SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (92 page)

The one thing they all have in common is their fear of Upton. It seems none of them are bright enough to understand he is not of great intellect. It’s his passion to persevere and overcome that raises him above the others and makes him a commander.

He does not want simple things. He wants the most complicated—namely, the power over the earth and all its inhabitants. In that way lies his folly and the failure of his reason. Not even Jesus Christ ruled the whole world. Not even Alexander the Great. Not even Julius Caesar.

Nevertheless, I would not leave him now if wild horses were tied to me. Life can be so tedious. At least life lived close to the old vampire is never that.

In his way he is patriarchal and likes to play the father to me. My own father early on showed a dislike for me that in the end caused me to severe the relationship. I’ve no use for fathers and mothers and none at all for my sister living outside of Paris. But I do have this fondness for old Upton and his egomaniacal need to control the world.

He already has power over life and death, he owns his immortality, and he can surround himself with anything he wants from the world. But he wants more. He wants to lead.

I think I like him because I understand. All the greatest beings of history wanted the same thing. Charles Upton will join that roster of greats.

And I will be at his side.

Chapter 6

Malachi saw Jacques in his dreams. Over and over, night after night, there he was, a man with jet black hair and eyes like navy blue-black ingots. He didn’t know this man’s name for a long time. He only knew the face. He saw him inside a house moving like a satellite around Charles Upton. The dreams were so real he could hear their voices clearly, smell the exotic cinnamon scent that wafted off the stranger, and feel the sullen air as it lay against his skin, unmolested by breeze or movement.

At first Malachi dismissed the dreams as just that—dreams. Made up figments of imagination. But as the dreams continued, and the two people were always in them, Malachi realized he was being shown things that must mean something—the way he’d dreamed about Balthazar before the vampire uprising.

He went to Mentor, worry evident on his face. Mentor sat him down in the empty living room and said, “So what’s the trouble?”

Malachi glanced around nervously to see if they were alone.

“She’s not here,” Mentor said, referring to Bette. “We won’t be interrupted. She’s taking her judo lessons.”

Malachi launched into it. “I’ve been having dreams again.”

“About the pit?” He meant the earthen prison Malachi had occupied as a prisoner in Thailand.

Malachi shook his head. “No, those dreams went away—well, almost. These new dreams are about Charles Upton and…someone else who stays with him.”

Mentor was obviously intrigued. “Could you tell where they are? What area of the world?”

“No, they’re always indoors, in a house. It’s more like a mansion than a house. It’s huge, with many rooms. But I can’t tell where it is.”

“Who is this other person with Upton? A woman?”

“A man. And I have the impression he isn’t vampire.”

“Is that so?” Mentor looked down at his hands in contemplation. “Not a vampire,” he repeated. “That’s extremely odd.”

“I think so,” Malachi said. “I didn’t think Upton had any fondness for humans.”

“He hadn’t before this, that’s for sure. Except as victims. Tell me more about the man. Your impressions of him. Does he ever speak in the dreams?”

“Sometimes. He doesn’t seem afraid of Upton. He isn’t exactly his friend, maybe more like a collaborator. I think Upton’s given him control over some of his Predators.”

Now Mentor showed real shock on his face. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“According to the dreams he has. He trusts this man. He…likes him.”

“In what way?”

“Oh, I don’t mean sexually. I mean he seems to like him as a person. He tells him things, like about his past and how he became a vampire, how Ross made him. He’s told him about the uprising he and Balthazar brought against you. He treats him like a Mafia don might treat his counselor.”

“That’s very interesting. I wouldn’t have thought Upton would ever bring anyone into his confidence. I just wish we knew where he was hiding.”

“What I want to know,” said Malachi, “is why I’m having the dreams. What does all this have to do with me?”

Mentor templed his fingers and touched them to his lips. “Some dhampirs are tortured with dreams and nightmares all of their lives.”

“You never told me that!”

“I didn’t want to. I was hoping you’d escape it. Not every dhampir is so afflicted. But you’ve been plagued with prophetic dreams since you were a child. I don’t think they’ll go away, Malachi, I’m sorry.”

Malachi hung his head in despair. “You don’t know how this wears me thin. Every night a new dream. Every night it’s like I’m somewhere else, walking like a spirit beside one or the other, either the strange man or Upton. I wake up worn to a frazzle, as if I never even slept.”

“It’s sort of an astral projection,” Mentor said slowly. “You may be actually traveling to the place where they reside and wander there for hours in your sleep, disembodied.”

“Then how do I stop it?”

Mentor spread his hands palm out to show his own helplessness. “I don’t think you can.”

“What am I going to do then? I’m already a nervous wreck.”

“Try to find out where they are. If we know, we can send a force to deal with them before they raise another army.”

“But how am I going to find out?”

“Go to a window, look out. Leave the house, wander around the place to find out where you are.”

“In the dream, you mean.”

“In the spiritual projection.”

“Christ.” Malachi stood wearily. If he could have lain down on Mentor’s sofa and taken a long nap uninterrupted by dream, he would have collapsed there. But he knew he wouldn’t rest. He might never rest again and the thought drove him mad.

“Life’s never easy,” Mentor said, rising to walk him to the door. He patted him on the back.

“You’re telling me.”

“I know that doesn’t help, but the sooner we accept the torturous paths we’re led down, the sooner we escape them—or at least the sooner we accept the burdens placed on us.”

Malachi drove home to the ranch going over what Mentor had told him. He was leaving his body as he slept, involuntarily he assumed, and kept finding himself in the presence of his old enemy. Could he really control his actions in the dreams, as Mentor suggested? Could he move freely in the big dark house where the two men lived? Could he leave it?

Tonight he would try. Rather than being a silent, unseen spectator, he would try to move about on his own; he would enforce his own free will on the landscape of his dream.

Even Danielle knew something was awfully wrong, though he hadn’t told her of the dreams.

He had to find a way out of them. He didn’t care what Upton was up to—even if the monster was again raising an army. He was curious about the human he kept in his house, but it was really of no momentous concern to him. Why did he have to be plagued this way, on and on, year after year, with things he didn’t want to be involved in?

Life was not only difficult, it was unfair in the extreme.

~*~

Extreme. That is what Jacques would call the old vampire. He fed too often. To excess, actually, even until his skin turned rose red and his strength was so vast he grew awkward and knocked over objects in the room or broke them from clutching a thing too roughly.

Now he was excessively haranguing his followers until they were on the brink of mutiny. “Bring some more to me,” he shouted to each group of Predators he visited in their various lairs around the city. “We’re not enough. I had as many as you before and you know what happened. Mentor is smart, he’s formidable, don’t mistake it!”

Jacques stood on the sidelines during these exhortations and could feel the uneasiness that slipped through the vampires like a fever, a contagion passed one to the other. They glanced at him surreptitiously as if he could control the old vampire. They looked at him as if silently pleading: Make him stop
.

It was during one of these chaotic sessions when Jacques turned his head at the feeling someone was too close to him and watching. He saw something…someone. A young man, not a vampire at all, a young man in spirit form, watching closely everything going on. Jacques knew with a shock that this was not a real person, or if it was, he wasn’t in his real body. What could he be? A ghost who had come from the old walls of this decrepit lair below the ground to see what his visitors were up to?

He was certainly no angel or demon.

Jacques’ frown deepened as he stepped closer to peer at the apparition. Couldn’t the vampires see him? Couldn’t Upton? They didn’t appear to know he was there at all.

The ghost man stared back at him and then abruptly his countenance changed, as if he knew Jacques knew he was there. He faded suddenly, his presence winking out. Jacques reached out to the air, dumbfounded. What did the Fates want with him now? This was a whole new equation. Was he going to have to deal not only with vagrant vampires boiling with hardly suppressed rage and a leader who was quickly losing his composure, but also with a peeping Tom of a ghost?

“Merci,” he mumbled, turning his attention back to the horde of vampires and Upton who shouted at them to do more for him, show some eagerness to please their master.

A vampire near the front of the group caught Jacques’ eye and smiled at him evilly. Had he also seen the apparition? Or was he just one of those willful vampires Upton warned him about who might watch for him to be alone so he could drain his blood?

Jacques smiled back to signal his fearlessness. Although he was Upton’s protégée, it never hurt to let the rogue vampires know he did not fear them. It was fear they feasted upon quite as much as it was blood.

Before he could stop himself, his gaze left the smiling vampire and glanced to the left of him again, just to be sure the ghost man was still gone. When he returned his gaze, the vampire was no longer smiling. He looked perturbed—as if his smile had not managed to do the job. So he had not seen the ghost, after all. He just wanted to catch Jacques and kill him.

That was much less a worry than if he’d been able to see the young man on the periphery of the group, watching them, then winking out. Much less.

Should Jacques tell Upton about it? About the Watcher?

Not yet, he decided. Upton did not really understand the links Jacques enjoyed with the subterranean underworld. He thought it remarkable he might have wrestled with an angel, but he hadn’t realized to what extent Jacques communicated with these other beings.

Jacques would not tell him everything. If he didn’t ask, he wouldn’t tell him. If he probed his mind deeply enough he could find out, but he thought Upton too self-centered, too uninterested to do that.

Upton droned on, often shouting and harassing, while the vampires tired and slumped where they stood, the fire beaten out of them by the leader’s hard words.

Jacques watched for the ghost man and fell to wondering what the creature could want. He must write of him in his journal. Tall, well-built, fair. Maybe twenty-three to twenty-five. Human or the shade of a human rather than vampire. A listener. Perhaps a teller of tales. And possibly, he was an enemy.

~*~

Malachi woke in a sweat. As he sat up in bed, Danielle roused, turned over, and finally sat up with him. It was barely dawn.

“What’s wrong?” She put her hand on his arm.

“The dreams are back.” He had told her about how he’d had dreams since childhood, but she didn’t know that now they’d changed so that he seemed to be going somewhere in his sleep, witnessing things.

“You’re soaking wet with sweat.” She threw back the covers and went to the master bath off their bedroom for a towel.

He mopped his face with it then bunched the towel in his fists lying in his lap. “I can see them now,” he said.

“Who?”

“Charles Upton. And someone who stays with him, a dark foreign man. They’re raising troops. Upton’s coming back.”

“What do you mean you see them?”

“In the dreams. At first all I could do was stand there, a silent witness. Now I can walk around and look at things. I told Mentor about it and he said I needed to find out where they are.”

“Did you?”

“Not yet. Tonight was the first time I wasn’t in Upton’s house in the dream. I was in an underground cave or cavern or large basement. It was filled with Predators.” He shivered and wiped his face again with the towel. He continued, “This time the foreign man knew I was there. I think he saw me.”

“What man?”

“The one called Jacques. I think he’s French.”

“What do you mean he saw you?” Danielle had crawled back into bed atop the covers. She sat on her knees. He saw the creeping terror in her eyes, but he could never lie to her again. Once he’d told her about his family, his origins, he swore never to keep secrets from her again.

“I was standing there to one side, listening to Upton yell at the Predators he had grouped before him. He wants more volunteers. He wants them to scout for him, to find more volunteers. Suddenly, the one called Jacques turned his head and looked directly at me. I know he saw me. It scared me because I thought I’d become visible or something and all of them could see me. But only seconds later when no one made a move toward me, I knew they couldn’t see me. Only Jacques could.”

“Malachi, I wish I could understand. All this frightens me.”

He took her hands and drew her next to him so that they sat side by side, his arm around her shoulders. “I know, honey. If I’d thought I’d still be involved in the vampire world, I wouldn’t have come back to you. I would have gone far away and let you forget me. Now it’s too late.”

He thought of his son, Eli. That, too, had been meant to be. When his child had been born and he’d first held him, a wave of love so great flooded him that he was rocked on his feet. He hadn’t any idea he would love a little baby so much. Now Eli was almost two and the very center of his life. He couldn’t imagine life without his family.