

He was at that moment a glorious creature.

Stepping over the corpse, Upton came to the window, leaned down and flew out of it. Jacques turned to follow the path of his short flight. He walked to him and kept his silence for the verdict as they strolled down the hillside back to the city lights.

“She was very sweet,” Upton said. “You might be an asset to me, after all.”

Jacques bowed slightly from the waist, but withheld his satisfied smile. “And now we will talk?” He asked.

“Come with me, Frenchman,” Upton said. “Indeed we will talk.”

~*~

Jacques was the first person ever to enter Upton’s Cannes home. He had lived here ever since that awful abortion of justice happened on the Thailand mountainside when Mentor decimated his troops. In the era of ancient Rome decimate meant to kill one of every ten soldiers in a legion, to punish them for cowardice. But Mentor had killed all of Upton’s army. His legion was gone. Decimated in the modern sense.

At the door, the locks automatically obeying Upton’s command to open, Upton stepped aside and ushered Jacques before him. The lights were still shining though daylight was beginning to creep over the eastern horizon.

All the shades and draperies were closed, but an expensive air conditioning system kept the house ventilated.

Upton led the human into the living room where Jacques sat in one of the leather chairs. He sat patiently, quietly, with his hands easy on the tops of his thighs. His gaze never left Upton.

Now Upton turned a bit to look around the room as if he had never seen it before and wondered if it was appealing to others. “Is this a beautiful room? Tell me truthfully.”

“I will never try to lie to you,” Jacques said. He then looked around him, taking in the statues, the paintings, the furnishings and the carpets. He finally looked back at his host and said, “It’s a palace fit for a king. I like it very much. It is not too modern.”

Upton smiled, his vanity something he could not control. He sat on the velvet sofa and draped one arm along the back. He stared sternly at Jacques. “All right, now tell me about yourself.”

“You know most of me since you searched my mind, but I am willing to tell you anything.”

“What about the angel?” The encounters Jacques had experienced with otherworldly beings intrigued Upton mightily. He had glimpsed some of these encounters in the human’s brain, but not enough to understand completely. He was not sure there was such a thing as an angel, for it implied there was a heaven where angels originated and a god whom they served. Surely the Frenchman believed he had wrestled a true angelic being, but men often deceived themselves, or misinterpreted incidents because of their beliefs.

Jacques sat back comfortably in the leather chair and stared off toward the lime silk walls as he prepared to relate his tale. “I was engaged in an affair with a woman in Paris. It was just after I’d finished my degree at the university. She was a student then, not yet graduated. I’d had many women by that time, but no real liaisons that lasted longer than a few months. This woman—Adrianne—took my fancy and before I knew it, I was reeling with love for her. Is that how you say it? Reeling? She was a beauty, almost as lovely as the girl you took tonight…”

Jacques paused and glanced at the vampire to be sure he understood just how beautiful Adrianne had been. Then he returned his gaze to the walls and continued.

“We were inseparable and soon I moved into her flat. I didn’t know at the time that she had an old boyfriend for whom she still had feelings. She was secretly seeing him, trying to decide if she should leave me.” He sighed deeply, as if recalling these memories were a little painful, which they were. It was the first time he had ever committed murder. He felt no remorse about killing Adrianne, but what it had brought upon him was anything but a scene he hoped to repeat.

“When I found out about the disloyalty my jealousy knew no bounds. I have a temper…” Again he glanced at the vampire, who now was smiling. “I have a temper that is legend. Ever since a child things have come to me easily. Money, education, women. When events do not go my way, it happens that I want to destroy.” He shrugged.

“I asked her about the secretive meetings and she lied to me, seeing, I guess, that I was furious. I took her by the hair and pinned her to the floor, sitting astride her. Still she lied, refusing to admit she was playing me a fool. I had my hands around her throat, strangling her. By that time my temper was…out of bounds. I could not have stopped had she begged on her knees for forgiveness. She was the first woman I’d made any kind of commitment to and I was just about to ask her to marry me. I thought I’d spend my life with her and she’d help…change me. I knew by then I was different, that I lacked something other men took for granted, which I believe you would call a soul. Adrianne, until this betrayal, appeared to be good enough in her own soul to rescue me from myself. A savior, if you will.”

He looked at Upton now with a level stare devoid of emotion. “I was young then and still stupid. I never should have thought myself less than perfect in all ways, but knowing Adrianne had made me think I was defective and needed healing.

“I was wrong. I was a deluded boy. Now I know the defection lay within her, not me.

“Nevertheless,” he continued brightly, “these are the circumstances that led me to want to hurt her. If she could not give herself wholly to me in devotion and help me rise above my baser instincts then what good was she to me?”

“Indeed,” Upton said, his face now serious.

Jacques felt the vampire’s impatience growing. He had not spoken of the angel yet. He launched now into that telling.

“I strangled her that night. I sank back on my heels once she was dead. I was out of breath and red in the face from exertion and fury.

“The room was suddenly hot, the air feeling as if it had been super heated, as if a dynamo had been imposed into the room. I got to my feet, Adrianne’s corpse lying sprawled on the floor, and tried to understand why the room’s climate had changed so abruptly. Until this point in my life I had not come upon any supernatural. I was not ready for it, wouldn’t have believed it could happen or that there existed in the world other than human beings.”

Now Upton sat forward on the sofa, his arm coming down from the sofa’s back. He clasped his hands together.

Jacques smiled inside, knowing his revelation was going to blow the old vampire away. Vampires, he expected, would not wish to admit the existence of angels. It might mean they would be called to task for their crimes.

He continued, Adrianne’s old betrayal and the pain it had caused him now taking a back seat to what he had to say to his audience of one. “The angel appeared. I swear it. It came from the ether into being right before me. I stepped back, startled, but unafraid. Along with my great temper, I have never been afraid of anything. Anything. That may not be something good for me, but there it is even so.”

“Are you sure it was not a data blanket projection? Some kind of techno guardian?”

“I’m sure.” Jacques said. “Absolutely sure. It was not a SIR or a projection.

“The angel solidified and was as real as you or I. He stood two feet taller than me, the top of his head brushing the ceiling. At that point I could see he had wings, great wide muscular apparatuses attached to his shoulder blades, but they were folded so that the tips dragged the floor. They were not made of feathers as depicted in ancient paintings by the masters. Not at all! I found this more startling than his sudden appearance or that he must be other than a human being.

“His wings were covered over with skin the same color as the rest of his body, and I could see the skeletal outline of bones beneath flesh. He was not dressed in garb, but stood naked…and without gender. There was nothing between his legs except smooth light skin where his genitals should have been. I only call him male because of his masculine face. No one would have mistaken his gender from his visage.”

“What did you do? Did he speak to you?” Upton asked, fully into the story and relishing every detail.

Jacques nodded emphatically. “He spoke, his voice deeper and louder than mine. He said, ‘You’ve set your path with this crime. Until now there was a prayer for you.’

“I could not have been more astonished.

“’So God sent you to dispatch me for my evil?’ I asked.

“He said, ‘I’ve come not to kill you, but to find out if you can be set back on another path.’

“That’s when the absurdity took over. I began to laugh at him. Save me from myself, was he? God thought enough of me to send an angel to turn me around even though I’d just within the past moments committed murder. It seemed hilarious to me. A play by a comedian. The best joke anyone had ever told me.”

“I suppose an angel does not like being laughed at,” Upton said.

Jacques finally smiled. “Indeed,” he said, gracing the old vampire with a response he had already offered.

“I won’t be told what to do with my life, I told the angel. I was by now totally unrepentant. This woman was a liar and a cheat, I said. Why waste your time on her death? The world is better off without her.

“’It is not the dead Adrianne I have come to see,’ he said. ‘It is you who have stepped over the line that will lead to a destruction even you cannot fathom.’

“Well, this was news to me. I asked him then what was it about me that had called him down. Surely there were murderers all over the world more evil than I, more prone to create destruction and devastation.

“I will never forget his reply.”

“Yes?” Upton clenched tight his hands.

“He said, ‘You’re different, even you in your vast stupidity know that. It’s not the murder of this one woman that anyone cares about so much. It’s what you will be called upon to do in the future now that you’ve turned down this terrible pathway.’

“Well, my temper returned at the great being’s presumption to tell me I had a sealed future when I believe I have self-will and the power to make my own decisions. I screamed at him that he was not welcome near me and I wanted him banished. I told him he was no agent of mine and his interference was an abominable thing.

“He flew at me then, striking me across the face the way a mother will strike out at a disobedient child. I fell back, rubbing at the pain in my jaw, and my anger only grew more intense. I leapt toward him and put my arms around his midsection, as that was all I could catch hold of, he being so tall.

“’Wrestle with me?’ he roared, trying to throw me off him. I don’t remember what I said then, so great was my rage. I screamed relentlessly and pulled and hauled and got him off-balance, for he had not really yet tried to dislodge me from his person. I cursed him and cursed any god who had sent him. I told him he could kill me for all I cared, but he would not tell me what to do or how to behave. I was my own man, I screamed up at him, and I didn’t care what happened from his wrath.”

Jacques glanced down at his hands resting on his thighs to gauge their steadiness. Speaking of the angel from that long ago time filled him with anger all over again. He felt once more the superlative rage that drove him then to grab hold of a supernatural being twice his size and scream obscenities into its face. It was at that moment in time he knew no fear and ever afterward had not a trace of it for anyone or anything. He knew his lack of a survival instinct that came normal to all men was not the only trait that made him different, nor was his terrible anger. It was the absence of fear that one night of murder which let him grasp hold and defy his first immortal.

“What happened then?” Upton asked, urging Jacques to continue.

Jacques voice was poised and calm as he said, “The angel took me by the shoulders, tore me loose from his body, and raised me until my feet were off the floor. He looked into my face and he said, ‘You are lost to us.’

“Then he vanished as suddenly as he had come. I dropped to the floor, his hands disappearing from their hold. I rocked on my heels to stay upright and I began to laugh uproariously that I had beaten an angel sent to admonish me.