LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) (14 page)

"Hello, Alan. You know the last convention I attended was with you in Austin. Listen, I called to check out something." She sounded pensive.

"Okay, shoot. I'm hurt you're not calling to ask me out, but shoot anyway." He smiled into the phone. Why had he let this woman get away from him? She was smart, hell, brilliant in her field. And he loved her small face with the dark Oriental sparkling eyes. At every convention they attended, usually at least twice a year, they took a room together in the hotel and renewed their affair. When the convention ended, they went their separate ways, back to Dallas and to Houston, with phone calls their only contact. It was a strange system for sometime lovers, though he had to admit she brightened his life considerably when he was around her periodically.

"Alan, you know I have a record of all the blood supplies in the city, right?"

"Sure." What could this be about, he wondered?

"Well, for some months I've been concerned. One of the banks, the Strand-Catel, has been low on blood about once a month for as far back as I've been testing. I just never noticed it before."

"Low?" His brow furrowed.

"Not dangerously low, I mean they can supply the hospitals if they have to, but I began to notice huge shipments from Strand-Catel going out of the city. They're shipped to Houston, El Paso, San Antonio, even down to Del Rio."

"Well, unless those cities have emergencies. You know, hurricanes, a deadly virus outbreak like e Coli, or major highway accidents."

"Well, I haven't noticed Houston needing any extra blood."

"That's just it, Alan. There haven't been any emergencies needing supplies for the people who live there. I just don't get it."

It was then that the light bulb went off in Alan's head. He shook himself mentally, trying to rid his mind of the nonsense. Blood. Vampires. Missing blood, blood shipped out of a central location to cities that were not in need. Unless . . . But that was fantasy.

"Would you do that for me? I just can't figure out what's going on. These shipments go out untested, and that's totally against regulations. I'm hoping the labs in those cities are doing their jobs. It worries me, that's all. I looked up the records after I noticed the pattern and this has been going on for a long time, Alan. A very long time. Years, in fact."

"Any other blood bank doing the same thing?"

"No, just Strand-Catel. That's why I didn't catch on for so long."

"Okay, sure, I'll find out something for you, Bette. I'll do some sleuthing." He knew she could hear the humor in his voice because she laughed. She didn't know he wasn't kidding. His real job now was looking into things that had to do with the use and care of blood.

~*~

In a supply room next to the doctor's lounge where Alan Star was taking his call from Bette, a Natural by the name of Hank sat listening to the conversation. He could hear both parties easily through walls and phone wires. He had accidentally picked up the thought "vampire" from Dr. Star when walking down the hall earlier and had followed him. Doctors did not generally go around thinking about vampires. It intrigued Hank enough that he stuck near Star most of the day. Every now and then he tried to carefully tiptoe into the doctor's thoughts, hoping to find out more details.

Now he heard the woman share her suspicions about Strand-Catel. Hank would have to alert Ross, the Dallas Predator who owned that particular blood bank.

Leigh, a female lab research assistant and also a Natural, spoke aloud. "This could interfere with our research."

Hank knew that. It was an ominous turn of events, certainly. "Nothing's going to stop us," he said, trying to sound confident. Early on, Ross, the Predator with the most power in the Southwest, had tried to stop them from getting into research. If there was a cure found, he'd be out of business. He didn't like any one of the Naturals thinking they might one day do something about the disease. If the Naturals stopped needing blood to survive, there went Ross' control right out the front door.

Hank didn't like Ross worth a damn. He might have gone to war with him had it not been for Mentor's plea for peace among the clans. If truth were told, Hank relished the thought he was going to be the one to tell Ross of the Dallas investigation by Kinyo. He'd love to hear him roar, that's what he'd really love.

Hank, Leigh, and another Natural, Dr. Shamoi, a molecular scientist and world-famous hematologist, had been medical researchers for many years, looking for a cure for the disease that turned them into vampires. They'd gone along quite well in the hospital system that employed Dr. Star. Often left to their own devices, they spent every spare moment delving into the molecular level of blood, trying to discover just what it was that changed porphyria from a human killer into a mutated disease that had afflicted their clans ever since 2000 B.C. If they could find the trigger mechanism, perhaps they could cure themselves—or at least offer the cure to those who wanted it. Some of them, Hank reflected, would never want to give up the supernatural life. More power to them, that was his position. But for the rest of them, like himself, who longed for a normal life again, a cure would be a glorious discovery.

Leigh, looking relieved, left the stuffy supply room for the lab. Hank leaned against the shelves and closed his eyes. Tonight after his shift he'd call Ross, and Mentor, too. No point in sending out a telepathic alarm at this point. He'd only get everyone riled up and have them descending on his hospital, further delaying important work.

And who, he wondered, was Upton? He had no first name, no other clue to the fellow's existence. All he knew from the tidbits he'd gleaned from Star's brain was that Upton had employed him. Christ, he thought, if it isn't one thing, it's ten dozen more.

11

Once Mentor let Dolan go, the house settled into a slow, numbing buzz of lethargy. There were always the unseen life-forms in a house. Cockroaches, spiders, silverfish, scorpions, flies, beetles, termites, mosquitoes. All of them flying just at the edge of the house seeking entry or crawling around inside or beneath it. Mentor counted these unseen creatures as his friends. They shut out the larger noises that filtered in through the walls from outside. If he let them, the sounds—of their little tapping feet, their wriggling antennae, the crackling of the beetles' hard shells—focused him in a way silence could never do.

"Not after this, Dolan, no. If after these days on your own in my basement, where you were alone with your own conscience, you decide you can't go on, well . . . I won't interfere a second time."

"I don't think I want to answer that question." Mentor spoke gruffly, hoping to spirit the old vampire out of his house and be done with him. He would not speak of whatever guilt he took upon himself. Not with Dolan. Not with anyone.

"All right," Dolan said, moving swiftly past Mentor and out onto the walkway. High above, the moon shone clearly, and there was not a cloud in the night sky. "I'm going back to my other prison now."

“God speed,” Mentor said, waving a little and beginning to shut the door. He already had turned his attention to the small life evident in the wall just behind him where he heard the scurrying of the tiniest feet. He must concentrate on the sounds so that they would blot out the world. He did not want to think about losing Dolan to despair, did not wish to remember the Craven house he'd taken him from where creatures almost too weak to maintain life lay about like sick dogs. There was only so much Mentor thought he could take, and when he reached that limit, he turned inward to survive another night, another day.

An impediment caused the closing door to jam so that Mentor had to shift his attention to it again. Dolan stood there, his hand holding the door. He looked into Mentor's tired eyes.

"I wouldn't have your job for the world. I would rather be a Craven hoping to die than to be you."

And then he was gone, disappearing on the night wind, a transparent shadow rippling past the leafy limbs of a tall mulberry tree planted close to Mentor's house.

Mentor closed the door with a sigh and walked slowly down the hall, an old man returning to his solitude. He felt no physical fatigue, no pain or ache, and was often completely out of touch with the process that ran the old shell that he inhabited. He was simply tired from living the life Dolan correctly recognized as a royal and total pain. How many times had he embraced a despair deeper than any Dolan had ever experienced and yet gone on? Sometimes he wanted to say to those like Dolan who would take matters into their own hands, "You spineless coward." He wanted to say, "You thought being a vampire would release you from all earthly care. You believed eternal life would be like a picnic, a holiday spree. Who gave you the idea that life, in any form, human or vampire, would be without pain and strange, unimaginable horror?"

Oh, he could not teach them anything. He thought about the uselessness of his mission some nights when he was alone, barring the transmission of the calls for help that came through the air like demented radio signals. He could not really teach them how to live. He provided stopgaps in their plans. He talked them out of mistakes. He took young ones, like Dell, and he hoped to see her prosper in her new incarnation, at least for a few years. Eventually, all of them knew despair like an old friend draped over their shoulders, a shroud to warm them. Eventually, they realized their lives were but magnified human lifetimes, lived over and over and over again, with so little changing along the way.

It was less a humanitarian urge than it was for his own sake that Mentor did what he could to guide and to save his kind from total destruction. Once they had lived as long as he, if they ever did, then they would know the ultimate truth. Hope was something you manufactured out of thin air. Not just when you were down and out, when you were depressed and hopeless, but every day, every single minute of every spin of the Earth around the sun.

Dolan was right to realize he was better off as he was than to have to walk down Mentor's path. Dolan was one of the intuitive ones. Dolan was no fool.

And that lifted Mentor's mood the smallest fraction. He had at least not wasted his time with the other vampire. He had been dealing with someone more enlightened than he'd imagined.

Mentor left the lights off and sat on the sofa next to the darkened fireplace. He would shut out the calls for help for just a little while. Ross, the leader of the Predators was coming to him tonight. It would be late, after midnight, when the city slumbered.

Mentor needed his strength for the meeting. He never dealt with a Predator without being at the top of his mark. After all, he had been one. He knew the latent danger inherent in the species. He must reach down and bring up his own power. Any weakness he might show could spell disaster. A Predator would prey, even on his own kind, if he sensed weakness.

He closed his eyes, laid back his head, and listened to the tiny creatures rustling all through, beneath, and just outside of his house. How he loved them.

~*~

Ross, he called himself, having taken a new name for each new body he migrated into. He was the leader of a Predator band that owned and ran the Strand-Catel Blood Bank in downtown Dallas. Because he and his kind did not, for the most part, care to walk free in the sunlight, they had hired enough underlings to keep the bank open and going in the day, while at night the real work was done by Ross' sect.

Strand-Catel supplied blood to Naturals and Cravens throughout the state of Texas and into New Mexico. They had done so for almost a century, calling their operation by different names over the years. It was made clear early in the eighteenth century, when the Americas were being settled, that their kind could not wantonly murder and prey on humans. Some of them still did, many of them, in fact, though they belonged to other Predator sects. But the majority of the vampire population knew that secrecy was paramount for their survival, and taking too many lives left a trail that would one day lead straight back to them.

Ross had run the blood bank for decades without too many hitches. The bank was his baby, his idea, and was granted autonomous operation from the many sects that occupied the Southwest. Everyone knew Ross. Everyone admired his business sense and how he kept up with the country as it moved and changed.