LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) (2 page)

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.

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.

"Take her through it, Mentor," Dell's mother pleaded at his side. "Don't let her be lost to us."

Mentor looked up at the mother, a handsome woman with blonde hair and dark skin, her eyes shiny with tears. If she shed them they would be her blood and weaken her. He took her hand for a moment. She was as strong now as when he'd helped her through her own change. "Go and pray," he said.

"God doesn't listen to me. I prayed that neither of my children would ever get sick, and my prayers went unanswered."

"You merely prayed for the wrong result," Mentor said. "God does not bargain."

Dell's father approached the bed and behind him in the shadows came Eddie, Dell's younger sibling. The rest of the family gathered together in a corner of the room, standing close, holding a silent vigil. The elder Cambian said, "I would give my soul if this could be stopped."

Mentor knew his job included the family, not just Dell. He could not have any more mention of sacrifice. That simply created shame, when the sacrifice could not be given. Even now, he could see how the father's hands shook in rage and how the mother's face belied her pain, and even the boy child had bared his teeth, the incisors growing of their own accord, as if he might rip open a vein in his own arm and feed his sister to hurry her back to the world.

Mentor did not know if prayer helped, of if God even existed, but he encouraged his people to believe. Believing might create truth. It was written in Romans, in the Bible, "I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God." If a man believed, then he always had God on his side.

"Go with your wife, take your son, and pray for Dell," he said, gesturing them away. He turned to the assemblage and commanded, "Leave us alone. Let me save what I can. We need to be alone for the journey."

When they'd left the room, Mentor placed his hands on each side of Dell's temples and turned her sweaty face toward him. He leaned in dose. "I'm coming, Dell. I won't let you walk through the dark without me."

2

She was alone, dreadfully so. Not just alone as she had been at home before, when her parents were out and her brother not yet home from school. Not alone the way she'd felt one day at the mall with her friends when they shopped for clothes and she discovered that she hadn't any interest in fashion.

This time, she was alone in a terrible place, a reality she never had known existed. It was a barren, scraggly wood where the moon was an improbable blood red and there was no path, no starlight, no hope. She had been here recently, she knew, and thought it a dream. Mentor had brought her out and in an insane way she had been momentarily furious with him.

Now she called his name, at first softly, "Mentor . . . Mentor," then louder, and louder, until she was screaming his name, frantic to find him or someone, anyone, to rescue her. The moon, escaped from a Salvadore Dali painting, was melting now and oozing down the sky like thick red paint. When it touched the horizon, she knew something would happen, something unforeseen and quite fearsome. The trail lengthened, the trees pressed in on all sides, their bare limbs almost touching her, and she found she could not breathe. It was as if all the air had been sucked from this surreal universe, forgetting her, leaving her to suffocate, to fall to her knees gasping.

"We must turn back," came a voice.

"Mentor! Where are you? Why can't I see you? Get me out of here, please. Mentor, I can't breathe!" As she said it, it was true. She grabbed at her throat and opened her mouth fish-wide, sucking, finding nothing to breathe. I'll die now, she thought. So this is how it happens? My lungs burst and fill with the blood-red moon.

Someone had her hand and was dragging her back the way she had come. She could not see who it was, could not bend her neck and try to see behind her, but it didn't matter anyway; she was blacking out from lack of oxygen. Stars that had not been there before lit the Dali sky, flaring just at the back of her brain. She thought her mouth was working, gaping, and she was still struggling, but a small voice in her mind whispered in a childlike singsong, "You're dead, you're dead, you're dead now, you're dead."

"Don't listen," Mentor said, and she knew the voice belonged to him. "It's not really the truth. Only listen to what I tell you, Dell. Try to get to your feet."

Get to her feet. She had always been obedient, at least almost always. But how could she stand if she could not catch her breath? She gasped and tried to turn her head so he could see for himself that she was losing the battle.

"Up! Get up, get to your feet, it's coming!"

She wanted desperately to comply. Something was coming, and maybe if she could ascertain what exactly that was, she would be motivated to climb to her feet, air or no air in her poor scalding lungs. Whatever it was it had produced panic in Mentor's voice. He jerked at her arm, and she flipped over onto her back. It was then she could see the thing that frightened Mentor so.