LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) (35 page)

She moved into her own thoughts and began to probe her body. She let her consciousness move from her mind to her chest and then lower, to her abdomen. She sought out her reproductive organs, ovaries, tubes, and finally, her womb.

She was pregnant! It was unmistakable. Though she did not have monthly periods and therefore never thought about impregnation, it had happened to her. To them. A baby.

A child of their own.

Would it carry her disease and be vampire like her one day? Would it be human like Ryan? Oh, dear God, what had they done? Her mother had told her of a child called a dhampir came from the union of human and vampire. She had said sometimes such a child grew up and turned on its parent. Her world seemed to tumble down around her ankles. They had been so happy, two people with a secret life, living far from the city and the humans. They worked at jobs they liked, kept the little farmhouse secure and snug, went for rides on their horses, studied college subjects together. They'd created a world unto themselves.

After a while they planned to buy a few calves and begin a small herd of cattle. They led such a serene and rich life together. It never occurred to them that they could procreate. Why hadn't she listened to her mother?

A baby. What did it mean? Would it even live? She had to talk to her mother about it again, she had to contact Mentor. She needed advice. Or was it too late?

He turned at the sound of her puzzled voice. "What? Is something wrong?"

He saw it in her face. She could never keep anything from him. "I don't know if ifs wrong or not, but something's changed."

That night they went to bed and held each other. She cried a little and he patted her back. "What will we do?" she asked, despondent.

"I won't have it," he said. "He'll be like me. He'll have a way with horses. He'll love animals and the ranch. He'll grow up and turn this hundred acres into a thousand, build our herd to hundreds. I'll teach him how to work on my old truck to keep it running. He'll be respected and honorable, and he'll be ours."

They laughed and they cried and they held onto one another in the darkness, thinking their own individual thoughts, both afraid as they could be.

~*~

Having gained his heart's desire, Charles Upton reveled in his new life. He had moved his operations to Dallas to be near a supply of blood. However, lately he'd been preying, trying it for the first time when he had been shopping at a downtown jewelry store for a bauble for one of his women. They flocked to him now, the women, despite his age. He was rich, and becoming vampire had done away with all the terrible symptoms of porphyria. His skin was smooth, his eyesight sharp, and his mind as brilliant as it had been when he was a young man.

He had been in the store, looking over a velvet tray of diamond bracelets when the manager came from the back to help the clerk with Upton's purchases. The manager was in his twenties, well-muscled, with a full head of thick, shining brown hair. Upton felt a hunger for him suddenly. He felt his fangs growing and determinedly retracted them before anyone could see.

He paid for the bracelet, a gaudy, much too expensive five-carat tennis bracelet, tucked the box into his coat pocket and left the store. But he did not go far. He told George to leave, take the car home. He'd be along shortly. He had no need of the car and only used it for trips that entailed being seen by humans.

He would not be seen doing what he wanted to do now. It was dark, the store about to close. He waited patiently for the employees to drift out the door and leave. He stood at the end of the building, hiding behind the corner, watching and scheming. When the last of the employees had gone, Upton returned to the store and knocked gently at the glass with his knuckles.

The manager looked up from an accountant's book spread out on the counter and, seeing him, smiled. He came to the door and said, "We're closed, I'm sorry."

Upton said in his most polite voice, "I know, I hate to bother you. I just have one question about the guarantee on the bracelet."

The manager's smile dissipated, but he took a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. "Come in, I'll be happy to help."

The moment he turned his back, Upton flew through the air and knocked the camera to smithereens from a corner of the room. Then he turned, snarling at the shopkeeper. "Come to me," he said. "Come give yourself."

The killing was not swift or neat. Upton had never killed before and had no practice at it. He made a bloody mess of the man before dropping him to the carpeted floor and stepping back, satiated.

For a brief moment Upton panicked. If he were caught in the store with the dead man, it would be found out he was not human. He also had to find the video made by the camera he'd destroyed. He hurried to a back room and found the machine, crashing a fist through it. Back in the store, he flung open the glass front door and ran. When he reached the next building and found an alley, he lifted into the sky and flew to his home.

George saw the blood covering his face and shirt when he entered. He did not flinch. George was paid more than any corporate executive to be discreet and to keep his mouth shut. He said simply, "How can I help you, sir?"

Upton waved him away and washed in the guest bath on the first floor. Spasms coursed through his body, causing him to tremble. These lasted for an hour after the kill. He was as elated as he had been when he first looked in a mirror and saw that the ravages of his disease had vanished.

This was the true joy of being immortal and vampire. No one had told him how exquisite warm, fresh blood could be. They had failed to instruct him in making clean kills, assuming he would always buy their plasma bags, but he thought that occasionally he would take a human. Maybe more than occasionally. He felt more powerful than ever. He was indomitable.

He could be king.

The phrase slipped into his mind and stayed. He could be king. He was already higher than any man. If he wanted, he could rule over the vampires, take over Ross' control, do away with Mentor, and lead the rest into the future as they did his bidding. Why shouldn't he?

He stripped off his clothes, throwing the boxed diamond bracelet onto the top of his dresser. One of his women was coming over tonight. This was her gift. She'd do anything for diamonds.

Upton stood naked before a full-length mirror and felt both love and loathing for his body. It was hard and strong. His teeth were his own and were white as bone. But it was his skin, the unblemished skin, that sent him into ecstasy. God, he had yearned for years to be free of the sores. But his body was old, so old. He was skinny-legged and his buttocks drooped. His face was wrinkled and he hadn't much hair left, the remaining sprigs a shade of yellowing white.

He wondered if he would be trapped in this old body forever. He got women because he was rich and because he could use his power to lure them. He could make them believe he was handsomer than he was.

Why were there so many drawbacks to his new immortality?

As he showered, he pondered the question of his aging form and what he might do about it. Surely there was a solution. Look at Ross, he was a beautiful immortal. He didn't walk around in an aging body, trapped within it. He'd have to ask Ross what he might do about his age, find out if it could be reversed or something.

As he dried off, he relived the murder of the jewelry store manager, losing himself in how wondrously exhilarating it had felt to drink the man's blood.

When the woman arrived and George showed her to Upton's bedroom, he handed her the box. He listened while she gushed over the beauty of the bracelet, but all he could think about was sinking his fangs into her beautiful, swanlike throat.

He made up his mind. Before she was able to leave tonight after their lovemaking, he would kill her.

~*~

Charles Upton was totally out of hand. He had sold out his business and the twin-tower building he owned in Houston and moved his operations to Dallas in order to be in the midst of his kind. He was no longer ill, but strong and growing braver and more wicked each day. "Nothing and no one can stop me," he was heard to say often when thwarted in business affairs. "Either get out of my way or I roll over you."

He wanted the Strand-Catel operation, and he wanted to ease Ross out of his position. He had not done one thing to increase Ross' power. He'd reneged on his deal, forgetting what he owed his maker. In fact, Upton took it upon himself to announce he was the only Predator with the business acumen to bring all the clans together and help them infiltrate and gain control over industry in the Southwest. Then they'd move out to the West, the North, and the East. His plan was national and in years to come would evolve into international.

"We don't live in the dark anymore," Upton proclaimed to anyone who would listen. "It's time we came out into the light and made this world our world. For those of us who don't have the guts for it, the Cravens, and the weak beasts—they need to be cut off from the tree."

"Although I agree with Upton in principles—I've been saying the same thing for years—he's a megalomaniac," Ross said. "And I'm here to tell you he needs putting down."

"I don't know why I keep listening to you," Ross said. "I wish you'd just take him out and let me help you bum him."

"We won't do that unless we have to," Mentor said.

He walked with Mentor through Bette Kinyo's neighborhood. It was twilight, and children were being called indoors. As the lights came on and the cars turned into the driveways, they passed by Bette's house. "Here, for instance," Ross said, pointing at the front door. "So far she's kept her promise, but she's human, Mentor. She's prey to vanity and ambition, morals and laws. I don't trust her."

"She's never brought us harm. You must never come here without me." As they walked by, Mentor glanced longingly at the house.

Ross flung his head and his long hair fell back on his neck. "I don't know how we've kept things going here the way you let everyone do as he pleases. Upton's going crazy, just crazier every day. That woman in there and her man, they could bring us down anytime they feel like it. And Dell. Running off with that boy, turning her back on the rest of us, breaking every code we ever taught her."

"You're intolerant, Ross. It must make your life miserable to see so many things you want to put to rights and they're all out of your reach. Dell's doing fine. She's gone away on her own and living the life she was meant to live."

"I don't think she should have done it. And none of these people are out of my reach, Mentor. You know better than that."

It was true things had changed, but they always did. It was the only certainty, Mentor realized. The world turned and change came and they adjusted. He had no worries about Bette or Alan, but he did keep a mental watch on Dell and he was in constant surveillance of Charles Upton.

Though he knew Dell was pregnant, which presented a whole new set of problems, it was Upton he must do something about right now. Immediately. He was one of the most powerful Predators who had ever been made since Ross, perhaps since Mentor himself, and that made him a great danger. Mentor was going to have to go to him, to reason with him. If it didn't work . . .

"It won't," Ross said, reading Mentor's thoughts. "He has to be put down."

"All you ever want to do is kill."

Ross stepped close to a hedge growing at sidewalk's edge, reached down quickly, and came up with a silky, long-haired white cat. It spit and clawed at him, instinctively knowing it had been trapped and now was prey. “I don't kill for fun," Ross said, slipping one hand around the cat's head to break its neck. "Just for the blood of it."

Mentor reached out and held Ross' wrist. "Let it go. You're just testing me. It's tiresome."

Ross looked him in the eye and loosened his fist. The cat fell to its feet and scampered away like a flash of silver in the darkness. "You're no fun at all. You're the prissiest Predator who was ever made."

Mentor laughed, his laughter booming out from deep in his chest, and it made him feel almost human. "Prissy, am I?" He laughed more, laughed so hard it brought a smile to Ross' full, red lips.

"And not only that, but you're old and incredibly wrinkled and look like a sack of bones. When are you going to drop that suit of flesh and get one that won't scare birds from the trees?"