SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Another time, many years in the past, he had gone to the aid of a young vampire who claimed he was cursed. No matter what he did, it all turned out wrong for him. He was a Predator, and every time he stalked a victim, the human found a way to slip from his clutches. He could not even take a drunk, without losing him in some debacle or another. He was about to starve, he told Mentor, and did not know what to do.

  Mentor searched his house and found an antique brass hairbrush on the vampire's dresser. The back was stamped with a lion standing on its back paws, and there was a coat of arms on the brush handle. The young vampire, a dandy who loved velvets and lace, used it every day to brush his long, luxurious blond hair. Lifting it in his hand, Mentor felt a surge of evil power, and knew whoever had owned the thing before had infused it with a sort of evil magic. After learning the vampire had bought the brush months before in a Venice market and his fortune had gone downhill soon afterward, Mentor suggested he take the brush, melt it down, and bury it in the ground. It held something from its original owner that gave it the power to affect anyone who used it.

  There were other objects in the world which seemed to possess an unnatural power that could not be disputed. Mentor did not know how these things came to be, but he realized it was foolish to disbelieve his own experience.

  "Where did he get the cards?" Mentor asked. "And who told you about them?"

  "The monks gave Upton the cards when he asked for a deck to play with. Madeline sent me a message saying she saw the cards, she held one, and she thinks they're possessed in some way. She knows how much you want to keep Upton imprisoned for the good of all of us. She thought we should know about the cards so that we could investigate, just in case Upton could really use them to free himself."

  "Well, I've never run into magic cards, though Gypsies have claimed for centuries some decks have the power to tell them the future," Mentor said. "But Madeline's not talking about fortune-telling cards, is she?"

  "No, not quite. She says they look like tarot cards, but she felt an electrical surge on touching them. Upton immediately snatched the card from her hand, but for the few moments she held it, she saw a knave holding a cup move on the card. It stepped back from a table and stared at her, as if the figure was alive. Then it lifted the cup and drank from it."

  Mentor decided he must go to Upton and take away the cards. Whether they could free him or not, he couldn't let Charles Upton have any advantage, even if it were but a mental one. The man was a genius and incredibly passionate about changing everything about the way vampires had lived in the world for hundreds of years. Given his way, he would rule the Predators, first in the United States, and later in the rest of the world. He would cease supplying the Naturals and Cravens with life-sustaining blood. If that happened, Naturals would be forced to prey, reverting to their most base natures, and Cravens, too ill for the most part to prey, would starve and turn into dusty skeletons. It would create true chaos, disrupting societies and even governments.

  "I'll go to the monastery and take care of it." Mentor rose from the hard sofa. He added, "Though you could have done this small thing yourself. I guess you're too content to leave your home."

  "Don't act like a peeved child, Mentor. You know I'm needed here to watch over Strand-Catel. Now I have the blood supplies in Arizona and Oklahoma to see about, too. You act like I never do anything when I'm the one who does everything."

  Mentor sighed, seeing the argument would not be won this night. Ross liked business. He liked numbers and accounting sheets and, lately, computer tracking system software and computer electronic mail to keep in touch with his minions. He thought dealing with anything at the Thailand monastery a real imposition. No matter that Mentor was in charge of hundreds of new vampires who had to learn how to live in the world again, or that he had Dell's young dhampir to monitor, or the Craven, Dolan, to train. Let Mentor do it, that had always been Ross' position. Let Mentor handle the people and Ross handle the business, the money, and the blood supply.

  "All right, keep your shirt on, Ross. I'm leaving now. If Madeline contacts you again, tell her to stay calm."

  "That woman? She's like a nuclear warhead with a hair trigger. There's no telling her anything."

  Ross was right. Dealing with Madeline was precarious. One moment she was reasonable, the next she was a maniac.

  Ross did not bother to rise and see him to the door. Mentor stepped outside and stared into the night sky. He sensed the sun creeping toward the horizon like a yellow claw reaching around the face of the globe. Dolan, like all Cravens, would have to retire to Mentor's basement and sleep in darkness. Mentor and Ross and all the Predators and Naturals were blessed to walk in the sunlight, the porphyria that killed them having been burned away in the change they made on the brink of their deaths. Cravens, essentially still suffering many of the characteristics of the human disease, were painfully burned if they braved the sun's light, just as they had been when alive. He would have to do something about that for Dolan if he wanted him as a helpmate.

  Mentor should hurry; however, as it was already day in Thailand and there was no telling what Charles Upton was up to with the unusual deck of cards he had in his possession. It was imperative he not have anything to further his ambitions, at least not as long as Mentor lived.

  Spreading his molecules thin until his Earthly body transformed into a thick, black cloud, Mentor rose into the sky and sped toward the upper stratosphere, there to wait for the turning of the planet Earth.

  Chapter 5

  “Hello, Madeline." Mentor closed the cell door behind him. She sat at the desk, writing on sheets of white paper with a long turkey quill. She had been offered more modern writing materials over the years and had snorted in dismissal. She had grown up using a quill and she saw no reason to change now.

  She did not turn at first. Mentor thought she was finishing the sentence she had been writing. When she did turn, he saw her face was ravaged with tears. She had cried so long her cheeks were red with blood, as was the whole front of her dark dress.

  "What's wrong?" Had she been in a rage, he wouldn't have been surprised, as she was often in high spirits, but to see her brought so low with weeping took him aback.

  "Is anything right?" She put her hands over her face and wept harder.

  Mentor went to her, touched by her pain. He tried to pat her on the back, not knowing what else to do, but she twisted away and he saw the old Madeline resurface beneath the tears. She glared at him and said, "You dare lay a hand on me!"

  "I'm only trying to help. Can't you tell me what precipitated this?"

  "You know, Mentor, you've known it for a hundred years. I can't live without the man I loved so much. I've done it so far, but I don't know why I've even tried. I was writing my memoirs and came to the time when I met and married Ian. I broke down the way you see me now. I can't go on, Mentor, it's too hard."

  Again she buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Mentor thought the retelling on paper of her life had brought her loss to her all over again and he feared for her mind now as he hadn't before. He realized with a sudden insightful shock that if he were to sit and write a close personal account of his love for Beatrice, he, too, might be filled with such misery it would block the sun. He had told Bette very little about meeting Beatrice, but if he tried to recreate their long days together, their every joy and shared burden, it might drive him mad.

  This time he did not try to comfort Madeline by touching her. This time he approached her mentally, speaking in her mind with soft loving words from one equal to another. He was buffeted by her great pain, but stayed, letting the hurricane of grief sweep over him. He spoke to her quietly, with feeling she knew to be true, for now he commiserated with her mind to mind. He told her that he had known love, too, and had lost it. He thought she should not try to write about it. She should wrench her mind from the past that could not be changed to the present, where she could find some hope of getting well.

  It was some time, the
shadows lengthening in her cell, before the weeping trailed off and Madeline found a folded napkin and cleaned her face. She said, "Thank you, Mentor. You are very kind."

  He thought it best to divert her attention to the matter at hand. "Ross told me you sent word of a problem with your neighbor, Charles Upton."

  Madeline's eyes narrowed, and he could almost see the intelligence behind them focusing. "That man is more dangerous than you know." She turned the chair at her desk and faced Mentor. "The cards he has possess some kind of power, whether you believe it or not. I held one. I saw it. He said Joseph gave them to him, and I cannot fathom why. Didn't he know what they were?"

  "I'll speak to Joseph and find out, but obviously he didn't. Do you think they really might help Upton?"

  "If they wish to, they will. It's hard to explain, but I think there might be some sort of presence behind them.”

  “Is it vampire?"

  "I don't know. Perhaps. It's powerful, that's all I could discern."

  "I'll take them away," he said, going for the door. "If you don't mind a little advice?"

  He turned at the door. "Yes?"

  "Confronting him to take away the cards will cause a tremendous fight, I think. His powers have really grown. You'd do best to go in when he's sleeping. He stays up most of the night, deciphering their meaning, and when he sleeps, he's so tired he falls over where he sits and even a gong striking next to his ear wouldn't wake him."

  Mentor thought her advice salient. Ross had made Upton. He had had the human condition of prophyria and was dying of it. He did not have their mutated strain of that same disease, and would never have been vampire had not he tricked Ross into making him one right at the last moment before death. Having been made by one of the great Predators, he possessed some of his Maker's power and strength and ability. He had not been trained, as Mentor trained new vampires in their powers and responsibilities, so he could not perform as well as Ross or Mentor, but the potential was there for destruction if it came to a serious confrontation.

  "I'll wait," he said. "Thank you, Madeline. I hope you'll put away your memoir as I advised."

  She glanced toward the pages covered with her fine script, and her face fell into sadness. "It's all I have left," she said. She turned back to him. "Go now, leave me be." She fluttered her fingertips in the air at him. "Go, I say, go away."

  Her mood had changed, as it was wont to do, so Mentor hurried out the door so as not to be in the path of her irritation. He slipped down the corridor away from Upton's cell, hoping the other vampire had not sensed him there.

  He must find Joseph.

  ~*~

  Joseph, confused and wallowing in guilt, told Mentor how the prisoner had asked for a deck of cards to play solitaire. Joseph remembered he'd seen cards wrapped in old velvet lying on a bookshelf in the library. It was on a top shelf and undisturbed, having lain there for years. Brother Hadeem told him they hadn't been touched since the vampire monks took over the abandoned monastery.

  "I didn't really look at them," he said. "I knew they were cards, that's all. I took them to the cell." He hung his head guiltily.

  Mentor said, "Don't despair, it's not your fault. I'll get them back."

  As Joseph left the chapel where they had been talking, Mentor scooted back on the oak pew, shiny from use, and draped both arms along the back. The monks had not taken down the old large Buddha above the altar. It reached from a stone base into the high rafters, larger than life-size, and crudely carved. Afternoon light filtered through high stained-glass windows, casting a rainbow of colored shadows. On the altar, incense burned in shiny brass coffers, the scent permeating the whole room with sandalwood.

  The monks prayed here, just as human monks had in the past. The vampires who chose the monastery as their home held to the old religion, even adopting the orange robes and leather sandals and shaved heads. They were vampires who, like Mentor, had come to the decision they must control their hunger and rid their hearts of the evil that drove them. They were pious, but still lethal if provoked by their prisoners. Most of the monks had been doing this for so long their strength was honed to a quick and deadly measure. They were mainly guards but also religious supplicants, dedicated to keeping order in the world. Without them, and other devoted men like them in other places in the world, Mentor thought the vampire nations would be completely out of control by now. They would have formed sects and splintered off, one from the other, battling for territory, taking down mankind without thought to the future.

  And that is what Charles Upton wished to create, giving no thought to what chaos and suffering he would inflict on the world. He was shortsighted, his ambition blinding him to how wars between the vampire clans would loose great evil and destruction. Left to their own devices and inflamed with hot rhetoric, some of the Predators could be talked into taking down leaders of state, heads of corporations, the rich and wealthy, celebrities, churchmen, and the intelligentsia alike. These were the men and women who kept the world on an even keel. Such devastation would send financial and political institutions into a turmoil from which none could recover. All would be anarchy. All would be lost.

  Balthazar would be such a leader, his thoughts of war very close to those of Charles Upton. Balthazar, however, hadn't been heard from in decades until he showed up in little Malachi's dreams. It hadn't really been a dream, but a dimension created by Balthazar from a distance, invading the child's mind and speaking with him as if there in person.

  The difference between Balthazar and Charles, though, might not be in their aims, but their resources. Balthazar hadn't had much luck in gathering together an army. Upton, set free and given sufficient time, could command a much greater army because of his higher intelligence and resolution.

  Mentor had lived long enough to know which vampires to fear and which to merely watch. He had also seen how humankind could cause warring periods of history and knew the long-term ramifications on both land and commerce. It took decades for order to resume and the populace to recover. A vampire war would portend even larger destruction. Bombs, warheads, snipers, and attack helicopters were nothing to what a large number of supernatural beings could do.

  Men might do these things, but if Mentor could help it, a vampire would not. Certainly Charles Upton would not get free and begin that destruction because of damnable cards accidentally given him.

  Mentor sat listening with his preternatural hearing to all the sounds in the monastery. He heard the sounds of the jungle that surrounded it, and farther away still, the sounds of nearby villages where life went on without a hint midnight creatures lived so close they could reach out and pluck any man or woman or child from life at a moment's notice.

  Twilight came and the bells rang, calling the monks to prayer. Mentor slipped from the chapel to allow them privacy. He walked a path through the jungle, hoping the night would hurry and Upton would tire soon of playing with the cards.

  He was hungry, but kept that hunger dampened as best he could. Failing, he spied a chattering monkey in a tree.

  It was dark gray with lighter gray splashed across its wide chest. Its animation resulted from the excitement over a stranger passing through its territory. Mentor's mind fell back and his need drove him as he mindlessly climbed the branches in a wink and reached out, his hand clamping around the small monkey's neck. He bent his head to the snarling animal's velvety throat and sank his fangs in, taking life as quickly as he could. He sat on the limb, the dead monkey in his hands, and suddenly his eyes blurred and he dropped the little body to the ground. He climbed down slowly, his heart dark as outer space.

  He picked up the monkey, holding it in his hands, the arms, legs, and head hanging down in limp death. Mentor could still feel the warmth of the skin through the fur. He looked away, infuriated. He didn't want to do these things. He wished to God that he wasn't driven to killing this way. In Dallas he took his sustenance from the blood bags he got from Ross' operation. Charitable humans willingly gave the blood. It was paid f
or and put into refrigerators for shipment. Mentor did not have to take animals this way when in the city. And he hadn't murdered a man in ages.

  But in Thailand or when he was on some trip out of the country for other business, he sometimes found himself turning to the animal world to sustain him. Each time, as now, he hated himself with a hate so bright it was like the interior of a minor sun.

  He dropped the monkey into the brush along the path and turned back. He was no longer hungry, but he was no longer content either. The monkey's blood roiled inside him, infusing his organs, giving them life. It also suffused him with unhappy guilt he was not going to outrun by merely returning to the monastery's shelter.

  He broke off a large leaf as he passed by a bush and crushed it in his fist, his fingernails digging into his palm. I am vampire, he thought.

  I am unholy and commit murder against living things.

  I am doomed, always doomed, there is no escape.

  ~*~

  Midnight came and went as Mentor waited for Upton to release his hold on the cards and sleep. Around three in the morning, Upton finally keeled over like a mechanical doll that had wound down.

  Mentor appeared in the cell and saw the cards spread in a large rectangle across the floor before the sleeping Upton. With a wave of his hands around the surface of the stone flooring, Mentor gathered the cards into a deck and tucked them into the breast pocket of his jacket. He left the cell as silently as he had come, moving rapidly down the corridor into the monastery and out into the compound. In mere minutes he had left Thailand and had returned to his modest home in Dallas.

  There he sat down to examine the deck of cards. At first he thought Madeline had been duped or her mind was so confused with her madness that she'd misinterpreted what she saw. These are just old tarot cards, Mentor thought, relaxing. But as he shuffled and fanned the deck, the cards grew warm in his hands and he paused, startled. Inanimate objects did not possess a way to generate heat, he knew. In some way the cards truly were supernatural. He leaned forward to the coffee table and spread them out, face up. The side table lamp was still lit, having been left that way by his houseguest, Dolan.