SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (54 page)

Hysteria gripped Upton so strongly that he almost withdrew. Every instinct screamed that he leave the monk's person and return to his body to save himself.

Yet, if he left the old monk, his one real chance at escape evaporated with the departure. If only I can hold on, Upton thought. If I can stay while Joseph flees, and if I can animate the dying body, I can leave this place forever.

Joseph had no thought for him. His salvation lay elsewhere. He could not battle the prisoner and at the same time save himself.

The body they both occupied fell to its knees. The bucket was knocked over, blood spilling along the floor in a messy red stream. Joseph was on his hands and knees, head hanging down almost to the cobbled floor.

Go, Upton urged the monk. Go now. Leave the body while you have time.

Suddenly the monk's brain was as empty as a dead planet circling toward the scalding center of a red dwarf. Upton found himself alone in the center of a brain where the lights were going out. All around him the sparkling neurons died, blinking out silently and without fanfare. The body keeled over onto the floor, the head striking stone with a resounding crash that echoed inside the skull. Upton didn't know where Joseph had vanished to, but he was gone, leaving behind the husk that had sheltered him for a lifetime. Upton did not believe Joseph had obeyed him. He'd merely fled the body because he had no other choice.

Upton wondered what would happen to him if he were trapped inside the dead body. But he hadn't time to worry about it. He had to find some way to get the body to its feet and to stumble away from the monastery. He had to move this body. The other monks would not even imagine it was Upton's spirit which animated the revered Joseph's form. He could pass by them without suspicion. They'd never think to probe or test the spirit animating their brother's body. It was Upton's one chance to be free!

They left it to Joseph to alert them when he escaped. Only then did they rush to come together and bring him back. With Joseph frantically searching for another body, he could spare no attention for his prisoner. This meant no one knew he was now the monk, Joseph.

He was Joseph. Completely.

He felt no thread of connection at all to the body he'd left within the cell.

All Upton had to do was infuse Joseph's old body with enough life to take him away from here. If he could do it . . . if he could only do it . . .

He was fully inside the body now, feeling the pain increasing inside it, suffering the earthquake that shook the foundation of the old, failing heart. Hold on, he cried. Hold on!

Unused to the new shell of flesh, he lost precious seconds trying to sense the hands, arms, and legs. When he did, they were wooden and unruly. He sent thought impulses to them and managed to get the hands to press against the floor, raising his upper body from the stone. He looked out of the dimming eyes and saw all peripheral vision was lost. He could see only round porthole tunnels of vision so that he had to turn his head to observe more than a few feet around him.

He forced the trembling legs to draw up and raised himself to his knees. Pain racked him and made him grimace fiercely with every small effort.

I can stand this pain, he told himself. I won't suffer long. I have to get away and then I can discard this old flabby shell. He despised the body's odd scent and the unfamiliarity of the muscle and sinew. It was like walking into a smelly old house that had been lived in by a family of untidy strangers.

By taking hold of the door handle of his cell, he was able to pull himself to his feet. He leaned against the barred grate in the door and with astonishment saw his old body inside the cell lying on the floor. The eyes were open, staring opaquely at the ceiling. There was no hint of life left in that body.

By fully leaving it behind, his entire spirit gone from it, the body must have died for good. When he'd become a bird or mist or a tiger, the molecules that made up his body came with him. But when he'd fled into Joseph's dying form, his former body had been totally vacated. He had taken another body, just as they all did when their housing grew too old. So this is how it was done. You had to want it badly enough, want it with all your being. Only no one, he would wager, had ever fled into a body near the brink of death. No vampire would be insane enough to do such a fatally foolish thing.

He mourned the familiar body on the floor of the cell for only a moment before remembering his important task at hand. He owned the monk's body now. It was his. He must move it or he would be trapped inside it. He did not know what might happen if he did get trapped. He knew he wouldn't die. His spirit could not be killed that way. He didn't yet know exactly how he could be truly killed, but he didn't think a heart attack would take away his consciousness.

Still, he didn't know for sure. He must hurry. He must be quick. Even now the cells of the brain were dying off, millions of them winking out and going dark and utterly silent.

He fought against the anvil that was the inert body. The heart had gone into sudden fibrillation, flapping like a wild bird against the ribs. Though it did not beat in the undead, it could still leap into movement and cause the death of a body too worn to be replenished by blood. He had not known this. There was so much he did not know, he felt like an ignorant peasant.

His vision dimmed and brightened, light and dark alternating in rapid succession. Fear ripped through him like a madman banging a big bass drum.

Upton stumbled away from the cell door, leaving behind his aged body, and angled down the corridor to where he saw stairs leading up to shifting sunlight. He could hardly think. The mad drumming of panic bore him step by step away from his old cell. If he could get out here, he'd leave the prison behind. He must take it. He had to, even if it took every ounce of strength he'd ever had in all his life.

He reached the stairs without passing anyone, ignoring the vampire hisses from other prisoners when he moved past their cell doors. They thought him their captor, their jailer. He shrouded his real persona from them by keeping his thoughts focused only on putting one foot in front of the other as he went toward the light. He got his hand on the wooden stair rail and saw the flesh of his hand was gray, the color of death. His extremities were leaden and difficult to animate. His feet were pails of cement, his hands cold and numb as if they'd been frozen solid.

His teeth were showing, his lips having pulled back in hard effort and savage pain. He took a step and then another, pulling himself up the steps, his face held up to the light. A second attack shook him, the heart spasming. It caused him to halt, his left hand clawing up and his heart sending out an excruciating radius of pain. The heart was treasonous, working now when it hadn't worked for years, trying to bring the body to the brink of real death.

He had never known such physical suffering. He had never been so hurt, even when he was mortal and living with the disease of porphyria. His vision went black and again he panicked, the fear of entrapment in the decrepit body causing him to want to leap from it as from a furnace.

Yet he held on. The very real threat of physical death and entrapment forced him onward. The pain slackened only for moments and he could see again, though even less than before. It was as if his eyes had blinders on them, shutting out everything but one tiny pinprick circle. He was about to collapse, he knew it. He had to get up the stairs and out of the dungeon prison. Had to . . . had to . . . the sun up there . . . the air . . . he had to reach it.

He grabbed at the railing and pulled himself up the steps one at a time, silently screaming against the dimming of the light. He finally reached the top and staggered into the open. None of the monks were here either, as it appeared the passage had led to the back of the monastery. It was too early for the order to be working in the small garden where they grew herbs for seasonings and medicinals they sold in little packets at village markets. He had learned all the herbs' names as he'd watched from his cell window while they worked the gardens. Here was rosemary, tansy, and the nodding yellow heads of feverfew flowers. He stumbled across a bed of bright, fragrant lavender, broke through tall plants of spearmint and peppermint, crushed the ground-hugging pennyroyal. His feet dragged through the herb beds, crushing their tender leaves and stems as he staggered, and the air filled with pungent, green scent.

Would the monks notice his bedevilment of their precious garden? He didn't know, but he was very glad they weren't here now and that the garden was empty.

Through a nearby gate he could see a path leading into the jungle lying at the base of a forested mountain. Upton made for it, spilling forward like a drunk, the world turning above and below him. All his senses were on the precipice of being extinguished. He could hardly see where he was heading. He couldn't hear, his ears as closed as the door of a bank vault. He couldn't feel the warmth of the sun overhead. His feet were blocks that he painfully force-lifted to make the steps necessary to reach the path.

He gritted his teeth, his head splitting with pain now that narrowed his eyes to slits. He found himself on the path, still not pursued. This small freedom gave him greater impetus to press forward. He went on in his stumbling, shambling way, sheer desperation guiding him. What will I do now? He screamed silently to himself. What can I do? Oh, God . . .

Before he knew it, a young man was at his side, propping him beneath a shoulder, babbling in a dialect that made absolutely no sense to Upton. He was a native of the country, a Thai, trying to help what he saw as a fainting monk.

Upton tried to speak, but his tongue was lax and his throat would not move even to swallow. Thin streams of blood filled and dripped from his slack lips. He felt himself being lowered to the jungle floor, while above him the dark young man still spoke to him rapidly, but now he could not hear a word. He saw the lips moving, but the world was hushed and silent.

As Upton felt the last of the body's strength deserting him, his lids lowered and his gaze fastened on a leather pouch at the young man's waist. From it protruded the carved bone handle of a knife. With all his remaining will, Upton lifted up a hand and touched the other man, letting his hand slide with gravity's help down the broad chest to the young man's waist and to the knife's handle. He had to kill this man in order to take his body.

He had to . . . had to . . . if he wanted to live, he had to.

There was a look of surprise in the man's eyes as Upton withdrew the knife and pushed it with all his remaining might through the mortal's rib cage. The Thai hovered above Upton, his hands going to his chest and the knife embedded there. He looked down at himself in disbelief. He looked back at the monk, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell headlong to the side of the wide satiny umbrella leaves of a large elephant plant.

Upton gave in to the dying of the body he possessed. He willingly let it go, relaxing all effort to keep the pain of this death at bay. He closed his eyes and turned all his consciousness inward, gathering himself to leave.

He would be young again.

He would be free.

He would be undetectable for long enough in Thailand to flee to the far ends of the Earth.

Mentor . . . Mentor would never find him . . .

~*~

Dolan, tuning into the corridor where the special prisoner was jailed, knew suddenly something was wrong. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. He walked to the corridor door and held onto the roughly hewn wood facing, his head cocked as if listening to a distant tune. He was listening with his mind to the unrelenting silence in the far cell. Too silent. No sound of movement. No electrical charges from anything living. Nothing occupied the cell but inanimate objects.

Dolan had kept his distance from the place where Upton was held. On his visits to the monastery over fifteen years he had never approached the old vampire, knowing that to do so would put him in jeopardy. Now he rushed back down the halls and took the stairs leading to the underground corridor of cells. He saw ahead of him a spilled bucket of blood.

He's gone, Dolan thought wildly. Upton is gone!

He hadn't any fear the vampire was playing a trick. Though a Craven, Dolan had grown more and more like the Predator species—strong, powerful, full of supernatural instinct. He could walk in the daylight now. He could go in Mentor's place to guide new vampires as they tried to fit back into the world again.

He knew what he'd find before he reached the cell and peered inside. Upton's body lay there, its spirit fled. Had the body died and trapped him in it, Dolan would have sensed it. This body was as dead as any mortal who had died. It was empty and cold, nothing but a fleshy container.

Dolan turned around, hearing a woman's voice calling him.

"Did he try to get away again?"

Dolan strode to the adjoining cell on his left and saw the woman there at the window. She seemed amused. She'd evidently seen Upton attempt escape many times before.

"His body's here. He's not here with it."

The woman put a hand over her mouth. She whispered, “Oh, no. How could he do that? That's never happened, not in the nearly twenty years since he'd been here. I heard Joseph the monk outside his door. Where is Joseph? Why didn't he stop him? For God's sake, call Mentor, call him right away."

Dolan went back up the stairs at a heady speed, his mind reaching out and sending the alarm that would travel over half the world to his master. "He's gone!" went the alarm. “Upton's gone!"

Dolan ran into a monk coming his way and grabbed him by the shoulders to keep them both from falling over. “Charles Upton has escaped. You must find him."

The monk's expressionless face changed, evolving before Dolan's eyes. It became a mask of hatred, the eyes darkening, the brow lowering, the lips drawing back so the fangs could lower into place. "We will find him, then," he said. “Please release me."

Dolan dropped his hands from the monk's shoulders and watched as the Predator monk rushed away. All over the monastery he felt the monks turn from their work and speed toward the underground prison cells.