Blood of Gold (28 page)

She stared at him until he met her eyes. “You should remember that, Terrill. I haven’t said it, but I agree with Jamie and Robert. You’re wrong to force vampires to accept the blood of gold.”

Terrill felt himself rejecting her words.
Have I ever rejected anything she said?
he wondered.
Have I ever not believed she was right?
He shook his head. “We have no choice,” he said. “The Shadow is coming, and it won’t be so patient. We can’t let it turn all vampires to the darkness. We have to force them to join us instead.”

“‘It is the actions you take that make you what you are,’” she said, quoting his own words back to him. “You must give them a choice, Terrill. None of us are all evil, not even vampires. But neither are any of us all good.”

Terrill realized he was blocking out her words. He changed the subject. “You hungry?”

“I seem to remember wanting to eat a policeman,” she said. “Did that really happen?”

“Fortunately, we caught you before you ripped out his throat.”

He went to the small refrigerator and took out a steak. The fridge had quit working a few hundred miles back, but they had stopped and filled it with ice. It didn’t really matter, though. A baby vampire would eat any meat, rotten or fresh.

It disturbed Terrill a little when he saw how savagely Sylvie tore into the raw flesh.
I did this to her
, he thought
. But I can also fix it.

From the driver’s seat, Robert turned his head and called into the back, “We’re almost there, Terrill! You better do whatever it is you’re going to do.”

Terrill felt a flash of alarm and got down to business. “Are you ready for the blood of gold?” he asked.

“Well, if you think you’re going to leave me like this, you’ve got another think coming!” Sylvie said. She pulled against her restraints. “You can untie me now. I won’t eat any unwary humans we come across, I swear.”

She had blood smeared across her mouth and chin. Terrill got up, wetted a towel and tenderly washed the red stain away. Then he untied her.

“We’ll skip all the mumbo jumbo,” he said. “It’s the blood that matters, whatever Marc might say. I’ll simply feed you some of my blood and you’ll transform.”

Sylvie nodded. There was no doubt in her face.

Why should there be doubt?
Terrill wondered.
There was never any doubt.
But he hesitated. Was it possible? Was there something in Sylvie that would reject the blood of gold? He hadn’t doubted Matt either, but something deep inside the vampire had rejected the sacrament. Then, as quickly as the niggling doubt had arisen, he banished it. Terrill smiled and bit into his forearm. He leaned over Sylvie and dripped the golden droplets, one by one, into her open mouth. She smiled at him and swallowed.

Just like that, it was done. Sylvie would be his for eternity.
Assuming we survive the day,
he thought with a grimace.

She sighed and settled back into the bed.

At first the tremors were slight. Terrill tried to ignore them, but as they became more and more intense, Sylvie’s arms and legs started to thrash, and he lay on top of her, trying to keep her quiet.

All part of the process,
he thought. Every transition was different. Some vampires simply shifted; some went through a struggle before finally transforming. Sure, he’d expected her transition to be easy, but young though she was, Sylvie was a complex person, with depths he had only begun to delve into. But he knew that in the deepest part of her, she was good and sweet and loving.

She howled at the top of her voice.

He heard Robert mutter, “What the hell?” and the motor home slowed down as he took his foot off the gas pedal. “I’m pulling over!” he shouted.

Sylvie continued to scream, her vampire voice louder than any human’s, piercing and otherworldly. She was shaking so hard she seemed to be levitating.

“No,” Terrill said. It came out flat, because he still didn’t believe what he was seeing. In the pit of his stomach, panic was blooming, working its way up his body. This was so much like Matt’s last moments that he felt himself lose all strength, and he closed his eyes in despair.

“No.” The second time he said it, it was with all the denial in his soul. “No! It can’t be! I won’t accept it!”

He pried open Sylvie’s mouth as if he could scoop out the golden blood, and she gnawed into his fingers and more of his blood went down her throat. He hastily extracted his hand. She had bitten her tongue, but it was blue blood that flowed out over her chin, not gold.

“No, no, no, no!” he repeated. He wasn’t aware that the motor home had stopped. The door burst open and Jamie rushed in as Robert scrambled out of the driver’s seat and headed to the back. While Terrill sat frozen, Robert held Sylvie’s legs and Jamie lay on top of her upper body. Slowly, Sylvie’s gyrations diminished until she was just twitching. Then she stopped moving altogether.

Terrill stood up and stared down at her, numb. Robert looked up at Terrill, his face pale, as Jamie lavished kisses on her sister’s forehead and cheeks. Then Robert stood up as well and gently moved Terrill aside so that he could put two fingers against Sylvie’s neck. “She’s still got a pulse,” he said, and at almost the same moment, Jamie said, “She’s still breathing.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Terrill whispered. He felt like a child, unable to do anything effective. His two friends gently guided him to a seat at the dining table while he kept his eyes fixed on Sylvie’s face. She looked as if she was in pain.
Why is she in pain?
he wondered numbly.

“It’s Sylvie,” Jamie said. “My sister never does anything the easy way.”

Terrill heard something in Jamie’s voice, and he looked up to see that she was standing next to him, smiling down at him. “She’ll be all right,” she said with a certainty that flowed into Terrill and started to unfreeze him. “I have no doubt of it.”

Robert straightened up from the bedside. “It’s a strange reaction, to be sure, but she didn’t reject the blood of gold, or she’d be dead. We just need to wait until she revives. Unfortunately, we don’t have time to stop. We’re right outside Crescent City. The motel is only minutes away.”

Terrill heard him talking, but the words didn’t really register. He was still staring at Sylvie’s face, and as he watched, her features smoothed out and became peaceful. He took a deep breath and realized he’d barely been breathing.

Someone grabbed him by the arms. Terrill wasn’t sure how much time had passed. It had seemed mere minutes, but he had the sense that he’d been in a daze. He looked up to see Robert’s frowning face. “You’ve got to snap out of it, Terrill. You led us here. This whole expedition is your idea. What do you want us to do?”

Sylvie’s eyes popped open. Terrill was at her side in an instant, as if he’d teleported there. “Sylvie,” he said. There was no reaction. Her eyes showed no understanding. They weren’t lifeless; in fact, they seemed to glow with a strange radiance, but they didn’t move, and she didn’t react to his words.

“Wake up, my love,” he pleaded. “Join me.” He sensed Robert and Jamie standing beside him. They were all silent as they waited for a reaction from Sylvie.

She gave a soft sigh and a smile. Nothing more.

It was enough. Terrill felt all his resolve return, and his mind cleared of worry. That smile was the smile of saint.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but she’s going to be all right,” he said. “I can see that now. Just as well: she can stay here, safe from the fight.” He looked up at his two oldest followers. “Are you ready?”

Jamie and Robert were looking at each other, not at him, but they both nodded. Robert went back to the driver’s seat. Jamie took her place in the passenger seat beside him. They took each other’s hands.

“Let’s do it,” Robert said.

#

Feller looked down at the bodies of Callendar and Jeffers, then out over the airfield, which was littered with dead vampires. You had to hand it to these guys, they’d wasted very few bullets. Especially those last two. They’d deprived him of the pleasure of tearing their throats out.

Strangely, Feller felt the impulse to keep the other vampires from ravaging the FBI agents’ bodies. He wasn’t sure why. He hadn’t even liked them. They’d always been in the way of his career trajectory. Still… they’d been FBI and he’d been FBI, and to desecrate them was to desecrate the memory of his former life.

All that effort to free the Pelican Bay psychos, and now all that was left was a handful of them. The Master had brought another couple of dozen Shadow Vampires from London, but half of them were gone, too. Their army had been winnowed down.

Feller stayed on the tower’s platform for a few moments longer, breathing in the fresh ocean air. Below him, the Shadow was like a black cloud floating over the field, except the wind didn’t touch it. If anything, the blackness had spread, as if it had absorbed energy from the vampires’ deaths.

Feller could sense that the creature was absolutely enraged. A pall had settled over all of them, and it felt as if they were going to be pinned to the ground under the weight of it. Personally, Feller wished he could slip away, like that group of vampires that had run off when the shots rang out. He didn’t want to die for the cause. He was too selfish for that. That’s why he’d taken so readily to the black blood in the first place.

But he was a Shadow Vampire. There was nowhere to run. Hell, the Master of Shadow was probably reading his mind right now, and the only reason he wasn’t being forced to throw himself off the tower was because the Master needed all the troops he could find.

Feller felt a tug, a summons. He sighed and slowly descended the steps of the tower.

Kelton was trying to reorganize the surviving Shadow Vampires. Laura was following him around like his personal shadow. Feller walked up to them, and Kelton grunted at him. Feller had never met anyone who communicated with grunts as expressively as Kelton.

“Still think we’re on the winning side?” Feller said.

“I never thought I was on the winning side,” Kelton said. “I was always on the only side I could be on. But yeah, I think the Master is going to be pretty hard to beat. Have you looked into the Shadow? I mean,
really
looked?”

“I’ve been trying to avoid it, actually.”

“How do you defeat nothingness?” Kelton said. “It is bottomless, never-ending. Anything that exists becomes nothing when it is thrown into that void.”

They finally gathered all the survivors into a rough approximation of a team. Off to one side, Peterson stood alone. The other four councilors huddled together. Two more vampires, who looked like a teenage girl and her boyfriend, stood waiting nearby.

“What now?” Feller wondered aloud.

A tentacle of the void shot out, running along the tarmac like a stream of tar, and headed straight for Feller and Kelton. Feller backed up, but Kelton stepped forward to meet the dark ribbon, and it enveloped him. The big vampire straightened up and went rigid, as if a giant had grabbed him by the throat. Then he flopped down onto the tarmac.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Laura exclaimed, running to his side. She threw herself across him.

When he turned his face toward her, Kelton was no more. The Master of Shadow’s voice came out of his mouth. “Turn them,” the hollow voice said, and Kelton, or rather, the thing wearing Kelton’s body, rose and motioned toward the councilors, including Peterson, as well as the two teenage-looking vampires.

Feller saw the vacant looks in the former bigwigs’ eyes and shuddered.
I’m not letting those zombies bite me,
he thought.

“You do it,” he said to Laura.

“Why me?” she whined.

“Because your Big Daddy isn’t around to protect you anymore, and I’m ordering you to.”

Reluctantly, she went over to the councilors. As if on command, the four fell on her and sank their fangs into her, and she cried out. They sucked deeply of her black blood. She staggered from the draining and fell to her knees.

Right where she belongs
, Feller thought. Then he felt the command also, and found himself walking toward Peterson and the two other vampires. “You are to take my blood,” he intoned, but it wasn’t him speaking, it was the Master. “You are to become one of us.”

Peterson didn’t object. He shrugged and bit into Feller’s proffered arm. He straightened up, then his eyes turned black. Just like that. It was the easiest transformation Feller had seen.

The girl didn’t hesitate either. She muttered “Holy shit” as she started drinking, then fell flat on her butt and rolled over onto her side. She lay there, moaning.

“Jodie!” her companion cried. “Are you all right?”

“It’s wonderful!” she gasped.

Feller turned to the young-looking male. “What’s your name?” Feller asked.

The vampire was obviously scared. “Jimmy,” he said nervously.

“You have no choice, Jimmy. You have to pick a side.”

Jimmy was white-faced, but he nodded. He gingerly leaned over and licked some of the black blood from Feller’s open wound.

It was as if someone had cut his legs off. He crumpled where he stood and lay limply on the asphalt. He jerked once or twice, and then his skin started to slough off, his bones broke with loud cracks, and his head rolled away and split in half.

“Sorry, kid,” Feller muttered. “You weren’t cut out for this.”

The four councilors seemed almost animated again, as if they were waking up from a nightmare. Their movements were still jerky, as if controlled from the outside, but intelligence had reentered their eyes.

“Load up the SUVs and let’s get going,” Kelton ordered.

Feller looked around and realized Kelton was talking to him.

“You heard Kel-… uh, the Master. Load up! We’re going to war!”

Chapter 27

Sergeant Butler took his personal vehicle, a beat-up old pickup he took camping and hunting, because it was less conspicuous than his cruiser. He pulled into the parking lot of the redwood sculpture stand across the street from the motel, and there, nestled among the carved gnomes and dragons and bears, he began his stakeout. He didn’t know when Callendar and Jeffers would arrive, but he wanted to make sure he got his fair share of the bounty.