And it caused him to turn aside his snarling jaguar face seconds before the killing blow.
Malachi would never know what the monster must have thought in those last few seconds, nor did he care. His arm fell with all the strength of arm and shoulder carried behind it. He would cut a swath through meat and bone, through earth and hell, severing the tie forever. He would bury the blade deep and hack at the beast until the beast was no more recognizable than a plate of raw hamburger. If no one came to stop him, he would raise the machete and bring it down, over and over again, for all eternity.
That is how much he hated the man who had ruined his life. That is how long he was willing to spend ripping the beast into minuscule bits of matter that could never again come together to hurt him.
In other words, Malachi threw away his mind and entered the world of murder with a passion so fierce he chanced losing himself along with the beast.
He didn’t know when he finished or when his arm ceased to move. He didn’t know when the beast died or which blow had taken his life away.
He didn’t know when the cave grew quiet, the enemy defeated by Mentor’s army, and the survivors all stood around him mesmerized by the evidence of his frenzied hacking of Charles Upton’s body.
Someone, Mentor he expected it was, lifted him under the arms and pulled him away from the bloody carcass. Someone led him up the long winding death-filled pathways to the top of the caverns and out into the night.
Malachi knew nothing anymore. He had spent days in some kind of semi-conscious state with Vohra in Egypt and then he had spent days following Upton into the Carlsbad Caverns. Once time and space shifted on the first killing blow to the beast he had pinned to the ground, Malachi couldn’t seem to regain the normal pattern of life again. He had gone mad, but did not know it.
He knew a few things. They came to him on the periphery of his consciousness.
His bed. Not in his home he had made with Danielle on the ranch. His bed from his childhood, in the house of his parents. He was in that bed.
Eli standing over him saying piteously, “Daddy? Daddy, please.”
Once Mentor swam into his sight and passed a hand over his face, but nothing changed. He was not ready to deal with Mentor.
Once he tasted soup—small bits of potato, chicken, onions floating in cream sauce. He obediently opened his mouth and swallowed, but nothing tasted the way it looked, so he again shut off his notice of it.
He just didn’t care.
He had done what he’d had to do and ended the misery that was issuing from Charles Upton, but he just didn’t care now.
One thing he knew.
Danielle was gone.
That meant his life as he knew it was over.
And he didn’t want any life after it.
Chapter 20
Jacques wandered the infernal wasteland that is hell.
He understood he was not there in reality. In reality, whatever that was, he lay on a cot in a poor house on an Italian hillside. An olive tree, stunted and twisted, having never produced one single fruit, stood next to the window opening, the leaves coated with dust. Behind the house a tethered goat whinnied as it flung about its back legs at the rope.
Over in the corner of the room a woman, with a shawl around her shoulders and a white handkerchief over her head tied into a triangle, sat weaving on a small loam. Two little boys, skinny and with big dark haunted eyes, ran in and out of the hut, their bare feet stirring the dusty earthen floor.
Jacques knew this is where he really was.
The monster had taken him from the caves, but he did not know how. He had blacked out and come to in this place, cared for by the widow woman, watched over and pestered by the children.
Yet Jacques couldn’t get out of hell. He went there when his eyes closed. When he slept. Hell was nothing if not inventive. Just when he thought it was the Biblical cauldron of fire and screaming sinners, it shifted and grew cold. The placed changed to a vista with an overcast sky. The inhabitants of hell could be seen streaming on escalators, flying in airships, going in and out of metallic buildings or down into portals placed in the ground. Explosions went off every few seconds, turning the city to flame.
Just as he was able to shrug and accept this version, it shifted again, and became a swamp pelted with rain, raked with lightning, the sinners drowning in water that reached their ears.
He could neither command the cessation of these shifting realities nor predict what they would be. He only knew it was Hell, each and every scenario.
Not that he was afraid. Nothing would or could frighten him. Not even a promised eternity in the shifting, sliding sands of Hell. However, he was weary and tested and would like at least one night of complete peace.
When awake, he was back again, asking for a tin of water from the woman for his parched tongue. Or he was shooing off the boys from where they pinched his toes beneath the rough woolen cover, waking him from his thrashings.
Finally he rose from the cot, not knowing how long he had lain there—one night or a hundred. He felt sore all over, his muscles used too little. It felt as if the musculature didn’t know how to work with his skeleton. He walked unsteadily to the woman in the corner and said in Italian, “Can you make the dreams go away?”
She paused in her weaving, a length of long rusty wool held out in one hand. She raised black eyes to him and said, “I am not a witch.”
“Then what good are you?” Jacques mumbled in French, moving away from her.
He went to the door of the hut and glared down the stony hillside. This was a ridiculous situation. What was he waiting for? Why had he been dropped here, of all godforsaken places? The woman might as well have been a peasant from the sixteen hundreds, for the way she lived. The children were wild and as untamed as the goat they used for milk tethered behind the house.
He could just start out. Take a step out the door and turn his back on the odd little family. He could find something to eat besides the goat cheese and hard bread they fed him. He could walk until he found a city. He could wire his bank for money and have them arrange for his papers to be waiting for him to pick up.
But lack of will stopped him.
He had come to a turning point, this he recognized with certainty. His sojourn with Charles Upton and the Predator vampires had come to one very big bad end. Mentor was a relentless competitor. Unfathomable and unstoppable.
Jacques suspected that was because he had killed the woman. He had been sent to the vampire’s house where the party was underway. He’d been coached in what woman to take aside and murder. He’d been promised protection once it was done.
What he did not know is how precious that woman was to the vampire community led by Mentor and Ross. She was just a little woman, Hispanic he guessed, dark and something of a beauty, but nothing ravishing. With his arm around her chest and her body pulled back into his body, he could feel the young peach hardness of her breasts. He smelled her fear. He heard the small whimpering of her pleas.
And he had sliced open her throat with no more remorse than a man slaughtering a pig for the table.
It brought the wrath down hard. Upton was prepared, but nothing could have prepared Jacques for the calamity that followed on the heels of his crime. They had retreated to the scattered abandoned buildings outside of the city.
Mentor and his Predators came out of that first night like a hundred-mile-per-hour wind. They mowed down the buildings, set fire to the heaping piles of wood, and scampered after Upton’s army that fled before them.
Jacques was whisked away by his two guardians, Predators Upton had ordered to stay with him, and he was taken straight away to the South. They passed through Austin, and San Antonio, going by car because he was human and they had no way to transport him otherwise. They kept driving, while Jacques squirmed with an urgent bladder, and finally they stopped for him alongside the road. He relieved himself, climbed back into the car, and was whisked south and west.
When they’d reach
ed the caverns in New Mexico, Upton was already there waiting. But not for long. In mere hours Mentor came again, his own Predators an avenging band of maniac vampires set on destruction.
Now. Now he found himself here. Whisked again, this time supernaturally by a thing that was not a vampire, into a place he had not picked for himself.
It infuriated him that he felt like a pawn, moved around the table, never capturing the King. He was used to making his own choices, going his own way.
“Did you?”
Jacques turned from the doorway, squinting into the dark interior of the hut. The peasant woman spoke Italian. It had been she who posed the question.
“Did I what?”
“Make your own choice?”
Ah. She was no peasant woman. He knew now he could speak French to her, or English, or any language on earth and she would know it. She was another one of those supernatural creatures who showed themselves to him. She might even be the monster from the darkness of the caverns, in disguise.
“I don’t know what you are saying.”
The woman pulled the kerchief from her head and swung out her shoulder-length dark hair. She had a face beaten by years of poverty and a lifetime of dust. It was seamed with wrinkles though she couldn’t be more than forty. Her hair was dark brown, almost black, and at the temples it was iron gray, the strands crinkled and dry as silver wires.
“I am asking you if you really made your own choices,” she said.
Where were the children? He hadn’t heard anything from them in hours.
“I think I have,” he said carefully. “Why? Do you know something I don’t?”
“I know many things.”
“That’s cryptic, dear woman. What do you know that I don’t?”
“That your choices aren’t always clear. They come of an instant. They change without motive. They bear no relation to you.”
Jacques rubbed the wood of the door frame beneath his hand. It was so old it was worn smooth as a river stone. In an odd way this evidence of the real world soothed him. “I don’t know what you want with me. A little explanation is in order, if you please.”
She put her hands on her hips. “If we saved you, and you know we did, then you why do you think we saved you?”
That royal plural again. We.
He dropped his hand from the door and spread both hands out in from of him, hunching his shoulders at the same time, the universal gesture of I don’t know. Beats me.
“You are either the instrument or the intelligence behind the instrument,” she said. Her talk was like an indecipherable Buddhist koan. He couldn’t make it out. It wouldn’t yield to reason. She sighed, seeing his confusion. “You are either the messenger or you are He who sends the message.”
“Oh for God’s sake!”
He turned on his heel and hurried from the house. He stumbled down the hillside, his feet sliding on loose rocks. His face was a grimace. He felt mocked. He would take no more of this.
The boys came from behind a hillock of land below racing toward him. He slowed only a little, startled. He put out his hands and said, “Whoa, leave me alone. I know you understand me. Go away.”
They reached him and came to his sides, each taking hold of a leg. He could not move, couldn’t take a step without falling on his face. “Let me go, you fools!”
She came up behind him, tapping him on the back. She came around to the front, standing below him on the slope. The wind pushed her hair off her forehead. Her eyes were piercing and her lips were set. A dying sun cast red shadows over the landscape. They might be on the face of Mars, the land was so ruined and sullen and blasted dry. “You cannot run,” she said in an exasperated voice. “I can’t believe you are so blind. I gave you plenty of time to rest and you treat me this way.”
“I’m not blind,” he shouted, trying to wrestle the children from where they were wrapped around his legs like snakes. “I’m not deaf! And I’m not stupid. You’re trying to tell me in your crazy, archaic way that I’m not the instrument. I’m not the messenger. I don’t want to hear what you’re telling me, do you hear? If I want to be the instrument, then I will. If I want to be the messenger, then I will. Do you understand? You must leave me alone!”
She shrugged the way a million peasant women throughout history had shrugged, accepting fate. “All right, have it your way. Joey! Enaldo! Let him go now. There’s no use holding onto him.”
He pushed the boys away and stepped toward her. She moved out of his way and he hurried down the long hillside, avoiding ruts, stepping over rocks, and as the scalding sun set at his back, he reached the lowland. He found a cattle path, took it until it led to a wagon path, took that until it brought him to a paved road where he waved down a driver and got a ride into the nearest city.
It was Rome. The mother of cities, the queen of an old empire.
Once he stepped out of the wire transfer office with a sheaf of money in his hands, he made for the nearest hotel. He glared at the pickpockets and kept them at bay with a glance of warning. In a shop he bought a suitcase and a wallet. In another shop he bought a wardrobe, stashing it into the suitcase rather than carrying it out in shopping bags. He walked with the suitcase in his hand and the wallet in his pocket, until he came to a hotel that did not look too flashy, too touristy.
He hadn’t thought about the woman again.
He refused to think of their conversation.
He was afraid of nothing.
He made his own choices. He did.
It was true what the peasant woman hinted to him: He was no mere messenger.
He was something…something much greater.
He would wake up to that fact all on his own. In time he would know who and what he was. From that self-revelation, he would know what he must do.
He was not afraid.
Chapter 21
“You should be afraid.” Mentor scowled as he said this.
“Of losing heaven?”
“I don’t know about heaven, Malachi. But I do know about the soul and you should be afraid for it.”
Malachi had made up his mind. It would not be changed.
Mentor read him. “You’ve made up your mind.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll accompany you into the red dream of death.”
“So that I won’t become a Predator?” Malachi laughed harshly. “I want to be a Predator. I will be a Predator. I want to be the most powerful of our kind. Don’t bother trying to talk me out of it.”
They sat on the front porch of his parent’s house. Inside his son played in the kitchen while his mother cooked dinner for him and her husband.
Mentor had come at her insistent call, Malachi knew. He had asked her an hour ago to make him full vampire.
He hadn’t come to the decision easily. He’d spent his life embracing the human world and the part of him that he’d inherited from his father. He had never before been tempted to become vampire. But that was before. That was when he had Danielle. He’d had hope.
“Then there’s nothing for me to do here,” Mentor said, rising from the bench. He strolled to the porch steps and paused there, his big shoulders humped in failure. Malachi could almost see the image of Mentor’s old body laid over the one he inhabited now. The wide shoulders, the shaggy white hair of an old man, the slow, ancient tread. It hovered just out of sight of the strong, young body with clipped blond hair and a neck thick as a bull.
“I’m going to find him,” Malachi said into the stretching silence.
“Jacques? He’s not one of us. You’ll never find him. He won’t let himself be traced. There are ten billion people on the planet. You won’t find one.”
“I’ll find him.” His hands had pulled the sharpened blade across Danielle’s throat. He had stolen her life in an instant.
Mentor shook his head. He went down the steps and walked across the lawn, vanishing bit by bit until he was gone.
I want to be able to do that, Malachi thought. I want to vanish, I want
to turn into mist or animal, bird or beast. I want to kill to live. I want to live forever, or at least until I can track down the murderer.
His mother, shocked at his request, had begun weeping right away. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “This isn’t the way.”
Then she said, “Who will take care of Eli? Who will raise him?”
“You’ll live forever,” Malachi said with a sharp tone. “You raise him.”
“Don’t you love your son?”
“I love him more than I love myself. That’s why I’m going to find his mother’s killer. As long as that man lives there’s some chance he’ll foment another uprising on his own. It’s Eli they’ll want next. It’s always the children who are taken.”
“When will this end?” Dell asked, wiping her eyes with her skirts. “You’re not a real vampire. You don’t live with the horror of your own death, walking in dead skin, in a dead body. You can’t do this. I forbid it!”
Malachi blinked, but he was not moved. “Mom, if you don’t make me vampire, I’ll find someone else. I’d rather it was you.” Hell, he was dhampir already and he’d had enough furious strength to kill Upton. But he needed immortality assured in order to finish the job. He wouldn’t chance some pure accident keeping him from his goal. What if a bus ran him down? Or a stray sniper’s bullet caught him in the back of the head? What if he drowned, crashed, burned, suffocated?
He wouldn’t take those kinds of chances. As long as he had a human wife and a human child, he hadn’t wanted the life of the vampire. But things were changed now.
He was changed.
Finally his mother gave in, albeit reluctantly. “Tonight?” he asked, pressing her. “After Dad and Eli go to bed?”
She had nodded perceptively and he had left the house to sit on the porch to wait. He didn’t want dinner. Didn’t want anything but to be vampire and invulnerable to the whimsy of death.
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