HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (36 page)

“
What are you
dreaming?" Mentor asked.

She could not see
him, so he must be apart from it, helping her awaken. That's what
Mentor did. That was his job. Helping.

She spun away from
his voice and fell through dark space until she found herself in a
strange surrounding. She was dreaming, she assumed. She saw something
she had to tell Mentor about.

"I'm in a dark
wood. And there's a red moon rising."

"Does it
frighten you?"

"Yes!"
She peered through leafless trees, tripped over exposed roots, moving
always toward the red moon. Though she feared what it meant to her
life, she was drawn against her will. She could sense there was
something waiting out there, just beyond her field of vision. If she
kept moving toward it, she would learn all she ever wanted to know
about the world and how it worked.

"You can speak
with the moon another time, Dell. Will you open your eyes now and
visit with me? We have lessons and preparations."

She feared the
moon, so luminous with blood, so majestic that it seemed to fill the
sky with rays that turned the landscape scarlet. What did it mean for
her? Yet waking to the reality of what she would become and how to
move into that becoming was even more frightening. "No, I'll
just stay here," she said, more careful now as she picked her
way over brown tangled roots and through thick vines that shimmered
and shivered as if malevolently alive. A limb with rough bark reached
out and scraped her cheek, leaving a burning trail. She flung her
arms at it, skipping aside and beginning to run now.

"Dell, it's
time for you to return to us."

Time. Mentor knew
everything. Mentor was as old as the hills in the hill country of
Texas, he was older than any vampire she knew. He was older than
dirt, as her grandfather would say. "Do I have to?" she
asked. She took one more step through the barren forest, looked up at
the startling sky, at the moon with a face like Death … and
opened her eyes.

"I'm sorry,"
he said. "I didn't think it was healthy for you to stay in that
place alone."

He had forced her
out and awake. She found a blanket covering her bare arms. She was
hot, suffocating, a sudden sheen of sweat popping from her brow. "How
long did I sleep?"

"Not long.
Less than an hour. Can I see the sores?" She stretched out her
arm and bent it at the elbow so that the lesion faced him.

"Are there
more?"

"Two so far."
She mentally searched her body and added, "No, there's a new one
since Mom called you. Three more then, besides this one."

"How do you
feel?" he asked.

She liked his eyes.
Many of the Predators had shiny brown irises so dark they looked as
black as the bottom of an oil drum. And since Mentor was technically
a Predator—or had been at one time—she thought he would
have eyes like that. Instead, his eyes were as warm and brown as
coffee and kind, patient, knowing. There was no furtive agenda of
harm hidden behind his eyes. He had come to help her.

She sat up,
throwing off the blanket, uncaring that she sat before this old
vampire in her bra. "Hot," she said, "burning up."

"It's fever.
You'll be chilled in a few minutes and will need that blanket again."

Behind Mentor, she
could see her family. Her father had his arm around her mother's
shoulder. Her brother Eddie leaned against the wall, chewing on a
fingernail. Then she saw Celia, her mother's sister, and her cousin
Carolyn.

She reached out her
arms and instantly Celia came to her side, leaning over the bed and
hugging her. "Oh, I'm so sorry, baby. We're all here for you.
Grandma and Grandpa are on the way."

Carolyn came around
the other side of the bed and took one of Dell's hands and squeezed
it. She was only a year younger than Dell, and all her life she'd
faced this same event happening to her. So far, like her mother, she
had not been infected.

Dell saw tears in
her eyes. "Don't cry for me," she said, trying not to cry
again herself. "I'm going to be all right. Won't I be all right,
Mentor?"

He nodded at her,
but he said nothing.

There was a rustle
in the room and from behind her parents Dell saw her grandparents
enter the room. The bedroom was crowded now with people, all of them
watching her. Soon Dell's other aunts, uncles, and cousins would all
file into the house, keeping vigil. Unable to fit into the bedroom,
they would stand around the living room, walk in the yard, whisper
her name to Heaven, and pray for her.

Her grandmother
came to the bed. Celia moved aside, first kissing Dell on the cheek.

"Darling,
we'll be waiting for you," Grandma said.

"I don't want
to die!" Dell heard the panic in her own voice and saw the
scared, startled look in her grandmother's eyes.

"You'll come
back to us," Grandma said. She was in her eighties and vampire,
a Natural, like all of Dell's family. "We'll wait here until
that happens. When you open your eyes again, I'll be here."

The warmth of her
grandmother's embrace gave Dell strength, but a trembling came over
her nevertheless. She shivered uncontrollably. She heard Mentor ask
everyone to stand back, and her grandmother let her go. Mentor
scooted his chair closer to the bed.

"What does the
moon dream mean?" Dell asked, feeling the outlines of the room
shimmer and move in and out as if they were no more substantial than
flimsy cloth.

He waved off the
question of the dream. "Not important. We can talk about it
later."

"What is
important, then?"

"Your soul."

As the human girl
she had been for nearly eighteen years, she might have scoffed at
him. But as a changeling, she understood perfectly how serious it was
to preserve the soul. If, in the midst of the change from death to
life again, she lost all vestige of her mortal self, she might be
condemned to wander the Earth like a fiendish nightmare bent on the
annihilation of the human race.

"Help me,
Mentor," she said, beginning to shake harder, holding her arms
close to her body to warm her ribs.

He lifted the
blanket and placed it gently around her shoulders. "That's what
I'm here to do, Dell."

"I'm sick. I
want to . . . die." She would die. Oh, yes, she would. But it
would not be real dying, not a death of rest or peace, with her soul
sleeping in the loving arms of her Creator. But die she would.

Mentor went down
onto his knees and took both her trembling hands into his own. "In
a few hours it will be dark, and you'll feel a little better. Until
then we'll talk."

He looked so sad,
she almost wanted to comfort him—except she had no emotional
strength left to comfort even herself. "So cold," she said,
teeth chattering. She felt as brittle as one of her mother's old
china plates, her tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth. Her eyes
felt dry, and she couldn't keep her knees from knocking together like
nervous tambourines. The bed shook with her trembling. In a minute
she might be fevered again. She would get sick and empty her stomach.
She would pace the floor and stop to frantically feel for her
heartbeat. Her little brother, Eddie, the only one she'd seen
transform, had done that and it had broken her heart.

She would curse
heaven and beg for hell, just as he had. She would claw the mattress
and try to bury her face in the springs so that no one could see her
private agony.

Tomorrow would be
no better.

"You're
wrong," Mentor said, brushing the hair from her eyes. "Tomorrow
will be a little easier."

Dell was used to
her family reading her mind, but they only did it when she said they
could, respecting her privacy. "Don't do that," she said,
breathless now, pushing at the blanket to get it away from contact
with her burning skin. Don't listen to my thoughts.

"All right,"
he said. "If that's what you want."

Dell looked for her
mother in the darkened room. Mom, I need you! Dell called to her
silently.

Before Dell could
blink, her mother was at her side, blowing on her skin, waving her
hands around like windmills to cool her escalating temperature. "My
baby," she crooned. "It's coming along, baby. Don't fight."

Mentor retreated to
the dressing table chair he had pulled over to the bed. It was too
small for his bulk, giving him the appearance of a creature on a
perch. He sat in the shadows, his aging, craggy face hidden in
darkness. Dell began to fear him until she caught the thought he
projected to her. It was the very first time she had read anyone's
thought at all, and she was glad it had come from Mentor. We love
you, he said simply. We're here for you. Don't be afraid. This is not
the end.

~*~

What Mentor had
promised Dell was the truth. Dying this way was not the end. Becoming
vampire was not the end. The end might never come for her, and there
lay the problem for all of them, even himself. Especially himself.
Though he had earned his respectful nickname more than a thousand
years in the past, and though it had been his job to mentor, to help,
and to guide new and desperate fledglings for as long as the memory
of his race could remember, sometimes Mentor questioned not only his
advice and the relevance of his role, but the very meaning of
vampiric existence.

The wise men who
had trained him in human psychology during the time of the ancients
when there were so few of his kind could never have envisioned their
teaching would have to sustain him throughout not one lifetime, but
dozens of lifetimes. Certainly he had kept up with psychology and
both the human and vampire spirits. He had augmented his education
over progressive generations until finally, one day near the
beginning of the new millennium in the year 2000, he turned away from
scholarship and said to himself, "Enough. I can learn no more.”

Yet even that was a
lie he told to himself. He learned something new about spirit every
time he was called upon to minister to someone as sick and miserable
and dying as the girl now lying on her bed in a comalile trance. It
was this challenge that kept him going, the task that drove away his
own misery long enough so that he could reach out to vampire children
such as Dell. What he had learned already from the girl was that
teens today were just as earnest, needful, and as full of pure light
as their predecessors had been.

Some parents had
tried to tell him the young people were subversive, rebellious,
uncontrollable, and sometimes conscienceless, as if born with
deformed hearts. Mentor knew that was wrongheaded at the outset. But
Dell Cambian was further proof. He could sense her true essence, and
it was as uncontaminated by fraud, evil, and envy as a newborn
babe's. Dell Cambian was worth saving, worth bringing into the
Natural life. He would fight for her soul and show her how to fight
for it. He would guide her to the other side and bring her back whole
again.

Changed, of course,
yes, changed. But whole and saved from the baser life of a Predator.
Or, God forbid, the nonlife of a Craven.

Most of his kind
believed that what one became—Natural, Predator, or Craven—had
to do with the progression and mutation of the disease. For many
years it was what he thought, too, but he came to realize it just was
not so. Many of the Naturals had entered medical research trying to
find an end to the disease. The first discovery they made was about
the nature of the actual human death.

Mentor had been
trying to spread the truth of the matter. The disease that made
vampires, the mutation that killed and made men live again, did not
determine a man's state of moral being. All it did was turn human
into vampire. What sort of vampire one became had to do with the
state of the soul. And how hard that soul fought for freedom from the
prevailing darkness.

If the patient
brought back too much of the darkness, he was Predator—vile,
often depraved, without empathy, and truly heartless. A wicked
creature. If the darkness brought back was less, the vampire suffered
physical weaknesses, a faint hold on the world, and a depression that
never relented. They were called the Craven. They were the cowardly
and weak, useless to themselves and society. The Naturals brought
back the least darkness from their encounter with death, and they
were never as human as they once had been, but they longed to be, and
that made all the difference.

"You must
fight off the dark wood," Mentor whispered to the now comatose
Dell. He projected his firm thought with the spoken words. He knew
she could hear him on some level.