Dracula: Hearts of Fire (Dracula Heart's) (53 page)

    The bear gestured to Keith with his paw for him to get a little closer. “I was talking to a worm down there and guess what he said.”

    “I don’t know.”

    “He said it’s tough to be a worm.”

  
Keith looked puzzled. He
put the animal back into the ground
and covered him with dirt
. “
I suppose
it is tough to be a worm
.
Probably
tough to be a deer freezing your ass off in the winter
.
There, how’s that?”

    “That’s good. The worm and I are going to be best friends
down here
. I’ll see you when you get to heaven. Bye now.”

    “Okay.”
Keith
sounded defeated as he
walked away with is head down, slower than a human.
He felt as if he was the only vampire remaining on the planet.
He wiped the tears from his cheeks but didn’t look back.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

   
P
IERS ANTHONY BECKONED TO JENNY
but he seemed to be so
far away. She could see his li
ps moving but couldn’t make out a single word he was saying.
The author
appeared to be shrinking in size
and was obviously in some sort of distress.
His face showed the stress of it all.
Piers
continued to beckon Jenny and was getting more and more frantic as he got smal
ler and smaller. Then Jenny saw
Moon Diamond
was dead, no brain activity whatsoever.
That made her sad and a tear ran down her left cheek.

    It was just after midnight and Jenny was asleep
in her bed
but restless. She jerked occasionally as the lion cub slept at the foot of her bed.
She turned from one side of the bed to the other.
T
he nightmare progressed
;
she started to jerk more and more
with a loud moan finally waking her up.
The girl wizard sat up with a gasp.
The lion cub watched as she quickly got dressed and ran out of the room.

    Allison and Dracula were snuggling as Jenny commenced to bang on their door. They looked at one another and both sat up in bed.
It sounded like she
was going to break the door down.

    “Stop doing what you’re doing and let me in! Piers is in serious trouble!”

    Allison ran and opened the door to se
e an alarmed Jenny. “W
hat’s wrong?”

    “Piers Anthony and Moon Diamond are in serious trouble. Mood Diamond mi
ght be dead.
I saw it in a dream
it was so clear.
”

   
Had she been an ordinary child they would have told her
it was only a dream, but she was miles from ordinary
.
Dracula had been in his underwear but he got dressed so fast that it must have been a record.
He kissed Allison and blurred down the stairs with Jenny right behind him.
The cub morphed into a full grown lion
and blurred down the stairs and out the front door with Dracula and his daughter.
A passerby ran as fast as he could at the sight of the lion.

    Within seconds they arrived at the zoo and found Piers Anthony han
ging upside down from a tree with Wang
in the process of sucking his life energy out of him; they could see the white light leaving Piers and entering the wizard.
The author was less than a minute from death.
The Master was
both sad and angry at seeing
Moon Diamond
’s
lifeless
body
on the ground.

    The lion
ess
sank it
s teeth into Wang’s left leg, biting
down hard and wouldn’t let go.
The wizard’s scream sounde
d like
a little girl. He was surprized and caught off guard
and started to pound hard on Sarah’s head
.

    Zacharia’s soul shouted at them. “Kill that bastard!” But neither Jenny nor Dracula could hear anything.

   Jenny blurred and broke the flow of white light from Piers
to Wang as a person would snap
a thread, but he turned and hit her with a bolt
, taking
a chunk out of her shoulder and she winced with the pain.
Dracula stepped in front of the second bolt that was meant for Jenny
; Wang sensed her powerful wizard status and figured that she was his biggest threat. It was his first time
seeing Dracula in person, and although he had seen photos of him he didn’t recognize him
in the heat of battle
. Dracula grabbed him by the neck and pulled him right off his feet; he sho
ok him around like a rag doll
. The Master
choked the head off the Chinese wizard and then watched
it
topple to the ground
,
as the miscreant turned to bones he hoped that it wasn’
t too much for Jenny to handle, seeing her father so aggressive.

    “Jenny, are you okay?”

    “I’m fine. It healed.”
Jenny picked up the cat
.
Moon Diamond
continued to have a pulse but just barely. “Dad, the cat’s not dead but Zacharia’s soul has been released.
I guess he’s gone.
”

    Dracula looked depressed. His handsome face didn’t appear quite so handsome because of his pain.
Even after all that he’d seen over the centuries it was painful to lose a friend.
“
Zacharia’s dead?”

    “A
ll I know is that his soul is not in there.
”

    Dracula went over to Piers Anthony who remained in his upside down position. The Master snapped the rope and placed him on the ground beside the Siamese. He returned all the energy that had been taken from him and the author’s eyes opened.
He was perplexed at Dracula staring down at him.

   
Jenny
continued to hold the cat. “I think the poor thing is in a coma?
”

    There was a loud crunch as the lioness snapped one of the dead wizard’s femur’s in two
, then the cat spat out the bone as if it left a bad taste in her mouth
.
Piers petted the unresponsive cat. Jenny handed the cat to Piers as she picked the dead wizard’s book up off the ground
.

    Piers stroked the Siamese and was saddened by its state. “What will you do with Moon Diamond?
”

    “I’m going to bring him home and see if he’s going to re
cover.
He’s not dead yet but it doesn’t look good.
”

    Piers shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. Being a wizard, can you spell him back to consciousness?”

    “Everyone seems to think that I’m such an almighty wizard, but my knowledge is probably comparable to a toddler. I’m going to check
this thing out
and see what’s in it, looks like a bunch of spells. But really, I need to get my hands on that Blood Book. Problem is I might not survive trying to kill that other wizard.
When I was shot I sensed his interference. He wants me dead.
”

    Piers gave the cat back to Jenny.
“It’s strange not being able to detect Zacharia in
side the cat. I’m sure he’s happier now
.”

    Zacharia’s ghost pushed at Piers but his hand went right through him. “I am not happier now! All this floating around is annoying. If I have to spend all of eternity like this; I can’t even kill myself.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

    A
NNIE WAS COMFORTABLE WITH ALISTAIR
and they got along well enough but she was restles
s. The more that she thought that
she might live for another hundred years or more was not sitting well.
Her soul had been ready for release; she would have died in less than three weeks had she not been turned.
In fact she was worried about
living so long
. Was that why some vampires turned evil?
Did their
brains implode after living
too long?
What
was she going to do with herself? Even now she had days where she was bored. How would she feel in five hundred years if she lived that long?
She wasn’t much for travelling but perhaps she would have to start.
There were certainly a myriad of things to explore in the world, and many new things to learn as we
ll. Perhaps she was over thinking
but she couldn’t control how she felt.

   
If she could save time in a bott
le she’d break it over some bad guy’s
head, she was quite sure of it. At least that made her smile.
Happiness was an elusive creature that one could stand beside but it could never be captured, never knowing when it was going to flee to greener pastures.