~*~
In a supply room next to the doctor's lounge where Alan Star was taking his call from Bette, a Natural by the name of Hank sat listening to the conversation. He could hear both parties easily through walls and phone wires. He had accidentally picked up the thought "vampire" from Dr. Star when walking down the hall earlier and had followed him. Doctors did not generally go around thinking about vampires. It intrigued Hank enough that he stuck near Star most of the day. Every now and then he tried to carefully tiptoe into the doctor's thoughts, hoping to find out more details.
Now he heard the woman share her suspicions about Strand-Catel. Hank would have to alert Ross, the Dallas Predator who owned that particular blood bank.
Leigh, a female lab research assistant and also a Natural, spoke aloud. "This could interfere with our research."
Hank knew that. It was an ominous turn of events, certainly. "Nothing's going to stop us," he said, trying to sound confident. Early on, Ross, the Predator with the most power in the Southwest, had tried to stop them from getting into research. If there was a cure found, he'd be out of business. He didn't like any one of the Naturals thinking they might one day do something about the disease. If the Naturals stopped needing blood to survive, there went Ross' control right out the front door.
Hank didn't like Ross worth a damn. He might have gone to war with him had it not been for Mentor's plea for peace among the clans. If truth were told, Hank relished the thought he was going to be the one to tell Ross of the Dallas investigation by Kinyo. He'd love to hear him roar, that's what he'd really love.
Hank, Leigh, and another Natural, Dr. Shamoi, a molecular scientist and world-famous hematologist, had been medical researchers for many years, looking for a cure for the disease that turned them into vampires. They'd gone along quite well in the hospital system that employed Dr. Star. Often left to their own devices, they spent every spare moment delving into the molecular level of blood, trying to discover just what it was that changed porphyria from a human killer into a mutated disease that had afflicted their clans ever since 2000 B.C. If they could find the trigger mechanism, perhaps they could cure themselves—or at least offer the cure to those who wanted it. Some of them, Hank reflected, would never want to give up the supernatural life. More power to them, that was his position. But for the rest of them, like himself, who longed for a normal life again, a cure would be a glorious discovery.
Leigh said, "What are we going to do, Hank?"
"I'll talk with Ross. Go back to the lab and don't worry about Dr. Star. He's a nonbeliever. He won't get anywhere."
"And the woman in Dallas?"
Hank hesitated. He didn't have enough information to say anything about the woman. "Maybe Mentor can see about her."
Leigh, looking relieved, left the stuffy supply room for the lab. Hank leaned against the shelves and closed his eyes. Tonight after his shift he'd call Ross, and Mentor, too. No point in sending out a telepathic alarm at this point. He'd only get everyone riled up and have them descending on his hospital, further delaying important work.
And who, he wondered, was Upton? He had no first name, no other clue to the fellow's existence. All he knew from the tidbits he'd gleaned from Star's brain was that Upton had employed him. Christ, he thought, if it isn't one thing, it's ten dozen more.
Chapter 11
Once Mentor let Dolan go, the house settled into a slow, numbing buzz of lethargy. There were always the unseen life-forms in a house. Cockroaches, spiders, silverfish, scorpions, flies, beetles, termites, mosquitoes. All of them flying just at the edge of the house seeking entry or crawling around inside or beneath it. Mentor counted these unseen creatures as his friends. They shut out the larger noises that filtered in through the walls from outside. If he let them, the sounds—of their little tapping feet, their wriggling antennae, the crackling of the beetles' hard shells—focused him in a way silence could never do.
Dolan had been contrite. "I won't do it again," he said.
"If you have to do it, do it only to yourself," Mentor advised.
Dolan gave him a puzzled look. "You're saying you won't try to stop me if I just want to destroy myself."
"Not after this, Dolan, no. If after these days on your own in my basement, where you were alone with your own conscience, you decide you can't go on, well . . . I won't interfere a second time."
"I heard that about you."
Mentor unlocked the front door before turning back. "What did you hear?"
"That there're no second chances."
Mentor shrugged. "I plead guilty."
"But it hurts you, doesn't it? I mean if I fall down. If I kill myself. You'll blame yourself."
"I don't think I want to answer that question." Mentor spoke gruffly, hoping to spirit the old vampire out of his house and be done with him. He would not speak of whatever guilt he took upon himself. Not with Dolan. Not with anyone.
"All right," Dolan said, moving swiftly past Mentor and out onto the walkway. High above, the moon shone clearly, and there was not a cloud in the night sky. "I'm going back to my other prison now."
“God speed,” Mentor said, waving a little and beginning to shut the door. He already had turned his attention to the small life evident in the wall just behind him where he heard the scurrying of the tiniest feet. He must concentrate on the sounds so that they would blot out the world. He did not want to think about losing Dolan to despair, did not wish to remember the Craven house he'd taken him from where creatures almost too weak to maintain life lay about like sick dogs. There was only so much Mentor thought he could take, and when he reached that limit, he turned inward to survive another night, another day.
An impediment caused the closing door to jam so that Mentor had to shift his attention to it again. Dolan stood there, his hand holding the door. He looked into Mentor's tired eyes.
"I wouldn't have your job for the world. I would rather be a Craven hoping to die than to be you."
And then he was gone, disappearing on the night wind, a transparent shadow rippling past the leafy limbs of a tall mulberry tree planted close to Mentor's house.
Mentor closed the door with a sigh and walked slowly down the hall, an old man returning to his solitude. He felt no physical fatigue, no pain or ache, and was often completely out of touch with the process that ran the old shell that he inhabited. He was simply tired from living the life Dolan correctly recognized as a royal and total pain. How many times had he embraced a despair deeper than any Dolan had ever experienced and yet gone on? Sometimes he wanted to say to those like Dolan who would take matters into their own hands, "You spineless coward." He wanted to say, "You thought being a vampire would release you from all earthly care. You believed eternal life would be like a picnic, a holiday spree. Who gave you the idea that life, in any form, human or vampire, would be without pain and strange, unimaginable horror?"
Oh, he could not teach them anything. He thought about the uselessness of his mission some nights when he was alone, barring the transmission of the calls for help that came through the air like demented radio signals. He could not really teach them how to live. He provided stopgaps in their plans. He talked them out of mistakes. He took young ones, like Dell, and he hoped to see her prosper in her new incarnation, at least for a few years. Eventually, all of them knew despair like an old friend draped over their shoulders, a shroud to warm them. Eventually, they realized their lives were but magnified human lifetimes, lived over and over and over again, with so little changing along the way.
It was less a humanitarian urge than it was for his own sake that Mentor did what he could to guide and to save his kind from total destruction. Once they had lived as long as he, if they ever did, then they would know the ultimate truth. Hope was something you manufactured out of thin air. Not just when you were down and out, when you were depressed and hopeless, but every day, every single minute of every spin of the Earth around the sun.
Dolan was right to realize he was better off as he was than
to have to walk down Mentor's path. Dolan was one of the intuitive ones. Dolan was no fool.
And that lifted Mentor's mood the smallest fraction. He had at least not wasted his time with the other vampire. He had been dealing with someone more enlightened than he'd imagined.
Mentor left the lights off and sat on the sofa next to the darkened fireplace. He would shut out the calls for help for just a little while. Ross, the leader of the Predators was coming to him tonight. It would be late, after midnight, when the city slumbered.
Mentor needed his strength for the meeting. He never dealt with a Predator without being at the top of his mark. After all, he had been one. He knew the latent danger inherent in the species. He must reach down and bring up his own power. Any weakness he might show could spell disaster. A Predator would prey, even on his own kind, if he sensed weakness.
He closed his eyes, laid back his head, and listened to the tiny creatures rustling all through, beneath, and just outside of his house. How he loved them.
~*~
Ross, he called himself, having taken a new name for each new body he migrated into. He was the leader of a Predator band that owned and ran the Strand-Catel Blood Bank in downtown Dallas. Because he and his kind did not, for the most part, care to walk free in the sunlight, they had hired enough underlings to keep the bank open and going in the day, while at night the real work was done by Ross' sect.
Strand-Catel supplied blood to Naturals and Cravens throughout the state of Texas and into New Mexico. They had done so for almost a century, calling their operation by different names over the years. It was made clear early in the eighteenth century, when the Americas were being settled, that their kind could not wantonly murder and prey on humans. Some of them still did, many of them, in fact, though they belonged to other Predator sects. But the majority of the vampire population knew that secrecy was paramount for their survival, and taking too many lives left a trail that would one day lead straight back to them.
Ross had run the blood bank for decades without too many hitches. The bank was his baby, his idea, and was granted autonomous operation from the many sects that occupied the Southwest. Everyone knew Ross. Everyone admired his business sense and how he kept up with the country as it moved and changed.
Ross was also feared. Mentor alone could not control the many thousands of vampires in the entire Southwest section of the country. Although the mutated porphyria cells that created them was a rare disease, it seemed to spawn more and more down through the generations, until their kind had gained in numbers. No one vampire could control them all, no matter how powerful. Ross not only watched over the bank's operation, the shipments that went out to the Naturals and Cravens who paid for the blood, and to Predators who needed the extra supplies to help control their hunger, Ross also acted as the chief enforcer over renegades. He was, in essence, Mentor's right-hand man, though neither of them spoke about the arrangement or admitted to it.
Of the two kinds of vampires below Ross, he despised the Cravens most. They lived on welfare, handouts, and begging. In order to pay for their blood, the strongest ones sometimes resorted to petty theft and drug trafficking. They lurked in dark alleyways with little bags of poison to sell, too weak to kill for their living, but not too weak to prey in another way on society.
Ross disliked the Cravens for their poverty and had been determined to make himself wealthy. Though wealth mattered little to most Predators, who were driven by their hunger to the point where ambition died away, Ross saw wealth as a tool that could protect him if things ever got out of hand. Wealth gave him choices, had bought him safe places in the world where he might hide, and it would insure his safety if his operation was ever found out.
It was common knowledge that Ross hated the Cravens. In the early 1900s he'd tried to eradicate the Cravens from the region. It was a famous bloodbath in vampire history. He had been stopped from completing his vendetta by Mentor and a few other ancient Predators who tracked Ross down and demanded he desist. Didn't he know that if they made the choice in death to be a Craven, it had something to do with the soul? If the choice was theirs to make, didn't he know he had no right to take that choice away?
Mentor knew he and Ross suffered an uneasy alliance. Ross thought him soft, a philosophical creature wasting his time with newly made vampires and old, helpless vampires and suicidal vampires. These were creatures Ross would have dispatched without a thought. Get them out of the way, would have been his wish. If they can't make it on their own, we take risks keeping them alive. What do you do when you see a slug on the pavement? You step on it, he was often quoted as saying. You step on it and walk away. That was his philosophy.
"You think because some of us choose to be weak and sick and pitiful that it's ordained?" Ross had asked, furious that he was being held back from the slaughter of the Cravens by Mentor.
"What else could it mean?" Mentor had responded.
"This means all of you believe there is some higher power instructing our existence. Well, you're wrong! We're alone! There is no God, don't you know that?"
It finally came down to a decree. Ross, called Brenton at that time, would leave the Cravens alone or they would all take measures against him. He could not hope to defeat so many as powerful as he. He relented, grumbling and cursing, but never forgave Mentor for his part. "I could have rid the world of them," he'd said. And Mentor had replied, "Never. There will always be those who choose the Craven way. That is just the way it is, and it's not up to you to change it."
Now he stood in Mentor's living room, towering above him, his body youthful, strong, and beautiful.
Mentor noted how Ross always chose the most beautiful male body he could find. He was as conceited as he was arrogant and dangerous. He was, it occurred to Mentor, the very embodiment of the modem day fictional vampire, with his rarified ways, haughty manners, and impeccable dress. Mentor thought he might have adopted the fiction, seeing himself as romantic, erotic, and dreaded. A ruse, Mentor decided. Or an illusion he favored, but that was all. He was simply a wicked, greedy, ambitious fool who happened to be a vampire leader because he was the smartest, the most ruthless.
Mentor, rested now and ready for him, rose from the sofa, and stood face-to-face with the other Predator. "You called for this meeting. Let's get on with it."
"I don't give a damn about you either," Ross said, twisting his beautiful mouth to show his fangs.
Mentor blinked, catching his own reflection in the wet white glisten of the other vampire's teeth. He knew this was one of Ross' newest tricks to entrance a prey. That he thought it would work on someone twice his age just went to show how pride could go before a fall. If he wanted, Mentor could have wrung forth from his being a fury that would have blasted Ross clear across the room and left him defenseless.
Instead of rising to the bait, Mentor walked to the dead fireplace and placed his hand on the mantel. He loved to show this Predator how unafraid he was of him. "Now that we have the polite greetings out of the way, what do you want?"
Ross turned his back for Mentor to contemplate as he spoke. "There have been quiet inquiries about the bank. Hank called me from Houston. Didn't he call you? He said he was going to."
"Not yet. What did he say the inquiries concerning your bank were about?"
Ross picked up a book from the table near the sofa. He dusted it off, though it was not dusty, read the title, and dropped it. "Our shipments."
"So?" Mentor was losing patience. Didn't the Predator know he was wasting valuable time? There was a new vampire being born right this minute without Mentor there to guide him through death. Mentor resented Ross' appearance and the talk about the blood bank. It was his problem. What possible motive did he have for coming to Mentor?
Ross turned so fast that a mortal would not have seen it happen, though Mentor did. "You accuse me of pride, but it's you who think yourself indispensable! I come here to ask for a minute, and you whine in your head about waste. I should rip you apart for that."
/> "If you think that you can, jump, Froggy."
Ross glared at him before he saw Mentor's small smile, and then he began to laugh. "Froggy!" He laughed some more, his anger all but gone.
"All right, it was rude of me to get impatient," Mentor said. "It must be serious if you've come to tell me personally. Now, what does it mean? I really do have to leave soon."
"It's a woman who runs an HIV testing lab. She has access to all the records of all the blood banks. Federal law requires the blood be tested, I'm sure you know that. She's discovered we ship out blood to other cities before it gets tested. She's called some of my people. She even knows it's been going on for years. She searched back records. She knows something isn't right."
Mentor realized this was indeed serious news. "Do you know if she's told anyone her suspicions?"
"We know she called a doctor in hematology at Hank's hospital. It's how he found out. I haven't sent anyone to investigate her yet. For all we know, she's already called in some federal agency or something. It could undermine our whole operation."
"Yes, it could." The thought of the loss of their blood bank threw Mentor into a sudden anxiety. Even he was nourished by the blood Ross supplied. The strongest-willed vampire, deprived of fresh blood, would turn on the closest victim to satiate his hunger. Naturals could only defeat their craving by having local supplies sold to them. If left to their own devices, many of them would be driven to hunt humans.
Ross was silent a moment. Then he said, "I wanted you to do it."
Taken aback, Mentor flinched inside. "You want me to investigate this woman?"
"Yes. I haven't really dealt with mortals in years except for servant types. I've lost the touch. While you . . ."
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