He heard someone calling his name. Malachi. It was a soft, female voice. It sounded like his mother, but his captors had fooled him before by transforming into a passable facsimile of her earthly form. He ignored the voice, telling himself not to reach for hope only to be horribly disappointed. His captors would not make sport of him this way.
It was perplexing to be here again, in the watery pit, rain sluicing down his body, slicking his ragged clothes to his skin. The chill was bone deep, causing him to shiver and ache. The awful squirming of the live things brushed his naked legs and feet. He winced with disgust and mentally moved away to some thought that might relieve this torture. He would think of Danielle, the girl he loved, the girl who waited for him still…
Malachi.
He opened his eyes, startled. There she was calling him. It could be her. It might be his mother. He’d prayed long enough for rescue. Maybe God took mercy and sent his vampire mother to save him. He was but dhampir, part human, with an inheritance of vampire strength and very few supernatural abilities from his mother. He had never done anything against mankind or against heaven. Why would a just God let him languish in this hell where he was drugged, tranquilized, and kept in a hole in the ground on an isolated mountainside in Thailand? Why was this happening to him?
The voice.
It could be his mother.
A small hand reached down into the pit for him. He sat down abruptly, sinking into the water until it ballooned his torn pants and splashed up past his bare nipples where the shreds of his shirt clung down the sides of his ribs. A hand, small and white, with nails squared on the ends. Was it an hallucination? Or had his mother really come for him? If she called his name just one more time, if she could convince him she was indeed his mother and not one of his captors playing a cruel trick, he would rise and turn to her. He would take her hand and crawl from this watery grave into the light of the natural world.
He woke, dripping cold sweat, sitting up in his bed, in his parents’ house.
Oh God, would the nightmares never end? He couldn’t stand it any longer. It was driving him mad.
Dream and nightmare had plagued him since he was a child, but these were by far the worst.
He had indeed been rescued that fateful day eighteen months into his captivity. His mother came with Mentor, the oldest vampire in the Western Hemisphere, and behind them stalked a hundred strong, hell-bent Predators to fight Upton’s Predator force and lay waste to them.
Now he had been home for two months and he still couldn’t get used to freedom. To sleeping in his own bed, the mattress soft and the covers clean and fragrant as wind washed by sunshine.
He swung his legs to the floor and rubbed hands over his face, wiping away the residue of horror from the nightmare.
He could still smell a whiff of stagnant water. He imagined the feel of the pelting rain.
“Malachi?”
He turned to look at his mother in the bedroom doorway. “Hi, Mom.” He tried to grin, but grimaced instead. He could never control his face. It betrayed him, letting others see whatever pain he endured, whatever depression or hopelessness.
“If you’re going to class, you better get dressed. You'll be late.” She’d seen his harrowed look and for his sake had chosen to not speak of it.
“Okay, thanks, Mom.” He was taking a full load of courses at Sam Houston University in Huntsville, Texas. Marking time. Nothing seemed to mean much anymore…except Danielle. If he didn’t have Danielle he didn’t know if he could even get up in the mornings, much less get to class.
His mother hesitated in the door, a small woman, almost a girl, having become vampire at eighteen and never aging. She looked his age. In fact, he was twenty, almost twenty-one, and older now than when his own mother had truly died to the world. When making any appearance in public, Dell Cambian Masterson wore artful make-up that made her look older, but at home she washed her face and looked as young and fresh as a rosebud. She had always looked this way, so he should be used to it, but sometimes the anomaly of it struck him right between the eyes, like an electric shot to the brain. She was young. Too young to be his mother.
“Nightmares again?” She asked in a concerned voice when he did not move.
He stood and began unbuttoning the shirt of his pajamas. He must indicate by action that he was himself again. At home. Well. Himself. “It’s all right. I can handle it.”
“If you’d let me into your thoughts…”
He interrupted her. “No! I mean, that’s okay, Mom. I’m fine.”
He had never wanted her to monitor his mind. She could do it easily, even entering into his sleeping state and rearranging the landscapes of his dreams. But it was such an invasion of his privacy. It felt…wrong. He had asked her not to do that when he was much younger and she’d abided by his wishes. He couldn’t change it now. He was already freak enough. He didn’t want his mother to know the details of his dreams or how they haunted him. There was no point in both of them suffering uneasy sleep.
“Breakfast is on the table.” She turned from him and disappeared into the hall. She moved like a shadow winking in and out. She usually moved with such supernatural speed within the confines of their home, but he didn’t know if he would ever get used to it. He could move that way too, but chose not to. Not unless forced to fighting an enemy—a predator vampire, a beast.
He chose not to do a lot of things. He wanted nothing to do with his vampire nature. He was human, by God. He did not drink blood; he ate food just like other people. He would not live forever. He was as mortal as was his aging, human father. He wanted so much to deny all the skills of his inheritance so he could live quietly and unobtrusively in the world.
He just wanted…
He wanted to forget.
He didn’t want Upton to come for him again. He didn’t want to be held prisoner. He didn’t want to be a threat to anyone. Because he was dhampir a rumor spread that he was the prophesied one who would lead a war against the Predators. It had been some old prophecy taken up by first the great and insane vampire Balthazar, and then the newly made and evil vampire Upton. At least now Balthazar was dead, dispatched by Ross, Mentor’s right hand man.
But Upton had escaped the carnage his mother’s Predators caused on the Thailand mountainside that day. He had been in Bangkok, sleeping with human women, Malachi imagined, or taking the blood from an innocent child, or procuring another temple to house his followers. Whatever he had been engaged in, it had saved his miserable soul.
If only Upton knew the truth. Malachi didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to interfere with the vampire nations. He refused to be involved in that strange, otherworldly life. He was no threat at all. Never had been. He could not understand why any of them connected him with the old prophecy.
He threw off his pajamas and dressed in Wrangler jeans that fit so well it was like pulling gloves onto his legs. He drew a plain dark blue T-shirt over his head and smoothed the front of it against his firm abdomen. He pulled on white socks and a favorite pair of worn Reeboks. Though there were completely new types of clothes he could wear, even some pullover shirts that were interconnected electronically via satellite with the worldwide web, he stuck with what most people thought of as “old style.” Sneakers were fine for him. Jeans and plain, real cotton shirts.
His parents had not gone very far into the new century, either. They still had a twenty-year-old television set, not one of the new blanket data sets that hung on the wall in other homes. They had not transformed the farmhouse into a facsimile, a Fax, so that it presented the look of an adobe villa or a French chateau. You could still see it from the highway in all its old glorious form—tin roof, plank siding painted white every three years, plain windows. All of it real, not a house pretending to be anything else.
In the hall bath he splashed water on his face. Thoughts of how he and his parents stuck to old methods and old technology fled. Proximity to water did that to him. He was immediately reminded of the dream and the imp
risonment and the day his mother came for him. Water. Always the water.
He scrubbed his face hard with a towel and went to the dining room where his father sat reading the newspaper. This was one concession to the new frontier. No longer were newspapers available in paper print. His father read the paper on a small handheld personal computer, flicking the pages with a touch of his finger. Every day the new paper was delivered by satellite.
Malachi glanced around. His mother had already left for her job as librarian at the University. Not that she did much there anymore. She expected to be replaced soon by a SIR, a complicated bio-tech robot machine. SIR stood for Synthesized Intelligent Robot. The books were not in print on shelves any longer. Everything was digital and electronic, and his mother, college-educated through home computer courses over the Internet, kept up as much as possible with advances, but it was clear to her she wouldn’t be necessary soon to the system.
“Hey, Dad.” Malachi slumped into a chair and stared at his plate. His mother had already served him. The plate held three fried over easy eggs gathered from their own chickens, two sausage patties, and two slices of buttered toast. He took his fork and stabbed the yokes. Nothing better than fresh hen eggs, nothing in the entire whole new frontier world.
Ryan, his father, put down his hand-held. He drank from his coffee cup. “Late for class again?”
“Not yet. I’ll make it.” It was twenty-nine miles to the University from their ranch, but he’d lay the pedal to the metal and make it in time to hear his philosophy professor begin his lecture on Sartre today. Another concession to the old ways. He could have caught a hydrogen heli ride just two miles from the house and been flown to school, but he liked driving. It was fast becoming a dead art.
While Malachi stuffed his mouth with the sumptuous fried eggs, he glanced at his father’s plate. The food had barely been touched. Everything looked as if it had been rearranged on the plate a couple of times, but not molested otherwise.
“Aren’t you hungry?” Malachi’s question belied his concern. His father looked the shade of his former self. Not eating wasn’t going to make things better.
Ryan waved his hand across the plate before pushing it aside. “I’m still full from supper.”
“But Dad…”
His father had not been eating well for weeks. In fact, ever since Malachi had come home. He said he needed to lose weight anyway, what was the difference? Something wasn’t right. Malachi needed to talk to his mom about it. She could ply him in her psychic way and find out faster than a doctor what was wrong.
“I’ll eat later. After I get the hay baled.” His father was watching him eat, a look of undisguised aversion on his face.
Food made him sick. Malachi must definitely speak to his mother.
His father ran a veterinary clinic in a town ten miles distant, but today it was closed and he had fields of hay to mow and bale. Yes, he could have probably had it done for him cheaper, but he liked to mow, the way his son liked to drive. They both enjoyed the control of their own actions.
Malachi would help him stack the hay in the barn when he returned from school. He wished he could stay, especially since his father was going out to work without any food in his stomach, but he couldn’t miss this class. He’d missed twice this semester already and the semester had hardly started. He’d get the boot if he kept it up.
Finishing his own food, hurrying, Malachi rose, still chewing, and grabbed the truck keys from a metal tray on the dining room breakfront. “Gotta run.”
“I’ll see you later, son.”
Malachi rushed from the house, worries about his father’s appetite slipping from mind. He had to hurry. Danielle was meeting him after classes and they were going to the textbook download store together. She needed a workbook for chemistry put into her hand-held. She was a good student, much better than he was. All high marks and her professors loved her inquiring mind.
High school had been easy for him because he cheated, in a way, reading his assignments with supernatural speed, relying on his phenomenal memory to come up with all the right answers. He had been an honor student and that secured him a scholarship—much needed since his parents both worked hard to care for the ranch and pay the Predators for his mother’s blood supply. But though he’d had good marks in high school, these days he couldn’t seem to concentrate. His grades were slipping and he didn’t know if he had the energy to stop the slide. He cared more about cows than calculus, more about hay and hydraulics than about hyperspace.
To hell with it. It was Danielle who kept him in school. If it weren’t for her, he’d stay home and run the ranch for his dad. He wasn’t a real scholar. He performed tricks and aced the exams that way, but he wasn’t sure if he was even all that bright…
Some days he was the dimmest bulb on the string of lights. That’s just how it was.
He hurried into the cab of the truck and slammed the door. He couldn’t wait to see Danielle. She had waited for him for all the time he was missing and imprisoned in Thailand. She had not dated anyone else. She had faith he’d return, though she’d never known where he’d been or why. There were some things he couldn’t tell her yet.
Like how his mother was a vampire. And he was half vampire, too. And a whole cadre, a platoon, a veritable army of vampires lived in the United States, not to mention all over the world. Some killed mercilessly and without remorse. That was the Predators, born to prey and to lord their power over the Naturals like his mother who only wanted to live again as human.
There were also the Cravens, the poor, sickly creatures destined to live behind closed doors and drawn drapes. The mutated disease of porphyria which made them vampire in the first place lingered in their bodies and made them so sick they hadn’t the will or energy to either prey or work and pass as human. They existed. And they were the saddest of all vampires, the ones Malachi stayed away from so their plight would not cause him to be as depressed as they were. No one lingered near the Cravens if he didn’t have to.
The names for these clans were simple in these days—Naturals, Cravens, and Predators. It had not always been so. Mentor, another simple name taken for such a complex and wise old vampire, told him once that in ancient days they were called something else to designate their positions. What had he said? Predators were Beasts. That was it. Beasts, and surely that description fit them best. Called beasts or demons, that is what men said when they spoke of them, when they had the courage to even name the monsters who walked among the living to steal away life in bloody attack.
The Cravens then were called the Afflicted Ones or The Ill. And the Naturals weren’t even known about for centuries for they passed so skillfully as human the world never even knew they existed. It had only been in the last century that the vampires renamed themselves and spoke of one another in this new, simplistic way. Why should they be known by names given to them by humans, they argued? They were superior beings in all ways to these humans who feared them and, in some instances, worshiped them.
He’d tell Danielle these things, and more, in good time. He knew he had to. Because he loved her completely and you couldn’t keep secrets from someone you loved.
The ancient 1952 Ford truck started right up. He put it into reverse and backed from the drive. He drove down the long, bumpy road on their ranch until he reached the highway.
Malachi was brought back to the present moment as he manhandled the old truck. His dad had done a great job restoring it to the original. It was better than most vehicles sold today, if you listened to his dad. It might be seventy years old, but it didn’t depend on gyroscopes and hydrogen and batteries to keep it going. It was getting increasingly difficult to buy gasoline, but his dad kept a hoard of it in a tank on the farm just for the truck.
It was a great piece of antiquity except it had manual steering so that he had to wrench the wheel like crazy to turn it, and there was no automatic transmission, air conditioning, or anything else modern about it. Hell, who needed that stuff, he asked himse
lf. This was a classic. The originals were always better. He and his dad loved to repair and restore old cars and trucks like this, saving them from the crusher and the auto graveyards. They made an extra hundred grand a year selling one old antiquity every year.
The old truck had been lovingly restored down to the gleaming chrome bumper and the spotless cherry red original paint.
He gripped the wheel in preparation for turning onto the highway. He looked both ways though no one ever drove down the road much anymore, and spun out onto the tarmac, back tires burning rubber. If his dad heard that, he’d scold him.
“It’s not a hot rod, son. It’s seventy years old!” That’s what he’d say. Had said. Many times. It might be old, he would reply, but it’s got gumption, Dad, it wants to rock and roll. It’s a racing machine. It’s Mad Max with a bullet.
The sky was overcast and only now did Malachi notice. The wind rushing in his open driver’s window was damp and cool, tasting metallic on his tongue. It was early spring, with new Bahia and coastal hay standing a half-foot tall in the warming pastures. Cattle clustered together in clumps, sentinels behind barbed wire and raw timber fences, lazy and moving slow as slugs. People didn’t eat much beef anymore, but those who did paid a premium. This had kept them in business, thankfully.
A clutch of black crows feasting on something dead in the roadside ditch flew skyward as the old truck neared, roaring down upon them. Malachi shook his head. The damn scavengers were worse than buzzards. They were everywhere in the spring, snapping off budding flower heads and swallowing them whole, swooping down over the pastures to pick at whatever the cattle left behind, invading back yards to steal corn thrown for the chickens or seed left out for the birds migrating home.
He wondered what good use there was for a crow. The same could be said for a vampire, he guessed, and the thought made him laugh a little out loud. Then it occurred to him that useless things were often the peskiest creatures on earth. Crows, vampires, pipe worms living in volcanically warmed vents of darkness at the very bottom of the seas, those little alien creatures everyone kept seeing in their spaceships that never landed. Dark and dread things no one really wanted to admit had a purpose in the scheme of life.
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