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

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  “You’ve been gone all night,” she said.

  “Yes. I met some extremely interesting companions.”

  “Did they know where Jacques went?” She knew he meant vampires.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Malachi saw the wash cloth Sereny had used on the boy was stained with blood. She had wiped his face of murder the way a human mother might wash chocolate pudding from her child’s face.

  “Things are really crazy,” Malachi blurted.

  Sereny stood and looked at him, but didn’t reply.

  “I mean,” Malachi said, “well, how we live on blood, how we die and yet we don’t die. The vampires I met tonight told me fantastic things about the nature of the world. It seems life only grows more bizarre the more I know about it, the more I know about the vampire nations.”

  Sereny laughed, then quickly covered her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, but the twinkle in her eyes revealed how humorous she thought him. When he frowned at her laughter, she said, “Of course life is bizarre. Would you have thought when you were young that today we would have data blankets and SIRs and FAX houses? Could you have imagined we would be settling Mars and sending ships to Venus? Stick to the basics, Malachi. Conduct your search for this Frenchman who has done you so much harm. Keep it simple. If you dissolve into the quagmire of the fantastic, then…”

  “What?” he asked. He had to hear this, knowing what she was saying was meant to ground him. When he’d first come home he’d felt like a helium balloon about to float off into the upper atmosphere.

  “If you fall into the fantastic, if you think too much about the craziness of existence, then you will only lose yourself, Malachi.”

  “Are you channeling Mentor?” He asked this with a smile.

  “I’m just giving some friendly advice. It may be worth what it costs you, which is nothing, but it is friendly.”

  She gathered Jeremy up and hustled him toward the door.

  “Are you leaving?” Malachi asked, rising from the chair, suddenly afraid to be alone. He hadn’t known how much he’d needed them.

  Sereny turned and hugged him briefly, then had the door open and Jeremy pushed before her into the hall. “We’re going to Italy. I need to get Jeremy out of the city.”

  “Where can I find you there? I mean, you know, if I need you.”

  “Ask any of our kind, they’ll know where we are. And Malachi…” She reached out and touched his cheek, trailing her fingers along to his lips. “…Malachi, finish this soon. So you can go home. To your son.”

  He winced inside. She turned and hurried away.

  He watched them go down the stairs until they vanished into the stairwell. He sighed as he returned to his room and closed the door. He hadn’t taken blood in days. He was haggard, his visage one of a man starving. When he happened to go through the lobby, the other guests and the staff looked at him from the corners of their eyes, shuddering. They probably imagined he was diseased and gave him a wide berth.

  He felt weak, even confused, the blood in his cold veins sluggish. He could have asked Ellington for sustenance, but his mind had been elsewhere. Now he would have to find a supply somewhere before the day was out. If he didn’t, he might turn on a man. A real man. A living man. And kill him.

  Now that he was vampire. Now that he was alone and adrift again.

  Chapter 25

  I don’t know how I got to this place, Malachi thought, glancing around in a panic.

  He sat on a park bench. It was past midnight. He couldn’t remember his wandering during the day and into the night. He’d walked all over London, hardly remaining still for a minute. He now had blood on his hands and the taste of it lingering in his mouth. He withdrew a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped his hands clean, but they didn’t feel clean. He kept wiping, wadding the handkerchief, scrubbing at his knuckles and between his fingers.

  He had broken into a blood supply area of a hospital. He was too famished to even abscond with the horde of plasma containers he found there. He stood under the cold, bluish light from fluorescent banks overhead and drank his fill. He spilled blood. He dripped it. He threw empties to the floor and stepped on them accidentally, speckling his shoes with blood.

  Now he sat on the bench in the empty park, the dark a cloak of shadow all around him, and he was a bloody thing. Infused with it. Spotted and streaked with it.

  He had come back from death a Predator, just as he had wished. Mentor hadn’t accompanied him into the red dream of death. Malachi didn’t want to be talked out of becoming a Predator. Mentor knew there was no point in trying to dissuade him.

  But being Predator did not mean Malachi would kill to live. Not if he didn’t have to. Being Predator just gave him all the supernatural abilities he believed he would need. He could take blood like the Naturals, like his mother. Couldn't he? In all the months since his change, he had only killed once, and the memory haunted him.

  It was a night he walked aimlessly through busy London, looking for vampires to question, hoping to pick up a trail on Jacques. He stopped at the mouth of a long alley, glancing down it. He saw the figure, felt its heat. The woman was dying. He knew this as surely as he knew his name. She was dying.

  He walked toward her and found she was propped against a flattened cardboard box lying against a brick wall. She saw his shadow fill the narrow street and gestured to him. He drew close, his nose detecting her complicated scent, detailing to him her physical state. He detected cheap wine, a vinegary, nose-assaulting smell. Old sweat soaked into old clothes that hadn’t been washed in ages. And the scent of death surrounding was a cloud that smelled like bad cheese and sewage.

  She waggled her fingers at him, her eyes going in and out of focus. He stepped closer. Bent down.

  “You want me, take me. That’s all right. I’m going now.”

  He straightened in a flash, shaking his head. “No…no…I don’t want…”

  She nodded her head. These small movements and the speaking of the words had drained her small pool of energy. She let her head hang and she was breathing in little light sips, as if there wasn’t enough air in the world to keep her respired. She whispered, gasping between the words, “Yes, you do want me. I know what you are. I won’t hold it against you.”

  She couldn’t possibly know what he was. Couldn’t possibly. Humans rarely knew vampires unless they were under attack and they were able to defy their rational minds to recognize the monster who had them in its clutches.

  “I’m vampire,” he said, making it plain she was wrong about what she thought he might be.

  “I know. I know.”

  She couldn’t possibly! He stood transfixed as she slid onto her side, her head now resting on the cobbled street. Her eyes rolled back in her head. “Come,” she whispered. “Hurry.”

  She was offering him her blood. She was not asking to be made into a vampire. He understood that implicitly.

  He hunched down next to her and lifted her beneath the arms, holding her upright. Her skin was soft and sagging; grasping her was like taking hold of worn pillows. Her head flopped on her neck. She sucked hard at air now, struggling to breathe.

  The urge to drink from her was upon him suddenly, but he didn’t want to. He hated to do it. He abhorred the thought. But the urge was there nonetheless, forcing him nearer and nearer.

  His mother had told him it would happen and it was up to him what he did about the urge. But she never told him how great was the force that drove him to bend over the old woman and snap his lips around the slack skin at her exposed neck and sink his fangs into her veins. He was never told his mind would fall back from him, as if fading into the distance, into a fog, and nothing existed but drinking and sucking and drinking. Taking life. Using life.

  Once she was truly dead, he stumbled back, falling onto his haunches, then leaping to his feet. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes were wide and stunned…and horrified.

  Yes, she would have died anyway, he reasoned. Sh
e had offered herself to him, knowing him vampire. He had needed the blood.

  But…

  But he had never wanted to do this. He shouldn’t have gotten so close to a human when he was that hungry. He shouldn’t have given in to the desire. He had gone for days before and had never been so impetuous.

  After the old woman’s death, she became a totem lodged in his brain. Now when he hungered, she was there, a voice whispering Take me. The remembrance of the blood, warm and vital, returned to harry him.

  He realized, sitting on the bench, repeatedly wiping his hands on the handkerchief, that even when he did not kill, he was going to be haunted by that first kill. He’d be tempted from now on and forever to go for the warm blood from a living being.

  He had only been full vampire for a few months and already he knew, knew, he had made a mistake asking for it. He should have listened to his mother. Listened to Mentor. Don’t do this, they pleaded, please don’t do this. Don’t ask for this.

  Yet he couldn’t listen. Rage drove him and revenge fueled him and he could see no other way. He could not take the revenge he had to take if he were dhampir and subject to accidental death. He might have died and left his son unprotected. And without extracting revenge for Danielle he couldn’t have kept going from one day to another without committing suicide. Upton might have ordered Jacques, but Jacques had killed her. Like Upton, Jacques must pay.

  But becoming Predator was all a mistake. Being vampire was a curse, just as they’d tried to warn him. He was a beast, closer to the wolf or the starving wild dog than to a man. Blood lust drove him; it controlled him. He felt sorry for little Jeremy, but the same horrible desires were resident in his own brain. He might keep himself from taking humans, but he wanted to take them. This was something that never left him for a moment. Not even when he slept. It was always present—the overpowering urge to kill man, to drink from man, to take new blood.

  I must go away, Malachi thought. He shut off his thoughts and his molecules began to swirl until his body on the bench grew transparent and finally invisible.

  I must stay out of cities and away from men, he thought, taking to the sky above London. The torture of denying myself living victims will drive me mad. If I go mad, I won’t finish what I’ve set out to do.

  He descended to earth again and stood on a dirt road bathed in moonlight. He looked around, glad to be in the countryside and away from the crowded city. He was about to strike out walking, but he spied a house just off the path and a light shining from a window. In the window he saw a figure passing through the light, moving about in the house.

  He wanted to kill that person. Take that blood. The blood from the hospital supplies had filled him, but it hadn’t satisfied him. He couldn’t get away from men. They were everywhere; they were like locusts on the earth, filling it and eating it to the bone. How was he going to stop this? Why had he ever given into the old woman and taken her blood? Why had he listened to her? Did she know the act would do this to him? Had she deliberately filled him not only with her blood, but with the endless need that would drive him for eternity? Had it been her revenge against the dying of the light?

  He leaped over a ditch and strode toward the house, unable to stop. He came up to the open window and peered inside. An elderly man was bent over a table, his back to the window. As Malachi studied him, his tongue snaking out to lick his lips, the man suddenly turned. He stared straight into Malachi’s burning eyes.

  Malachi pulled off the window screen and climbed into the room. His fangs lowered and saliva dripped from his lower lip.

  “Be gone from here, demon.” The old man’s voice was strong and unafraid.

  Malachi swallowed. “I’m no demon.”

  “But you’re not like me,” the old man said.

  “No, I’m not like you.” When he said this he couldn’t keep a note of self-pity from creeping into his voice.

  The man stared without blinking. “I sense something. You’re an aberration of nature. I tell you now, you don’t belong here. You know you shouldn’t do harm. You know you’ll be damned.”

  Malachi felt rooted to the spot. This was the second human who had some kind of psychic connection that told him things he shouldn’t have normally known.

  “No,” Malachi said, “I don’t really want to do this. I’m…driven.”

  The man crossed the space between them in a heartbeat. He took Malachi by the arms, shaking him. “You must go far away from here. Leave! It’s not my time to die. I have work to do. You see?” He pointed behind him to the table. Books and papers were scattered everywhere in a pool of lamplight. “I’m involved in important work. It must be finished. You cannot come in here, invade my home, and end my life when I’m needed so badly. Do you understand?”

  “What…what kind of work?”

  The man blew out an exasperated puff of air. “Does it matter? When I tell you it is important, I want you to believe me.” He shook Malachi hard again, as if he were trying to wake up a sleepwalker. “All right! It’s a theory about the universe! It’s part of my life’s work. You can’t end it here and now, leaving it all unfinished. Now go! Go!”

  He released Malachi. Malachi’s blood lust had been momentarily stilled by the man’s bravery and vehemence. He staggered back toward the open window. Then the famine of his hunger returned and he leaped forward, taking the old man into his arms and sinking his fangs toward his throat.

  A woman burst into the room screaming. She flew at him and beat him on the shoulders. “Stop,” she screamed. “Stop this!”

  He remembered the love his mother had for his father. The love his Danielle had for him. This woman wanted to save her husband. He could not take life against that kind of defense.

  He let the old man go and stumbled back. “All right,” he said. “All right, I’ll go. I didn’t want to come here anyway. I don’t know how I got here. I’ll leave. Please…forgive me.”

  Malachi climbed outside and looked up at the night sky. Had the heavens tilted and the planets gone awry? Had he been dropped into a world he didn’t understand, where humans knew his intent and were able to ward him off?

  “Go! Be gone!” the old man screamed at his back.

  Malachi’s molecules spun into a tornado and dispersed to vapor and finally into nothingness.

  He was above the earth again, searching for a place anywhere below him where humans did not live. He must find a place, a hiding place; he must think. He must stop the terrible madness that had now overtaken him completely.

  He was pulled earthward and saw the great white endless plains of ice and snow. He gravitated toward the cliffs that rose hundreds of feet high. He flew toward their center, aimed toward the cold frozen heart of the ice shelf. He was at the pole of the planet, a place where man rarely traversed.

  Once inside the giant shelf of ice, he transmorphed into his body again, displacing the atoms of the ice, pushing them aside so that the whole cliff groaned with the movement, giving way to the two feet by six feet it took to allow him space.

  Ice pressed against his eyelids, his nostrils, his fingernails, and his neck. He could not, nor wished to, open his eyes. He could not, nor wished to, move. Ice could not make him much colder than he already was. He was a dead man walking.

  He wouldn’t be found here. He could harm no one here. He would thirst in agony and in time he would shrivel, the ice packing closer and closer against the bones and failing flesh of the body. He could die here, he hoped, if he held out long enough. If he did not move or wish to leave or hope for rescue. If he denied the survival instinct that drove them all so relentlessly.

  This was different from the watery pit where Upton had kept him prisoner in Thailand for a year and a half. This was a real prison. A secret, hidden place.

  This might be his grave if he were lucky.

  He shut off his thoughts. He shut down his mind. He turned into mental darkness that matched the darkness of the interior of the ice shelf.

  He dove headfirst in
to oblivion. The only safe place.

  Chapter 26

  Two months passed without contact with Malachi before his mother went to Mentor. She tried to convince herself Malachi simply needed to be left alone while he searched for his wife’s killer. Time between their communications grew longer without word from him. But two months! She’d tried to reach him telepathically and could not pick up any sense of where he might be.

  Something was terribly wrong. Mentor was all she had left. She sat in his living room, the worry dragging at her mind like a hundred pound weight. Bette was in the kitchen making herself a pot of tea.

  Mentor said, “He went to ground.”

  “How did you know? If you knew, why didn’t you tell me so I could…”

  Mentor interrupted. “He’s coming to terms with himself. I thought he needed time. I’ve been following him, shadowing him, watching over him as much as I can.”

  “But I don’t even know where he is. There was no warning, no communication. He just disappeared.”

  Mentor ran big hands through his blond hair. He was already acquiring wrinkles, as if his aged soul was forcing the new body into resembling the old body he’d had to give up. “I was near when he found a hiding place. I decided not to interfere.”

  “Then where is he?” Dell had aged none at all. She still looked like a fresh teenager. It would seem odd to anyone but the vampires who knew her to listen to what appeared to be a very young woman speak worriedly of her grown son.

  “He’s in the Arctic, frozen into an ice shelf.”

  “Oh god. I have to get him out. He’ll die. He’ll starve to death.” She was on her feet.

  Mentor stood quickly and took her by the arm. “No, wait. I’ll go.”

  She hesitated, her eyes filling with tears. “Why did he do it?”

  Bette came into the room carrying a saucer and teacup of steaming tea. She gave Dell a sympathetic look. “Mentor says it’s because he can’t cope with the guilt.”