SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (89 page)

He had to get to Mentor, measure for himself how much time he had left, and then rush to find a replacement body. It was a monumental duty, but he would take care of it with expediency. Mentor’s survival depended on it.

As they reached the house and hurried into Mentor’s bedroom, Dolan prepared himself for bad news. If he only had minutes to find a body, his chances at failure were astronomical. People did not just keel over dead whenever you needed them to.

He was at Mentor’s bedside, taking his old hand into his own. He checked the dimmed eyes and the aura of life force that emanated from all living beings, no matter how they lived—as human or vampire. He measured the time left and knew he had but an hour, no more.

Mentor had not said a word. He was almost beyond the capability of speech. Dolan said, “I’ll be back before your time ends, I promise.”

He did not take the human way this time, through door and by foot. He spun his molecules into a mist and disappeared immediately from the room.

He went to the nearest hospital and in an empty hallway transformed back into a man. He was on the intensive care unit and just ahead of him stood double doors leading to beds there. He must(??? Replace with “had to”) throw a mesmerizing trance over staff and patients alike. He walked through the doors, swinging them wide, his trance spearheaded before him. Mentor had taught him how to do this and now he was glad. He rarely had reason to use it, but had he not been able to do it now, his task might have proven insurmountable.

Two female nurses sat on stools behind a counter, their eyes locked, unblinking. A male nurse walked from behind a curtain, his mind blank, his footsteps stumbling. There was no other staff present in the unit, doctors’ rounds having occurred earlier.

Dolan stepped behind the first curtain to his left and quickly assessed the people lying in beds there. Two women, one man. The women were elderly and not suitable. The man’s heart was stuttering and he had one leg amputated from the knee down.

Dolan left and hurried to the next curtained cubicles. When he pushed back the blue curtains hanging from steel cables he knew immediately he had his body. Two of the patients weren’t suitable, one being a female teen, the other a man as elderly as Mentor was now. But in the farthest bed lay a male who had nothing more wrong with him than that he was dying.

Dolan approached and put his hands on the comatose man’s chest. He was big, over six feet tall, and well built. His hair was light and cut very short on his head, imparting a Roman gladiator kind of look to the strong featured face of square jaw, heavy brow, and a mouth, now lax, that animated would probably be sensuous. He appeared to be in his early forties and in good condition. Except for his heart, which Dolan knew from probing him, that was rapidly failing. He would not live the night out.

It did not matter if the heart was bad. A vampire did not need the internal organs to be perfect. New blood infused them with life, though it could not always heal them. The man’s other internal organs were fine. His heart would last much longer in a vampire than in this dying man. Mentor could cause it to mend somewhat, once he inhabited the body, and the organ would last him many more years.

Besides, Dolan hadn’t the time to look further for a candidate. Mentor would have to settle for what he could get.

Dolan rapidly unhooked the man from his life-support machines, knowing they were not going to keep him alive much longer anyway. Mentor would not want him to steal away a body from someone destined to live. Dolan lifted the body easily into his arms. He took him from the room, from the unit, and in the hall he forced both his own molecules and those of the stranger into a frenzied dance that spun them out of orbit so that the two of them became mist. Man was mainly made of water and this water, along with flesh and bone, would transform into the original person at the end of their flight. Dolan and the gladiator, as he mentally thought of him, spun rapidly through the twilight towards Mentor’s bed.

No vampire thought much of these magical transformations, no more than they questioned the ability to soar above the earth, or change into animal or bird or reptile. There was one theory being investigated by their vampires engaged in research that the vampire was able to move between dimensions, though how or why they had not yet uncovered. Dolan didn’t know about that, nor was now the time to debate it with himself.

He simply had to hurry.

He did not have to consult a watch. He knew he had only minutes left. In Mentor’s room he brought the man back with him into solid form, the man still held limply in his arms.

Mentor sent him the question they all asked in the end when they meant to take a new body. Is he near death?

Dolan nodded. He lay the body on the floor at the side of the bed. Mentor knew where to go. He had to leave the old body lying on the bed and escape to the new one on the floor, but only when the human died. If the stranger didn’t die naturally before Mentor’s own body failed him, Mentor would have to leave the house as a spirit and search maniacally for another poor soul dying. This was much too risky.

Dolan kept his hand on the man’s chest and felt the moment the heart ticked its last tock. He glanced at poor Mentor in the bed, saw his eyes close peacefully, and knew he was migrating. Dolan stepped away from the body and sighed.

He had been in time. Oh God, he had done it.

Mentor was lucky.

~*~

Bette Kinyo left the building housing her Judo Kai instructor’s domo and began the long walk home to Mentor’s house. She had been taking lessons in Combat Ki, a form of judo that afforded the master of it the highest form of self-preservation skills. She was not a master yet and wondered if she ever would be. Combat Ki was extremely difficult on the body, though she’d learned through her lessons that it was not the body that mattered whatsoever. Being of small stature did not mean she wouldn’t be able to sustain the dead blows reigned upon her flesh during the master test. Combat Ki was a discipline of judo that taught the recipient the mind and spirit were stronger, by far, than the body.

After all, Bette thought, she lived with a vampire; she was surrounded by vampires, not all of whom looked upon her fondly. Although Combat Ki skills were still nothing in comparison to a vampire’s abilities to fight, at least it was a highly evolved skill that could startle an attacker and give her precious moments to escape.

It was Mentor who had suggested she seek these new skills. Not merely to protect her from a vampire attack, which was unlikely since it was widely known she belonged to a vampire leader, but also to protect her out in the day-to-day world. It was obvious to both of them that violence was escalating in American society. A woman, especially, was vulnerable.

The master of the Judo Kai had found her willing and motivated. She could already take a blow from a two hundred-fifty pound man to her throat without it killing her instantly—as it would have had she not been trained. She had not yet been dealt the deathblow to her chest area around the heart, but she was not afraid. Each lesson prepared her further. When that blow came, it could throw her heart out of rhythm and cause it to stop. But it wouldn’t. She’d live through it. She was confident in overcoming the bodily responses.

One thing the training had done for her already was to give her greater peace of mind. She walked places now where before she never would have. She hadn’t been accosted, but if it ever happened, she was ready.

When she walked through the door at Mentor’s house, she found him pouring over a deck of cards spread out on the coffee table. It was still a jolt each time she looked at Mentor. She knew it was he, but now that he inhabited a new body, the shock each new time seeing him hadn’t yet dwindled.

Before he had lived in an elderly body, his face fissured and stern, with very thin and white hair. Now he was a tall, Caucasian blond man with wider shoulders, firmly muscled midsection, and long legs. He looked at her from gray eyes the color of a garden snail’s back. His mouth was usually set, as if he should not be disturbed, but when he smiled, the smile lit up his eyes with warmth. From their depths she could still measure his love for her.

Before he looked like a wise old grandfather. Now he looked like a…what was it Dolan had said?…a Roman gladiator! Though she wasn’t really sure what a Roman gladiator looked like beyond the image in her head of the aged actor Russell Crowe in the very old theatrical movie that earned him an Academy Award in his younger years. That was indeed what Mentor looked like now. A young, strong Russell Crowe.

“How was your lesson?” Mentor asked before letting his gaze drift back to the dealt cards before him. His lips had smiled warmly when looking at her, but now they were set again and grim as he tentatively touched the cards.

“I found the meditation exercises useful. I’m always renewed afterwards.” When she saw he was not going to question her further, and that he was in some way mesmerized by the spread before him, she said, “What kind of cards are those?”

“Tarot.”

She could not have been more surprised. Mentor dealing with Tarot cards? He might be a supernatural being, but he was in no way connected or interested in the so-called prophetic arts. Magic, he had explained to her, did not belong to man or object. It wasn’t even real for vampires. Everything they did might appear magical, but was in reality able to be explained—or would be once their research into the physical world was complete. It was his theory that there were scientific reasons for everything now thought “supernatural.” Physics would one day make it all clear.

“Why are you dealing out Tarot cards?”

He paused with a finger touching one of the cards lying face up. He glanced at her and held her gaze a beat longer than usual. She knew instantly this was no child’s game. The cards meant something to him, something very serious.

“Upton got them when he was held prisoner in our monastery prison in Thailand about twenty-five years ago. One of our priests gave them to him after being hounded for cards to play solitaire with. The priest never looked at the cards, which were wrapped in old cloth. He assumed they were a regular deck of playing cards.

“Upton’s cellmate next door, Madeline, sent an urgent message that she’d handled one of the cards and saw they held some sort of magic.”

“Really?” Bette sat across from Mentor on the opposite sofa. Magic. But he had assured her there was no such thing.

“Apparently, yes, though I hate to admit I might have been wrong all these years.” He paused, considered, and said, “Hundreds of years.” He smiled wanly. “I went to the prison and confiscated them and brought the deck here, fearing Upton might find a use for them, some way to divine his escape.”

“And he did escape.”

“But not because of these. I’m fairly certain of that.” Mentor swept his hand over the cards. “Anyway, once I had them in my possession, I discovered Madeline was correct. The cards hold some kind of…spell…from a previous owner. We don’t know who that was, by the way. The deck had been lying on a dusty shelf in the monastery’s library for ages. Maybe a century.”

“Let me see them,” Bette said, intrigued. She leaned forward and reached for a card nearest her.

“No!” His voice was so loud it unnerved Bette, who sat back abruptly. Mentor never raised his voice to her.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice lowering. “I just don’t want you to touch them. They’re…they’re something evil, something a mortal shouldn’t even be near.”

“What’s so bad about them?”

Mentor gestured that she sit next to him on the sofa. She did so, grasping her hands in her lap so she wouldn’t be tempted to reach out for the cards again.

“Look,” he said, pointing to the layout of the cards. “Watch closely.”

Bette leaned forward a bit and focused on the card faces. Suddenly she knew what Mentor wanted her to see. The cards were alive. The figures on them walked, moved, gestured silently. They walked out of frame and back into frame as if there was some dimension beyond the rectangular edges of the cards themselves. The pierced heart of the sword card seemed to bleed droplets of blood that oozed from the wound. The hanging man swung back and forth upside down as if a hard wind blew him. His mouth was open and he seemed to be cackling. The Empress on her throne glared and jiggled a foot in what appeared to be impatience. All the figures on the cards moved, as if the cards provided doorways into other worlds.

“Oh my God.” Bette could hardly believe it. Her eyes had widened and she heard herself gasp. “Are they data blanket cards?”

“No. We didn’t have data blankets when I got these. They were made long, long before technology even reached the steam engine phase.”

He touched one edge of a card near him. “You see? The cards aren’t just inanimate objects. Each one holds a world behind it. They talk to you, these knaves and queens and kings. They tell the future.”

“Mentor, these should be destroyed.” Bette knew it in her bones. She felt an instinctive revulsion to the cards as something so unnatural they were truly dangerous.

“I’ve tried. I can’t get rid of them. I’ve burned them, thrown them into rivers; I’ve even buried them. They always return stacked neatly here on the table. It’s as if whoever has possession of them must keep possession until they’re taken away by someone else, as I took them from Upton.”

“What future do they tell you?”

He sighed deeply and put down the rest of the deck of cards he’d been holding in his left hand. He rubbed his palms together as if transferring heat from one to the other.

“They keep telling me to prepare for a war. A vampire war. One that will grow and grow to the point it will eclipse any war ever waged by humankind.”

“Oh no. Not another uprising.” She had stayed in Mentor’s house the first time during the siege by Upton’s Predator army. She had lost her husband to the marauder, when he’d come into her home and attacked them.

“I’m afraid so. I don’t know whether to believe these things. I don’t want to believe it. They told me this before and I naturally assumed they were pointing to the uprising when all of Dallas was in chaos. Now I’m not so sure. Or why would they keep repeating the warning?