The Vampire's Betrayal (7 page)

“For the purity and mystical qualities of the child’s blood, yes. I could not allow Eleanor to live after that.”

“William, I’m sorry. Really I am. I know that you made El to be your mate for the long haul.”

“Yes, I did. But I could not let anyone threaten my family. Not even the woman I loved and hungered for. I’d loved her like no other in half a century. But my family—Melaphia, Renee, and you—are the most important things to me on earth. And I would do anything it took to protect you all.” William gave me a meaningful look. “Do you understand, Jack?”

It wasn’t like William to go all touchy-feely. And goodness knew, if the situation were different, this little speech of his would have made me feel all warm and fuzzy. He and I had butted heads many times over the years because he used to treat me like a hired field hand. It had been only recently that he admitted how important I was to him, like a real son almost. Even though we looked the same age in human years, William was my sire and more of a father to me than my human father had been.

But what he was hinting at was out of bounds. “If you’re suggesting what I think you are—”

“You know exactly what I mean.”

“I want to hear you say it,” I challenged, although in fact I didn’t. I really, really didn’t. Maybe I thought William wouldn’t put it into words, that he’d back off. Perhaps he’d show some humanity. After all, it was William’s love of humanity that had led him to make me his offspring, his undead
son.
He’d told me so once. He said he’d seen the kind of humanity in me that would not go away even after he’d made me a fellow demon. It was William who taught me never to take a human life without the most dire provocation. Surely, I thought desperately, he would never, ever ask me to harm the human I loved the most.

“Very well, then,” he said. “Maybe you do need to have it spelled out for you. I expect you to do everything you can to preserve this family. I have no doubt that you would lay down your life for me as well as for Melaphia and Renee—”

“I can’t make that choice for Connie,” I said, interrupting him before he got to the part that would break my heart. “I can’t choose to lay down Connie’s life for our family.”

“The day will come when Connie will try to take your life. That is the point at which you must destroy her. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for Melaphia and Renee. If anything happens to me, who is to protect them from the forces that are coming? They are the last remaining pure sources of the voodoo blood. The old lords will kill them for it, and their deaths won’t be quick and painless.”

I heard myself make a choking sound. “There has to be something I can do,” I murmured, my mouth as dry as ashes. “There has to be a way around this.”

William grasped me by the shoulders, getting all up in my grill with those cat-green eyes of his. “This is bigger than you or me. Do you think that you, Jack McShane, can reverse a prophecy of two ancient cultures? Even Lalee herself could not do that.”

I swallowed hard and shook off William’s grasp. “You can’t ask me to kill Connie. You just can’t.” I staggered a few feet away, desperate to put some physical distance between us before I took a swing at him despite myself.

“That is precisely what I am asking you to do,” he said calmly. “For the sake of this family, for Melaphia, Renee, and all the vampires whom you have come to know and love—Werm, Olivia, Tobey, Iban—”

“Stop!” I fought the urge to clap my hands to my ears like a child. “I love her, William. I love her more than anyone I’ve ever loved.”

“The way I loved Eleanor,” William said stoically.

“And the way I loved Diana.”

I’d never seen William’s face like it was now—a twisted mask of grief. I’d been so shocked at seeing Eleanor being turned into a sideshow-worthy snake woman and horrified to hear that William had had to kill her that I’d forgotten all about William’s former wife, Diana. She and her mate, Hugo, had been the ones who kidnapped Renee. When William had left for Europe, he was so angry that he could have killed her with his bare hands. “What about Diana?” I asked.

“The last I saw of her she was being buried alive.” In a movement so fast I could barely see it even with my keen vampire sight, he was on me again, staring at me eye-to-eye. “I would have killed her myself if I could have reached her—drained her like I did Eleanor. Did I tell you I too saw Eleanor in hell?”

“How? The shells?”

“Yes. I used the shells to try to get you back—to see if you could be reached.”

“Then you saw…” I couldn’t even stand to say what Eleanor had become. There’s just something awful about snakes. I guess it’s human nature to be disgusted by the serpent and what it represents. The story of the fall is part of all of us.

A wave of revulsion showed on William’s face and he staggered a step away from me, the reality of what he’d done to Eleanor dealing him a body blow. I reached out to steady him. It was a sign of his condition that he let me.

“I did what I had to do, Jack. I sacrificed the woman I loved, the woman I’d planned to spend eternity with, and even having seen her being tortured in the hereafter, I can swear to you I’d do it again, because she was a danger to my family. I put you and the rest of my family first. And that is what you will do, too. When the time comes, you must kill Connie Jones. It’s time for you to be a vampire!”

I tried to look away. I tried to think. “But she doesn’t know she’s the Slayer,” I pleaded again. “Maybe she’ll never know. You said earlier that I could keep a close eye on her.” I stepped back and this time William didn’t close the distance.

He sighed and rubbed his brow, considering. We had all been through the wringer tonight, physically and emotionally, and his exhaustion showed. “All right. Watch her carefully until Melaphia and Olivia can find out more about the prophecy. In the meantime, if she comes for you…”

“I know,” I said, holding up a hand. I couldn’t bear to hear it again.

William stared at me for a long moment, sizing me up, trying to decide if I was made of stuff as stern as he was. But he’d gotten as good at hiding his thoughts from me as I was at hiding mine from him. It was probably for my own good that I couldn’t read him now. I probably wouldn’t like what I saw.

“Prepare yourself,” he said. “What Melaphia and Olivia uncover might be quite unpleasant. If that’s the case, I expect you to act and act quickly. As I did.”

He turned on his heel and left me standing in the kitchen thinking about the horror of spending eternity knowing that I’d murdered the woman I loved. Just as William had done.

Six

William

I awoke later than usual. Even vampires can suffer from jet lag, not to mention weariness. By the time I rose, both Jack and his black coffin with the number 3 decal were already gone. I knew that now that I had returned from Europe, Jack would go back to his own digs, as he would put it—a unit in a heavily guarded mini-warehouse.

At my request, he had been staying at the house in my absence to look after Melaphia. That was no longer necessary, but I knew his hasty departure had as much to do with the tension between us on the issue of Consuela Jones.

Jack and I hadn’t always gotten along. He’d resisted my authority as his sire since I made him some one hundred and forty years ago. Most of that resistance was passive, but we’d come to blows on occasion—certainly not that unusual between a blood drinker and his offspring but troubling nonetheless. Still and all, we needed each other, both to protect our family—the descendants of Lalee—and to defend our territory and the human population of Savannah from any nonhuman threats.

Over the years, as Jack had achieved more maturity and hopefully better judgment, I offered him more autonomy. I don’t think Jack fully appreciated this until the day my own sire, Reedrek, arrived in Savannah. With the threat of Reedrek, I’d been forced to share with Jack some of the darker knowledge about our race, information that he had craved but which I’d nonetheless hoped to spare him, because along with this new awareness came responsibility.

I thought about these things as I showered and changed. I had much to accomplish this night and moonlight was burning. The first order of business was to meet with Melaphia and decide how to proceed with our lives now that this vampire slayer was in our midst.

Despite the weighty matters on my mind, I had to smile when I entered the kitchen. The domestic scene that greeted me gladdened what was left of my heart. Melaphia stirred a pot of a stew on the stove while Reyha sorted through the spice cabinet in search of herbs for the mixture. Deylaud sat at the kitchen table with Renee and a very large book, extolling the virtues of the epic poem as a literary form. Anyone who might think this too dry a subject for a nine-year-old doesn’t know Renee. Her attention was as rapt as if Deylaud were discussing the finer points of a Harry Potter novel. Actually more—when the head of your household is a vampire, wizards hold less allure.

Their greeting smiles lightened my spirits. Renee ran to me and threw her skinny arms around my waist. “Deylaud is helping me study my literature lesson,” she said, giving me a brief hug before leading me by the hand to the huge volume open on the table.

“Evangeline,”
I observed. The tragic love story forced the unpleasantness of the last night back to the forefront of my mind. I looked at Melaphia and the look she gave me in return said she followed my train of thought.

“The stew is ready,” she said. “Reyha, get the cornbread out of the oven and y’all go ahead and eat.”

“But Mama, aren’t you going to eat with us?” Renee was at her mother’s side in a thrice, clinging in a most uncharacteristic way to Melaphia’s slender frame. It would take time for both of them to recover from their recent forced separation and the danger they had both been in.

“William and I have some things to talk about,” Melaphia said, stroking her daughter’s braids. “I’ll be back to get my supper in a little bit. Why don’t you butter some cornbread for me while it’s hot.”

As Renee and the twins settled down to dinner, Melaphia and I retreated to the parlor. “I still can’t believe she’s really home,” Melaphia said, hugging herself. “Thank you, Father.”

I felt myself smile. As it was with her mother and her mother’s mother before her, nothing pleased me more than to hear Melaphia call me
Father.

“There’s no need to thank me. I’m only sorry that you had to suffer through the ordeal of the kidnapping. How are you feeling, really?”

“I’m fine now.” She seated herself on the sofa across from the fireplace. She did indeed look as if the weight of the world had lifted off her shoulders. The stress of the abduction had visibly aged her. Now she looked like a young woman of thirty again, clad in her jeans, sneakers, and blue pullover. Her dreadlocks were pulled back and secured with a kerchief of matching blue silk.

“So, your…thinking is…” I began, searching for the most tactful way to ask if she believed she had regained her sanity.

She smiled. “My mind is as clear as a bell, honestly. I know we have a lot to talk about, a lot to plan. I promise you I can handle it.”

“I’m glad to hear that. Because I need you and your skills as never before, my dear. First, I want you to think back a few months to when I went to the underworld when Eleanor was being made a blood drinker.”

“All right.” Melaphia’s face clouded. It had been a dangerous time. I nearly didn’t make it back from the netherworld.

“When I returned to my body, did anything come back with me?”

“You mean like the fireball you said came back with Jack? No, not at all. Why? What do you think it means?”

“Perhaps nothing. Do you think that your texts might shed any light on such phenomena?”

“I’ll search for any reference that might be helpful, while I’m researching…the other thing.”

“Yes,” I said as I stoked the fire by prodding a glowing ember with the iron poker. The sparks that shot upward into the chimney reminded me of the ball of fire I’d seen when Jack returned to his body. “‘The other thing’ indeed. Is there any reason to believe that Connie knows any more about her destiny than that she is a Mayan goddess?”

“No, and I don’t know how she could. The sources on the Internet only go so far, and I don’t believe she would find anything useful in even the best libraries. It might occur to her to travel to New Orleans to talk to some of the best voodoo practitioners, but…” Melaphia shrugged but was too modest to continue her thought. She might have pointed out that no other
mambo
on this continent came close to her own skills. And none had access to the sacred books passed down from Maman Lalee herself.

“Good,” I said. “Keep on searching the texts for anything you can find on the Slayer.”

“And how to kill her.” It was a statement rather than a question.

“Perhaps Jack is right and it won’t come to that,” I said.

“I can only imagine how he reacted when you told him,” she said. “You did tell him, didn’t you?”

“That he would one day have to kill her for both our sakes? Yes. He’s in denial right now, and I’ve decided not to force the issue until we know more.”

“I guess I have my work cut out for me then,” she said, and rose to leave.

“One more thing. I spoke to Seth Walker briefly last night.”

“I heard he was back in town. Werewolf business?”

“Yes. And he said something strange. He’s been having premonitions about serious events coming our way.”

“What kind of serious events?” Melaphia frowned.

“He said he didn’t know specifics. But, as you know, his werewolf instincts are sharper than any of ours when it comes to phenomena in the natural world, so what he senses is worth listening to, no matter how vague.”

“Maybe I should talk to him further about it.” Melaphia gave me a sly smile despite the seriousness of the issue. She was as fond of Seth as all women seemed to be and would no doubt welcome an excuse to seek out his counsel.

As Melaphia joined the others for dinner, I returned downstairs and turned on my computer. The phone rang as the PC powered up, the caller ID indicating that Tobey was calling from the West Coast.