SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (91 page)

“We have a little over five hundred,” Jacques said.

“It’s probably enough.” Upton wasn’t sure, and he’d really like more, but five hundred hungry, mad, driven Predators was a formidable force.

Upton reclined on one of his velvet sofas with Jacques sitting in a club chair across from him. It was full dark and the drapes were drawn. Pools of lamplight fell on mahogany tables, imparting a soft glow to the room. Upton raised the arm from his eyes and stared up at the ceiling.

“Why don’t I make you one of us?” He asked. He turned the jaguar head with the jaguar eyes squeezed down to slits toward the Frenchman.

Jacques shook his head. He had never shown any sort of fear or loathing when Upton looked like the jungle cat. This amazed Upton.

“I’d rather not,” he said without enthusiasm.

“If I insisted? If I just pinned you down and took your life against your will?” Upton liked to torment him. He’d never do it. He actually wanted Jacques as he was, thoroughly human. He could use him to infiltrate where a vampire could not safely go. But he regularly offered him the vampire life just to see if he again refused.

“You can do what you like,” Jacques said, entering into the old argument. “But I’d rather you not.”

Upton laughed and turned away his slick head. When he smiled he knew he looked horrible, so he smiled often when in Jacques’ company. “You’re an incorrigible human. If you were more afraid of dying, you’d take me up on the vampire life.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“It goes without saying.”

Upton amused himself trying to shake the other man. He had played tricks on him, trying everything from visions of a grotesque corpse hanging from the balustrade to dismembering a victim before him, to see if he would crack. Never had he seen the man even wince, much less tremble. He could not be touched. Something at the center of Jacques was so rock solid and immovable it gave him a superior sense of aloofness. Kill him this second or a decade from now, it did not matter to the man.

Upton adored him. If he’d had a son, he would have wished for someone like Jacques.

Changing subjects, Upton said, “I was told Mentor had to take a new body.”

“Did he?”

“He’s a Nordic blond now. Big guy with gray eyes. I won’t even know him. I wish I could take a new body,” Upton said wistfully.

“You will eventually.”

“Yeah, when this old sack of bones finally gives out. I don’t know why we can’t just transmigrate when we feel like it. If I can turn into an animal, why can’t I take a new body at will?” Upton growled like a jaguar.

Jacques gave a considered opinion. “Perhaps it’s because bodies come with souls.”

“And animals don’t.”

“And animals don’t,” Jacques agreed.

“It’s maddening.”

Upton had not been at home in his own body for many long years. When he’d been human and plagued with porphyria, his body had been hideous in the last years before his change. He had begun to hate his body then, feeling it had betrayed him. While his mind remained sharp, his body had steadily begun to fail him.

“At least I can be an animal,” Upton said, reminded of his fierce jaguar head that he kept most all the time now. By force of will he exuded the musk scent of a cat’s glands. He sniffed the air, whiskers shivering in delight, and enjoying himself tremendously.

“But you’d rather be a big blond Nordic guy with icy gray eyes."

Upton laughed uproariously. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do with Mentor’s new fine body. I’ll tear it to shreds. I’ll burn it to ashes. I’ll cast it in the Rio Grande River.”

Jacques nodded sagely.

Upton spent the next half hour railing against his enemy, Mentor, and his maker, Ross. He listed all the ways he could find to torture them. “And that boy,” Upton said, spluttering in his anger.

“Malachi?” Jacques asked.

“Yeah, that one. I should have killed that little pip-squeak when I had the chance. He lasted much longer than expected.”

“He’s not really someone for you to fear, though, is he?” Jacques asked.

“Fear? Certainly not! He’s not even a vampire. He has no power over vampires. Not like Mentor does, or Ross.”

“And Balthazar’s fears were unfounded,” Jacques added. Upton had told him most of the history of the last uprising.

“Balthazar was an insane superstitious fool. I’ve told you that before.” There was nothing to the old prophecy of a dhampir who would lead a war against Predators, he thought. It was a ridiculous notion on the face of it.

“But Mentor cares for the boy, regardless,” Jacques said. “True?”

The jaguar lips closed before slowly lifting over the sharp teeth to emit a low animal growl. “Everyone Mentor cares for will be killed if I get my way.”

Upton knew the Frenchman understood his hatred was not all based on simple revenge. He could never gain power in the world with Predators like Mentor and Ross around. They embraced the vampire status quo. They wanted to keep everything the way it had been for a thousand years. Make no new vampire, that was the ultimate rule. Sponsor research for a cure for the mutated disease that caused vampirism. Keep the uneasy alliance between the nations and do as little harm to mankind as possible.

Fools, all of them.

Upton had made at least fifty new vampires himself and they were some of the fiercest Predators in his whole army. They owed him an allegiance they’d never break for they were of his blood.

As for research and science—hell, the brightest minds couldn’t find a cure for bio-degradation, the disease terrorism spawned. How could they ever decipher the riddle of how a man died and lived again?

Doing harm? Harm was the way of the vampire. It was his birthright. Do harm, leave behind deaths and victims, or die, that was the rule, the only rule.

Mentor had to be brought down. He was listened to, he controlled and influenced thousands of their kind. He was beloved.

Oh, how Charles Upton hated him.

“Bring me the girl.” Upton gestured suddenly to Jacques. His anger was gathering like a storm on the horizon. If he didn’t feed soon, he would only get worse. “She’s been locked up long enough to turn her into a gibbering baboon.”

Jacques rose and left the room wordlessly. Upton listened to his footsteps recede through the house to the basement door. He heard the locks and chains coming undone. And then he heard the girl crying softly.

When Jacques brought the girl into the living room Upton was on his feet, hands easy at his sides.

The girl raised a tear-stained face to look at him. She seemed to be a stunned animal. She had been locked in the dark too long. Her imagination had done more damage to her mind than the imprisonment. He wanted her to react! He threw back his jaguar head and opened his great mouth to show the many rows of shining, pointed teeth.

A flicker of horrified recognition dawned in her blood-shot eyes. Fear sweat popped out on her brow and temples, smelling strongly of unwashed skin. Her head trembled on her spare neck and her hands danced with tremors. Now it was time to drink.

~*~

Jacques watched dispassionately while the great vampire ravished the girl. It seemed to Jacques that Charles Upton didn’t possess a brilliant mind. Upton thought these spectacles of murder bonded Jacques to him, made him at least an accessory to the crime. But Jacques was unmoved by murder, no matter how grisly, and his opinion of Upton was not raised an iota because he was obliged to view it.

Upton had brought him into his clan and given him an apartment of his own on the top floor of his villa. Jacques spent his time there thinking about what it was he hoped to accomplish with the vampire. Power, surely, more power than any normal man could hope to secure on his own. Luxury without earning it, that was something, too.

But fate had something in store for Jacques that neither he nor the vampire could envision. Jacques knew this because of the midnight visit of a scampering demon. The little monster came in the dark, tugging at Jacques’ toes beneath the sheet. Jacques woke, drew back his foot quickly, and reached to turn on the table lamp. When he saw the demon, he merely stared curiously.

“I didn’t call for you. Go away,” he said, despairing that he’d get any sleep now.

“Jacques, Jacques, you break my heart,” the little monster cooed. He came close to the bed, grimacing into Jacques’ face.

“You don’t have a heart. You’re something defiled and dirty and ignorant that blows on the wind.”

“I know something you don’t know, how’s that so ignorant?”

Jacques grew alert. Demons lied, it was their mission to cloud a man’s thoughts with lies, but this sounded like truth. “What is it you know that might involve me?”

The demon, light of foot and mischievous, danced away from the bed and leaped atop a chair back. He sat hunched in the shadows, but Jacques could see his horrific grin floating like the Cheshire cat’s. “The vampire will lead you to near doom, but you’ll narrowly escape.”

“So?” Jacques asked, exasperated. Even if he was lead straight to his doom, he did not care.

“When the vampire dies, you will become his clan’s general.”

“Ah. That’s more interesting.” Jacques found this bit of information more worthwhile. If he’d been told he would die, the news wouldn’t have caused a ripple in his mind. But to think he might command a vampire clan…now that was something he’d never imagined.

Something occurred to him. “Must I become vampire too?”

The demon cackled and leaped from the chair to the floor and ran up a wall to the ceiling where it hung upside down like a bat. With twinkling eyes it said, “Wouldn’t you like to know!”

“Oh, be gone with you, brat.” Jacques turned his back to the creature. He no longer wanted to see the bulbous head, the skin like dark cracked leather stretched over the demon’s skull. The thing made him gag it smelled so horribly of long dead fish and ripe carrion.

“I’ll take my bit of flesh first,” the demon said, dropping from the ceiling onto the bed and latching onto Jacques’ leg. Before Jacques could even move to defend himself, the demon had clamped long teeth into the muscle of his thigh and torn out a small chunk. Blood rushed, filling the bed, as the demon jumped away, chomping with delight on the human flesh between his teeth.

Jacques let out a cry when he’d first been bitten, but then he held his pain in silence. He didn’t want to wake Upton in the rooms below. “You little bastard,” he said. “You’ve wounded me.”

“For the information I imparted, I should have taken your nose. What an ungrateful wretch, you are!”

While Jacques rose from the bloody sheets and hurried to the bathroom to stem the flow of blood, the demon disappeared.

It was days before the wound began to heal. During that time Upton had smelled his blood and inquired of the injury. Though the vampire could read his mind when he wanted, Jacques took the chance this time he wouldn’t. He lied, saying he’d punctured his leg when outside in Upton’s garden. He had fallen on one of the iron spikes of the fence, he said, but his leg was better now.

Jacques did not for a moment suspect the little demon who had visited him was telling a lie this time. If he’d been lying, he wouldn’t have extracted payment.

There were all these forces beyond the pale of reality that continued to intrude on Jacques’ life. Angels, ghosts, demons, gargoyles, witches, and now vampires. He knew in his heart that he was specially picked to be witness to these otherworldly beings and to incorporate that knowledge into his life’s plan in some way. Or else why was he privy to the knowledge, he asked himself?

He had begun a journal to record the fantastic episodes soon after the first event happened years ago with the angel. Today, just before meeting with Upton and going to the basement to retrieve the girl victim he had written:

She is a virgin, young and supple. Upton claims a virgin’s blood is pure and sweet. Although I don’t find his actions distasteful in any way, as nothing a creature does to another surprises me, it does seem simple superstition to believe a virgin’s blood better than any other.

Then again, I am not a vampire, so I could be talking out of my hat
.

This house I live in is often silent as a tomb, especially when the vampire sleeps. He seems to be dead, as his chest does not rise in respiration, and his eyes are closed and the muscles of his face limp. He told me he could not be killed with a wooden stake through the heart, that many myths of the vampire were entirely fictional, but he failed to tell me what WOULD kill him. I suspect he does not trust me fully yet. For when he sleeps, he seems vulnerable, and it is in sleep that a human could perhaps dispatch him.

Not that I wish to. For now I’m intrigued with the old vampire and his ways. He has told me some of his history and his vengeful plans. I would like to be involved just to see what transpires. Life is so much more interesting when lived in tandem with a monster beneath a craven moon.

He is not as smart as he thinks he is, but he’s still somewhat clever. I enjoy handling his cadres of malcontents he’s drawn to him from all over Europe. Each and every one has a gleam in his eye for mischief and mayhem. The only reason they don’t drink from me is their fear of reprisal by Upton.

And they all have such individuality! Not one is like the other. Some are hungrier and always on the prowl, though they have to feed elsewhere besides Cannes by Upton’s order. Some brim with hate so real it is palpable. Some are ambitious, lured to the new army only to find a way to rule it.

And they have varying scents about them. One, a big hulking creature with a large square head that sits on wide shoulders smells like cabbage. Strange, since they don’t eat food as I do so it couldn’t possibly be because of that. Another smells like roses. He’s rather effeminate, prancing as he does, flinging his hands around in wild gestures when he speaks. Some, of course, smell of decay. Those are the ones who fail to bathe regularly so the dried old blood of their victims remains on their clothing and sometimes even in their hair, their ears, and the corners of their eyes. Though I have no evidence, I think they let the blood stay and the death scent grow stronger in order to paralyze a prey when they get near.