SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (53 page)

It was nearly an hour before his mother, clean and fresh from a shower, her hair hanging in wet strands around her face, came to him. He sat in the glider beneath a locust tree.

"It's all cleaned up?" he asked.

"Yes, pretty much. I'll take him later and burn his body away from the house."

"Where is he now?"

She pointed toward the garage where his father kept an ancient truck he tinkered with when he had free time. "Mom, I . . .”

"You don't have to say anything. I know it's brutal to witness murder. But it had to be done. We couldn't have rid ourselves of him any other way, unless there'd been a fire."

"Why are they coming for me this way?" Malachi asked.

"Some of them think you've been chosen to lead a holy war against them. They created a myth a very long time ago and began to believe you were part of it. I promised Balthazar you'd never be a threat."

Malachi said, "I told him I don't want to hurt anyone. I told him in the . . . the nightmares. Can't you make him believe me?"

Dell came to sit by him on the glider. "I can try. Until now I didn't really think he'd do anything like this. After that time he lured you away from the house, I sent word that if he tried that again, he would have to fight me and everyone connected to me. We had a pact. He'd left you alone so long after that attempt. Something's happened, something's changed. He doesn't trust either of us anymore."

They sat in companionable silence as the afternoon waned and a sliver of white moon hung in the daylight sky. When Malachi's father came home from work, they finally joined him in the house to tell him about what happened. Soon afterward his parents went to the garage and slung the wrapped corpse over the back of one of the horses. Then his parents mounted their own horses and rode off across the land toward the back pasture and the dense woods that skirted it.

Malachi found himself spooked, looking around at shadows, watching for danger, checking and rechecking for anyone approaching the little farmhouse sitting out in the middle of a wide green field.

He didn't know if he'd ever feel safe again.

~*~

Charles Upton spent fifteen years in volcanic struggle. He never got the magical cards back to help him. For months he raged, trying to convince his captors to return them. He knew how the monks would come into his cell and possess him, mind and body, if his temper flared out of bounds, so he was careful not to try their patience. He still made everyone's life miserable by raving in his cell for hours each day. At least he could do that much.

Madeline came into his cell once during that time, lecturing him, but he laughed in her face. "You would tell me how to conduct myself in this place? A woman often restrained because of a vile temper? Please. That's ridiculous," he said, using her favorite word.

Insulted, Madeline retreated to a corner of the cell and pressed her lips together in an unforgiving line.

He asked, "Why is it you can come in here and the monks don't stop you? Every time I try to leave, they catch me before I get far."

"You try to escape, that's why. I just come into this cell. You try to leave the monastery. They have placed a spell over the windows in our cells and the outside walls and the ceilings. We can't get out. They always catch us when we try, as you well know. Combined, their strength is overwhelming. When I come in here, I'm not escaping. Why should they care?"

When Upton retreated into silence, thinking how long Madeline had been kept in the monastery, she began to shimmer. He glanced at her and smiled. He wouldn't beg her to stay. He would be indifferent to her. She didn't know any more than he did about how to escape. Until now he hadn't known the cell windows and outside walls, and even the ceilings were impenetrable. He'd just thought the monks came to possess him every time he tried to shimmy out the bars or through the chinks in the exterior stone walls, that being their only recourse. But the monastery was a more formidable prison than he'd ever imagined, wrapped in supernatural spells.

Upton didn't care if Madeline never came back. He had come to relish his solitude. Only in solitude could he fashion some means of escape. He'd made attempts nearly every year, a total of eleven times, with eleven failures. Not knowing how to use his strength and cunning in the beginning, he had been determined to learn how. It was a slow process, as he had no one to teach him, but eventually he learned to transmorph himself into mist. He had entered Madeline's cell without her knowing, watching at her back as she sat at the desk and scribbled furiously. He'd even slipped in when she slept, standing right at her head, close enough to touch her if he'd wanted.

He had then slid outside of the prison cell, slipping through the bars in the door leading into the interior corridor as easily as a puff of wind. He was free mere seconds, however, before one of the monks caught and bound him, and he woke to find himself in the cell again, lying like a block of wood on the cold stone floor.

It came to him that the monks used some sort of inner radar system to monitor him. They didn't have to be near or watch him with their eyes.

Usually it was Joseph who came for him. Joseph, surely, was his personal keeper. Of the eleven escape attempts over the years, Joseph alone had returned him to the cell six of those times.

Upton had learned many tricks, but immunizing himself from takeover by Joseph was not one of them. No matter how strong his will or how swiftly he moved, Joseph or his comrades caught him.

Once Upton sensed another nearby vampire presence that watched him closely. This one was not a monk, but an outsider residing in the monastery. All his probing told him was the vampire's name. Dolan. Where he came from or why he was there remained a riddle.

Dolan was not always there either. Mentally searching for him did not turn him up very often. But just when he was sure Dolan was gone for good, he'd sense him creeping down the halls or pacing in the courtyard or lost for hours in the jungle, taking paths the monks used to approach the far village.

Dolan's presence confused him, but he finally decided the vampire was one of Mentor's lackeys, sent there to help Joseph keep an eye on him. This meant Mentor feared him and could not altogether trust the monks. Good! That meant there must be a crack in their system; it wasn't infallible. Just because Madeline had never discovered it didn't mean he wouldn't. She was a woman who did not devote all her time toward finding the crack through which to slither away, whereas it was all he ever thought about.

Besides, he was glad Dolan was often in the monastery, giving evidence to Mentor's fears. He wanted Mentor unsettled. Foremost, he wanted Mentor to die, but to keep him unsettled was as much as he could hope for until he broke free.

Upton had also learned how to change himself into another kind of living thing. He had transmorphed into a tiger, but when Joseph showed up at the cell door, the old monk just smiled enigmatically and went away again. He had changed himself into a little brown bird, lighting on the sill of the door's small barred window. Again Joseph appeared and before Upton could fly into the safety of the cell, he was trapped in the monk's fist, strangling.

"Hello, little bird," Joseph said. "I could feed you to a starving villager for dinner, boiled, with carrots and rice."

Then he let Upton go and went away again, proving once more there were no tricks worthy of his time.

Day after day Upton tried out his powers, honing them and discovering just how far they would take him. Already it was harder for the monks to possess his mind when he went into a rage. He was able to fight them off for several minutes before they could shackle him into the dark pit of his brain, making his body go limp.

One day, Upton thought, I will outwit them. One day, Joseph will turn his attention away just at the moment I make my escape attempt, and I'll skitter away in the guise of a mouse, or fly into the jungle as a colorful parrot, or be taken by the wind in the form of a cloud of mist.

That he'd not done it yet might have defeated a smaller, more fragile intelligence, but Upton would not give up hope. He would not live in a dank, cold cell for eternity. He would not give up his entire magnificent vampire existence to talk with insects and vermin that came to invade his sleep.

When he'd first been made vampire, he thought the world was at his feet, there for his personal amusement. He could have women, wealth, all earthly pleasures, and even fame, if he desired it. He would live forever and eventually he'd rule over every living being and every vampire on Earth. He was not so megalomaniacal to think he'd own the world and everything in it all at once. It would take work and time. It was in a future where Mentor and Ross were both dead and out of his way. But becoming a god was worth the years it might take and any amount of effort. He wasn't made to live eternally only to waste away within the confines of four stone walls.

It had come to him in the last couple of years of his incarceration that he had been trying to use the wrong skills. Rather than perfect the art of changing into mist or another living entity, he believed his greatest skill might be in invading Joseph's thoughts. If he could know where Joseph was and what he was doing as easily as Joseph knew the same about him, he might find a way to use the information to his advantage.

The first time he tried it, Joseph had been at prayer. He was standing before an old worn prayer wheel, spinning it with his hand, mumbling beneath his breath. He was lost in his meditation. Yet Joseph knew instantly when Upton touched him. His hand paused, his words ceased, and he turned his head to look out at the open courtyard.

He smiled.

Upton hurriedly pulled back with a jolt into his own skull, silently cursing. He hated Joseph, his malice toward him as hot as the center of a live coal. How had this old monk developed such superior skill? Tiptoeing into his mind without notice might be impossible. God damn him.

Nevertheless this did not deter Upton from trying. He would pester the old monk until he wore him down or caught him unaware. Some way. Somehow.

He never dreamed his chance would come on a late June day in the nineteenth year of his imprisonment. Though he thought himself ready to snatch any opportunity to wriggle away into freedom, when it came, he was so elated he almost missed it.

Joseph came down the corridor alone. He had in his hands a small bucket swinging from his right hand. Sloshing within was the blood to feed Upton, his daily ration, just enough to keep him from starving.

Upton sent out his probe to the monk's mind, tickling him with his presence, hoping to torture him into submission. He'd done this every time the monk was near and each time was rebuffed and thrown back as easily as tossing aside a bone to the floor. He expected it to happen again, as always, but something was different. He discovered Joseph's mind was dim and his thoughts scattered and as indistinct as faded photographs. He had never been this way. Touching his mind before had been as dangerous as reaching into a tangle of thorny locust trees.

Upton probed deeper with his telepathy. He spider-walked into the monk's brain in amazement. The farther he went, the more his mind turned into the flesh and finally he realized what was going on. Joseph's old body was dying. He had kept it too long. In mortal years, the body he inhabited was over one hundred years old. It had served him well, but he'd grown too fond of it and had held onto it long past the time he should have let it go. He should have found another body to inhabit many years ago.

All this information came from Joseph's dying thoughts that flew about in a maelstrom of disarray.

Stunned and hopeful, Upton, probed deeper. He hadn't known that vampires changed bodies. He had no idea that once the mortal body gave out, the vampire soul could transfer itself to another. All in a flash he knew everything he needed to know. Though his body stood immobile in his cell, his mind began to glow with excitement as it slid about on the slippery slopes of the monk's brain tissue fighting against imminent physical death.

Joseph stopped at his cell and set the bucket on the floor as if in a trance where long routine kept him performing old tasks. He fumbled for the keys at his waist to unlock the grate on the door, fighting to finish this one duty before seeking safety to deal with his failing body. All the while he forced the flow of blood in his rapidly deflating veins. It was as if he knew what was happening, but just couldn't believe it. Refused to believe it.

Even as he struggled in this way, the blood flow to his brain diminished, slowing the way water in a pipe does when a faucet is being closed by a slow, weary hand. He hadn't the strength to ward off Upton's probe. He might not even know the prisoner was there, watching through mental eyes the rapid deterioration of the elderly brain.

Suddenly Joseph dropped the keys and clutched at his chest. Along with him Upton felt a sizzling pain slice down his left arm and paralyze it. A greater pain squeezed his heart, a physical pain so devastating that not even a great vampire's supernatural abilities could ward it off.

No! Upton knew these symptoms. As president of his corporation before his change to vampire, he'd been present when a colleague at a corporate meeting had fallen from his chair, the victim of a heart attack. The colleague had died before the paramedics arrived.

Joseph was dying. Right now, this very minute. Upton realized the truth. Though a vampire's heart did not beat, the intake of daily blood suffused it. That fresh blood kept the heart supple. Now, as veins and arteries closed down, depriving the heart of life-sustaining blood, the organ had suddenly spasmed, mimicking the heart attack a human would suffer. Joseph would have to slip from the body and find another quickly or be doomed to wander like a haunt, lost to the real world.

Upton knew all this just as Joseph knew it. The two of them, locked in the dimming brain, panicked.

Joseph's thoughts raced to find a body nearing death he could take over. He could not take over a living person. Upton knew this, too. He knew all that Joseph knew—and it was terrifying knowledge.