SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (21 page)

Mentor, hearing Dell's family calling for him, went on a mental search and, after little difficulty, found her outside of the city. She was with the horse her parents had bought as a gift. He must go to her and explain things. Though he understood her need for solitude and the companionship of the new pet, she should not worry her family. He was also concerned about how wild and free she was acting as she rode alone through dark woods. She was giving in to the dangerous part of her vampiric nature.

Once a Natural took to the wild, it was only a matter of time before giving in to the blood call. Even a Natural might take to random kills if she did not stay close to the human community and continue living as she always had. If Dell ever gave in and listened to the call her soul made for abandoning the real world, she would be a renegade and lost to her family forever.

Ross met him at the entrance, swinging wide the twelve-foot-tall, ornately carved door to let him inside. "Did you take care of the woman asking questions about Strand-Catel?" he asked without preamble.

"Yes," Mentor said. "She won't be a bother to you again."

"Good! I was about to take a swim. Care to join me? I have extra trunks."

Mentor was inside before he saw two women sitting side by side on Ross' sofa. He knew from their scent they weren't vampire. Had he not had his mind on Dell, he would have known they were there before Ross admitted him.

The women wore bikini swimsuits and seemed to be in a stupor, their eyes glassy and out of focus, barely registering his presence.

"What are they doing here?"

"Oh, them," Ross said, flicking long delicate fingers in the women's direction. "My dinner companions, that's all." He grinned and Mentor shuddered.

Ross would play with them as if they were puppets and when he tired of their company, he would take them one by one, having his way with their bodies before draining them dry.

"I don't know how you live with yourself," Mentor said, moving again for the door. "I'm leaving now."

"Well, hell, if you weren't going to stay, why didn't you just call?"

"I wanted to walk. I didn't know you wouldn't be alone."

Ross stepped to the door and held it as Mentor exited. "Your sensibilities bore me, Mentor."

"And the lack of yours bores me." Mentor did not turn back as he left the house.

A low growl came from Ross suddenly and Mentor turned back to him. "What is it?"

"Did you bring someone with you?"

"I certainly did not."

Ross swung his head from one side to the other, peering out from beneath a frown. He looked like a buzzard, checking for prey. "Are you sure no one came with you?"

Mentor now looked about too, scanning the property. He sensed a human, but he did not want Ross to know it. He did not want more bloodshed. The two women inside were already doomed. Why give Ross another?

The human was male, a lurker, near the windows. Let Ross take care of that, if it came to it. If he saw something he shouldn't, Ross would know that as well. For right now, Mentor would not divulge the human's whereabouts. "There's no one," he said, lying easily, waving away the idea with a gesture of his hand. "Go back inside."

"Are you sure you won't have a taste of my lovelies before you go? When was the last time you had a warm meal?"

Mentor heard his laugh, and it followed him down the driveway to the highway. If he had his way, all Predators would be wiped from the face of the Earth. They not only preyed on mankind, but they were truly heartless creatures. They were too fully engaged in the world, taking from it all earthly delights and then discarding their dead as if they were refuse for a landfill. They controlled the Naturals by being their only supply of blood, and if given the chance, they would murder every Craven who came near them.

Mentor wondered why God in heaven had ever allowed them to exist, but he wondered, too, why any of them existed and why God had no answer for him. Just as there were criminals and humans without souls walking among the normal population, there were the unholy and despised living alongside the Naturals. There was no good reason for it; it simply was how things were arranged. Mentor felt he would never really understand it all until the day he no longer lived on the planet. Whenever that would be. . . .

Sometimes he worried. He tried to be religious. He tried to believe in a Supreme Being. He hoped God was there, looking down, taking notes on his conduct. He had done evil things, but he'd shown regret and tried to mend his ways. He worried, still. For if there was a God, there might be a Devil, there might be hell.

Waiting for him.

He shrugged off the thoughts, relentless as they were, and turned his attention to the human hiding near Ross' house. He tried to send him a warning, but seemed to be blocked from telepathically reaching the man. The stranger's fear crowded his mind, keeping it locked solidly against outside interference.

So be it. The curious always got what they deserved. The man never should have gone near a vampire's house.

Now he must go to Dell, thirty miles away, and speak to her about the rebelliousness that had overcome her since she had been given the horse. It was not the horse, per se, that had triggered it. She probably would have acted this way no matter what. Many of the young ones made mistakes, unsure of themselves and their powers, confused by their new lives and the changes that were taking place.

He spent half his time trying to teach them control. He could not have them turning out like Ross. There were quite enough unruly, unfeeling vampires in Dallas already.

He was not too far from Ross' house when he gathered himself together and changed so quickly it was like a lamp turned off in a room. One moment he was walking along the side of the road and the next he had vanished. What he had really done was take to the skies with such speed his movement would have blown away a supersonic fighter jet.

~*~

Alan thought he might have made a pretty terrific private investigator. He tailed the bus easily enough, watching for the old man to leave when the doors opened, but once his target was on foot, that was another problem altogether. He parked on a deserted street where small businesses were closed for the night, entrances barred by heavy black iron grilles and metal curtains that rolled down to cover wide windows. Here, roving dogs nested behind trash bins, and people scurried home to be safe from the night. Alan turned off the headlights to sit in the darkened car. His heart beat fast. He felt both scared and elated. He was in a frightening part of town, but he was excited by the hunt.

He watched the old man move deeper and deeper into the lonely darkness that spread out from the edge of the city into fields and pastures and farmlands. Where could he be headed and why?

Alan had to know. He had come this far, following the bus on its circuitous routes through city streets, and now he had to make another decision. Did he leave his car and walk, too, keeping his distance so the other man did not know he was being followed? Or did he give it up as a bad job and drive back to Bette's house?

He looked at his wrist watch. It was almost eight p.m. He had told her he would be back by nine. He had an hour. He might as well finish what he had begun. Besides, he hadn't walked anywhere like this in ages. Except for health-conscious joggers, did anyone walk anywhere anymore, he wondered? Now he wished he'd been more athletic.

He eased out of the car, shutting the door quietly and locking it. One could not leave a thirty-thousand dollar car unlocked in a deserted place like this. It was a poor business district and not much business at that. A few storefronts, some of them with painted signs in the windows announcing they had moved elsewhere. The only working streetlights stood just over where he was parked at the broken concrete curb.

He set off into the dark, wondering why he felt so compelled to act in this manner, and yet unable to stop himself. It was the excitement, he realized. It made him feel so alive.

He could barely see the figure of the old man ahead of him, and that was good. If the man turned, he would have a difficult time detecting that he was being followed. Alan was ready to move off the highway and hide in bushes along the way if he had to.

Only two vehicles had passed them so far, a brown Toyota with a dinged front fender and a pickup truck that spewed black smoke out its tailpipe. Alan gave them a wide berth, afraid he would be seen in their lights as they passed.

After a mile of walking, he was sure the old man was absolutely crazy. There were no houses, no lights, nothing but a few cattle barns and rows of barbed wire fences. Hadn't there been something in the news about some cattle mutilations going on for a while out here? he wondered. Was this the highway where they'd found the cattle lying dead, no footprints or tire tracks around them, and they had been cut, their genitals taken, half their jaws, parts of their stomachs? What was that all about?

Despite the fact he was a medical doctor, he was not a surgeon. He couldn't fathom how anyone without knowledge of animal anatomy could perform such delicate surgery in the middle of an open field. Or why they'd want to. People who perpetuated hoaxes had never made sense to him.

Alan shivered, though the night was warm. He saw some cows in the distance, like black dots at the horizon in the fields behind the fences. God, he was glad he was not a cow. Eating grass and waiting for something to descend upon them to surgically and cleanly remove most of their blood and vitals. Or if not that, the slaughterhouse.

He walked another mile, keeping far back from the old man, always alert and ready to fall down into the high grass of the ditch if he thought the old guy might look behind him. Not far ahead he saw lights illuminating a house. A very large house, tall in the middle and long on both sides. There were small domed pathway lights along a gravel path leading up to the massive doors.

That's where the old man was headed. He was not crazy, he was just being careful. Alan watched him near the house, and then enter it after a moment or two at the door.

Going up the gravel driveway was out of the question. It would be like turning on a foghorn to announce his presence. Instead, Alan walked on the thick lush lawn, now wet with dew, skirting the front and approaching the windows from an oblique angle.

When he got to the wide, leaded-glass picture window on one side of the door, he crept close and peered inside. He saw two women in bathing suits, sitting on a sofa together. They weren't talking. They weren't doing anything, but sitting, looking kind of spaced out. Drugged? He couldn't really tell, but it sure looked that way to him.

To the right of them, he saw the old man talking to a younger man dressed in bathing trunks. There was something about this man that gave Alan the willies. He was handsome and fit, very tall and broad in the shoulders, but there was an unmovable cruel expression on his face that could make you go jelly-kneed. Alan couldn't make out what the two of them were saying.

He looked around and found a thick stand of cypress near the corner of the house, close to the window, and stepped behind them. He was just in time. The door opened again and the old man stepped out. He heard the younger man call to his back, "Are you sure you won't have a taste of my lovelies before you go? When was the last time you had a warm meal?"

Taste of his lovelies? The girls inside? Taste them, as one would a . . . a . . . meal?

Alan cringed, knowing without doubt that the man meant exactly what he said. He wasn't talking about tasting them sexually or he wouldn't have added the stuff about a meal. Jesus, were they cannibals? This was too bizarre for words.

The old man made some reply, then stalked off into the night, back down the road toward Dallas. Alan watched him go and heard the younger man close the door. He stood up, watching and waiting. As he tried to decide when he could leave his cover and follow, he saw the old man disappear into the night. Alan stepped out from behind the cypress trees and took a step forward. He stopped, staring hard at where the old man had been walking, sure he had made a mistake. It was a trick of the night, the lack of light along the highway, the utter isolation of this place. It was because he was tired and felt dumb for playing at detective work. Surely a person could not just vanish.

He began to walk toward the highway, searching everywhere, hoping for a glimpse of the old man. Maybe he had suffered a spell or seizure and fallen down so quickly Alan hadn't seen it happen.

When he neared the spot where he had last seen the man, he looked around on the pavement, in the ditch, even over the fence and into the pastures. The old man had simply vanished, all right. He was nowhere. There were no hills, no obstructions, no place where he could have hidden himself. He was just gone.

Just then Alan heard screams from the house and he turned, hunching his shoulders. He hurried back to the cypress trees near the window. The man inside had drawn the curtains, but Alan could see through a slit into the lighted interior.

The screams were from the women he'd seen on the sofa, and they were unending. The screams rose from the house and into the night like sirens at full blast. Peering through the slit, Alan saw what was occurring, but his mind could not comprehend the scene. He fell back, putting both hands over his eyes, his lips tight and teeth gritted. He lowered his hands to look again.

The man had straddled one of the women, bending her back over an ottoman. He held her arms down with one hand and her head down with the other. She was screaming piteously. The man had torn flesh from her throat with his teeth. A gout of blood gushed from the wound, covering the ottoman and the tiled floor. The man chewed the flesh as one would a mouthful of steak.

The other woman seemed to have come out of the trance she had been in and was standing, screaming, beating at the mart's back with her fists to try to stop him.

As Alan watched, sickened and stupefied, the man whipped around, dropping the wounded woman onto the ottoman where she slipped limply and unconsciously to the floor. He grabbed the other woman who had been fighting against him, bent her over his knees, held one arm against her forehead so as to bare her throat, and then he leaned down and bit at her savagely.