SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (51 page)

Malachi knew many things about the vampires from his mother, but he didn't know if the great vampire in chains from his dream existed or if he was just a fantasy produced by the dream wolf that haunted Malachi's nights. He also didn't understand the connection between the wolf vampire and the renegade on the high cliffs. No matter how he pondered these dreams, knowing they were trying to tell him something, he could not decipher their meaning beyond the distinct feeling they presaged a vampire war.

A week later, at a family gathering for July Fourth, he realized he'd not kept his nightmares secret at all.

Everyone came. At least everyone from the maternal side of his family. They had never thrown the two sides of his family together. He couldn't imagine his father's people standing around waiting for hamburgers from the grill while his mother's people stood nearby, hungering for a glass of blood taken neat.

Great-aunt Celia and her daughter, Carolyn, had come together, holding hands, walking from beneath the shade of the giant oak. Carolyn's husband, Andrew Greer, a lanky computer programmer with a lock of silky blond hair falling over his gold-rimmed glasses, followed just behind. It was known he was not vampire, not part of the clan, but he knew the truth and it made him skittish at these gatherings. Malachi's grandparents were there, holding hands, and smiling contentedly as they sat in the swing. His great grandparents were there, too, bopping a volleyball over a net to one another and laughing. They did not look as old as his own father, for they, like most of his relatives on his mother's side, were vampire and had not aged physically.

Even Uncle Eddie showed up, coming into the back pasture from out of the woods like a wraith, his twelve-year-old body disguising the adult vampire he had become.

Malachi was happy to see him. He hadn't talked with Eddie since he was just a boy himself. On that first meeting he had taken his uncle for a child at first, someone to play ball with. He had run to him, hugging a football to his chest, about to ask this boy to throw it to him. The minute Eddie spoke, however, his voice deep as that of a grown man, Malachi knew he was no child. "I'm like your mom," Eddie said in that surprisingly adult voice. "I'm not human anymore. I'm really in my mid-thirties. Damn shame, isn't it, boy? Give me that ball and run out there and see if you can catch it."

They threw the football back and forth a few minutes and then Eddie said, "Let's go for a walk, kid." They walked off together that first time, away from the family, and Eddie talked about growing up with Malachi's mother, and how they'd all hoped, he and his parents and the entire family, that Dell would never be stricken with the malady that would turn her into vampire. She'd escaped it until she was in high school and they'd all been lulled into believing she'd been spared, like Celia, like Carolyn.

"But few of us are spared," Eddie had said. "I sure wasn't. I changed when I was twelve and left home three years later. I couldn't finish school. I couldn't live in the neighborhood. I had to . . . go off."

"Where did you go?"

"I went to Brazil and stayed for many years."

"Why Brazil?" Malachi asked.

"There were whole gangs of children in the cities living on their own, scrounging through the dumps, living without adults to care for them. I sought their company. I was still a child, but I'd never grow up. No one noticed in Brazil, except the children. And they didn't care. Most of them were feral, more like animals than children, so we had something in common. That, suited me fine for a while because I felt like an animal too. Then I saw how it really was for the gangs. They sniffed bottled glue out of paper bags for cheap highs. They couldn't live in the world, so they sought another, a fantasy one. They grew cold and hard, committing worse crimes than theft to fuel their habits."

"Did you leave them?"

"After a couple of years. I couldn't really find my place. The glue didn't affect me. I couldn't escape what I was and what I faced in the future the way they could. I grew so depressed I went outside of the city and away from humankind. I spent several years in the jungles, living like a lost explorer or a native. Living like Tarzan."

"Tarzan. Ha." Malachi laughed uneasily.

Eddie ignored him. "It was silent. That's what I remember. The silence, broken only intermittently by jungle sound, by bird or frog or the antics of monkeys. It took me some time when I came back to civilization to even speak. I hadn't spoken a word in years."

"What did you do then?" Malachi was fascinated. His mother rarely talked about her brother. He didn't know any of these details of his uncle's life. Being a boy himself at the time, it sounded exciting and adventurous to live in Brazil, to go into the depths of the jungle and live with the wild things. Had he swung from vines and bathed beneath waterfalls? Didn't all boys dream of such heroic adventure?

Eddie continued, "I went back to the city. All the children I'd known before I left had disappeared. They'd died or moved on or were kidnapped or they'd just managed to reach adulthood and were assimilated into the crowds on the streets.

"I wandered South America until I got to Buenos Aires in Argentina. It was different from the other cities. It was clean and prosperous. Urchins didn't pick over dump heaps and I never saw the homeless lying in gutters or doorways. I began to think about living again, like a human. I found a . . . a patron. Or he found me."

Malachi vaguely understood the word. He'd read that word in Dickens, but he wasn't sure the meaning was the same for Uncle Eddie.

His uncle must have read his mind. "A vampire patron," he explained. "I was half starved, having come into the city after traveling. I was skulking in a park, hiding in shadows, when this tall, thin man appeared. He came down a path wearing, of all things, a bowler hat and sporting a cane. I remember sneering at him. Did he think he was in London? Was he lost? And why was he walking this dark path when he could have taken a better lighted one?

"Before I knew it, he'd left the path and he had me by the throat, lifting me straight off my feet. I fought him, but without a prayer. I knew then he was like me. Vampire."

Malachi shivered, imagining being taken off guard and threatened that way in the darkness.

Eddie grinned suddenly. "He knew what I was. He was just teaching me a lesson. He said I was a rat, hiding like that in the shadows. Rats were brainless and not predators at all. They were scavengers, he said. Was I a little scavenger?

"He let me go and made me walk with him all through the park. He made me tell him where I'd come from and what I thought I was doing. That very night he took me in and told me I could stay with him in his villa on a slope above the city. His servants were closemouthed and loyal, they'd never betray us. He had money and interests he could share with me. He could teach me all that I'd missed from my abruptly ended school days. He had a great library, he knew the famous writer, Borges, he could take me to the opera and the museums. He knew painters and artisans. He was a patron of the arts and highly regarded. He had nothing better to do, he said, than to bring me into that rarefied culture where he would make me an educated gentleman." Eddie laughed harshly.

"Is that where you live now? In Buenos Aires?" Malachi asked.

"I live in the house still," Eddie answered slowly. "I no longer live with the patron."

"Why not?"

Eddie grew agitated and stopped walking. They were miles from the house and surrounded by thick woods. "He died."

Malachi was shocked. Vampires did not die. He never heard tell of a dead vampire. It just wasn't possible, was it? The body gave out, he had heard, but not the spirit. It went on, taking another body. "Died?"

"He asked me to kill him." Eddie had been staring at his shoes, a pair of fine leather sandals from Italy. He was dressed in gray slacks and a gray shirt with a pinstripe of red around the edge of the short sleeves. He looked like a miniature man. He glanced at his nephew and saw his consternation.

"Malachi, life is not as easy for the Predators as it is for Naturals, like your mother. If you're a Natural, the way I was, and you go off on your own, away from ready supplies of blood, you sort of . . . revert. You become more Predator than Natural, more vampire than human. That's what happened to me.

"Many Predators do away with themselves. My patron, my . . . teacher . . . admitted he'd taken me in purposefully to train me as his little assassin. I never knew that, of course. If I had, I would have run away from him as fast as I could. He first did all he promised, furthering my education about the world. He introduced me to intelligent people and taught me to hold my own in conversations with them. He made me read most of the books on his library shelves and then questioned me about what I'd read. He had me write essays and put forth opinions, then defend them. Finally, satisfied I knew enough to pass in society as a precocious young man, he showed me all the details of his finances and how he handled money and made it grow for him so that it hardly diminished as he lived on it. When he was sure I would be all right without him, he made me promise I would take his life and release him."

Malachi thought he'd never heard anything so awful. "How could you do it?" he asked.

Eddie grabbed him suddenly by the shoulders. He looked at Malachi face-to-face as they were nearly the same height. Malachi dropped the football he'd been carrying, and it rolled away from them. "Look into my eyes, Malachi. Read what you see there if you want to know the truth."

Malachi tumbled down the corridors of his uncle's wide, fiery eyes. He fell into visions that rushed into him and transported him through time and space. He stood with Eddie in a beautifully appointed room where the only light came from tall mullioned windows open to the breeze. It was night, the air scented with summer blossoms mingled with the exhaust of vehicles on the crowded streets. Neon lights reflected from the shops below, turning the night vivid. Voices and traffic sounds floated from the city three stories below.

An old vampire sat in a high-backed leather chair studded along the wide arms with brass nails. He spoke roughly to Eddie. "Do it! Don't make me get up from this chair and turn the sword on you."

Malachi looked at Eddie and saw he held a long broadsword in his right hand. It hung limply from his hand at his side, the tip almost touching the floor. Light danced from the blade. The hilt was thick and heavily ornamented with scrolls worked in silver. It was a very old sword, possibly ancient. Malachi marveled, having never seen anything like it.

"I don't want to do this," Eddie said. His voice was not that of a grown man yet. It had the high squeaky sound of a frightened youth.

"You have no choice now, Eddie. I will die this night . . . or you will."

"Don't make me do it." There was revulsion and sadness in Eddie's plea.

"Lift it over your head, swing it wide, do not make a mistake!" the old vampire bellowed. "You're not a coward. You are vampire and the recipient of all my knowledge. I've given you everything. In return, I command you to kill me!"

Malachi knew the second the sword began its upward arc, and he turned his head away, turned his body to the side, and refused to watch. If he were in a dream, it was too real to endure. He did not want to see the beheading. He would not watch it. He wanted to go home, find his mother, and bury his head in her lap. He wanted to forget he'd ever talked to Eddie and come to this foreign place of murder and death.

He blinked and felt Eddie's hands fall from his shoulders. He fell to his knees, his eyes tearing. He was back home again, the woods he loved so well all around him. His uncle stood above him, his fangs lowered, his eyes ablaze.

"Dell got off easy," Eddie said. "So did you. Now you know a little of what it is to be trapped in a boy's body and commanded to murder someone you love. I didn't do it because he might have killed me. And he would have, don't mistake it. I did it because he begged me and he wanted it more than he wanted another moment of this life, and because there was no other way. I owed it to him."

Malachi never forgot the scene that had been projected into his mind that day. He understood his uncle's agony and his tenuous hold on his humanity. He realized how different the Predators were from all that he knew. He felt a fear of them he had never felt for his mother or her vampire family before this.

He knew murder. Sacrifice. The depth of despair. The loneliness of separation.

On this July Fourth gathering, Malachi went across the pasture to meet his uncle, remembering the day of the confession in the woods. He hadn't seen Eddie in over a year and hadn't really expected him to come today. Eddie looked the same, of course. Boy size. Fragile wrists at the end of long arms. A thin, freckled neck. Ears too large for his head. But in his eyes resided boundless experiences and more knowledge than Malachi at eighteen could imagine.

Eddie smiled, taking Malachi's hand to shake. "You've grown into a big man," Eddie said. "Are you a linebacker?"

Malachi laughed and fell into step beside him. "I played running back."

"Bet you bowled the opposition over. Going to college now?"

Malachi sobered. "Oh, I don't know. I mean, yeah, I guess. I just don't . . ."

"Knowledge is power, Malachi. Get all of it you can get. That wolf in your dreams? You can keep him at bay with knowledge."

Malachi turned to him in surprise. "You know about that? The wolf?"

"We all do. Dell told us. We keep a watchful eye on you, didn't you know?" He paused and then said, "No, I guess you didn't."

So they all knew. For how long? Why hadn't his mother told him?

"How long have you known?"

"Since you were a toddler."

"What? Oh, man."

"You had these nightmares when you were very small. I don't know if you remember. Your mother contacted the dream walker and found out his name. She made a deal with him. But she didn't trust he'd keep it. She made sure all of us knew of him and his threats. Even from Buenos Aires I've kept in touch with your mother, just to see how you were doing. I even know about that time when you were nine or so and Balthazar lured you from you bed into the woods."