SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (94 page)

Eli and the dog followed Malachi to the bathroom and stood outside the door wrestling one another until he re-appeared trailing steam behind him. He was dressed in clean clothes, his hair wet and combed back from his face.

“Get off him, Harper.” Malachi pulled the big dog off his small son’s chest and helped Eli up. “You better watch out, Harper’s bigger than you are.”

“Nuh-uh, Daddy! He’s a PUP-py.”

Malachi herded them through the house to the kitchen where Danielle had dinner ready and on the table. He went to her for a kiss and, just because he felt like it, took her into his arms and gave her a lingering kiss rather than a peck on her lips. She tasted of spicy fried meat. “Ummm, you’ve been taste-testing the meal.”

She laughed and pulled away. “No one told you to kiss me that way.”

As the night lengthened, the little family ate together in the kitchen, and spoke of routine daily matters, never of Ryan or of strokes or of grief and lost dreams.

Nothing was as it would ever be again for them, but there was no point in discussing that fact. The point of life was to move forward through the days with as much grace and hope as possible. Any other direction was anathema.

Chapter 8

Little Jeremy was totally beyond control. Sereny stood near the rear of the pool at the back of Ross’s great oversized ranch home calling shrilly, “Jeremy! Come back! Do you hear me? Come back this instant!”

Ross appeared at her side magically, moving so fast from within the house that he hardly stirred a breeze. “What’s he doing this time?” Ross asked.

“He’s hunting coyote.” Sereny’s voice teetered on the edge of panic. It wasn’t so much that the boy hunted every single night, as if ravenous for blood and insatiable, but since he had turned on whatever wildlife he could find on the land, he was growing ever more feral. She was losing command over him. She, a vampire who had lived with one of the greatest Predators, Balthazar, and now with Ross, one even more powerful and well-connected, couldn’t even control her own household.

The night was redolent with scent. Pine, dewy grass, and, of course, prey. In this isolated place a great deal of wildlife flourished. Wild pig, coyote, rabbit, gopher, armadillo, wild dog packs, and deer. Jeremy had never gone after the animals until now. He had told her he would take down the coyote one by one until they were gone. He had said it defiantly, a wild light in his eyes, and though she forbade it, he merely laughed and rushed from the house with Sereny on his heels.

“I’ll go after him,” Ross said now, vanishing.

Sereny unclenched her fists and felt the blood rise into her face from where it had drained until she was white as powdered snow.

Jeremy had been with them almost four years and he just kept getting worse. Her own children, when she’d been human, had never given her this much trouble. She frowned, thinking of her children. Gone, lost. They would be in their sixties now, her children, if they lived. Carlos, only five when she left. Babina, her beautiful girl, only seven. She had left them when she’d sickened and become vampire. She hadn’t wanted to do them harm, hadn’t wanted them to know her fate.

And here she was again, mourning for a child, as she’d mourned abandoning her first family. For it seemed Jeremy was indeed lost. If he could not control his urge to kill, he’d become a rogue Predator and Ross would have to do something about it—something final.

Wandering back into the house, Sereny slumped into one of Ross’s strangely shaped modernistic chairs in the two-story-ceilinged living room. She faced a dark hearth. Her gaze rose to the wall above it where a large canvas by Jackson Pollock hung.

Ross had exquisite taste, though slightly too modern for her. He owned many wonderful paintings, most stolen from private collections from around the world. His home was a gallery. She appreciated the art and it bonded her to Ross, who had been a cruel and tormented lonely vampire when she’d met him. Now he sometimes—not often—but sometimes showed his more refined side to those around him and she knew it was because she had come into his life.

She and Jeremy. Ross had become attached to the boy much to his surprise. He’d never had children or been around them. Vampire children were frowned upon and kept hidden or sent away to live on their own, to perish usually. For Ross to not only embrace Sereny, mate of his enemy Balthazar, whom he had murdered in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, but to also embrace an orphaned vampire child, was evidence he had chosen to live an entirely different life—one of family and obligation.

Yet neither of them could reach little Jeremy, neither could tame him. The boy had been strange from the beginning. When Malachi had brought him back from West Texas where his beloved grandfather and younger sister had been killed by Upton’s Predators, it was said Jeremy began to catch and eat yard chickens. He’d snap off their necks and drink the pumping blood while the live birds struggled in his arms.

When he’d come to Sereny, sidling next to her and attaching himself as a child to a mother, she had taken him in. It was true she missed her own children. She’d missed them all those long years. Jeremy was her second chance at motherhood. Jeremy would never age. He would always and forever be her child. She would always be his mother. Life could not be more beautiful.

And it was a relief to Malachi and his family to let the boy go. “He’s angry,” Malachi told her. “He’s lost everyone he loved and now he’s lost his life. Be kind to him, be patient.”

She had tried. She had allowed him to follow her about the house like a shadow. She had even gone hunting with him, fulfilling his Predator nature, taking him to outlying farms and isolated ranches where she indicated he prey on the aged and ill, or those already dying. She taught him to be stealthy and to heal the puncture wounds before he left the dead bodies so that no one would suspect other than natural death.

“We don’t want to raise alarms,” she told him. “If you take humans, you must always be careful to cover your tracks. If you bring suspicion down on Ross, he will punish you severely.”

Jeremy seemed to understand, but she knew from the start that there was something so wild in him it was impervious to instruction and caution. She had not been able to let him go out to prey on his own, not even once. She wanted to trust him, but couldn’t.

Now he was tracking down and drinking from every animal in the vicinity. When would it stop? How could they civilize him? She feared Ross’s temper. Though he professed to like the boy’s predatory nature, when would he realize that very nature could jeopardize him?

Sereny caught herself wringing her hands and clasped them together to hold herself still.

Maybe she should take Jeremy to Mentor. Perhaps he would know what to do.

Something or someone had to intervene. She couldn’t afford to lose this connection to a child. She couldn’t bear another loss. Driven to it, she realized with a jolt that she would align herself with the boy against Ross. She would protect him from his fury. She would give up her life of domestic bliss in order to save Jeremy.

If she had to, that is what she would do.

Chapter 9

Ross came upon the boy miles from home in the dense forest. Shadow covered the forest floor and the canopy allowed little moonlight to filter through. Ross smelled not only the boy, but the blood of the wild coyote. It was a complicated scent, tangy with copper, wild with a tangy animal odor, and electric with heat that even now was cooling toward death.

He stood silently behind Jeremy, whose head was bent over the torn, bleeding animal.

If Jeremy had not been so engaged, he would have known the vampire was at his back. As it was, his whole being was focused on feeding. Ross thought Hannibal’s elephants could have tromped past him in the night, felling trees right and left, and Jeremy might not have raised his head.

Let him finish, Ross thought, holding himself still.

It didn’t take long. Finally, Jeremy, suffused with new blood he’d hunted down and taken himself, drew back and wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve the way a human boy might wipe his mouth after an ice cream cone. He immediately turned, knowing he was not alone.

Ross saw his pupils shrink, become pinpoints as hard as black stones. “You followed me,” he said in an animal-like growl.

“Sereny called you back and you didn’t come.”

“She’s always right on top of me, watching. She never lets me go.”

“Because when she does this is what you indulge in.” Ross pointed to the coyote’s carcass.

Jeremy lowered his gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’re not contrite, don’t pretend you are. What do you think I should do with you, Jeremy? Do you think you can stay at my house when you won’t obey anyone?”

“I couldn’t help it. I was hungry.”

“Sereny takes you on the hunt whenever you want.”

“She hates to do it.”

“But she does it.”

Jeremy had not raised his gaze. He shrugged the way a child does when he is out of logic and has no room to maneuver against an adult.

“Come along,” Ross said, gripping Jeremy by the scruff of his neck and hauling him along the ground. “Let’s see what Sereny wants to do with you.”

Jeremy began to weep and drag his feet. Ross lifted him and together they rose above the trees into the sky. Ross held him around the chest.

“I don’t want to hear that,” Ross said, anger creeping into his tone. “You disobey and then you cry like a baby. If you’re going to kill like a heartless Predator then act like one.”

They moved swiftly across the forest below into the open land surrounding Ross’s house. He deposited him on earth again near the back door. “Get inside,” he said, pushing the boy a little so that he stumbled. “Wipe your eyes.”

They wandered through the house to the front room where Sereny waited. “Here he is; you deal with him,” Ross said, pushing Jeremy into her open arms.

“I have a meeting with Mentor. I’ll be back later. And if I find you outside this house, Jeremy, I’ll do more than admonish you and turn you over to Sereny. Is that understood?”
The boy nodded, turning fearful eyes on Ross.

When they were alone, Sereny pushed him from her arms and told him to sit down. He was a mess, blood smeared from his kill on his lips and chin, blood from his tears streaked across his cheeks. His face was red as a sunset with blood. She wrinkled her nose at the scent and put her own sudden urge to lick away that blood from her thoughts.

After he had taken a chair across from her, Sereny said, “He’s going to have to kill you if you keep this up.”

“I know,” Jeremy said in a small voice.

“What gets into you?”

“I…I can’t help it. I could never help it. As soon as I was vampire all I could think about was killing and feeding. Malachi could hardly keep me alive when we were in the desert on the way back to his house, I needed so much blood to drink.”

“It’s all a matter of control.” Sereny looked upon the boy with sadness.

“But how? I don’t know how! I get so hungry I go wild inside. All I want to do is kill something. It’s all I want to do.”

Sereny sighed. “If you don’t learn to control this, we’ll have to leave.”

Jeremy looked at her. “Leave? You and me?”

“Yes. And I don’t want to leave, Jeremy. I made this my home. I care for Ross. But if you fail to master your urges, I’ll have to give up this home, this man…this good life.”

“You’d do that for me?”

His voice was so young and fretful, it moved her. She rose from her chair then went to her knees before him and wrapped his small shoulders in her arms. She put a hand on the back of his head, smoothing his icy brown hair. “I’d do anything for you, Jeremy. You’re young and can’t be alone. I wouldn’t abandon you.” Like I abandoned my real children, she thought in woeful regret.

He snuggled his face into the crevice of her neck. He kissed the large vein there that lay silent beneath the velvety skin. “My mama died when I was so little,” he said, crying again now, his tears wetting her neck.

“I know, baby.”

“I miss my mama.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’ll try to be good, I promise.”

Sereny turned her face and kissed his forehead. She felt him trembling in her arms. She lifted him and strode through the great open empty house to the bath attached to his bedroom. She waited while he bathed and dressed in pajamas. She tucked him into bed and patted his cheek.

“Sleep,” she said. “Don’t worry about anything. Just sleep.”

Once his eyelids fluttered down and he grew still, his breathing even, she sat looking at him a while. He was a boy with cherubic cheeks and long lashes. He was dark from the sun and muscular from all the frantic hunting activity. He could pass for her own son, they were so alike. She loved him most when he slept, her mothering instincts strongest then. His presence caused her to miss her own children sharply, but as a replacement he was perfect.

She sighed and rose to leave the room, closing the door behind her. She leaned back against the closed door and put a hand over her eyes.

She’d sealed her fate, this time not to a man as she had always done before, but to a boy vampire. She couldn’t let Ross hurt him. She wouldn’t let him come to harm. She’d spirit him away, just as she’d said, if she had to. They’d live as nomads, roaming the country, never settling anywhere. She might even take him back to Italy with her, to her home country.

For she knew in her heart he would never be able to keep his promise to be good. He was a wild scavenger, born too young into the Predator world. He hadn’t the resources to change. He was feral and driven by murderous impulse.

Yet she loved him—loved, loved, loved him. His small inquisitive face with the upturned nose. His shiny brown hair shot through with streaks of white icicle strands. His little hands, his small shoulders, his eyes so dark they were like black moons.

She removed her hand from her eyes and walked smoothly down the hall away from him. Ross would ask her upon his return if she had found a way to discipline the boy. She would lie and say everything was going to be all right. But the next time Jeremy left her side against her wishes to go on a hunt alone, she would follow and force him to leave with her. They’d travel far away from the ranch, far away from Dallas, Texas, where even Ross could not find them.