Twilight Prophecy (12 page)

She thought about that. “Does there have to be a reason?”

“Doesn’t there?”

“I don’t think so. I was born with brown hair and eyes. There’s no reason for it. It just is.”

He nodded. “Lots of people are born with brown hair and brown eyes. But I’m the only one of my kind.”

“You’re a twin.”

“Brigit’s…entirely different from me.”

“I see.” But she didn’t. Not really. “So she doesn’t have the healing touch, then?”

“No.”

She sensed there was more, but she didn’t press. He was in a talkative mood. She sensed it would be best to let him run with it, see where it led, rather than risk making him clam up again.

“Go on,” she said. “Please.”

He nodded. “I don’t really know where I was going.”

“You have the healing gift. You believe it’s for a reason. You’ve been wondering what that reason is for your entire life. What else have you been doing while you were wondering?” she asked. “I take it you’ve been…estranged from your family?”

He nodded. “They see it that way. I haven’t been out of touch with them, I just chose not to live among them. I’ve been trying to lead a more…normal life, in constant search of a raison d’être.”

“So do you have…a job?”

“Lots of them. Mundane ones, though. Jobs where I can be largely anonymous, and come and go at will. Nothing like a career, the way you have. I do whatever is necessary to earn enough money to keep me going. My real vocation has been healing.”

“You just…go around putting your hands on people?”

He nodded and got a faraway look in his eye. “Huts in HIV-ravaged villages in Africa. Cancer wards at children’s hospitals. Refugee camps in Darfur. I slip in while the mortals sleep, and I put my hands on them. The little ones, usually. And then I try to slip away without being caught.” He shook his head in self-deprecation. “Brigit says I’m like some oversized tooth fairy.”

She sat there, stunned to her core. Of all the things he could have told her he’d spent his time doing, saving dying children was not one of them. Not even close. She found herself starting to see him as angelic again.

“You’re just like a vampire,” Lucy whispered.

“Only instead of taking life, you’re giving it.”

He smiled softly. “Vampires don’t take lives, Lucy. Not anymore. Not unless it’s a life sorely in need of taking.”

She thought about that, fascinated. “But…they need blood. I mean, do most of them really subsist by robbing blood banks?”

“Not entirely. But they don’t need to kill in order to feed. They can drink from the living without taking enough to do harm and even remove any memory of the experience. It can be…quite pleasurable, actually.”

“Do you…?”

“No.” He looked away. “Yes.”

Lifting her brows, Lucy said, “Which is it?”

“I…I can extend my incisors—vamp up, as Brigit calls it. I can pierce a jugular, imbibe human blood. But I’ve only tasted it once, and not from the living. And it wasn’t my choice—I was a child.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Was it…horrible?”

“It was…wonderful.”

Her face went lax, brows rising, stomach clenching. And yet, even while being repulsed, she found herself wondering why he was being so honest with her, so open. He had to know it would disgust her to think of him feeding on blood.

“But I’m not a blood drinker,” he said quickly.

“I don’t need to be, so I’ve chosen not to be. I eat normal food, drink normal beverages and keep my fangs firmly retracted.” He smiled to show her.

For one brief moment she got lost in that smile, in those eyes, in the man who was…once again convincing her that he was some sort of a hero. Her kidnapper. Damn, what was wrong with her?

“And what about Brigit?” she asked, to change both the subject and the line of her thoughts.

He averted his eyes again. “I believe she imbibes on a regular basis. It increases any vampire’s strength, their power. She thrives on it.”

“What sorts of powers does your sister have?” Lucy asked.

He shook his head. “That’s for her to tell you, should she choose to.”

She couldn’t help but want to continue the discussion, her curiosity more powerful than her fear. “So vampires, and half vampires, can drink and make the victim forget?”

“Three-quarters, not half. And yes,” he said.

“And what about the…the marks?” She touched her own neck as she asked.

His eyes followed the motion of her hand and then lingered there on her throat. It seemed to Lucy that his gaze heated while it rested there. “The punctures heal at the first touch of sunlight. So the mortals rarely even see even a hint of a mark.”

She was quiet, contemplating.

“It’s a lot to absorb, isn’t it?”

“It’s an entire world I never even knew existed.”

“Most people don’t know. At least—they didn’t. Until now.”

She lowered her eyes. “Can I ask about the clichés without offending you?”

“Of course.”

“Is it true about the garlic and the crucifixes?”

“No. And no.”

“And the holy water? It doesn’t burn?”

“No.”

“And what about you and Brigit? Are you really…immortal?”

“We don’t know.”

She frowned, puzzled. “You don’t know?”

“How can we? There have never been children born to vampires before—until our mother. She stopped aging, as near as anyone’s been able to figure out, the first time the DPI killed her.”

She blinked in shock. “The…the government…
killed
your mother?”

“My mother was their most sought-after captive for a time. Half vampire, half human, bred in a DPI experiment just to see if it could be done. Vampires are supposed to be sterile, you know. Turns out the males are. In females, though, it takes a few months for all the viable eggs to leave their ovaries. They fertilized one in a female prisoner right after she was turned, using semen from…from a mortal who hadn’t yet been turned. Then they implanted the fertilized ovum and held the female captive until she gave birth. That baby was my mother.”

“And the parents were…your grandparents?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to them?”

“They escaped, along with their child. Jameson and Angelica—they’re still alive today, still look as young as they did then and they’re still together and deeply in love.”

“And your mother?”

“The DPI found her again as a young woman, captured her, then experimented on her, killing her in various ways to see if she was immortal or not. Reviving her and killing her again. Over and over, until her family managed to rescue her. She, too, is still alive, as is my father.”

“Good God,” she whispered. “And she conceived—why? How?”

“There seemed to be some healing properties in her blood, that restored my father’s seed.” He looked at her quickly. “I’m sorry. Our nightmarish family history isn’t something you really needed to know about.”

“I had no idea.”

“How could you? But maybe it’ll help you to see why Rhiannon is so…hostile toward humankind.”

“And yet she once was. Human, I mean.”

“That’s the irony, isn’t it?”

“And you go around saving them. Healing them. Us.” Lucy drew a deep breath and put a hand on his chest. “And you don’t even know…if you’re immortal or not?”

“I’ve never been sick a day in my life. Nor has my sister. We aged normally into adulthood, and since then I’ve been waiting for years, searching the mirror for signs of my first gray hair or crow’s feet to appear.”

“How old
are
you?”

He smiled. “Old enough that I should have seen some of those signs by now.”

“Do you have other—you know—powers?”

He shrugged. “You already know I can read your thoughts.”

“It’s very disconcerting, you know,” she admitted.

“It’s considered bad manners to go probing around in someone’s head without their consent or knowledge. I don’t do it. I only heard you before because your thoughts were so…well, vehement. They were projectiles, in a way. You were sort of sending them.”

“I see.”

“Everyday thinking, I wouldn’t hear unless I was listening in. And I’m not. I promise.”

“Okay.”

“You can block them, shield yourself from eavesdropping vampires, if it makes you feel less…violated.”

“Really? How?”

“Visualization. Picture an invisible helmet, impermeable, no thoughts can escape it. See it strongly, and often. Design it. See its colors, feel its weight. Then just don it whenever you have thoughts you want to keep to yourself.”

She nodded. “So you…you communicate with each other that way? Is that one of your powers, too?”

“It’s so natural to us it doesn’t seem like a power, exactly. I mean, maybe anyone raised by adults who communicate telepathically would pick it up, you know? And a lot of mortal twins seem to have a bit of that ability. Beyond that, we’re very strong, far stronger than any ordinary human being. We can run faster, jump higher and we see well in the dark. None of those things are as strong in us as they are in our vampiric relatives, but they’re far stronger than in humankind.”

He sighed, looking at her again, and this time he covered her hand with his. “I’m going on and on, and you need to get some rest so your mind will be fresh come sundown. I just…I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to show you that I’m not bad, not evil. And to tell you how sorry I am that I had to drag you into this drama.”

“Why?” she asked softly, her eyes on his hand, where it rested on top of hers.

His gaze was there, too. “I care what you think of me.”

She lifted her head just as he raised his. Their eyes met. “I’m fascinated by you, James.” Maybe that was too much. She blinked and said, “By all of you, I mean. And by your history and your abilities and your family. Thank you for telling me a little more about you. I think…I think I understand a bit better now.”

“I hope so.” He reached out with his other hand, as if he were going to brush it through her hair, then stopped himself and blinked at it as if in surprise. “I’m overtired. I need to get some rest, too,” he said, lowering his hand to his side. “If you can think of anything that would make this time a bit easier on you, please don’t hesitate to let me know.”

She nodded. “This…training they have you doing. Is it pretty grueling?”

“It drains me. Physically as well as spiritually. But it has to be done.” He moved toward the door. “Oh, before I forget, Brigit said you thought you could work faster if you knew exactly what you were looking for.”

She nodded. “I can’t see what harm telling me might do. I mean, I’m going to know what that tablet contains anyway, once it’s translated.”

“That was the argument I made to Rhiannon. She forbade me from telling you anything, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I’ve decided to tell you anyway.”

She lifted her brows in surprise. “You’re defying her?”

He shrugged. “The faster I’m finished with this, the better. She’ll see that it did no harm in the long run.”

“So…?”

“According to legend, that tablet contains the entire account of the death of Utanapishtim. It is our hope that it also contains some clue that will lead us to his remains. As well as telling us how he can help us prevent this so-called vampire Armageddon.”

She frowned. “The original tablet didn’t actually say he could prevent it,” she told him. “It did seem to be about to say that, but then the rest of the segment was missing.”

“I know. Those missing segments are another piece of the puzzle. Translating what we have here might fill in the blanks. We desperately need to know everything we can, everything that prophecy has to say, especially about Utanapishtim.”

She frowned hard. “I think you take these things far too literally.”

“I think you’re going to change your mind about that.”

That, she realized, was entirely possible. “Then again,” she said, “a week ago I’d have said there was no chance, not even a remote one, that vampires could exist, and now I’m surrounded by them.” She rubbed her arms as a chill ran up her spine. “Just saying it out loud still feels so…surreal. It’s like my entire worldview has been demolished. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

“Nothing has changed from when you felt secure and serene, not really.”

She shrugged, not agreeing with him at all. From her perspective, everything had changed. “What do you want with Utanapishtim’s remains?”

He shifted his eyes away from hers. “There’s a ritual. It’s complicated, and also sort of oathbound.”

“Oathbound?”

“It’s something we don’t share.”

“I see. And are you going to tell Rhiannon that you told me all this?”

He got to his feet and stood beside the bed. “Not unless I have to. Good rest, Lucy. I’ll see you at sundown.”

“Good night—I mean, good rest, James.” She got up, as well, and there was an awkward moment when she tipped her head up to stare into his eyes and he stared right back. The air between them actually seemed to snap and spark. But only for a moment. Then he turned away, moved to the door and was gone, and Lucy wanted to stomp her feet in frustration.

She closed her eyes tightly, wishing she could control this desire, fight this magnetism of his that drew her like a moth to a flame. And then she lifted her hand to the doorknob, intending to turn the lock—but stopped with her hand in midair. What if he wanted to come back in later?

What the hell was she thinking? She was in a den of vampires, for God’s sake!

She turned the lock, firmly and decisively, and then she went back to her bed and tried to get some sleep.

A
t sundown, James once again found himself in the hidden basement room with Rhiannon by his side, giving orders as if she had some inherent right to do so. He resented it but didn’t say so aloud. She was older than he, more powerful. An elder among the undead. A leader. And besides that, she was family and he loved her. So he tended to give her more leeway than he would have given anyone else.

Before him lay five corpses, and the stench that filled the room was almost unbearable.

“Dab some of this beneath your nostrils,” Rhiannon said, handing him a jar of menthol rub. “Brigit said it would help.”

“Brigit watches too much television,” he muttered, but he obeyed, and the vapors did indeed mitigate the stench of rotting flesh. “You really expect me to…to try to resurrect these?”

“No, I don’t expect you to try. I expect you to do it. Start with this one.” She moved to a table and yanked a dusty sheet, probably one that had been covering old furniture upstairs, from the face of a corpse. “He’s only a few days dead.”

He thinned his lips. “Does he have a story? Is there going to be a way to explain his return to his family?”

“If you insist on a full biography of every stinking bag of flesh you work on, we’ll be extinct before you get to the bony ones. Now do it.”

He balked at being ordered around, but he knew she had a point. “I’m just trying to make this okay in my mind. In my soul, Rhiannon.”

“That’s the trouble with having a soul.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. You have a soul and you know it.” Still, he approached the corpse, which was blue but mostly intact. He suspected its closed but sunken eyes and shriveled lips, and the peeling skin here and there, were not quite as pronounced as in the other bodies that lined the room.

“Fortunately,” Rhiannon said, “I don’t let my soul dictate my actions as if I’m a slave to it.”

“You mean the way I’m letting you dictate mine?”

“Revive the corpse, J.W.”

He sighed and held his hands over the stinking body, not touching it, but very close. Far closer than he wanted to be. The light began to emanate from his hands, to beam into the body on the table, and within a few minutes the corpse’s peeling flesh began to smooth itself out again. The sunken eyes seemed to plump themselves, and the flesh to lose its gray-blue cast. He felt it when the heart began beating, felt it echoing in his own chest. The rib cage expanded as the cracked lips healed, then parted, and when the being on the table exhaled, the stench made James sway backward, pulling his hands away.

But the eyes did not open.

“Very good. Very good!” Rhiannon clapped her hands several times. Applause, for making a half-rotten corpse breathe. Go figure. “On to the next one, then,” she said.

“But we don’t know how this one is going to turn out yet.” He frowned, then faced her, trying hard to read her thoughts. “What’s going on, Rhiannon? Why are you in such a rush all of a sudden?”

She lowered her head, and he found her mind completely blocked.

He probed, but she was stronger. “Where is Roland? And Pandora? Where’s Pandora?”

“I couldn’t have the cat in here. She would have made snacks of our experiments. And then how would I have borne her breath?”

“Rhiannon. Something’s going on, isn’t it?”

She wasn’t letting him read her thoughts at all. But she did lower her eyes, guilt showing in them. “Things out there have…taken a bad turn.”

“Out where? What things?”

Rhiannon lifted her head and moved her long dark hair behind one ear. She met his eyes, her regal bearing wavering very slightly. “The vigilante movement has exploded all over the nation, and it’s spreading overseas. We’ve lost even more of our own, J.W.”

He felt the knowledge hit him squarely in the chest. “Who?”

“Hundreds. During the day, while we rested, they set fire to countless homes. Anyplace they suspected might house a vampire. They were wrong as often as not, idiots that they are. Uneducated, ignorant bigots who don’t know the first thing about our kind. They killed as many of their own as they did of ours, and—”

“My parents? Where is my mother?”

“We don’t know. We can’t contact anyone mentally—”

“The hell we can’t!” James closed his eyes, began beaming his thoughts out to his family.

“James, no!” Rhiannon’s shout stopped him dead. It was the first time she had ever called him James, and it got his attention. “You know as well as I do that there are humans with the power of telepathy. ESP, they call it. They’re able to tap into our thoughts if we do not block them carefully. Your mother knows that, too, so she would be blocking. We
cannot
risk communicating by telepathy right now. It might only lead them straight to us—or to your parents.”

“I have to find her. All of them. And—”

“Roland has gone to check on them. He intends to gather up everyone still alive and take them to a safe haven.”

“No.
I
have to go. I have to be with them and—”

She clapped a hand on his shoulder. “You, James, are the only one who can end this madness. This is exactly what the prophecy foretold. We should have expected it—
did
expect it—but it’s unfolding far more rapidly than any of us could have imagined.” Rhiannon spoke softly, but there was power in her voice. “This is what you were chosen to do. This is why you have the power you have. The prophecy foretold this war. We need Utanapishtim to end it. If your family is still alive, they will only survive if you stay here and do the job you were born to do. That’s how you will save them. It’s the only way you can.”

He stared into her eyes for a long moment, and then he sensed his sister behind him in the doorway and whirled, wondering how much she had heard.

She met his eyes. There was absolute fury in hers. “I, on the other hand, was born with a power that hasn’t been much use at all,” she said. “Until now.”

“Brigit, we need you here,” Rhiannon said.

Brigit shook her head, backing away slowly. “I love you, Aunt Rhi, but I have to do this. And you know damn well I can protect our family better than anyone else.”

Rhiannon couldn’t seem to drum up an argument for that. She nodded and said, “Go and pack some things. I’ll contact Roland as discreetly as possible—he deigned to take a cell phone with him, and you know how he hates technology. I’ll call and hope he can figure out how to answer. I’ll find out where he’s decided to take the survivors.”

Brigit nodded once, patting her pocket. “You have my number.” Then she sent James a long look that spoke volumes, turned and ran from the basement.

James nodded firmly and made himself face corpse number one, which was still lying on the table, twitching every now and then, as if in the grip of a restless sleep. Time would tell whether it would return to full lucidity or remain a mindless animated bag of meat. But time was something he didn’t have. He moved to corpse number two and held his hands over it.

Lucy knew something drastic was going on when Brigit came slamming into the office, practically emanating rage from her pores. Lucy looked up from the tablet, where she’d been right in the middle of something major—then froze as she saw what appeared to be a light glowing from behind Brigit’s eyes.

Lucy found herself caught off guard. She’d seen a glow behind James’s eyes, but this one was different. His glowed the way she would expect an…well, an angel’s eyes to glow. His sister’s seemed to gleam the way a demon’s would. The light from within had a redness to it. And it felt…angry.

“Brigit? What’s wrong?”

“Later.” The blonde with the angelic face sped into the next room—the little kitchen, and on through it to the first of the bedrooms.

Lucy got up, about to follow, but she stopped after only a single step. She felt an instinctive fear that she didn’t dare ignore. The hair on her forearms was standing upright, and the nape of her neck was tingling. Every cell in her body was warning her away from Brigit, and she decided she would do well to listen.

Swallowing hard, Lucy sat back down at the table and bent over the passage she’d been working on. It wasn’t hard to focus her attention on the job at hand, because it was fascinating beyond all reason. In all her years of studying the tales and texts and legends of ancient Sumer, she had never seen this one—this account of the death of Utanapishtim. And what stunned her most of all was that the story matched what the vampires had told her—of how he had been punished by the gods for sharing the gift of immortality with the great king, Gilgamesh, and how Gilgamesh’s sworn enemy, Anthar, had forced the old man to share immortality with him, as well, to better enable him to fight the king. And how Anthar had then beheaded the ancient one, and abducted his young servant and taken him as a slave. She picked up her smart phone, hit the digital recorder and began reciting her translation of the text into it. She had written it down, as well, but felt compelled to have more than one record of this vital piece of history.

“‘Thirteen days passed, thirteen nights, as Ziasudra lay there. Dead, but not. Eternal and imprisoned. Until the old woman, the one they called Desert Witch, came upon him there, as if asleep. No maggots, nor flies, nor stench of decay, did she find upon him. And it was she who burned his body. With fire and with herbs, with chanting and with dance, did she burn him, to break the curse that could not be broken, to free the spirit that could not be freed.

“‘His ashes she took to the artisan of Uruk, that he might make for her a likeness of the man himself, with his remains secreted within, and to engrave upon it his secret name, Utanapishtim, that the gods might never find him and curse him again.

“‘And so the craftsman formed the limestone into the likeness of the priest-king Ziasudra, although he knew it not. The length of his forearm, he formed it, in a pose of submission, and obsidian eyes he gave to him, that he might see. Ziasudra, who had been made like a god, given the breath of life by the gods and cursed to suffer by the gods, now, he was ash and dust, hidden within the statue. But his curse was not to be broken, not until he reversed his sin against the gods.’”

Lucy lifted her head. “I think I know where he is,” she whispered. “Oh, my God, I think I know where he is!” She jumped to her feet just as Brigit came surging back into the room, a leather biker bag over her shoulder.

“Brigit, I—”

“Not now.” Brigit stomped through the secret passage into the crumbling bedroom of the main house, but Lucy ran right behind her, grabbing her handbag and slinging it over her shoulder as she dropped the phone into it, her notebook still in her other hand. It was only as Brigit turned to close the panel in the wall that she realized Lucy was still behind her. “What the hell? You’re supposed to stay—”

“I think I know where he is!” Lucy said.

“Where
who
is?”

“Utanapishtim. I think I’ve found him.” She frowned, seeing how distracted the girl was. “God, what’s wrong with you?”

Brigit seemed to bank the fire behind her eyes. “Hundreds of vampires were burned alive in their sleep while we rested safe and sound here. That’s what’s wrong. Mortal idiocy, moral bankruptcy, murderous pigs who think thou shalt not kill only applies to their own kind, right down to species, race, creed and color. I’m surprised they don’t annihilate according to age and gender. Humans suck, and I intend to start exercising some old school justice. One of theirs for one of ours. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. That’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”

“Straight from the Code of Hammurabi,” Lucy replied.

Brigit was surging through the house as she spoke, into the hallway, down the stairs, with Lucy rushing to keep up. They crossed what had once been the glorious foyer, raced down a long vaulted corridor, and then Brigit flung open what appeared to be a basement door, with a dark stairway vanishing beneath it. She turned back, seeming to finally realize that Lucy was still with her. But she only paused for a moment, then shrugged and kept on walking. Down the cellar stairs, across the basement. When she reached a closed door, she said, “Wait out here.”

And then there was a crash, followed by Rhiannon’s voice screaming, “Kill them, for the love of the gods!”

Brigit yanked the door open, and the stench that wafted from within the room beyond nearly knocked Lucy to her knees. She stared in paralyzed shock as what she saw inside the room delivered a second, even more debilitating, blow to her psyche.

There were…corpses…or zombies or something—half-rotted bodies—stumbling around what looked like a demolished laboratory. One of them had Rhiannon by the throat. Its flesh was falling off its bones as its bony hand clutched the beautiful vampiress. Three more of them, one no more than a bleached white skeleton that looked like a Halloween decoration, were surrounding James, yanking at his limbs, his hair, his face.

Brigit started to hum. No, she wasn’t humming, but there
was
a hum coming from her, and as Lucy watched, unable to speak or move more than her eyes, she saw Brigit lift both hands, palms up, fingers lightly touching her thumbs. Her eyes were glowing red, and then, as she flicked one hand open, a beam of white light with a reddish tint—flashed like a laser from her eyes. It shot from her to the creature that had Rhiannon, and the corpse exploded.

Lucy jerked away in reaction, falling on her backside on the floor as scraps of rotting meat rained down on her. Even before her stomach could heave, Brigit’s other hand flicked open and her killer gaze was blasting another corpse to bits. And then another, and an other, with pinpoint accuracy and deadly results.

Within two seconds there were no more walking corpses. No more bleached white bones, grasping… But Lucy’s mind felt as if it had been hit by one of Brigit’s beams. She stared at the mess, at the gore, at James moving slowly toward her. He was speaking, but she was still hearing that hum in her brain, or maybe that was the reverberation left behind from the explosions. She only knew she was terrified, unable to think coherently and wanting nothing more than to crawl into a hole and then pull the hole in after her.