SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (58 page)

His mother had approached him and touched his shoulder. He turned to her, his eyes blank and cold. He had killed, and it wasn't as traumatic as he'd thought it might be. He just felt empty, his emotions as quiet and removed as distant galaxies in the sky.

"You did fine. And tonight, too," Dell said. "But what if Balthazar sends more? Three, six, a dozen at once? You'll need me."

"I'll find a way to survive," he said. "Maybe I'll stop waiting for them and go to the source."

"No!" Her eyes widened, showing fear. "I mean, no, please, listen to me. You can't think of doing that, Malachi. Balthazar isn't at all like these . . . these things he's been sending to us. He's . . . he's . . ."

"I don't care, Mom. If this doesn't stop, I won't have any choice."

"Never do that without calling for me," she said, taking him by his arm. "Do you hear me? Never attempt something like that alone."

"All right."

"Promise me."

He promised. That night while his parents slept and he kept vigil in the living room he struggled to write a goodbye note. His mother knew as well as he did that he had to go. He had to lead the enemies away from his home, away from his father.

They wanted him, Malachi. They cared nothing for his parents. He'd lead them far away from the ranch, and he'd battle on alone. His mother had taught him many things over the past weeks. How to fight. How to move and feint. How to appear and disappear with rapid movement, creating confusion. And how to fight to the death, shutting out everything in the world but surviving the dance.

He didn't intend to die for a very long time. Once Mentor had told him that he would be as strong as any Predator one day. This was that day. He could take care of himself.

He would settle this eventually and return to enroll in college. He would propose to Danielle and marry her. He would have a normal life, just like anyone else. All he had to do was rid himself of this specter who had haunted him for too many years.

He stared at the blank page. He hardly knew what to say. He didn't yet know where he was going, except he must go far away. He would miss his parents, but he couldn't write that. He loved them more than anything, but he didn't know how to say it. He was sorry his mother was a vampire and he had inherited vampiric abilities. He wished the world was the way most mortals thought it to be—untouched by the supernatural. He dreaded sleep, his dreams stalked by Balthazar in the guise of a wolf. He wanted only peace, and yet he must employ violence.

Finally, he wrote none of what was in his heart, but just told them not to worry. He would be back one day. It wouldn't take long. He or Mentor or someone would make Balthazar stop this insanity.

He folded the paper into thirds and propped it on the dining room table. He bent to take up a small airline bag with his clothes in it. He had savings in the bank to draw upon, so he would be fine out in the world on his own. Since he was twelve, he'd raised calves for sale through a local 4-H program, all the profits going into his own account for college. It wouldn't take much to keep him while he worked out this problem.

He looked around the darkened house once more before turning for the front door. He had already called Danielle and tried to explain his leaving without alarming her.

"I'll wait," she said. "No matter how long it takes."

"I'll be back," he promised, whispering into the phone. "Just as soon as I can. I wish I could tell you what this is about, but I can't. One day, maybe . . ."

"Don't worry," she said. "Do you hear me, Malachi? Don't worry about me."

"Danielle?"

"Yes?"

"I love you, honey."

He didn't know about destiny. He didn't know anything for sure, not even if he'd be the victor against Balthazar's assaults. But he was willing to try. He had to try.

At the door he thought he felt his mother's intelligence gently reaching out to touch him, like a finger at his back. She did that at night sometimes, making sure he was safe. He did not turn or respond in any way to her probe. He would not be stopped.

He turned the knob and let himself out into the cool night. He kept still, taking in all the scents that reminded him of home. He would take these smells and this place with him in his heart until he could return to it. He could detect the horse manure in the riding path, hay bales in the barn made from rich Texas coastal grass, and oiled tack from the horse stalls. He could smell the midnight sweetness of the red-and-yellow trumpet flowers his mother called four o'clocks. Where they grew up a trellis near the house, intertwining vines with flashes of color, he could smell white roses with their hint of clove and red damask roses with their perfume of honey. He could smell cedar and hackberry, daylilies and blackberry flowers and yellow jasmine. In the distance he could see the leaning shadows of the split rail fence, the pale winding road that cut across the pastures to the back woods, the shiny metal cattle guard gate that met the highway.

This was his place, his Shangri-La. And he would return to it.

He stepped off the porch and turned away from the ranchland that was the only home he'd ever known. There was no point in lingering. He might change his mind. And he couldn't change his mind.

He meant to take a bus to Austin. From there, he didn't quite know what direction to head. Maybe West Texas, somewhere into those open dusty plains so reminiscent of the moon-washed landscapes of his dreams, there to meet the wolf. For he knew eventually Balthazar would tire of sending poor assassins and come himself.

Malachi must be ready to battle alone.

3

Balthazar chose the black volcanic island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands as his home. It appealed to him because of its isolation, of course, but more so because of the four-mile deep caverns which bored down through the island. Lanzarote, covered with volcanic ash for centuries, was inhabited by descendants of a tribe called Guanche, who had come to the island in the fifteenth century. Since then Spain had owned the island, but the natives remained, intermarried with the Spanish invaders, and now hardly remembered their ancestors. Just eighty miles across the sea lay the African coast, but the sudden blasts of winds which swept Lanzarote came not from that emerald continent, but rather from the chain of islands called the Azores.

Three hundred volcanoes, the Mountains of Fire, had created Lanzarote, but now they'd been dormant for a century. The climate was so dry the people had to dig pits in the volcanic ash in order to grow grapevines. During the night they covered the depressions with plastic that helped condense the night air into precious droplets of water to feed the vines. From the grapes, the people made and exported wines that were as fragrant and full-flavored as any Parisian spirit.

The tunneling caverns had been made by volcanic action over many hundreds of years. Deep in the earth the caverns developed sheer drops and gaping chasms. In a few places there were small openings to the sky and in other places the darkness was deep enough that it spooked mortals so much they kept away.

They called the caves the Cueva Verdes, the Caves of the Green Man. The few tourists who visited Lanzarote were taken on brief camel rides lasting but fifteen minutes, and they were shown the white-washed buildings in the town, none of them more than four stories high. Most tourists left unimpressed and more than slightly depressed from spending time on such a black, infertile island where nothing flourished and the Azores' wind swept down with such suddenness it would snatch hats and glasses off the head.

Balthazar had lived in the very bottom of the Cueva Verdes for nearly a hundred years. At first he lived alone, creating a bone palace in the wide earthy depression he found. Taking victims not only from Lanzarote, but from the other Canary Islands, he would let the carcasses molder and decay, waiting for the death beetles to finish their grisly work of stripping the flesh from the bones. Once the skeletons were as clean as fine, spotless china, he fashioned chairs, a bed, sofas, and tables from the bones. He used the skulls, sitting upside down, to hold thick candles so that light poured from the empty sockets and gaping mouths. He was perfectly at home in his macabre palace, until his mind began to slip and betray him. It happened slowly, so slowly he hardly knew he was growing demented.

Mentor had come to this place once, seeking him out, sensing his mental health teetered toward madness. Mentor counseled him to leave his bone palace and come up from the caves into the light of the world. Ross would put him to work in the States. He could find a society of Predators who would take him in and keep him company.

Balthazar laughed and laughed, his maniacal laughter ringing over the domed roof of his cave. "What work would I care to do?" he asked. "Why would I want to subject myself to Ross, who cares about nothing but money and acquiring wealth and earthly goods? What use do I have for fine palaces and expensive baubles when I have this?" He then swept his arm around the room of skeletons and smiled broadly. He said, "What would I do with the company of other Predators?"

"These skeletons are . . ."

"They're what?" Balthazar asked. "Evidence of my misdeeds? And I suppose you never killed a single soul. You never drank the blood of an innocent. You, a Predator, never preyed."

He sent Mentor away, holding more critical comment from his acid tongue. He could have berated the old vampire in an even meaner way if he'd let himself go. Afterward he sat in a bone chair that resembled a throne, rubbing his palms along the smooth thigh bones that made up the chair arms. He was meant to be alone, hidden miles underground, didn't Mentor understand that?

These bones that made up his furniture held the memories of his hunts. They were the repositories of the mortal souls that had once animated the living forms. The thigh bones he caressed had belonged to a statuesque woman from the African coast who had thought herself immune to aging and to death. Like most mortals, she believed she would live forever in her large house with her fine silks and abundant food and servants who were at her beck and call. When he'd taken her, she had fought like a wildcat, clawing at his face and neck with long nails, shredding his skin with her hands. He could still recall the taste of her blood, the taste of her fear as she fought and died.

He had made a mausoleum of the dead to always remind him of his place in the natural world. He was meant to kill. His role was to take life without compunction, without remorse, and he loved murder. He loved the stealthy hunt where he stalked his victims. He loved the surprise in their eyes, the taste of despair in their souls when they accepted their doom at his hands.

If that meant his mind was warped beyond repair, fine. Fine!

But then things got worse, and he finally realized Mentor had seen in him something more than murder.

Many Predators walked alone, taking blood from mortals at will, keeping apart from the clans. They weren't bothered unless they got very sloppy, the bloodletting so out of hand the police grew suspicious. Then they risked not only a visit from Mentor or another leader like him, but a visit from a whole gang of Predators who gave an ultimatum. Cease and desist or we'll send you into the wind from fire, they would threaten. We will not be found out, they said, because of your reckless thirst.

So it was not Balthazar's murders that pointed toward madness. He was not taking too many mortals or taking them too young. He was not leading authorities to search for a beast who tore the throat and drained the blood. He was a careful hunter, arranging his victims in a way that made men think they died natural deaths, prompting no autopsy. Even their puncture wounds were carefully healed over before Balthazar left them. It was not the victims, then, that Mentor and the others worried about.

It was his complete and utter separation from his kind. His solitude.

It was his cavern full of carefully styled bone furniture that flickered in the shadows of candlelight.

It was his obsessions with Malachi Major.

The isolation and the bones did not especially disturb Balthazar. Of course not. Or why would he make the Cueva Verdes his home? The vampire nations knew he was eccentric, so what? He was not like them. Who cared?

But when he began to believe he'd found the dhampir who would eradicate his kind and when, as the years passed, he grew into the firm conviction that his very future depended on killing that dhampir, he knew vampires like Mentor would think him truly out of his mind. They might try to stop him.

Why was he so convinced he had found the one dhampir who had been prophesied as the leader who would hunt the Predators? Because he had been graced with a vision.

It had come to him almost twenty years ago. On a winter night he lay in his bed fashioned from bones. The Azores' wind whistled around the mountains of Lanzarote, the openings into the caves singing with deep tones as that wind drove across the mountaintops. Balthazar dozed, reality fading in and out as he flirted with sleep. He was convinced the vision appeared when he was awake, but even if he'd fallen asleep, he believed the vision was prophetic.

His consciousness hovered above a city. The people on the ground in the streets ran around wildly, screaming. Vampires fought one another while humans fled the scenes of carnage, their minds incapable of witnessing the supernatural. Peering closer, Balthazar saw Malachi, the dhampir, at the head of a gang of vampires who were Naturals. He led a rebellion. One by one they sought out and found the Predators, setting them afire with torches. Burning Predators twirled like dervishes, screaming in agony. Balthazar knew the killers were Naturals and the victims Predators because the vision told him. The vision said to his mind, A war. He leads them. Naturals are murdering Predators.

In an incredibly old scroll found in a crumbling Belgium castle, it was written that a dhampir would be born who would change the world of the vampire. Studied by vampire scholars of the region, the scroll was determined to have been written by a seer of the Predator nations living in 900 AD. A ripple of unease went throughout the world, and vampires everywhere spoke of the scroll and the prophecy.