SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (34 page)

After her Aunt Celia left, Dell went to the bedroom where the computer sat and did a search on the Internet for hyperspace and Dr. Kaku. She wanted to know more, she wanted to try to understand it better.

Ryan found her there and asked, "How was Celia?"

Dell turned from the monitor, "Oh, she's fine, just fine. I'll tell you all about it later."

That night she discussed it with him and saw he wasn't quite as excited as she had been. "What if he's wrong?" Ryan asked. "Has it been proved scientifically?"

"I'm trying to find out. It just opens up a whole new thought for us, Ryan, all of us, not just vampires, but for the human race. If there are dimensions beyond the reality we know, then the existence of creatures such as ourselves isn't so strange, is it? In other dimensions, why . . . there might be all sorts of worlds and creatures, but they're just beyond our notice, like our world is to the goldfish."

"Well," he admitted, "since there are vampires and I know that's real, I guess nothing should surprise me."

She boxed him on the ear and laughed. "Funny guy," she said, hugging him close.

Later that night as they sat studying in the living room, Dell let her mind wander over their new life together. They lived outside a small town south of Dallas where she could still buy supplies from Ross' worker bees. They had a hundred acres, a small house, and a barn for Lightning. The old horse was showing his age, but he still didn't mind a little trail riding now and again. Ryan bought a roan gelding for himself and most weekends found them riding across their land, talking and laughing.

Ryan had taken work on a local ranch, breaking horses and training them for cattle roundups. Dell worked at the town library, spending her days reading everything on the shelves when she wasn't arranging story parties for area children or checking out a book for the occasional reader who wandered in.

Life was calm, quiet, routine even, and as wonderful as Dell might ever have imagined. The brightest element in her universe was Ryan. He was all she needed. He loved her fully and without restraint. She loved him back with every ounce of her being. When they'd married, she knew her destiny was sealed to Ryan and that, yes, she would suffer a thousand deaths when he grew old and died. But she also knew without him she might have wasted away, or given in to her baser instincts and become a heartless machine, a taker of blood, a killer.

She never let him see her take the blood they kept in the refrigerator and she never told him how sometimes when they were making love she wanted nothing more than to lick and nip at the skin just at the juncture of his strong, smooth jaw. Mentor had not told her she would fight forever the urge to drink even from the one she loved.

One evening, days after Aunt Celia's visit, as Dell sat poring over an assignment in math, she felt something move in her abdomen. It was nothing more than a slight flutter, but it was undeniably something unusual. Growing stiff, she sat straighter on the sofa and glanced at Ryan. He was watching a football game and eating from a can of cashew nuts.

She moved into her own thoughts and began to probe her body. She let her consciousness move from her mind to her chest and then lower, to her abdomen. She sought out her reproductive organs, ovaries, tubes, and finally, her womb.

She was pregnant! It was unmistakable. Though she did not have monthly periods and therefore never thought about impregnation, it had happened to her. To them. A baby.

A child of their own.

Would it carry her disease and be vampire like her one day? Would it be human like Ryan? Oh, dear God, what had they done? Her mother had told her of a child called a dhampir came from the union of human and vampire. She had said sometimes such a child grew up and turned on its parent. Her world seemed to tumble down around her ankles. They had been so happy, two people with a secret life, living far from the city and the humans. They worked at jobs they liked, kept the little farmhouse secure and snug, went for rides on their horses, studied college subjects together. They'd created a world unto themselves.

After a while they planned to buy a few calves and begin a small herd of cattle. They led such a serene and rich life together. It never occurred to them that they could procreate. Why hadn't she listened to her mother?

A baby. What did it mean? Would it even live? She had to talk to her mother about it again, she had to contact Mentor. She needed advice. Or was it too late?

He turned at the sound of her puzzled voice. "What? Is something wrong?"

He saw it in her face. She could never keep anything from him. "I don't know if ifs wrong or not, but something's changed."

That night they went to bed and held each other. She cried a little and he patted her back. "What will we do?" she asked, despondent.

"We'll love it," he said.

"But what if . . .?”

He touched her lips with his finger. "It'll be fine. He'll be a boy, a big strong boy, and we'll name him Sean."

"Sean?"

"Or Tom. Or Joshua."

She laughed and snuggled close. "I love you so much. You're crazy as a doodlebug and I still love you."

"That's why it's going to be all right, Dell. This baby comes out of our love. It's pure and good and a new creation."

"But it might be . . ."

"It won't. He won't."

"She might be . . ."

"I won't have it," he said. "He'll be like me. He'll have a way with horses. He'll love animals and the ranch. He'll grow up and turn this hundred acres into a thousand, build our herd to hundreds. I'll teach him how to work on my old truck to keep it running. He'll be respected and honorable, and he'll be ours."

"You won't love her if she's like me?"

He leaned back to look into her eyes. "I'll love him more!"

"Her."

They laughed and they cried and they held onto one another in the darkness, thinking their own individual thoughts, both afraid as they could be.

~*~

Having gained his heart's desire, Charles Upton reveled in his new life. He had moved his operations to Dallas to be near a supply of blood. However, lately he'd been preying, trying it for the first time when he had been shopping at a downtown jewelry store for a bauble for one of his women. They flocked to him now, the women, despite his age. He was rich, and becoming vampire had done away with all the terrible symptoms of porphyria. His skin was smooth, his eyesight sharp, and his mind as brilliant as it had been when he was a young man.

He had been in the store, looking over a velvet tray of diamond bracelets when the manager came from the back to help the clerk with Upton's purchases. The manager was in his twenties, well-muscled, with a full head of thick, shining brown hair. Upton felt a hunger for him suddenly. He felt his fangs growing and determinedly retracted them before anyone could see.

He paid for the bracelet, a gaudy, much too expensive five-carat tennis bracelet, tucked the box into his coat pocket and left the store. But he did not go far. He told George to leave, take the car home. He'd be along shortly. He had no need of the car and only used it for trips that entailed being seen by humans.

He would not be seen doing what he wanted to do now. It was dark, the store about to close. He waited patiently for the employees to drift out the door and leave. He stood at the end of the building, hiding behind the corner, watching and scheming. When the last of the employees had gone, Upton returned to the store and knocked gently at the glass with his knuckles.

The manager looked up from an accountant's book spread out on the counter and, seeing him, smiled. He came to the door and said, "We're closed, I'm sorry."

Upton said in his most polite voice, "I know, I hate to bother you. I just have one question about the guarantee on the bracelet."

The manager's smile dissipated, but he took a set of keys from his pocket and unlocked the door. "Come in, I'll be happy to help."

The moment he turned his back, Upton flew through the air and knocked the camera to smithereens from a corner of the room. Then he turned, snarling at the shopkeeper. "Come to me," he said. "Come give yourself."

The killing was not swift or neat. Upton had never killed before and had no practice at it. He made a bloody mess of the man before dropping him to the carpeted floor and stepping back, satiated.

For a brief moment Upton panicked. If he were caught in the store with the dead man, it would be found out he was not human. He also had to find the video made by the camera he'd destroyed. He hurried to a back room and found the machine, crashing a fist through it. Back in the store, he flung open the glass front door and ran. When he reached the next building and found an alley, he lifted into the sky and flew to his home.

George saw the blood covering his face and shirt when he entered. He did not flinch. George was paid more than any corporate executive to be discreet and to keep his mouth shut. He said simply, "How can I help you, sir?"

Upton waved him away and washed in the guest bath on the first floor. Spasms coursed through his body, causing him to tremble. These lasted for an hour after the kill. He was as elated as he had been when he first looked in a mirror and saw that the ravages of his disease had vanished.

This was the true joy of being immortal and vampire. No one had told him how exquisite warm, fresh blood could be. They had failed to instruct him in making clean kills, assuming he would always buy their plasma bags, but he thought that occasionally he would take a human. Maybe more than occasionally. He felt more powerful than ever. He was indomitable.

He could be king.

The phrase slipped into his mind and stayed. He could be king. He was already higher than any man. If he wanted, he could rule over the vampires, take over Ross' control, do away with Mentor, and lead the rest into the future as they did his bidding. Why shouldn't he?

He stripped off his clothes, throwing the boxed diamond bracelet onto the top of his dresser. One of his women was coming over tonight. This was her gift. She'd do anything for diamonds.

Upton stood naked before a full-length mirror and felt both love and loathing for his body. It was hard and strong. His teeth were his own and were white as bone. But it was his skin, the unblemished skin, that sent him into ecstasy. God, he had yearned for years to be free of the sores. But his body was old, so old. He was skinny-legged and his buttocks drooped. His face was wrinkled and he hadn't much hair left, the remaining sprigs a shade of yellowing white.

He wondered if he would be trapped in this old body forever. He got women because he was rich and because he could use his power to lure them. He could make them believe he was handsomer than he was.

Why were there so many drawbacks to his new immortality?

As he showered, he pondered the question of his aging form and what he might do about it. Surely there was a solution. Look at Ross, he was a beautiful immortal. He didn't walk around in an aging body, trapped within it. He'd have to ask Ross what he might do about his age, find out if it could be reversed or something.

As he dried off, he relived the murder of the jewelry store manager, losing himself in how wondrously exhilarating it had felt to drink the man's blood.

When the woman arrived and George showed her to Upton's bedroom, he handed her the box. He listened while she gushed over the beauty of the bracelet, but all he could think about was sinking his fangs into her beautiful, swanlike throat.

He made up his mind. Before she was able to leave tonight after their lovemaking, he would kill her.

~*~

He would kill whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted to. He had a whole world full of victims to prey upon.

No one could stop him.

Ross brought the problem to Mentor's attention. "I should have killed that old bastard."

"For once I'm inclined to agree."

Charles Upton was totally out of hand. He had sold out his business and the twin-tower building he owned in Houston and moved his operations to Dallas in order to be in the midst of his kind. He was no longer ill, but strong and growing braver and more wicked each day. "Nothing and no one can stop me," he was heard to say often when thwarted in business affairs. "Either get out of my way or I roll over you."

He wanted the Strand-Catel operation, and he wanted to ease Ross out of his position. He had not done one thing to increase Ross' power. He'd reneged on his deal, forgetting what he owed his maker. In fact, Upton took it upon himself to announce he was the only Predator with the business acumen to bring all the clans together and help them infiltrate and gain control over industry in the Southwest. Then they'd move out to the West, the North, and the East. His plan was national and in years to come would evolve into international.

"We don't live in the dark anymore," Upton proclaimed to anyone who would listen. "It's time we came out into the light and made this world our world. For those of us who don't have the guts for it, the Cravens, and the weak beasts—they need to be cut off from the tree."

"Although I agree with Upton in principles—I've been saying the same thing for years—he's a megalomaniac," Ross said. "And I'm here to tell you he needs putting down."

"If you hadn't made him like us . . ."

"I know. For the first time I trusted a mortal. It won't happen again."

Mentor said he would take care of it, as he always did. Without spilled blood, without rancor and riot.

"I don't know why I keep listening to you," Ross said. "I wish you'd just take him out and let me help you bum him."

"We won't do that unless we have to," Mentor said.

He walked with Mentor through Bette Kinyo's neighborhood. It was twilight, and children were being called indoors. As the lights came on and the cars turned into the driveways, they passed by Bette's house. "Here, for instance," Ross said, pointing at the front door. "So far she's kept her promise, but she's human, Mentor. She's prey to vanity and ambition, morals and laws. I don't trust her."

"She's never brought us harm. You must never come here without me." As they walked by, Mentor glanced longingly at the house.