SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (101 page)

In London, Sereny came to him. She found he had left Texas the same week she did. She had Jeremy in tow. Malachi understood the child better now—his urges, his unquenchable hunger. Being Predator made you walk a fine edge where the smallest temptation might be too much. For a child, the temptations had to be too overwhelming to control.

He shook Jeremy’s small hand. “Hello again,” he said, smiling. “Do you still like chickens?” Jeremy had killed nearly every chicken in his mother’s hen house when Malachi had first brought him home.

“I like anything,” Jeremy said, a wild glint in his eye. “Anything alive,” he amended.

A knife twisted in Malachi’s heart. He had known the child when he was human. As Predator he’d hardened and grown cold. Though he smiled, it was not the smile of a child. This one was a torturer. Didn’t Sereny sense that in him? Surely Ross had and that is why he’d sent him away.

Sereny asked to stay in his suite in the hotel for a few days. She was taking Jeremy to Italy, she said, but now they were in London, and she needed to let him feed.

Malachi put them into the bedroom and took the sofa for himself. He never saw them at night, when they were out stalking. When it was day, they slept like angels in his bed, Sereny’s arm thrown over the boy as if protecting him in sleep.

Malachi spent his time contacting vampires in the city and questioning them. They had heard of Jacques, they admitted, knowing he had lived with Charles Upton. But they didn’t know where he was now. They hadn’t sensed him in their city, nor heard of anyone who had seen him.

By pure chance Malachi stumbled onto a society of vampires living in a brownstone near Hyde Park. Though they proved to be of no use in finding Jacques, they were more than a mild diversion.

He had been walking late at night in the park when two Predators strolled up to his side and kept his pace. They were very elegant, dressed expensively, expertly coifed, and educated in speech. It appeared to Malachi they were hedonists and that pleasure was their religion. They smelled of cologne, their faces were full from feasting, and they wore a great deal of gold jewelry adorned with gems.

“Do you know a Frenchman who walks with the vampires by the name of Jacques?” he asked them.

“If a man walked with us, we would kill him,” one of his companions said. “We have heard of you, though. We’ve heard of your quest for this man. If we get a sniff of him, we’ll contact you immediately.”

Malachi’s first impression of the two elegant vampires was right in the fact they were pleasure-seeking creatures. But until they took him to their lair in the brownstone, where more than a dozen of their comrades lived, he had no idea there was another side to the society. He soon discovered they were not always engaged in the pursuit of gratification.

“We call ourselves Synchers,” the leader said. He was dressed in silk pajamas and was smoking a fragrant cigar when Malachi was presented to him. His name was Ellington.

“I’m sorry, Synchers?”

“Short for synchronization. We have been trying to find the link that connects one dimension to another. We synchronize our lives, locking in these other dimensions in order to explore them, but we don’t know yet what the true link is.

“You realize that when we dematerialize and travel, we move into a dimension we never knew existed when human?”

“Yes.” Malachi had intended to research this phenomenon himself, but who had time?

“So far we have found there are at least sixteen dimensions.”

Malachi’s mouth dropped open. “No physicist imagined that many!”

Ellington nodded smugly. “I know. We’re moving past the present research. There are sixteen dimensions at the very least. We suspect many more.”

“What does it all mean?”

Ellington raised his brows and blew a ring of smoke at the high ceiling. It settled near a black wrought iron antique chandelier and hung there like Spanish moss from a tree limb. “It means a great many things,” Ellington said. “It’s possible we become vampire in one of those dimensions. It’s probable, actually. It’s certain that we travel in one of them. In another we have encountered a world like our own, but slightly off-synch—as if it is two paces behind this one. It’s only a matter of seconds, but it makes everything confusing for us. There we find ourselves repeating some action we’ve just acted out in this dimension. We know we’re doing it again because we remember.”

Malachi was stunned. A thought occurred to him. “Then could you change the course of the future in this dimension by changing it there?”

Ellington narrowed his eyes and Malachi knew he was trying to read him. “Unfortunately, no,” he said finally. He waved the cigar expansively. “If we could do that, we could change our deaths and not become vampire at all, correct?”

Malachi wasn’t thinking of that. He was wondering if he could step back in time some way and save Danielle. Save her from… Save her for…

His face must have betrayed him. Ellington had leaned forward and now he reached out and touched Malachi on the hand. “We know of your loss and we are sorry.”

Malachi tried not to flinch. His face hardened. “I didn’t think we could manipulate the past anyway. It was just a question.”

Ellington leaned back again and returned his gaze to the ceiling and the chandelier, his head resting on the back of his chair as he smoked. “I’m not saying that isn’t yet possible. We don’t know everything there is to know about other dimensions. There may be one, if we can find it, where anything is possible. Who knows?”

“What are the other dimensions like?” Malachi forcefully wrenched his thoughts from Danielle.

“Two of them are like black holes. They’ve sucked in our members and never spit them back again. Therefore, they’re still indecipherable. We don’t know what goes on there. In one dimension all the creatures are nightmarish. It is a…sort of hell. A team went there and barely escaped to tell the tale.”

“How did you find out you could explore these dimensions?”

“Do you have about a year? It would take me that long to explain. It has been a very long pursuit. I’ve been involved with this society for two hundred years already.”

Two hundred years. And they hadn’t found a way to change the past. Disappointed, Malachi frowned. “I guess I’m a product of my age. I want quick answers.”

“And simple ones,” Ellington added. “I wish it were simple. I wish it didn’t take so much time. We’ve devoted ourselves to these missions and with our newest technologies, we’ve been able to crack some of the equations faster. But what if there are a hundred dimensions? A thousand? Ten thousand?”

“It sounds like dangerous work.” Malachi now thought he understood why this little society lived like hedonists. They took pleasure seriously because the work they were involved in might make them disappear suddenly, like a puff of smoke in a breeze. Immortality wasn’t so assured for them as it was for other vampires. Their lives were even more temporary and more in jeopardy than the life spans of mortal men. Although Ellington claimed to have been doing it for two hundred years, he knew the society had lost many of its members. Any of them could venture out and never come back, lost in the “black hole” dimensions that wouldn’t release them.

He and Ellington talked all night and when morning dawned, Malachi left the brownstone, wishing the group well. He was convinced the universe was not only infinite, it was multi-layered. He had learned enough from Ellington to keep his mind filled with philosophical questions for the rest of his life. Toward the end, when the sun was rising, Ellington said, “You might be someone who could join us one day. What do you think of that? Would it suit you?”

Malachi thought it over briefly and saw years stretching into decades, into centuries, all of it spent alone and aimless. He looked at Ellington and smiled. “I think that might be possible. One day.”

Still, the knowledge there were other dimensions and other worlds did not lessen his pain or his loneliness, and it did not bring Jacques to justice. He had given up his humanity for Jacques. He might have an eternity to live now and he couldn’t even begin exploring the deeper mysteries until he could find peace.

Back at his hotel, he found Sereny bathing Jeremy’s face. Malachi slouched into a chair and ran a hand over his eyes.

“You’ve been gone all night,” she said.

“Yes. I met some extremely interesting companions.”

“Did they know where Jacques went?” She knew he meant vampires.

“I’m afraid not.”

Malachi saw the wash cloth Sereny had used on the boy was stained with blood. She had wiped his face of murder the way a human mother might wash chocolate pudding from her child’s face.

“Things are really crazy,” Malachi blurted.

Sereny stood and looked at him, but didn’t reply.

“I mean,” Malachi said, “well, how we live on blood, how we die and yet we don’t die. The vampires I met tonight told me fantastic things about the nature of the world. It seems life only grows more bizarre the more I know about it, the more I know about the vampire nations.”

Sereny laughed, then quickly covered her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, but the twinkle in her eyes revealed how humorous she thought him. When he frowned at her laughter, she said, “Of course life is bizarre. Would you have thought when you were young that today we would have data blankets and SIRs and FAX houses? Could you have imagined we would be settling Mars and sending ships to Venus? Stick to the basics, Malachi. Conduct your search for this Frenchman who has done you so much harm. Keep it simple. If you dissolve into the quagmire of the fantastic, then…”

“What?” he asked. He had to hear this, knowing what she was saying was meant to ground him. When he’d first come home he’d felt like a helium balloon about to float off into the upper atmosphere.

“If you fall into the fantastic, if you think too much about the craziness of existence, then you will only lose yourself, Malachi.”

“Are you channeling Mentor?” He asked this with a smile.

“I’m just giving some friendly advice. It may be worth what it costs you, which is nothing, but it is friendly.”

She gathered Jeremy up and hustled him toward the door.

“Are you leaving?” Malachi asked, rising from the chair, suddenly afraid to be alone. He hadn’t known how much he’d needed them.

Sereny turned and hugged him briefly, then had the door open and Jeremy pushed before her into the hall. “We’re going to Italy. I need to get Jeremy out of the city.”

“Where can I find you there? I mean, you know, if I need you.”

“Ask any of our kind, they’ll know where we are. And Malachi…” She reached out and touched his cheek, trailing her fingers along to his lips. “…Malachi, finish this soon. So you can go home. To your son.”

He winced inside. She turned and hurried away.

He watched them go down the stairs until they vanished into the stairwell. He sighed as he returned to his room and closed the door. He hadn’t taken blood in days. He was haggard, his visage one of a man starving. When he happened to go through the lobby, the other guests and the staff looked at him from the corners of their eyes, shuddering. They probably imagined he was diseased and gave him a wide berth.

He felt weak, even confused, the blood in his cold veins sluggish. He could have asked Ellington for sustenance, but his mind had been elsewhere. Now he would have to find a supply somewhere before the day was out. If he didn’t, he might turn on a man. A real man. A living man. And kill him.

Now that he was vampire. Now that he was alone and adrift again.

Chapter 25

I don’t know how I got to this place, Malachi thought, glancing around in a panic.

He sat on a park bench. It was past midnight. He couldn’t remember his wandering during the day and into the night. He’d walked all over London, hardly remaining still for a minute. He now had blood on his hands and the taste of it lingering in his mouth. He withdrew a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped his hands clean, but they didn’t feel clean. He kept wiping, wadding the handkerchief, scrubbing at his knuckles and between his fingers.

He had broken into a blood supply area of a hospital. He was too famished to even abscond with the horde of plasma containers he found there. He stood under the cold, bluish light from fluorescent banks overhead and drank his fill. He spilled blood. He dripped it. He threw empties to the floor and stepped on them accidentally, speckling his shoes with blood.

Now he sat on the bench in the empty park, the dark a cloak of shadow all around him, and he was a bloody thing. Infused with it. Spotted and streaked with it.

He had come back from death a Predator, just as he had wished. Mentor hadn’t accompanied him into the red dream of death. Malachi didn’t want to be talked out of becoming a Predator. Mentor knew there was no point in trying to dissuade him.

But being Predator did not mean Malachi would kill to live. Not if he didn’t have to. Being Predator just gave him all the supernatural abilities he believed he would need. He could take blood like the Naturals, like his mother. Couldn't he? In all the months since his change, he had only killed once, and the memory haunted him.

It was a night he walked aimlessly through busy London, looking for vampires to question, hoping to pick up a trail on Jacques. He stopped at the mouth of a long alley, glancing down it. He saw the figure, felt its heat. The woman was dying. He knew this as surely as he knew his name. She was dying.

He walked toward her and found she was propped against a flattened cardboard box lying against a brick wall. She saw his shadow fill the narrow street and gestured to him. He drew close, his nose detecting her complicated scent, detailing to him her physical state. He detected cheap wine, a vinegary, nose-assaulting smell. Old sweat soaked into old clothes that hadn’t been washed in ages. And the scent of death surrounding was a cloud that smelled like bad cheese and sewage.

She waggled her fingers at him, her eyes going in and out of focus. He stepped closer. Bent down.

“You want me, take me. That’s all right. I’m going now.”

He straightened in a flash, shaking his head. “No…no…I don’t want…”