LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) (10 page)

"The funny thing is," she said, "I thought I'd feel . . . dead. I thought I'd hate being this way and I'd want to. . . die for real. I didn't know I'd feel so alive and thrilled about it."

"This feeling might pass, Dell," he warned. "There will be times when you'll feel just the opposite. Times when life will be unbearable."

"It's hard to believe that."

"It is now, but you'll have to trust me. Our emotions tend to swing widely, leaving us hanging on stars or dropped into the lowest pit. You'll call for me if that happens, won't you? When you think you can't go on?"

"Yes, of course, I will," she said.

"Good. Then tomorrow or the next day you will need to return to school. As a Natural, you're going to take up your old life and carry on. The sun will not harm you, the night and darkness will not call to you. You've chosen the path that allows you the greatest freedom in this world."

"I won't . . ." She could hardly say it. She tried again. "I won't try to . . . harm anyone, will I? I mean, I won't be like a Predator, will I?" Already she yearned for one of the blood-filled bags in the refrigerator. It was like a thirst that never ended. Her throat was as parched as a mesquite tree in a dry plain in the middle of a West Texas summer.

Mentor took his time answering. He was probably listening to her thoughts, weighing her need. Finally he said, "I can't promise that you'll never be tempted. At times, all of us fight the urge to just take what we want when we want it. It's so easy that way, you see. It's something you'll have to wrestle with and overcome."

"Your conscience is strong, Dell. Your humanity still resides inside you. Murder isn't something your mind will accept, though your hunger might grow strong. But there will be times when hunger overpowers the heart and your mind may get confused. It's at those times you'll be most vulnerable to committing an act against man. If you ever give in, even once, the next time will be easier. So you must never give in. Do you understand? Never, no matter what provocation or how weak you think you are or how great your need for sustenance."

"I didn't really think that would ever happen," she said sadly. "And this urge will be there all of my life?"

"I'm afraid so. It's the nature of our affliction. Unfortunately, it's part of being vampire, any kind of vampire."

She thought long and hard about what Mentor had said once he left. A horrible thought occurred to her. She called her mother into her room and shut the door.

"Well, what I wanted to ask is …" She wasn't sure she actually wanted to know, but she had to ask. "I wanted to know if you or Daddy ever wanted to drink from Eddie or me before we … we got sick."

"Never. You're my flesh and my blood. Your father and I would have set ourselves on fire before we'd bring harm to you."

Dell breathed a sigh of relief. She didn't know how she would have handled the thought that her parents had hungered for her. "Okay, thanks, Mom. I didn't think you did, but I had to find out."

Her mother gave her a hug and opened the door. She paused on the threshold. "Do you think you're up for school tomorrow?"

"I can try. I guess if I feel out of sorts once I get there, I can call you at work and come home."

"That's my girl! I'm sure you'll be fine. The faster you get back into your normal routine, the better off you'll be. Remember, you graduate this year. And at the top of your class!"

Dell smiled as her mother left the room. Her mother loved and appreciated her. She was proud of all her accomplishments.

Restless now, Dell went to her dressing table and sat down before the mirror. She didn't look different. The sores that had erupted so rapidly were now healed, not even leaving scars. She was tan and fit, a girl verging on womanhood, and the only change she could detect was the look in her eyes. That look was one of knowledge and sadness. She knew now of death and of living on after death as a new being. Would her friends and classmates notice her eyes? Would they suspect she was different? Maybe she could wear sunglasses for a while, like some of the weird kids in school. She could say she had a sty. Or pink eye. Everyone hated getting pink eye.

She wouldn't know how her friends would react to her, though, until she went back to school and faced them.

"I can do this," she said aloud, turning away from the mirror and the dead look in her eyes. "I can live again."

~*~

It took Dell two more days before she was ready to face the world outside her home. During that time, with her parents at work and Eddie at school, she wandered the empty house and tried to stay away from the transfusion bags in the refrigerator. Given her deep hunger, she thought she could down them all at once. The idea made her laugh, but the sudden sound of laughter in the quiet house gave her pause. She rubbed the back of her neck where the hair there had crept up. To ease her mind into trance, she tried to watch television. Think nothing and nothing will matter, she told herself, hunting down the remote where her little brother had stashed it between the sofa cushions.

Usually TV talk shows could turn her into a mindless vegetable, but it didn't work this time. She watched Jerry Springer, horrified at the guests as most Americans were, and remembered she'd heard her parents talking about a Predator in Fort Worth, Texas, who got himself booked on there one time to discuss the vampire "legend." Mentor was called in to squelch the renegade, for it was bandied about among the Predator community that the vampire doing the show was disgruntled and mentally unstable. He promised the Springer show that he would show his fangs and even take a victim under the watchful eye of the camera, if they wanted. A willing victim, if they could find one.

Secrecy was everything to vampires. Without it, they weren't safe. Rarely did anyone get out of hand and try to give the secret to the media. Mentor went to the renegade and discussed his upcoming television appearance. He judged the vampire to be clearly unreliable, his mind teetering on the brink of insanity, and had taken him away for his own good, and the good of all vampires everywhere. The Springer people booked wannabe vampires instead.

Dell's parents did not know where the renegade was taken, but they understood there was a place, a monastery run by vampire monks somewhere in another part of the world. Was it Asia? The far reaches of China? There someone could be kept prisoner until well, or if it was judged he would never be well again, rumor had it the prisoner was bound forever. There was no alternative.

Dell hoped the talk show hopeful hadn't been destroyed or imprisoned for the rest of his vampire life. She did not want to think about what it might be like to be held prisoner by powerful supernatural monks, but burning the renegade for turning to the media seemed to her too harsh a judgment. Go on Jerry Springer and die for it. She almost laughed aloud again, thinking cynically that some of the guests ought to have that option.

Maybe she would ask Mentor what had happened to the renegade vampire. . . .

Turning off the TV, she wandered the rooms again, peeking through the drawn curtains at the postage stamp-sized front yard. Their house looked similar to all the other houses on the street in the suburb. Brick, three bedrooms, two baths, two-car garage. Decidedly middle class. Which was about all her parents could afford, given that a majority of their income went to Predators for the blood.

They had lived in the house since she was born. Their neighbors knew them enough to speak to. Some neighbors had moved in and moved out again, their incomes taking them to more sophisticated habitats. The ones who stayed kept to themselves, so that a family of vampires could live unnoticed by curious humans.

Two of Dell's friends lived on the same street; she'd grown up with them. They had spent nights at one another's houses, had backyard barbecues together, played dolls under the shade of the crape myrtle. She had gone swimming with them at the neighborhood pool, discussed boys with them, and traded clothes.

Knowing her so well, would they ever guess she had changed? She couldn't let that happen. They'd never known about Eddie or her parents. Why should she think they'd discover her secret? No one believed in vampires anyway. It was the stuff of movies and books and TV shows. Quite a popular myth in entertainment now and again, but that made the reality of them even more fantastic. If Hollywood made them up, how could they be real? Impossible.

And some of the movies! They made her family laugh. They made them fall off their chairs laughing. What idiot had done those scripts, what nincompoop had written those books, they asked one another?

Dell had just rented an old video about vampires starring James Woods, one of her favorite actors. Even he could not make the inane dialogue come out as real—and if he couldn't, no one could. It was that bad. In the movie it was all the Catholic Church's fault there were vampires. An exorcism in the 1600s had gone badly. Hah! If only that was what it was. How easily the mistake could have been rectified. Near the end of the movie, with Jimmy Woods ransacking a vampire town with his trusty steel bow-and-arrow contraption, the arrow connected to a steel cord hooked to a Jeep to haul vampires out into the sun to burn, Dell got up and savagely turned off the VCR. This kind of thing made her angry. It made vampires look . . . like . . . animals. Rabid animals that had to be put out of their misery.

She wished that one day she could tell Hollywood how it really was, how difficult it was to maintain a normal existence, how heartbreaking it was to know you were cut off from mankind, how the prospect of living for many lifetimes over drained the soul of pity and hope. Not that they would believe her or that she would ever really want to tell them. No. She would not want Mentor tracking her down, taking her off to some dreary old monastery.

So her friends had their heads full of stupid movie ideas of what vampires should be and would never be looking for someone like her anyway. There was no reason for her closest friends to even have the thought that she was something other than human.

It would be the same as believing she was an alien from outer space, hatched from an egg.

Unless she did something really stupid, no one would ever know.

Then again, if she didn't learn how to breathe properly, she was going to be in one hell of a lot of trouble, she thought, realizing she hadn't taken a breath in minutes.

She sucked in air and let it out as she walked the house, room to room. If she ran, she would have to exert her will and pretend she was breathless. If someone were to accidentally knock her down or if she fell—which she supposed she probably wouldn't, ever again, unless it was to fool someone, she would have to pretend she'd lost her breath. She must recall how she'd breathed naturally for seventeen years, unconsciously, and get into the habit of it all over again.

On the second day she thought she had mastered breathing so that it came more naturally to her. It was funny how the air tasted. It was as if the little sacs in her lungs had taste buds and relayed them to her brain, the same as her tongue did. The air in the living room sometimes recalled the taste and scent of popcorn left over from human guests. Sometimes it tasted of the tweed fabric on the sofas and sometimes it just seemed it was a room full of dust despite the fact that her mother was a neat housekeeper. The air in her bedroom was made up of distinct scents of lipstick and foundation powder and deodorant and peach toilet water. The bathroom—she tried to stay out of the bathroom. It tasted downright foul, with old, stale scents coming up from the drains of the tub and sink. Those particular bodily functions had ceased along with the end of her intake of food and drink. Pure blood did not produce waste. The bathrooms now were just places where they bathed and shaved.

On her second day home alone when Eddie got off the school bus, Dell met him at the door. He threw down his schoolbooks on the sofa and made for the kitchen. He never had to study anymore. His memory was phenomenal. All he had to do was glance over pages and they were committed forever to memory. That was a change Dell was looking forward to. Now perhaps she'd truly understand chemistry. She would soon tackle her father's computer, go on the Internet, and study the online encyclopedias. She'd end up acing her tests. She'd have more knowledge than a college grad. She wouldn't even need to go to college, except for the sheepskin she might want to show the world so they'd believe she was educated.

She followed Eddie to the kitchen, watched him take, a bag from the white cardboard box, and loft it higher than his face. He hadn't even said hello to her yet.

"But it's not really food, the blood. It just keeps us vibrant, gives us our energy back. It doesn't even go into our stomachs. And the hunger isn't centered there, is it? It's like . . . all over our bodies . . . or mostly in our brains. Like if our brains had teeth, they would crawl out to search for blood." The thought gave her a shiver. It made her think of zombie movies. More dumb stuff from Hollywood. She rubbed her arms.

"Mmmm."

He finished draining the bag and, with his foot, hit the garbage pail pedal. He dropped the bag inside. They were very careful to double bag their garbage for pickup. They didn't want some garbage man breaking open one of the bags all over the street, strewing dozens of plastic transfusion bags that were slick with rotting blood.