SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (112 page)

Malachi returned to the ranch to take over from his father. Ryan was an old man now, bedridden, unable even to sit in his wheelchair. Malachi spent part of every day caring for him, loving him for his vulnerability, his humanity. He knew the family would lose him soon and it was up to his son to keep his memory alive.

Malachi’s own son, Eli, grew into a strapping boy with a wild thatch of very dark hair and eyes as chocolate as his mother’s. He possessed no vampiric abilities whatsoever and Malachi was glad of that. “Be like your mother,” he always told him. “Love life and live it fully. Never think of the kind of person I’ve become. Be like your grandfather and live like a man.”

Some years after Jacques’ death, Mentor lost Bette, the love he had been so afraid to hope for again in any lifetime. She died peacefully in her sleep on an October night when witches rode past the moon and demons stalked graveyards. Or that is what Mentor told people. It was Halloween, that pagan holiday of trick or treat, with children costumed in the streets. Bette turned over in her bed and sighed her last breath, her small hands cupped beneath her chin.

Mentor called together his clan and after announcing her death, told them he was going away, he did not know where. He did not know how long he would be gone. They were to go on without him, now there was peace, and to listen to Ross. He left the assemblage like a broken old man, his shoulders stooping, his hands hanging at his sides. Malachi hoped he would come home soon, but he understood the need for solitude.

Sereny returned to Ross, slipping into his empty ranch house one night past midnight and climbing into his bed to snuggle close. She was alone. She said Jeremy had left her in Quebec, claiming he was no child any longer and he didn’t need a mother. “I never needed you in the first place,” he said hatefully. For some years Sereny mourned him, but Ross kept her busy, putting her in charge of all the new vampires Mentor had helped through the red dream of death. She was an excellent teacher, patient, and full of concern. “Sometimes I dream of Jeremy,” she told Ross. “He’s a marauder and a rogue and he’ll never be happy.”

“He is what he is,” Ross said. “Let him go, Sereny.”

Vohra left his Egyptian home and was never seen again. Mentor said he had gone to live inside a mountain with the elders, but no one knew for sure. Malachi asked often about those elders—where were they, what was their purpose, why did they hide away from the world? Mentor claimed to possess no real answers so Malachi finally let the subject drop.

Dell, Malachi’s mother, gave up her librarian job when she could no longer disguise her age. She retired early and was given a lovely brass and wood plaque for her service that she hung in her home. “I’ll start a new life,” she told her son. “From all the books I’ve read and the study I’ve done, I think I can contribute something.” She became an avid inventor, working in a lab with other vampires to help create the technology for ships that would one day travel beyond Mars. She told her son and grandson that before their deaths they would witness a migration of earth people beyond the stars. Earth people and their vampire companions, she said, as their destinies would always be intertwined.

The vampire nations lived on. There were quarrels and rogues, as always, but between Mentor and Ross, and then Ross and Malachi, the secrets were kept and the vampires were safe. Naturals continued working alongside humans, paying for their precious blood so they could live. Cravens moved out of the cities, setting up enclaves in wilderness areas, hiding away with their disease and their pain. Predators ran the businesses that supplied the monies and the blood and the network that allowed vampires everywhere to live on unmolested and without fear of discovery.

Malachi worked the cattle ranch, buying more land, hiring men to tend the herds. When his father finally died, Malachi would have been forty-five in human years, though he looked twenty years younger, and his son was grown.

They buried Ryan at a funeral attended by hundreds of vampires and dozens of humans.

Except for Ross, who had Sereny, they were all alone now. Mentor, Malachi, and Dell.

One day Eli came home from college during holiday and said to his father, “Dad, I’ve thought it over. I want to be like you.”

Horrified, Malachi turned from his chore of shaking cattle feed into a bin, and said, “No, Eli! I’ll never make you vampire!”

Eli grinned. “You don’t understand, Dad. I don’t mean I want to be vampire. I want to be a rancher. I want to run the place with you when I finish college. There are new methods now I’ve been learning. Cloning, DNA, anti-gravity capsules for difficult births…”

Relieved, Malachi hugged his good and earnest son to his chest. “I’d like that, Eli. I’d like that a lot. The ranch can always use new ideas.”

So the days ran on and during the nights the moon shone a river of silver across the land. It was a craven moon, weak and useless, uncaring of the planet’s woes or triumphs. When Malachi sat on his porch and contemplated it, he wondered how long he would live, how many full moons he would witness, and how many future nights he would spend alone once his son and his son’s sons and their sons were gone from the earth.

He would sit this way in weary wonder until it was time to rise up and care for his place with the advent of dawn.

He thought he would sit this way on his porch in the nights, company for the moon, for a very, very long time.

Once he thought about the society in London he’d met, the vampires who crossed over dimensions and mapped out the limits of the universes. I’ll go to them, he thought, when I lose everything here I value most. I’ll go back there one day. I’ll travel through dimensions and try to find God. Surely, he thought, there has to be a God.

The vampire nations were growing, spreading across the world, and some crisis would eventually befall them, that was a certainty. Just as mankind grew in population, so did the vampires. One day there would not be room for either of them.

Malachi didn’t know how distant in the future that crisis loomed or what he would do when it happened. Maybe the Synchers would find a way to move everyone between the several dimensions of reality, emptying the world of too many vampires—and too multiplying humans. Or maybe the world would finally travel beyond the stars, just as his mother believed.

Malachi saw the sun peeking over the horizon and watched the dew as it dried sparkling like diamonds on the stems of the emerald grass. He thought he could feel Danielle moving about silently inside the house, preparing breakfast. He closed his eyes and dreamed that years had not passed and his love was as alive as ever.

It was a sad little lie. All he had to do was rise from the rocker on his porch and go inside to disprove the dream.

Instead, he rose and went down the steps to the yard, stretching his arms over his head to loosen his muscles. Bright sunlight fell on his face and warmed him. He was always so cold, his heart as still as a stone tablet in his chest.

He had work to do. Animals to care for. Hay to cut. Life to live. The life of the undead, the Predator, the only life given him.

Along with the little dreams, the sweet lies, and the memories, it had to be enough.

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