SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (75 page)

"Hospital?"

"Aunt Celia. She's thinking of Aunt Celia."

It was the cancer, Malachi suddenly knew. The cancer he'd detected in his great-aunt years ago. It must have come back.

"Oh, she's okay," Jeremy said, reading him now. "That's what you're mama's thinking. How glad she is Aunt Celia's going to make it."

Malachi walked to the front door and onto the porch. The car slowly maneuvered down the drive.

He didn't want to hear any more of his mother's thoughts until she was in the house where they could talk out loud.

The boy stayed quiet, probably having read his mind again. No one did that, not even his mother, unless he invited her. He wished Predators weren't so strong.

"Or so scary," Jeremy said, unable to resist finishing his friend's thoughts just once more.

"Stop it," Malachi said. "That's not funny." He put Jeremy on his feet and went down the steps to meet his parents. Thank God he'd have someone to help him out. He hadn't known just how frazzled he was from his days on the road until he saw his mother's happy smile and his father's beaming face.

~*~

Dell's heart leaped when she saw her son standing on the porch waiting. With all that was happening—Celia's surgery, rumors of an outside renegade force trying to take over, the complete loss of her blood supplies—she had been sick with worry about Malachi.

She raced up the path and hugged him hard. She thought her smile would break her face. "You've come home!"

"I've missed you, Mom." Malachi hugged her back and then let her go to hug his father. "How's Aunt Celia?"

"She had a radical mastectomy, but I think she's going to be all right now. At least as all right as you can be with a thing like that." The vampire hung back behind Malachi's legs. "Well, hello there. You're Jeremy, right?"

"We've got to talk about him," Malachi said, pulling him from his hiding place to face his parents. "He took your last meal from the refrigerator and he's still hungry."

Dell felt her smile dissipate and tried to get it back. Now what would she do? She was already feeling weakened from trying to dole out the blood to herself to make it last. "I'm afraid there's a problem. Upton joined with Balthazar and he's here now trying to make sure none of us get our deliveries. No one's been able to get through Upton's lines for two days."

"Balthazar's dead, isn't he?"

Dell knew that he was. She's talked with Mentor who assured her Malachi could come home. Ross had been sent to dispose of him. "Yes. Ross went to his caves and . . ."

"It was fire, Malachi said." It was the first thing the boy had said.

Dell looked at his feral little face and wondered if he really knew how terrifying death by fire could be for anyone, but especially for the vampire. She said, "Yes, that's right. Fire."

"I don't care about that guy anymore," Ryan said. "But something has to be done about this character Upton. It's all over the news about the fires set in Dallas. They think it was a group of arsonists, but your mother said it was Upton."

"He killed every Craven he could find," she said. "He knew they couldn't escape. It was an unbelievably wicked thing to do."

"Is Mentor able to stop him?" Malachi asked as they moved indoors.

She believed he could, but there was a small voice in the back of her mind that kept piping up and asking, What if he doesn't?

She shouldn't worry her family with her own doubts, she thought, so she said, "I'm sure he will."

Jeremy had surreptitiously slipped from Malachi's side and now stood very close to Ryan. He stood staring at Ryan's hand, his stare trained on the pulse he could see there, pulsing. He licked his lips uncontrollably. Dell moved toward Ryan and said, "You'd better see about the horses. They haven't been fed today."

"Okay. I think I'll take a ride, too. It's a beautiful day." He turned to Malachi. "I'm glad you're home, son. We missed you every day you were gone." His genuine words were accompanied with a crinkling around his eyes as he smiled.

Dell saw the boy's disappointment when Ryan left the room. She knew Jeremy's hunger, though her own was not yet nearly as strong. Over the years of marriage to a mortal she'd sometimes had to battle her own instinct to sink her fangs into her husband's throat and lap from his warm blood. She never would have killed him. She loved him more than anyone in the world. But she'd often been tempted to make a very small puncture and taste him. It was obvious the little Predator wanted more than a taste. If she and Malachi hadn't been right at his side, she expected the boy would have attacked.

"Malachi, go out and catch a chicken for your dinner. I'll fry it the way you like. First, catch one for Jeremy." Her small flock of yard hens had grown thanks to the unflagging efforts of a huge black rooster. Her son loved fried chicken that had been double-dipped in buttermilk and seasoned flour.

"A chicken's not going to be enough." Malachi gave her a serious look. "It's only an appetizer for Jeremy. I don't know what's happening, but in the last couple of days he's been that way."

Dell didn't know the boy's real need any more than she knew what was in his soul. She knew he'd come back a Predator, and a Predator was a more voracious feeder than the Natural or Craven, but how much more?

"Take two chickens, then." Malachi's face remained somber. "Okay, as many as he wants. I can always get more."

She watched as Malachi took Jeremy with him to the back door and outside where the chickens ran free every day. They roosted at night in a small enclosure with graduated shelves, but during the day the flock was free to roam, pecking at insects and clucking curiously over unearthed worms.

As she began to prepare the big pot of boiling water she'd have to use for dipping the headless chicken into so she could pluck out its feathers, she watched her son and the little Predator beyond the window over the sink.

Malachi began to give the boy instructions on how to sneak up on a hen so he could catch it, but before he finished speaking, Jeremy was already on the prowl. Dell turned off the faucet and set aside the filled kettle. She had never hunted. The act mesmerized her.

Jeremy swooped over a hen scratching in the dirt and immediately pushed back its neck and sunk his fangs into the fowl's breast. It squawked and beat at his face with its spurs. Dell wanted to turn away, but couldn't. The boy's actions had also frozen Malachi in place. He stood by, his eyes wide in wonder, and, she thought, revulsion.

Dropping the hen quickly, its blood drained, the boy reached down where another hen had wandered near his pants leg, clucking and cackling crazily. He snatched it up and the deadly act began again. Unable to move from the window, Dell saw the boy go through eleven hens before he dropped the last one and turned with bloody lips to Malachi. She heard him say, "That's enough for now. You need more chickens."

Indeed she did. Her small flock had been halved in mere minutes. With one more feasting the boy would have finished off every bird on her property. This couldn't continue.

Shaking her head, she carried the kettle to the stove and turned on a burner. She wouldn't clean all of the hens. One was more than enough to satisfy her son. She'd have to take the others to the trash barrel and burn them to keep coyotes and other scavengers from coming into the yard in the night.

There was no way she could feed Jeremy. His appetite for blood far surpassed her own.

When Malachi came back into the house carrying one of the dead hens, he sent her a mental comment. Jeremy's a real killer, as you can see for yourself.

She could certainly see that. She'd have to keep close tabs on her husband and give the child Predator no opportunity to be alone with him. She'd have to go in search of wild animals on their two hundred acres and hand over her booty to Jeremy. What she really needed to do was find someone, another Predator, to take the boy. He was too dangerous to keep around for long.

That night she sat with him on the front porch. Inside, Ryan and Malachi slept in their beds. It was after midnight and the landscape lay beneath a bright moon.

"I'm bad," Jeremy said. "You don't have to tell me.”

“No, you're just a Predator. Predators can't help their need for prey."

"I liked them. Your chickens," he said.

"I know. I used to like them, too." She meant when they were alive, pecking around her home and keeping her company as she went about her gardening.

"You drink blood. Why doesn't Malachi drink it?”

“He's part human. He's mortal."

"Oh. He smells like a vampire."

She knew what Jeremy meant. Malachi's scent wasn't as overwhelmed with human pheromones as it was impregnated with the scent of his vampire heritage. Vampires smelled to her like copper pennies—the hard, metallic odor that was so close to the scent of blood.

They sat a while quietly, and then Jeremy said he was going inside to sleep. She followed him mentally as he climbed onto the living room sofa where she'd fashioned him a bed.

While she waited for her mind to wind down and let her find rest, she caught herself licking her lips just as she'd seen Jeremy do it. She, too, was hungry and growing hungrier by the minute. She hadn't taken blood in twenty-four hours and something inside her screamed for sustenance. She thought of the hens and rejected the idea. They were her friends. She couldn't kill them.

She thought of the wildlife lurking just at the edge of the ring of blue-white light thrown by the yard light. She could sense living things there, hiding. She might find a rabbit if she would get up and leave the porch so quickly the wildlife never knew she was coming.

Still, she sat hungering, her mouth salivating, and struggled with the urge to move, move fast, and kill mercilessly. Until she absolutely had to, she wasn't going to give in. She just couldn't see herself in the same league as the boy Predator. She was a Natural, devoted to leading a peaceful life alongside her human counterparts. She wasn't like Jeremy. She never wanted to be like him. She couldn't kill.

They had to get past Upton's people and bring her the blood soon.

They had to. Or she'd go get it herself.

She tried to concentrate on the sky rather than the darkness beyond the ring of yard light that illuminated her house and yard. Up there might be worlds like this, she thought, where men don't have to be vampires and take blood to live forever. Scientists had theorized man was a Type 0 civilization, the lowest in the hierarchy. Type 0s used the energy of dead animals and minerals to propel civilization. Type is used the power of nature itself. It was true this civilization was rapidly moving toward a Type 1, and it was predicted mankind would reach that higher world within a hundred years. If he didn't blow himself up first. That was the danger in moving from Type 0 to 1. As man harnessed the power to control nature—able to control hurricane, tornado, earthquake, and the deep hot heart of the volcano—he might also forget himself and set off a firestorm of antagonism between nations that would spell the end.

If it ever came to that and man's destiny was sunk, she figured ships would ferry passengers from Earth to a nearby planet made habitable by man's ingenuity. Would she and others like her go with them? She couldn't image they'd let themselves be left behind.

Or was it possible the vampire could one day guide man and keep him from destroying his own world? If that happened, the vampire would be thrust into the Type 1 civilization along with the mortal. What a wonderful future, Dell thought, realizing she wasn't suffering so much now from hunger pains.

Even a vampire couldn't harness the energy of nature, though they were able to bend it and use it for their own means. She thought the vampire might be the stepping stone, taking man from his inferior and dying Type 0 world into the new, powerful civilization of the Type 1. If one day man would study how the vampire bent natural laws governing the rest of the world, and discover how to enlarge that power to include taming the tornado and turning its great force into usable energy, the future wouldn't look so grim.

Whether this cooperation ever came about or not might depend entirely on vampires like herself who took the longer view. She had so much to look forward to.

Her mind was brought back to the here and now when her instincts alerted her to movement near her porch steps at ground level. A snake. It slithered past, oblivious to possible predators.

She could either rise and strike, taking the snake and drinking down the small amount of blood it contained, or she could have let it go on its way.

She sat unmoving. She let it go.

She was a superior being, fit to rise into a Type 1 civilization, that's all there was to it. A balanced world depended on control.

She licked her lips, her nostrils flared, and the snake crawled past the steps and into the long grass of the yard. That was when she heard the soft crying coming from inside the house. It was Jeremy, thrashing about on the sofa, weeping in his sleep from a nightmare.

She rose to go to him. She'd wake him so the nightmare would go away. She'd done this a hundred times for her son when he was young. She was surely competent to do it again, even if the boy she must minister to was a Predator.

She shook Jeremy by the shoulder. He jumped up suddenly, his eyes open and afraid as he threw his arms around her neck. His tears of blood dripped, wetting her throat.

"Shush," she said, cooing next to his ear. "Shush, it's just a dream, baby, that's all it is, a bad dream."

~*~

Alex drove up to Malachi's house and waited beside the car for his friend to come outside. He knew he'd heard him drive up.

Malachi waved as he came down the path to the gate.

"Hey, where have you been?" Alex asked. "I've been calling, and your mom said you were visiting relatives. Why didn't you let me know?"

Malachi seemed about to answer him when he turned at the sound of the front door slamming shut. A little boy came running down the steps. He called for Malachi.

Alex joined his friend at the gate. He said, "Who's the kid?"

Malachi caught the child by the shoulder to keep him from skidding into them. "This is Jeremy. My . . . uh . . . cousin. Jeremy, meet my friend Alex."