SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (65 page)

Mentor turned and came to him. "I came as quickly as I could," he said. "I'm afraid it wasn't quick enough." He lifted a sheet from the unmade empty bed and walked over to the girl on the floor. The sheet billowed out and floated down to cover her. "We knew you could handle the others. We tried to get in here before the children were taken."

"Oh, God." Malachi hung his head, his heart breaking inside him. He moved to the bedside where Jeremy lay. "Is he . . . ?"

"No, he's not dead," Ross said quietly. "We interrupted the attack. He's in the dream of the red moon."

Malachi sank onto the bedside. He took the boy's limp hand. There were sores on his bare arms and face. He'd been bitten by one of the vampires, but not killed. He'd been infected.

"Oh, no." Malachi knew what it meant to die to the world and enter the dream Ross spoke of. His mother had told him about it. How the soul chose there what sort of vampire he or she would come back as. Jeremy would be vampire. Jeremy would live again eternally. He'd be destined to walk in his nine-year-old child body for a hundred years, trapped in childhood though his mind would mature into an adult's.

"There's nothing to be done about it now," Mentor said, as if listening to Malachi's thoughts. "I'll try to help him."

Ross moved and Mentor knelt by the bed, taking the boy's dead face in his hands. While Ross and Malachi looked on, Mentor closed his eyes and mentally entered the death world with the child, hoping to guide him.

~*~

Malachi tied his bag onto the back of the motorcycle. It was morning, the sun only just risen. Jeremy stood at his back, waiting. He was still barefoot and dressed in overalls, but he no longer looked like the innocent child he had once been. His face was as white as cooked rice, the eyes too intense and otherworldly to be human. When his lips twitched, as they did constantly now, his small fangs showed. Despite Mentor's advice and guidance during the dream of the red moon, he had chosen to be a Predator. Mentor said he'd been so full of the loss of his sister and grandfather that he'd been incapable of choosing otherwise. He'd been motherless and fatherless, and now had lost the only two people left in the world who had ever loved him. Knowing how alone he was, he had moved toward the Giant Predator Maker with sure resolve, inviting the immortal change that would give him the most power.

"I want to be like them," he had told Mentor in the death dream. "Like the ones who came to the store. I want to be exactly like them. I don't want to live as human anymore. I want to hunt and to fight. I want to kill."

He would soon possess more powers than Malachi, such as the power to change form and to fly. He would learn more as he lived the life and perfected the supernatural arts granted him.

"Where will we go?" he asked now, watching Malachi secure his belongings in the saddlebag on the motorcycle.

Malachi paused and looked at the far dry mountains of West Texas. "I don't know," he said. "Anywhere but here." They would wander. Stay on the move. Keep out of cities and away from other people so this would never happen again. He'd left home to save his father and instead had made Jeremy into a victim. He felt so heavy inside, like a bag of rocks was fastened around his heart, weighing it down.

Ross had buried the old man and Dottie. Then he'd disposed of the vampire corpses out on the desert plains. They'd locked the doors of the store, set loose the remaining rattlesnakes, and put the CLOSED sign in the window. They just didn't know what to do with Jeremy.

Malachi had insisted he come with him. He felt responsible for what had happened. If he'd never stopped at the store, never stayed, both children would have been spared. It was all his fault. Who was going to teach Jeremy how to live again? Who cared enough to protect him until he found the right way to exist as vampire? Mentor had too many responsibilities. Ross had no interest in fledgling Predators, especially one who was under four feet tall. So Malachi would take the boy and he would teach him how to survive. No matter how long it took.

"Get on the back," he said once he'd straddled the bike. "Hold me around the waist."

With the boy mounted and his arms encircling him, Malachi rose up on the starter pedal and turned the motor over. He sat down once he had the engine revving and, without giving the bike gas, turned the wheel first one way down the highway and then the other. He turned his head this way and that, trying to decide.

Jeremy let one of his pale hands fall from Malachi's waist and pointed. "That way," he said.

"Okay." Malachi put the bike into gear and let out the clutch. They were headed east again, but he wouldn't go home. He'd go somewhere else.

Somewhere safe.

Somewhere to hide.

BOOK THREE

THE UPRISING

1

Dell sat on the porch thinking of her son. It was Saturday, and Ryan was in the garage tinkering with his old truck. He was unaware of her worries and even if she'd told him, there was nothing he could do to help. As lovable and good as he was, his mortality kept him from being any help when it came to vampire troubles.

Dell tried to keep her mind at home, but Malachi was all she could think about. Mentor had told her what had happened. Now her son was not alone, but had a child in his care. He had no idea what he was doing, it seemed to Dell. Eddie, Dell's brother, had been infected and changed when he was just a child and it had been a sad event for the whole family.

Today Eddie was a wanderer. She might see him once a year, if she were lucky. He couldn't stay home, living as a Natural, and continue going to school while never physically maturing. They'd all known the day was coming when he would go away. It was put off as long as possible, but two years after Dell's marriage to Ryan, Eddie came to her to say good-bye. They had wept together and hugged. He would live a lonely existence, wandering the world, never fitting in anywhere for very long. He had heard of a colony of children, he'd said, living in Brazil. Perhaps he should find them.

"Oh, you don't want to do that," Dell had said. "They hang out on the streets, abandoned, wild. They aren't vampire, Eddie."

"The kids in Brazil are no wilder than they have to be. At least they'll take me in."

The Brazilian band was separated from their families, making one another brothers and sisters, creating their own families. The Brazilian public and the government thought they were scabby little runaways or orphans, sniffing glue and rummaging city dumps for food. No one cared about them. No one knew what to do.

Eddie didn't know what to do, either, unless he kept on the move, all alone, until his body finally gave out and released him so he could take the body of an adult. He didn't want to be so alone, he'd said, for so many long years. He'd rather be with children.

Dell had let him go, standing on the porch, watching him vanish. His molecules danced like a storm of light and then swept upward into the sky until no hint of his existence could be seen. She mourned him for many months, worrying about how he was doing. He would never tell her, she knew. None of the vampire nations liked to admit their youngest members were doomed to live such a hellish nightmare.

Now her son had taken on the burden of watching over a child who would one day have to leave him. She wished Mentor had taken the child away, but he said Malachi wouldn't let him. Her poor son, with his heavy guilt, had insisted the boy go with him. Maybe she should find them and try to protect them both. But then what about her husband? How could she leave the one person she loved with all of her heart? If Balthazar sent more assassins out of revenge, Ryan wouldn't have a chance. They'd kill him, killing her soul. She couldn't leave him and had to hope her son, who had proved so far that he could care for himself, might continue to survive the attacks.

~*~

"Tell me a fairy tale," Jeremy said.

They were camping in a dry gulch off the lost highway. Around them loomed the deep night, the sky overhead shining with an array of stars. Malachi lay on his side on a spread sleeping bag, supporting his head on one arm. A campfire made from fragrant sagebrush and small dry sticks flickered nearby. The smoke spiraled into the sky like deep gray ribbons sailing to heaven.

"I don't know any fairy tales," Malachi said. It was the truth. His parents had never told him stories, and the books they read to him were about cars or trucks or farming. It seemed his childhood had been so immersed with nightmare and dream that fictional tales weren't needed. He didn't even know if his mother knew any fairy tales.

"You don't know any?" Jeremy asked.

"Afraid not."

Jeremy sat cross-legged before the fire, staring into the flames. "I can tell you one, then."

"All right."

"There were two little kids who lived in the woods," Jeremy began. "They were named Hansel and Gretel. There was also a mean old witch who lived in the woods . . ."

Malachi listened to the child's tale and realized it was similar to what had happened to Dottie and Jeremy. Two children, a boy and a girl, menaced by something evil. When the boy finished, Malachi sat up and poked at the fire with a stick until sparks flew skyward. He wondered why anyone would tell a child such a terrible story.

"That's pretty awful," he said, adding more brush to the fire.

"Not so bad. It's just a pretend story."

"Yes, I suppose so." He wasn't going to ask for another fairy tale. He didn't think he liked them.

After a companionable silence, Malachi said, "Are you hungry?"

"Very. Really really hungry. My stomach hurts."

Malachi nodded, knowing it wasn't really the child's stomach that was involved. His whole being was deprived of sustenance. Soon he'd be moaning, unable to go on, starving for blood.

Malachi stood from the campfire and said, "I'll be back in a few minutes. Stay right here and you'll be all right.”

“Where are you going?"

"To find gingerbread and gumdrops."

Jeremy smiled and his fangs showed. "Okay."

It took under fifteen minutes. Ever since he was small, Malachi had been a superb hunter. He could smell the prey before he saw it. He could sense the slightest movement, the blink of an eye, the whisk of a tail. It was clear to him that he was in no way ordinary, not for man or for vampire. He had fought off a whole cadre of vampires. He was beginning to feel changes taking place inside that he couldn't understand. He wondered at this, finding it curious and bizarre. He thought he should try to find out why. Mentor might know. When he returned home, he'd ask him.

A tiny sound interrupted his thoughts. He spied a prairie hen waddling through brush and cacti, swooped down on it, and plucked it from the ground before it could take wing. He wrung the hen's neck as he sped back to the campsite in the distance. When he entered the circle of firelight, Jeremy looked up surprised.

"You didn't hear me coming?" Malachi asked.

"Uh-uh. You're real quiet."

"Don't worry, your instincts will kick in soon. You'll be able to know where I am even if I move far away from you."

"That would be good," Jeremy said in a suddenly serious tone of voice. "I want to know everything. I want to find out who sent those bad vampires to my house."

Malachi could have told him, but thought now was not the time.

"Here," he said, handing over the fowl. "It's dead, so you have to hurry. It won't taste so good once it's dead too long."

Jeremy took the hen into his lap and stared down at it. He began to brush the feathers smooth. He lifted the limp head and looked at the glazed eye.

"What do I do?" He peeked up at Malachi, a lock of hair falling over one eye.

Malachi stooped and took the hen back, snapping off its head with one quick motion. Blood immediately welled and slid over the neck of the bird onto its back. He pressed the bird toward Jeremy's face.

"I can't do that," the child said, scooting backward on his haunches, holding his hands up to ward off the bloody carcass.

"You have to." Malachi waited, holding the bird out.

A look came over Jeremy's face, a wild and feral look never seen on the face of human children, even those who were starving. He blinked, staring at the blood coming from the bird's neck.

"I don't like that," he said. "I can't . . ."

"You have to, Jeremy. You need it. You'll starve." With a movement that was like the strike of a snake, Jeremy leaped forward and jerked the bird from Malachi's hands. He buried his face over it in his lap, the sounds he made causing Malachi to turn away.

This is a terrible thing, Malachi thought. This is a terrible thing. He might be better off dead.

Jeremy's voice came from behind him. "I'll never die now," he said. He had read Malachi's mind.

Malachi turned and saw the boy standing there, the dead bird hanging from one hand at his side. On Jeremy's face the blood was smeared across his lips and cheeks and chin in scarlet streaks.

"I'll never ever die." He dropped the bird and kicked it away from the camp. He wiped his face on his shirtsleeve and went to his own sleeping bag and lay down on his back, his face to the sky.

"I'm so sorry, Jeremy." Malachi stood over him.

"It's not your fault."

"Yes, it is. If I hadn't come to . . ."

"I'll make them pay one day," Jeremy said, never looking at Malachi. "When I'm stronger and can do what I want, I'll make them pay."

The quiet little boy who had followed behind his twin sister like a shadow was beginning to come into his own. He had drunk his first blood. He knew the depth of his true nature. He knew he would live forever if an enemy vampire never vanquished him.

Jeremy was Predator, and Malachi mourned the long future that lay before the child. He didn't know it yet, but the uncountable years ahead were like a nightmare from which he would never wake.

2

Mentor sat beneath the breezy willow limbs in Bette Kinyo's garden. He knew the new child vampire had just feasted for the first time on warm blood. He tried to keep a channel open to watch over the wandering pair on the Texas plains. He'd been too involved in local affairs to do it before and look what had happened. He and Ross had been too late to save the little girl and her grandfather. And the assassins had made the boy into a Predator.