“I’m your little pack mule,” he said. When she turned to him, wondering if he were being sassy, she saw his bright smile.
“Hee haw,” she said, swatting him on the back and pushing him along with a load of silver in both his hands.
“Uh…Sereny?”
She had gone on before him, rushing impetuously to check on the serving trays in the kitchen. She turned again, exasperated, her long blue satin skirt swishing about her legs. “What is it?”
“Who’s that?”
Sereny peered down the hallway thinking maybe Jeremy was more trouble than help to her. He was just always so inquisitive. A figure passed through the hall darkness toward them. She didn’t know the man either. He was dark, with midnight black hair, and a beautiful suit that accentuated his broad shoulders and his height. She pushed Jeremy toward the kitchen. “Go check the trays in the kitchen.”
She strode to the stranger and said, “I’m sorry, we haven’t met. I’m Sereny. Are you one of Malachi’s relatives?” He was not vampire. He was not Hispanic, therefore probably not related to Danielle. He could be one of Malachi’s human relatives who had never come down with mutated porphyria. There was rumor Dell had a brother, turned vampire at a young age, though older than Jeremy, who had exiled himself to the South American continent. Although this man was too old to be her brother, he could be another self-exiled relative.
The man extended a hand with long fingers and said, “Hi, I’m Jacques. I am visiting from my home in France, and Malachi’s mother is my cousin.”
Sereny smiled. “Well, that’s lovely. I hope you’re making yourself at home. Would you like a glass of punch? Or maybe you’d prefer something stronger?” Ross kept a bar secreted away just in case he had mortal visitors who required liquor.
She took him to the living room and poured him a drink. He had asked for whiskey and ice, no water, please. His voice was mellifluous, the accent a sweet pleasure to the ear. He took the crystal highball glass, raising it slightly toward her in thanks. By the time he had the glass to his lips, her mind spat out an alarm signal. She’d spied something secretive hiding behind his gaze, down in the depths of the terribly dark eyes.
“I didn’t know Dell had a cousin in France.” It was a statement, but in her mind it was a question.
“Ah. There are a few of us there, and some in Italy too. Are you originally from Italy? Your accent…”
The memory of Italy flooded over her and she damped down the alarm. Italy, her homeland with the golden light on the olive orchards, the roughened hills stacked against an azure sky. For the next few minutes she spoke with Jacques about Europe and the changes taking place there. They discussed Italy with familiarity of the landmarks until Sereny began to feel homesick.
It was some time before Sereny, charmed now and spellbound, could break away to attend to her duties as hostess. “I’ll be back,” she said. “Please, make yourself comfortable.”
~*~
Malachi found he was enjoying himself immensely. Though he hadn’t slept well and he’d had some bad feelings just before leaving home, he discovered his spirits rose once at Ross’s house. Sereny had outdone herself. The whole house looked celebratory in every sense. Candles, silver, decorations that swooped and dripped and twinkled. Danielle looked up at him, her eyes smiling with joy. It was so nice to be with people they liked for their anniversary. It seemed it had been five years of tremendous change and adjustment, just as every newly married couple experiences. The birth of Eli. The making of a home. Getting to know one another’s moods and needs. But now Malachi knew they would slide into years of deep love and understanding, so the five-year mark was really like a portal into a blissful future.
“It’s so beautiful,” Danielle said, fingering a napkin with silver bells embossed on it.
“It’s really nice,” Malachi said. “Sereny’s done a great job.”
On the patio he and Danielle split up, talking to groups of people who all congratulated them and gave them warm hugs and handshakes. Malachi found a cushioned chair in the shade near the pool and sat talking with relatives and friends as they drifted past or came over to sit with him. He was handed a glass of champagne and sipped at it, relishing the cool bubbly bite of it on his tongue.
“You look like a happily married man today,” Malachi’s mother said as she slipped into a chair near him.
Malachi raised his eyebrows. “Don’t I look that way every day?”
She smiled. “You know, I haven’t noticed. But today you both look radiant. Lavender is Danielle’s color. She looks like a fairy princess, with her dark hair and eyes, and all that light color floating around her.”
Malachi thought so too. He was proud of his wife, and, he realized, desperately in love with her. He should tell her more often. And today he would. He’d tell her every time they came together at the party. He’s whisper into her ear, “I love you.” He’d say it a dozen times and watch her eyes dance and her lips curve into a smile. Tonight when they got home and were alone, he’d show her how much he loved her. Five years or fifty, he didn’t think he’d feel any different.
When it got too warm in the shade, Malachi found his father and began wheeling him around the pool so he could speak with some of the guests. Well, not speak, but his eyes said everything and people were very kind to him.
Once Malachi saw Danielle going into the house, her lavender dress floating like a cloud behind her. He almost followed, so he could whisper in her ear about his love, but two of his distant cousins who had come from Waxahatchie, Texas, waylaid him before he got to the open French doors leading inside.
“Eli’s a pistol,” Brett said, a tall, slim boy who looked almost skinny in tight-fitting jeans and cowboy boots.
“Where is Eli?” Malachi asked, glancing around.
“Over there.”
Malachi followed his cousin’s pointing finger and saw his son playing with a beach ball balloon, throwing it into a group of children.
Malachi laughed. “He was really looking forward to this party. Living out on the ranch he doesn’t have any playmates.”
“Then it’s time for a brother or sister, hey?” Brett asked.
Malachi had thought the same thing. He just hadn’t brought it up to Danielle yet. “Maybe,” he said.
The cousins drew him into a group where Mentor was regaling a group with historical facts that couldn’t be found in any history book. Malachi lounged back against the brick of the house, glad he was in shade, and listened to fascinating tales of London during the eighteenth century.
His stomach rumbled once and someone came by with a tray of tiny vegetables. Before the food got away, Malachi had a paper plate full of carrots, cucumbers, radishes, broccoli sprouts, and baby tomatoes.
He munched and laughed and wondered where Danielle was. She was missing all the fun.
~*~
A couple of hours passed before Sereny saw Jacques again. There were so many guests arriving late, spilling from the house onto the lawns. She never even had the chance to mention Jacques to Malachi or to Dell. When she tracked the dark stranger down her mouth dropped open and a hiss fell from her tongue.
He was in the library where Ross handled his business matters. It was one of the quiet rooms none of the guests wandered into. She’d found the door partially open and had looked inside. Jacques held a knife at Danielle’s throat. Danielle!
He smiled evilly over the young woman’s shoulders. “This is Malachi’s wife, is it not?”
Sereny felt weak-kneed. She didn’t know whether to fly at the handsome stranger or flee into the house calling for Ross. “What are you doing?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“I want what Charles Upton wants. And what I am doing is killing her.” He pressed the sharp edge of the blade against her throat. The look in Danielle’s eyes was one of stupefied terror. A tiny line of spittle dripped from her lower lip to her chin. She trembled in the Frenchman’s clutch like a rabbit in a wire trap.
“Let
her go.” Sereny stepped forward.
“I can’t do that,” Jacques said. “It’s what I’ve been told to do today.”
“Upton sent you because we wouldn’t suspect,” Sereny whispered.
Jacques’ eyes sparkled with mischief. “Being merely human, I couldn’t hope to take the life of a vampire such as yourself. My mission was to take Malachi’s child or take this one. The child was around too many others, while this lady came down the hallway alone. She is as human and frail as I. It is she who I will take.”
And then he cut her throat so swiftly Sereny hardly saw it happen between one blink of the eye and another. He flung her to the floor where her blood rushed onto the Oriental carpet. Danielle clutched at her throat with both hands before suddenly those hands fell away and Danielle stared blindly into death. Now Jacques held his hands up, one holding the bloody knife.
“Well, my Italian friend, it is done.” He stared Sereny down. “Don’t you want to retaliate?”
A keening escaped Sereny and she leaped forward. She hadn’t noticed they were not alone in the library. Two Predators she did not recognize were at the stranger’s side immediately, grasping Sereny and throwing her across the room and against the door.
Sereny squalled in rage and ripped the door open, running down the hallway to the center of the house. She was screaming for Ross, for Malachi, for Mentor, screaming and screaming.
“Help! They’ve killed Danielle! Ross, help, help!”
Chapter 15
Malachi sat among the ruins of the party in Ross’s living room, his dead wife in his arms. They couldn’t pry her from him.
Eli had been taken away by his aged Great-Great Aunt Celia and her daughter, Caroline. Around Malachi hovered his friends, grieving with him. His mother. His wheelchair bound father. Ross and Sereny and Jeremy. Mentor and Dolan and Bette.
When they’re come at Sereny’s hysterical beckoning, the library was empty save for the corpse. The killer had fled with the help of his Predator friends.
Ross rushed from the front of the house and tried to track them, but they’d vanished on thin air and he couldn’t pick up even a trace.
Dell, her face streaked with blood tears, stooped next to her son and lay her hands on his where he grasped his wife to him. Malachi had not wept. He sat immobile and stone-like.
“Son, let us take her.”
Malachi seemed not to hear.
“Please,” Dell said softly. “You have to let her go.”
Malachi slowly lifted his gaze from his wife’s dead pale face to his mother. “She can’t go. It’s too early. We’re too young. What about Eli? Who will be his mother?”
He paused, brought his gaze back to Danielle, wincing at the red wound in her neck. “Who will be my wife?”
Dell glanced up pleadingly to Mentor.
Sereny had turned away, her hands over her face. Jeremy stood clutching her about the legs, his head buried in the blue satin of her skirt.
Mentor stepped forward, touching Malachi on the shoulder. “Leave the room,” he said to the others. “Let us be alone.”
When the room emptied, the mourners silently filing out one by one, Mentor gave his entire attention to the young grief stricken, mindless dhampir. “Malachi?”
The room seemed too small for the swollen anguish that had invaded it. Mentor knew normal methods were useless. The supernatural was called for.
He gathered himself into a focus point of pure thought before next touching Malachi.
When he lay his hand on him again, he was no more than a soft voice in the other’s brain. Let her go. Let her go now, boy. You have a reason to live. Your son will need you more than ever.
Life is mortal and so often brief. Someone living needs you to return to yourself. For his sake, for Elijah, I ask you to let her go.
Malachi closed his eyes, as if drifting into sleep. His tight hold on his wife’s body relaxed. He leaned back into the chair. Danielle lay across his legs, her head resting in the crook of his right arm.
Mentor leaned over and took her from him. He lifted her away and left the room. He handed the body to Dolan, who waited faithfully just outside the closed door of the library. With swift communication telepathically, he instructed Dolan to take the poor woman to one of their vampire laboratories where she’d receive a death certificate, where she could be embalmed and sewn together and made immaculate for burial. Her mortal family would expect a service, a burial, and a tombstone. They would be told she expired in an accident. On the way to work, perhaps. Just a tragic accident, that’s all.
Tell everyone else I’ve taken Malachi away for a while, but we’ll return. Tell them not to worry. Tell Ross to prepare for invasion.
When will you be back to lead us, Dolan wanted to know, holding the dead woman gently in his arms. His face was seamed with sorrow.
Soon enough.
Go prepare.
He returned to the library then and easily lifted the dozing Malachi into his arms, turning with him, twisting their molecules, spinning their matter into another dimension.
Chapter 16
Malachi woke a world away from where he fell asleep. He sat up carefully, as if he might break if he moved too quickly. He saw an olive-skinned man, an Egyptian or Arab of some nationality, sitting beside a reflective pool in a courtyard filled with banana trees and vines covered with purple passion flowers. Colored tiles paved the whole courtyard, creating a mosaic, but Malachi could not make out the design. Birds taking flight? Desert traders with camels?
He did not know where he was. Hardly knew who he was.
Malachi, son of Dell. That is all he could recall. There was no past attached to him, therefore the future was open.
“Hello,” the Egyptian said, rising from his cross-legged seat on a gold pillow near the pool. He wore a white toga bordered with a gold stripe at shoulder and hem. The gown had long sleeves and the hands that fell from those sleeves were so beautiful they attracted Malachi’s sole attention.
“Where am I?”
“In a place where men start over again.”
Malachi cocked his head to the left, puzzled. He drew his gaze away from the stranger’s hands and looked into the twin pools of his eyes. “And who are you?”
“Vohra.”
“Predator?”
“At one time. In some dim past.”
“So you’ve moved beyond Predator, like Mentor?”
“Oh yes.”
Startled, Malachi said, “I know Mentor! Where is he? And my mother, Dell. Where is she?”
Vohra had reached him and now floated down into his cross-legged sitting posture in front of him, folding like a lotus blossom. Malachi could not see the pool now unless he leaned to one side to look past the man. Even the light from the sun was blotted out.
“Mentor is in Dallas, remember? And your mother, she’s with your father on the ranch south of Dallas. Remember?”
It was as if Vohra was giving him a command. Remember.
Malachi remembered. But with remembering Dallas and the ranch and his parents, he remembered his wife Danielle, and his child, Elijah.
Danielle! Covered with blood, her throat open and gaping, her eyes rolled back in her head, her beautiful lilac summer dress stained the deep purple of her blood.
He fell forward, covering his face in his hands, trembling with despair.
“She’s dead. Danielle’s dead,” he wailed.
“Not forever, Malachi. You believe that, don’t you? You who have lived your entire life as half vampire, lived with the supernatural all around you, how could you believe she is dead forever and gone from you?”
Malachi’s chest heaved with emotion and the need to restrain it. If he let it out, he thought he would burst into a million pieces and fly into the sun.
Vohra sat patiently, waiting for him.
Malachi’s hands fell from his face and he lifted cold eyes to the great vampire. “I want to go back. I have to go back. Where is Danielle, what have they done with he
r?”
“She has been interred, Malachi.” Vohra said this as gently as possible, but the words still struck Malachi like an anvil against the head. He rocked on his buttocks and almost fell over.
“Interred? They buried her? Without me? Oh God. Oh God, oh God.”
Vohra lifted him to his feet and guided him indoors where he was put on a bed and covered with clean white cotton sheets. A hand was passed over his face and he dropped into sleep again, crying so hard that even as he drew breath to let out his wail, the sound ended with a sigh.
Chapter 17
Jacques toiled across the desert through the night, carrying his burden. The boy slept sometimes and sometimes he woke, weeping and thrashing about. It was not so hard to hold him. He was built well for a child, but he was also wearied from all the days of his being held hostage.
The moon rose slowly overhead, outlining cactus and hillocks of land on the desert. Sometimes Jacques gave the boy to one of the vampires to carry, but he felt safer when he had him. If Mentor or the boy’s father appeared, he would have something to barter. He trusted Upton to protect him, but who knew was the stronger—Mentor or Upton? Jacques was taking no chances.
The boy woke, his lolling head straightening and his face turning to the man who carried him.
“I don’t like you,” the kid said. He hadn’t said it in any kind of mean voice. He said it as if it was a truth anyone could see.
“That’s fine. I don’t need you to like me,” Jacques said.
“My daddy is going to hurt you for taking me away.”
“Oh, I doubt that.” Actually he didn’t, but he wasn’t going to let the kid know his fears.
“My daddy is strong. My daddy is fast.”
Jacques had been told Malachi was dhampir, making him half vampire, half human. No doubt he was strong and fast.
Jacques slogged on through the night.
Eli said, “You hurt my mommy.”
Jacques didn’t know how much the boy knew. Maybe they’d told him his mother was sick or hurt. That’s what weak people did—lie to kids. But it wouldn’t be he who told this kid the truth. He had enough trouble carrying him as it was. He was beginning to feel like a sack of iron pellets.
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