“Something’s wrong with your eyes,” the boy said then.
“Nothing wrong with my eyes,” Jacques said, exasperated.
“Something inside them.”
Jacques sighed. “There’s nothing inside my eyes.”
“That’s what’s wrong with them.”
Jacques almost made a misstep and fell when the boy said that. It was a keen observation for one so young. Or maybe the young were the ones most likely to notice.
Jacques thought to play a game to pass the time, to get his mind off his aching arms and feet.
“That’s right, Eli. There’s nothing inside my eyes. I’m like the Devil.”
“Almost,” Eli said.
“You ever see the Devil?”
“Nuh-uh.”
“And you don’t want to, I’ll bet. What do you think your grandmother is? Isn’t she like the Devil? Did you know she’s a vampire and she drinks blood?”
“Does not. Not my grandma.”
“She does, too. She can’t get old and she can’t die like me or you. You have to cut off her head or burn her up.”
Eli began thrashing around trying to get free.
“Okay, okay, take it easy.” Jacques hadn’t meant to go that far. He wanted no trouble.
“Vampires can be like angels too,” he said, hoping to calm the kid. “I saw an angel once.”
Eli calmed, staring into his face again. “An angel? Did it have wings?”
“Oh yes, absolutely it had wings. It wasn’t a boy or a girl. It was tall as the ceiling and very strong. And very stern.”
“Stern?”
Jacques realized the boy didn’t understand the word. “Tough,” he said.
“Angels come from heaven.”
“Well, wherever they come from they can be beaten up.”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Sure. I beat that one up that came to me. He wanted to make me feel guilty and I didn’t like that, so I hit him and pushed him.”
“An angel wouldn’t let you do that.”
Jacques gave up. He couldn’t even tell this kid a story without having to argue all the time. “Okay, maybe you can’t wrestle an angel.”
The boy grunted as if satisfied he was right. His head lay back in the crook of Jacques’s arm and his eyes closed. He had to be exhausted. He was asleep again within seconds.
Jacques traipsed on across the night landscape of hell and thought about angels. And where they came from.
~*~
Malachi did not know this time how long he slept either. He woke with a female vampire at his bedside, bathing his face with a cool cloth. She had olive skin and black hair that was pulled back and turned into a bun at the back of her neck. Mercifully she did not smile at him.
“Where am I?” he asked.
She took away the cloth and left the room, her long skirts whispering along the tiled floor. In moments Vohra appeared, still dressed in a toga of white, with gold stripes at shoulder and hem.
Vohra came to his side and said, “Shall we begin again?”
Malachi knew it all then. The anniversary party at Ross’s house. His whole family gathered to celebrate. Eli running around like a little tyke on speed the way he barreled across the lawn to hug yet one more aunt or uncle or cousin in their clan.
Danielle in her lilac dress, sweeping past him, the flowers in her hair trembling at her passing. She paused at his side, smelling of sunshine and beauty. She whispered, “You look nice today.”
She never came back. He next heard Sereny screaming for Ross and the whole pack of vampires at the party coming together like a dark storm, rushing into the house, a block of dark creatures amassing to rescue someone—or to kill and maim and drink blood.
Except there was no killing to be done. No rescue. The deed was done and it was done and it was done and over.
Malachi held his little wife in his arms, his dead wife in his arms, and they would never celebrate an anniversary again.
“Come with me, if you feel like it. I think it’s time you go home.” Vohra interrupted his remembering with this.
Malachi knew the truth of the words. Now that he’d accepted his loss, there was nothing to do, but go home. He had accepted it, hadn’t he? He must.
He needed to return home where the rooms would echo with her voice. The bed would smell of her scent. Her clothes would hang in the closet and her keys to the car would lie on the bureau chest. Only then might he accept anything at all.
“Why was I brought here to you? Couldn’t Mentor have…” He couldn’t finish his thought. Couldn’t Mentor have what? Saved his mind from chaos? Watched over him in the greatest grief of his life?
“Mentor,” Vohra said, “has been rather busy. There has been another uprising.”
Mentor had tried to revenge Danielle’s death, of course. Mentor had gone out as a warrior to prevent an unraveling of the vampire nations.
Upton had done all this. No matter who actually killed his wife, it was Upton whose hands were bloody.
“Send me to him.” Malachi stood ready to depart for his home, his own continent, his destiny. He knew he must be in a Middle Eastern nation, perhaps Egypt.
“How long have I been here?”
“Only a week,” Vohra said, turning to him and taking him by both arms. “And now I will send you back.”
A week! Danielle had been buried without him. A war had been fought while he slept. His son…his son…
“Eli needs you.” Vohra had read his mind and answered his fear.
“Needs me! Is he…? What…?”
“I bid you good-bye until we meet again,” Vohra said in his frankly foreign, ancient way of speaking.
Malachi heard the word good-bye echo and echo, as if down a long metal corridor, as he vaporized and vanished from the cool tile floors of the Egyptian’s home, his fearful thoughts flying before him.
Chapter 18
Malachi had never traveled this way before, not that he remembered. Perhaps his mother had taken him from the pit in Thailand this way, back to their ranch, but he had no recall of it. He had seen his mother transform and Mentor, and a few others, but never had he done it. He knew instinctively he could not have done it, never in his lifetime. He was mortal and without the ability to disintegrate and then come together again as a man. It must have been Vohra who did it to him, who caused him to sparkle into the atmosphere like a veil of mist and wink out altogether.
He felt his whole self as if made of zillions of atoms, bumping one off the other, coming together in a surge of electrical activity. It was thought of his mortal self that saved him from scattering far out into the lonely universe.
Thought of Eli.
Thought of saving his son from whatever horrible fate was upon him.
He wobbled on his feet and threw out his arms to catch hold of something. It was like stepping off a ride at the county fair, a ride that swung you up and over and down and out, leaving you breathless and weightless.
He failed to grasp hold to anything, but his feet steadied on earth and the vault of a night sky overhead slowed in motion until it was a moonless, still dome.
He drew in his breath, happy to be alive. His happiness evaporated the moment he could make out his surroundings.
He stood on a desert floor, beneath that moonless, star-studded sky, and in front of him a horde of Predator vampires scurried like lumpy shadows as if on urgent missions.
He looked around, but Vohra had vanished.
He saw Mentor and stumbled toward him. He took him by the shoulder and turned him around saying, “Where is he? Where’s Eli?”
The body Mentor possessed now was not as tall as Malachi, but it was strong in chest and the face was forbiddingly stern. The gray asphalt eyes rested on Malachi for just a moment, measuring him, before Mentor said from tight lips, “They have him hostage. In the caves. Down there.”
Where he pointed Malachi saw the opening into the side of a mountain, a darker mouth than the night around it. Before it
vampires grouped, an army ready for attack. Migrations of bats, disturbed by the influx of greater beings than themselves, flew from the cave’s mouth, swarming into the sky.
“We’ve beat them back, Malachi. We drove them out of the city and they fled across the south until they reached here. Carlsbad. We’re in New Mexico. They couldn’t find a refuge until they reached here. These caverns go very deep, nearly four miles. They’re trapped.”
Malachi made a move to rush toward the entrance, but Mentor halted him. “I want to tell you something. Yes, Upton did this. Upton orchestrated the whole thing, just as he did before. But it was a mortal who killed your wife. And the same mortal took your son from us. He slipped in while your parents slept, Dell exhausted with worry about you. She never felt an alarm because the man isn’t vampire.”
Malachi stared at him, his own face growing flinty. “I’ll get him. Whoever he is, I’ll get him.”
“His name is Jacques. The man you dreamed about.”
Malachi flinched a little, remembering clearly the Frenchman toadying to Upton, the Frenchman who could see him even in spirit, the Frenchman who was as malicious as the devil himself. The memories skipped away. Malachi tore across the desert floor toward the cave entrance. It was time to tango. He had only half a heart left. The woman he loved was gone, taking the dead half heart with her into the grave. The other half belonged to Eli. If he failed to save his son, he might as well lift up his neck to the first enemy Predator who approached and let himself be drained dry of blood.
He might as well be dead if this didn’t go well. He had, by Christ, suffered too much. All his life had been invaded and manipulated and ruined by Charles Upton, the mad Charles Upton. Upton, the mistake. The vampire who never should have been.
In childhood Upton and Balthazar had stalked his dreams, threatening him. In youth Upton had caught him on the streets of Dallas and whisked him away to Thailand where he remained his prisoner for eighteen months, tortured beyond anything imaginable.
And now Upton had murdered his wife and stolen his child.
It would end here. It would definitely end here.
~*~
Jacques huddled in the cold damp dark, listening to the trickle of water somewhere. The air smelled of wet clay, a sharp, unusual scent that made his eyes want to pop from their orbits. He imagined this is what being dead and in a grave might smell like. Earth all around you. Earth weighing heavy overhead. Earth to the left and the right and below you.
Far above him Upton and the remainder of his army rallied for one last fight to the death. With them they had the little boy, Eli, child of the mother he, Jacques, had killed.
Something changed in the atmosphere and Jacques knew he was not alone. The monster that came on padded feet in the darkness did not show himself. Jacques only knew he was there by his stench and the prickling on his skin. “What do you want?”
Jacques voice was raspy from the dampness. He felt achy and hot, probably coming down with some malady like pneumonia. They had been down here for hours now.
He had not wanted to come down into this cavern. He tried to make an escape when Upton wasn’t looking, but there was no time when Upton wasn’t looking. He had been pushed, shoved, and hustled straight down the narrow walkways, hugging the cold walls for he could not see in the dark the way the vampires could. It seemed they walked for miles into the belly of the earth. The deeper they went, the colder it became, until goose bumps were raised on his skin. He suffered from the darkness, stumbling, until one of the vampires thrust a flashlight into his hand. He fumbled until he got it on and could spearhead the cone of yellow light before him.
“What do you want with me?” Jacques repeated in his raspy, aching voice. He fingered the switch on the flashlight, debating whether he really wanted to see the monster in the dark or not. He decided not.
“I’m really sick of this, you know?” He’d lost all patience. “If you can’t help me out of this situation, there’s no point in showing up.”
He had never spoken so ruthlessly to the supernaturals who appeared to him. He held his breath for the reply. If he had crossed some line or other, if he’d stepped beyond his authority, he’d know soon enough.
The creature was simply a clot of deeper darkness gathered into a hunched shadow against the rough clay wall. It said to him, “Come with us and you’ll live.”
“Us?” Jacques looked around for more clots in the darkness. He wanted very much to turn on the flashlight, but his hand was frozen around it.
The thought occurred to Jacques, We are legion.
God almighty, he was steeped in religious bullshit, inundated as a youth with Catholicism and a romantic fervor of the Christ, the Savior. He had no other names for the things which came to him other than angel, demon, and devil. Yet at this moment, with the clotted darkness calling out to him and Predator vampires above him in the shafts screaming in furious combat, there was nothing left for him to do but make do with the facts as he knew them.
“Then take me,” Jacques said, stepping forward, the fever making him faint so that he stumbled. “Be you devil or demon or angel, take me. I don’t care.”
Chapter 19
Malachi rushed down the steep inclines leading into the caverns ahead of the Predators at his back. Mentor called to him to wait, but he wouldn’t wait.
He met the first enemy head on, butting into him, knocking him flat, side-arming him away. He met the next enemy with the club of his arm, feeling invulnerable, feeling no pain.
Mentor’s vampires caught up with him and joined the melee. The dark bloomed with raised cries, loud sounds of scuffle, and screams that wailed and spiraled up the shafts. Blood flew in the darkness, spattering against clay walls that for centuries had never felt the touch of a man’s blood. Heads rolled, torsos flopped about, and everywhere death blows were dealt without cease.
They fought to the death, enemy and friend of Malachi, vampires falling on both sides, until Malachi worked his way to the man he loathed most in all the world.
He was thrust forward, vampires fighting at his back, and there stood Charles Upton, his yellow fangs lowered in a jaguar jaw.
Malachi wasn’t going to be swayed by the face of a beast. He had seen the jaguar head when imprisoned in Thailand. Usually when he was on the precipice of despair and tried beyond his limits. Upton would lean over the pit showing his black jaguar face with the impossible many rows of teeth.
Nothing was going to stop Malachi this time. If he died for it, he was going to save his son and kill the monster who took him. The very thought of little Eli held in a dank prison in some foreign country spurred Malachi into deeper rage.
He yelled at Upton, “Where is he?”
Upton settled his slitted amber eyes on Malachi. He did not have to reveal Eli’s whereabouts. Malachi heard his child’s voice cry out for him. He turned, saw him down the passageway, the dark lit by a few security lamps embedded in the tourist caverns’ walls. He saw Mentor sweep past and engage with two Predators who had been guarding the boy.
He will get Elijah, Malachi thought. He will keep him safe for me. If Mentor couldn’t do it, no one could.
“I took his mother away,” Upton said, the impossible voice coming from the impossible head of an animal.
Malachi turned his gaze back to the monster. Reason fled and fury took its place. All he could think was Danielle. This beast had killed her. Not by his own hand, but he might as well have wielded the knife himself. Were it not for him and his madness, none of this would have happened. Malachi’s whole life had been blighted by Upton’s plague of terror.
The darkness leaping with shadows cast by the few security lights seemed to squeeze down into an umbra of blackness that was a jaguar. The sick yellow eyes were twin moons on a field of devastation. Nothing existed in the universe except the beast. He was both the beginning and the ending, the alpha and omega. He was the stalker of dreams, the bringer of chaos, the host of pain and separation.
He had kil
led Danielle merely because she was human and helpless and belonged to Malachi.
“God will never forgive you,” Malachi roared. He moved in a blur, aiming himself like a bullet. He smacked straight into the man with the beastly head, wrapping his arms around the great vampire. He drove him back until they hit the cavern wall. He must kill this thing, this abhorrent monstrosity. He must avenge Danielle. He must retaliate for all the months kept down in a pit, surrounded with mud and water squirming with worms.
His arm came up and across Upton’s throat, bending it back until he heard bones snapping like dry twigs. Upton had claws driven deep into Malachi’s back, but now they loosened. It felt like shards of glass withdrawn from muscle, but Malachi ignored the pain.
He dropped Upton to the damp path and fell on him, his knees on his chest. He wiped out the machete carried in a loop of leather at his waist. He saw the amber eyes widen and glow.
Upton, momentarily at a disadvantage, mending bones Malachi had broken in the vampire body. Now was the time to finish it.
Malachi breathed like an engine of destruction. He had become deaf to the war raging all around him in the dark caves. All he heard was the mighty beating of his wild heart and the keening of his engine lungs.
He raised the machete, knowing all this took place in only moments, but time had been sucked out of the world, along with sound. He and Upton acted within a time continuum and on a plane of space that was reserved for the battle of great enemies. Reality narrowed to a few feet on either side of the vampire lying on his back and the young enraged man astride him, raising a machete to end his life for good.
Upton twisted his neck back and forth as the bones mended under his willpower. He saw the machete rise like a sword of doom above him and his mouth opened in a roar. He was every creature and every human who had been below the ax. He was all men and women who had put their heads into the stock and waited for the blade of the guillotine. He was every being who had teetered on the edge of oblivion.
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