LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) (3 page)

Her mind raged against it.

"Dell, you must help yourself. If you don't get up and move, all is lost."

He must be a Predator, but more bloodthirsty than any she had known on Earth. He stood so tall his cape blocked the bloody sky and the moon's melting curves seemed to be red wings attached to his back. He swept down toward them from a hill, his face set against any plea for mercy.

"I will give you the power of a god," boomed the Predator's voice. "You will be ruler over the Earth, if only you'll come with me."

And I will kill and take innocent life the way you do, she thought. No, no, that's not what I want.

Dell found the last bit of air in the bottom of her burning lungs and drew strength from it. She scrambled to her feet and, turning her back to the marauding creature, clutched Mentor's hand. They ran swiftly, barely touching the ground, and she knew Mentor was supernaturally speeding them away. They moved so fast past the blackened trees that the trunks were but a blur to the right and left of her. The light glowed red all around and from out of the clouds it dripped like liquid to cover the earth. Mentor led her into the clouds, which were more mist than anything else, the moisture cool against her skin. If she were dead and being pursued by a devouring vampire, then she must find some way through this death dream and back to her parents where they might lay her to rest. She would not be taken.

The clouds parted, and Dell stood alongside Mentor at the edge of a great cliff. Below she could see for miles, and across a chasm there appeared to be numerous dark-mouthed caves yawning.

"Come back to me," screamed the creature at their backs. "Be one of my children. I will give you all the power of the universe."

"Hold tight to me," Mentor said. "Don't listen to his promises."

She clutched at his hand. Suddenly, Mentor stepped off the cliff and pulled her with him into clear space above the canyons. Behind her, she thought she could hear the frenzied footsteps of the Giant Predator, thought she could smell his fetid breath at her neck. She would not look back, never would she look back. And she would not look down, knowing if she did she might collapse and lose touch with Mentor, to fall forever into oblivion.

They crossed the chasm through thin air, air that was without air, and settled on the lip of a cave opening. Mentor drew her inside.

She did collapse now, falling to her knees in a near faint. She realized with a shock that she had not taken a breath since she first heard Mentor's voice back in the red forest. Could she speak, without air in her lungs to voice the words?

"I . . . I . . ."

"Yes," he said, sitting beside her on the cold, damp earth of the cave floor. "You can speak. And you have no need of air here. This is the place where the soul lives once the body's heart has stopped beating."

"Yes, like them. But you must understand you will never need breath again. You'll have to learn to breathe only to pass through the world without arousing suspicion."

Mentor gazed over the gorge to the far side and the red, misty clouds there. It was as if he could see through it to the heart of the haunted woods. There was no sign of the large Predator. "It was The Maker. He isn't the only one. There's one more."

Dell thought it over. "And the other one … somewhere in this place is a Craven Maker?" She shivered at the thought of the Craven and what it might be like to meet the one who made them all. They weren't as scary or ferocious as the Predators, but their lives on Earth were full of suffering and loneliness, which seemed to her just as horrible a fate.

"This cave," he said, "is the place of the Mistress."

"Then why did you bring me … ?"

She never got to finish her question. From out of the vast darkness at the back of the cave came a shuffling sound, and into the red light spilling from the chasm into the mouth of the cave came a creature that could stir pity in the hardest soul.

She was ancient, far older than Mentor, Dell knew it from the depths in her eyes. Down those blank corridors lay a million years of anguish. She was stooped and dressed in tattered layers of soiled white cloth. She shuffled rather than walked, and her mouth hung open on empty gums, her chin almost touching her chest.

Dell pushed back along the ground, heading for the void. "Get her away from me," she cried, flailing her arms to ward off the presence. "Oh, dear God, save me."

Mentor was again at her side and said quietly, "This time you do not run away. The Predator would have made you one of his had he caught you, but the Craven one comes as a supplicant. She begs your sympathy and asks you to join her. You must find a way to deny the request."

Dell turned wild eyes to Mentor. "Can't you help me?"

"I am helping you. It was your own will that propelled you away from the red moon. It must be your will to turn away from the Craven's cave. Use me as your staff, lean on me when you feel weak."

Dell hardly understood what was being asked of her. She faced the apparition. The devastation, the blasted landscape hidden behind the blank eyes made her weep. Tears ran down her cheeks unchecked. She nearly reached out to take the ancient woman's frail hand. But she felt Mentor strong next to her and knew she could not do it or she would be giving permission. She would return to herself in the real world weak and nearly blind, hiding from the sun, unwilling to walk free ever again among humanity. If she gave in now, she would forever be tormented and tortured by illness and despair.

"If you are mine," said the Craven, “you will never kill. Others will care for you. You will seek the darkness that comforts. You will leave behind comradeship of mankind so that you won't envy him. All things of the world will fade away and mean little to you."

She looked full on the ancient's face and said, "I know you've suffered an eternity and you want me to go with you, but I can't. You have to understand. I can't go with you."

"Forgive her," Mentor instructed.

"I forgive you for hoping to spirit me away and make me a part of your suffering," she said meaning every word.

The Craven Maker sighed and it was harder to bear than if she had wept and begged. It was the sigh of a loneliness that had gone on forever without abating.

Dell felt herself weakening, making a move forward as if to embrace the old sick woman, but resolve held her back. She bowed her head and shook it slowly from side to side. "I can't help you," she said. "I can't spend the rest of my time in sorrow and sickness, never to see the light of day, never to be dose to humans again. I would rather be dead in my grave." She didn't know where the words were coming from to explain her position and to deny the old woman satisfaction. It was as if she had aged fifty years in only a few hours since the onset of the mutated disease.

The Mistress turned slowly and padded back into the black hole of the cave until they could not even hear her footsteps.

Dell turned into Mentor's arms. "Can I go home now? Please, help me find my way."

Mentor lifted her into his arms and ascended from the mouth of the cave, over the deep chasm, above the red clouds, beyond the haunted forest, and past the sagging blood moon. When again Dell opened her eyes, she was in her bed, in her own bedroom, holding onto Mentor's strong hands.

She tried to breathe and couldn't. She tried to cry and couldn't. She wanted to speak and nothing came from her lips.

"Now you learn how to be a Natural," he said. "The first step is to relax into your body and get to know it again. You have passed the hardest tests of all."

Dell gazed down at herself. Someone had changed her clothes and dressed her in a long granny nightgown. She tried to remember it. Maybe she'd gotten it for Christmas or Aunt Celia had given it to her for her birthday. She was closest to her Aunt Celia of all her aunts, but she had to admit Aunt Celia always gave her old-fashioned things that a girl her age privately shunned. Carolyn often complained that her mother belonged in another age, one of long dresses to the ankles and button-up shoes.

It was not only the gown she did not recognize. She found herself alien. A cold hard body. With a working brain. No air in her lungs. No beating of a live heart in her chest. It all seemed unholy. Why must she go on with knowledge of life when she was not alive?

It was enough to drive her mad.

~*~

Life among the undead had been nearly as normal as for someone who lived with a human family. Dell remembered early memories that lay in her distant past like shiny shards of mirrors reflecting bits of her childhood. When she was almost five, living in the daydream that children dreamed, she recalled a sunny spring day with her mother. Her brother was a newborn, lying in a bassinet in the living room while her mother attended to her regimen of household cleaning. The blinds were drawn against the bright light that threatened to spill around the edges of the windows. She remembered the dark drapes printed with large green leaves, the marching-soldier columns of plastic blinds, and the light peeking around all the edges with a golden aura.

Dell stood at the corner of an Early American maple coffee table, clutching a baby doll, her attention switching from the brightly outlined windows to her mother's swift movements with a dust cloth. Suddenly her mother lifted off her feet and was first near the top of the television and then in a blink she was across the room, without ever touching the floor, and dusting a tall bookshelf full of porcelain ladies in frilly dresses.

It was not at all startling. She had seen her mother do strange things before and thought nothing of it. If her mother could levitate and fly through the air, if she could move like a tornado, or if she could appear and disappear in a twinkling, then that is just how the world was arranged. Surely all mothers could do the same.

Another mirrored memory was of her father on a hot summer day. He stood in the backyard turning hamburger patties on a grill. Mom had gone indoors to make a pitcher of lemonade. The scent of the searing meat made Dell's mouth water. She was so hungry that her stomach growled. She had noticed that only she and Eddie ever ate hamburgers. Her parents carried on a conversation as their children ate and didn't even have a plate setting before them. None of that mattered, of course, just so long as she got her own fat hamburger with the juices squeezing into the bun and the mayo and ketchup dripping over the sides.

Eddie found the old crape myrtle at the back of the privacy fence and began to climb it, the brown peeling bark of the limbs flaking off in his small hands. Dell must have been seven and Eddie almost three. Dell watched him from the swing set where she pushed herself back and forth lazily. She could have told her father that Eddie was doing something he shouldn't, but she was curious to see if her brother could make the climb she had been making for some time already. If he could, then they might have races up the tree to see which one reached the top first. But only if he didn't fall now, didn't prove he was too little for the game.

Eddie made it to the very top of the old tree before his father noticed. Dell turned her head at her father's cry. "Eddie! Get down from there."

Eddie, startled, lost his hold, gazing out in his dumbfounded way from between the pendulous white blooms, and began to plummet.

That was when her father sped across the lawn in a blur, in a motion that was inhuman, and leaped into the air, catching his son in mid-fall.

"Wow," Dell recalled whispering below her breath. "Gee."

When Dell was a few years older, she understood that her parents' abilities might be above and beyond normal parental behavior. No one else could do what they did. Not a single soul. Children climbed trees and fell, no rescuers in sight. Mothers dusted in a thoroughly mundane way, slowly, on two feet. Most refrigerators held more food and no blood bags. Parents ate the same food as their children.

When Eddie got sick and began to change, her parents sat Dell down and explained everything. The blood, the swiftness of movement, the appearing and disappearing acts, the way they were never ill, not even with a cold, not even with a fever. They told her why they might be caught standing in the hall or the kitchen, napping. When Eddie got sick, Dell faced the numbing truth. Her family wasn't really human anymore. And she was about to lose her brother, too.

Eddie was twelve when he got sick. The disease came on rapidly and waylaid him one winter afternoon when he was lying on the sofa reading comics. It was Dell who found him prostrate, sweating, unconscious. His body was covered with sores and his lips were pulled tightly back from his teeth so that he looked as if he were in great pain. One look at him spurred Dell to the telephone to call her mother at work. "Mom, Mom, come quick, Eddie's dying."