Teal dropped the microphone. He went for his holster and the gun there.
The hand again, magically it seemed, stayed him. "Uh-uh," the man said.
"What the . . . ?"
Then the world dimmed, and he thought he was floating down the pretty green Guadalupe River in a rowboat. He was relaxed and dreamy, his big belly unencumbered in a pair of loose shorts and his shirt open to the warm sun. A voice spoke softly at his ear and he listened, his head turned slightly to the side.
The next thing he knew it was morning and he was lying in his hotel bed in the same clothes from the night before. He hadn't even removed his big shoes so the sheets wouldn't get dirty.
He was disgusted with himself. He must have had one too many with Mrs. Carrie. He had to stop that shit, even if she did look like his grandmother. He'd be late to work. He had to hurry and take a shower and get his other brown suit from the Mayfair Cleaners. It was going to be a long day.
~*~
Mentor saw the policeman at the fire.
He saw Ross leave the area after speaking with the television crew, the firemen, and two men in a patrol car. It seemed all was handled. Mentor stood in the shadows, grieving for the Cravens who had died this night. He didn't know how Charles Upton could find it in himself to send out his Predators to do this terrible evil thing. They were all brothers. The Cravens had been infected just as had the Predators. It was not their fault they couldn't contribute to their own well-being or make their own way in the world. They were like mice born blind and helpless. How could anyone wish to stamp them out?
As Mentor pondered these questions, the car came speeding up. The policeman exuded curiosity and anxiety. Mentor saw him approach the television van. The crew was in the process of packing up to leave. The reporter, her mind emptied, offered no answers.
That's when Mentor knew he had to do something about the straggler to the scene. Ross had already left. This policeman represented a complication. He could undo all of Ross' work to quiet the media.
As the man stepped back into his car, Mentor hurried to follow. When he appeared in the moving car's front seat and grabbed the man's hand holding the microphone, he knew he risked causing an accident. He thought it worth that risk.
In wiping the policeman's memory he discovered how worried the man was about bodies found around the city. It seemed to Mentor they weren't going to be able to stop all the information from leaking out. This man might remember his concerns later. He had a particularly strong personality. His mind was like a steel trap, holding all his suspicions with clamped teeth.
Someone in the coroner's office could talk about the murders. A real investigation could reveal the bodies had been dead even before their neck wounds. Dead men, dead again. He would send someone to steal the bodies. They needed to make them disappear. It would be better for the city to get in an uproar about missing bodies than to report on bodies obviously dead before recent wounds were inflicted upon them.
Look what Upton was doing. He was about to let the world know about the vampires. How were they all to function in a world where humans hunted them? And they would. First they'd panic, they'd deny the possibility, and then they would take justice into their own hands and begin to hunt down every vampire they could find.
Mentor left the policeman he knew as Detective Teal lying on his bed in his dreary hotel room. Teal had come along as easily as a child, crawling into the bed upon command and closing his eyes. From the room's window facing out into the city, Mentor placed his hand on the chair that stood there. He picked up Teal's confounded thoughts.
After a moment looking at the brightening sky, Mentor turned and left the peacefully sleeping man. He did not know if he could really stop this human. His mental processes were a maze of connections and not all of them could be so easily erased.
Keeping this vampire war out of the human consciousness wasn't going to be so simple. All he could hope was the reporters, police, and coroner's office personnel never put it all together. The machinery of human detection ground exceedingly slow. It might be months before they released reports pointing to supernatural events. If ever.
Mentor left through the door and took the elevator to the lobby. He stepped from the building just as the sun's first rays breathed life into the slumbering city.
5
Malachi lay dreaming beneath the open night sky. He and the boy had made camp again in the wide open space of West Texas. They had not gone that far from Howard's Rattlesnake Farm store, taking back roads and avoiding towns. They hadn't been accosted again, but this was the first night since leaving that Malachi had been able to sleep.
In the dream Malachi saw fire and smelled columns of choking black smoke. He had seen a flash of the silver wolf howling, his head held high, his long throat extended. Fire brushed his magnificent fur coat so that it curled and blackened. The wolf was dying, consumed by flame.
"Balthazar," Malachi whispered, coming awake at the sound of his own voice. He could almost smell the scent of scorched flesh and hear the howl fading into the night. He brought a hand to his forehead and found he was sweating. The dream was so real. Could Balthazar have died in fire? Would he be sending no more assassins?
The boy's eyes were open when Malachi glanced over at him.
"You're awake, too?" Malachi sat up and scooted to the campfire coals to add some wood he'd gathered earlier. The night air was chilly, though his body was covered with a clammy sheen of sweat from the nightmare.
"I was thinking of Dottie," Jeremy said. He didn't move to sit up. He lay on his back looking at the sky overhead, his arms resting at his sides.
Malachi wished Jeremy wouldn't think of his twin sister. Every time he did, he fell into a morbid mood. Though he was ten, it seemed he had aged since his transformation into vampire. He was often moody and when he spoke, his concerns were not those of a child.
"Do you know why she wore our mom's dresses?" Jeremy asked.
"No, why?"
"Because once Grandpa told her she looked like our mother. She thought if she wore her clothes, she could bring her back."
"Oh." Malachi found that so sad he felt his face collapsing into despair.
"Where are we going, Malachi?"
"I think it's time we went home."
"Your home?"
"Yes. I had a dream, and my dreams have always been prophetic. I saw the man who sent the assassins after me, and he was on fire. He was dying."
"You think he's dead? I thought vampires didn't die. Unless they lost . . . unless someone . . ."
"Decapitates them? That's one way. The other is fire. They can't regenerate if they're burned. It takes them too fast, gives them no time to save the body. Fire consumes the soul so fast it scatters it."
Jeremy was quiet for a long time. Malachi stoked the campfire and looked out over the plains. In the distance were low mountains, but where they camped there was nothing but a flat vista broken occasionally by barrel cactus and the scraggly mesquite tree. He missed his East Texas home terribly. It was nothing like this. There were trees and lush grass, smooth rolling hills, and whole fields of wildflowers in the spring. He hadn't known how attached he was to the ranch until he left it. He missed his horse, Harley, and riding down the long wooded paths. He missed his parents—his mother's soft gaze of love, his father's reserved and respectful care for his son. He missed his bedroom with the east-facing windows where the sun came up and streamed through on late mornings when he stayed in bed.
If Balthazar was dead, it was safe to return home. He'd take Jeremy with him and let his mother help raise him. He'd teach him to ride while she taught him to control his natural urge to kill for blood. His father would teach him about animals and their care and how to work on old cars. Jeremy needed guidance, he needed someone to care about him. He was so young and so helpless yet.
"Do you think Dottie knows I'm all right?" Jeremy asked, interrupting Malachi's reverie.
"I don't know. Maybe." Malachi found it uncomfortable
to speak of the spirit. He didn't know what he thought about the soul, though he had just spoken of it to the boy. He believed the soul was real or why else did the vampires battle in death to find the path they should choose? Other people would try to explain it away, saying humans didn't die completely and come alive again as vampires. And if they did, by some fantastic chance, if that could be scientifically proven under lab circumstances, then the vampire's soul certainly could not have entered into a mythological land where he or she chose to be a certain type of vampire. But Malachi knew differently. He believed in the supernatural because he was living evidence of an unnatural human. He could move faster than any person alive. He enjoyed precognition, knowing when something was about to happen. He had extrasensory perception, knowing when another presence was nearby. And he had great inhuman strength and an unnaturally strong immune system.
What he didn't know for sure was why he was the way he was, or why vampires had ever come about. He didn't know if their place in the scheme of nature was an aberration or a leap in evolution of one branch of the evolutionary tree. He didn't know about an all-knowing Creator or if there were many gods controlling human destiny. He didn't know about heaven or hell, about spirits that survived. He just didn't like to talk about it because he had so many questions himself.
Jeremy rolled onto his side and stared at Malachi. "You're sure he's dead? The one who sent the vampires to kill us?"
"I think so."
"If he isn't, I'm going to kill him."
The boy's voice was deep and fierce. In his voice and his words was promise of violence. Jeremy's sorrow had changed to anger. He frequently argued with Malachi or gave him a dangerous look. He was like the newly born viper with a bite as poisonous as that from a mother snake.
"I think he's dead," Malachi repeated.
"I'm hungry," the boy said, changing the topic.
Malachi sighed. Jeremy's appetite doubled each day.
Soon the small animals he slaughtered to give the boy wouldn't be enough. If he didn't get him back to the ranch soon, the young Predator might become so ravenous he'd go in search of a mortal. Or he'd turn on Malachi some night when he was sleeping, unable to help himself.
"I'll go find something for you." Malachi stood from the fire and walked off into the desert. A full yellow moon lit up the landscape, highlighting the animal eyes that shone from burrows and behind brush.
That's my moon, he thought, staring into the sky. Malachi's moon. It's the first moon of my freedom. Balthazar came into my dreams for years, threatening me beneath a moon like that, but now he's dead. I'll be free to live my life in peace. He felt his heart soar at the prospect.
He walked on, taking his time on the hunt, hoping to take only the largest specimen. This time he'd let the boy kill the animal himself. Or he might want to drink from the animal while it was still living.
The whole idea upset Malachi, from the hunt to the innocent creature's death, but then he, too, was a carnivore. He and Jeremy might take different nourishment from lower species, but they both killed to live. The difference was negligible when he looked at it that way.
He walked farther into the desert, wide awake and not at all tired. Now the moon was at his back so that his shadow fell long over the desert before him.
He could go on until dawn if he had to.
~*~
After leaving Detective Teal, Mentor returned to Bette Kinyo's home. He stood close to her again, remembering the long night he had spent at her side.
He had heard the multitudinous voices of dying vampires. They did not call for him, but he should have been there to circumvent their deaths and he knew it. Outside, fires roared, devouring homes not far from Bette's house. The fires hadn't reached her neighborhood yet, but they were on the way if firefighters didn't check them. It had to be Upton sending his Predators to kill the poor Cravens, just as he had promised to do. The night was the best time to attack. Cravens rarely left their communal homes, but at night they always stayed indoors, afraid any strong, criminally-minded human could overtake them.
They moved too slowly to escape if a fire broke out. They were too weak and too debilitated by disease to fight back. They probably put up very little resistance when the Predators came. Killing them as mercilessly as this was an act so evil it rivaled any act ever committed against the vampires.
Mentor had wanted to be out there saving them, but he couldn't leave Bette, he simply couldn't. He had hoped Dolan could reach the Cravens in time, but evidently he hadn't. Then there came a cry so piteous from a trapped Craven in a fiery furnace of a communal house, it caused Mentor to shiver. He had to go to her. It was a female, trapped, dying.
He hurriedly left Bette's house. He found the fire already extinguished and the female Craven near death behind the building. He lifted her up and held her close to his chest. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and he realized he wasn't going to save her; he'd come too late. Her limbs were blackened and shriveled. The flesh of her face was also burned, mottled by fire. He felt her life force leaving her. "Leap to another body," he instructed her. "Go!"
Suddenly her spirit left her and he held merely the dead carcass. She had sped away, trying to save herself, but he wondered if she would find another human to inhabit in time. He placed her body carefully on the grass and stepped over it. It was in front of the hovel of burned timbers and coals that he spied Detective Teal's car speeding to the scene.
Mentor now looked at the light streaming through Bette's windows. He felt bitterness that a day could dawn on so much destruction to the vampire nations. Upton was responsible for murdering most of the Craven population in the city. It was just the beginning. Next, he knew, Upton would try to disrupt the blood supplies to the Naturals. He was intent on throwing all the vampires onto their own devices. This would create a chaotic time that would divide the vampires and crumble the natural order.
He glanced down at Bette. He must rouse her soon. She sat unmoving, not even crying, and he feared for her mind. She needed to call the police and report the murder. She'd have to make up a story about an intruder. Alan's neck wound could have been made from a blow. Before Mentor healed Alan's neck, the authorities would have thought a wild animal had torn him apart, just like the bodies they already had in the morgue from the night's slaughter of Predator by Predator. There was no way Bette could have explained that away.
In the past minutes since his return Bette had not moved or spoken. She sat with her hands in her lap, staring at the covered corpse of her husband across the room on the sofa. Coming to terms with his death would be a slow, painful process.
"Bette?" He lifted his hand from her shoulder. He hunched beside her and took her chin in his hand, turning her face to him. "Bette, I'm back. You have to call the police. I'll have to leave you. Do you understand?"
She licked dry lips and said, "Who do you live to honor?"
Puzzled, Mentor tried, but could not understand what she was asking.
She said again, "Mentor, who do you live to honor? I lived my life in a way it would honor my grandmother. She was a good woman. She never caused harm. She was giving and loving and open. But now I will live to honor my husband."
Mentor understood. Was there someone he tried to emulate? Was there a life he admired so much he tried to live in a way to honor it?
"Bad people live for no one," Bette said. "They have no ancestors or loved ones who can influence them. Like the one who came in the night and took Alan."
Mentor looked back over his long life and realized for the first time that he had also lived to honor someone. He had never thought of it that way, but it was true. His decisions and actions over many decades reflected the sensibility of a Predator he admired. He drifted back in memory to the beginning of his life as a vampire. Early on, he had been summoned to a meeting with what he came to know as one of the oldest living vampires on Earth.
The great Predator called himself Vohra and lived on the Nile River at the edge of the Egyptian desert. Ment
or had been wandering the East, trying to find reasons for his condition. None of his family had been afflicted, so at that time he didn't know the disease was usually genetic and ran through whole generations. He also searched for others like him for companionship. Loneliness weighed heavily, causing him to turn inward to such a degree that he felt like a stranger on the planet.
He was like no one else, he believed. He was an abomination.
He would never find someone who understood him.
One night a vampire came to his room where he was staying in a small Egyptian hotel and told him Vohra had asked to see him. Knowing of no reason why he shouldn't go despite the fact he didn't know the vampire who had extended the invitation, Mentor dressed in white linen slacks and shirt, brushed his hair, and followed the servant vampire away from the city and down to the Nile. They were so far from the city the twinkling lanterns from it glowed like a rising sun on the horizon.
Vohra possessed the body of a young man hardly out of his teens, but his eyes belonged to someone incredibly old. He looked to be of Egyptian heritage, with a fine noble nose and full lips. His profile was similar to that of the pharaoh Tutankhamen. He was dressed as a traditional Egyptian, in a white robe tied with scarlet at the waist and leather slippers on his feet. He sat on the sand, the Nile flowing before him. He did not turn his head to acknowledge Mentor.
"I'm glad you've come," Vohra said in a pleasant, cultured voice. He knew many languages and this time spoke in English. "Please sit beside me."
Mentor sat down, hugging his knees and staring out at the wide Nile River. He waited. He thought it would be discourteous to come out and ask this Predator what he wanted of him. He'd tell him soon enough.
"Let me tell you of Bucchus, the divine bull of ancient Egypt," Vohra said.
"All right." Mentor loved to be instructed, and hoped the story would tell him something about the vampires.
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