Now Mentor had come and gone, knowing he wasn’t going to stop it.
They weren’t going to threaten or cajole him out of it. He’d suffered enough, more than enough. If that was human life, then he was well shed of it. He couldn’t suffer that much if he had the powers to protect himself. And if he did not ever… Ever. Ever. Love again.
Chapter 22
Sereny could not look Ross in the eyes. “We’ll go,” she said. She had her hand on Jeremy’s shoulder. They had been called into the living room and asked to sit down, but Sereny didn’t sit. She knew what was coming. No point in getting comfortable.
“I’m sorry,” Ross said. “I just can’t keep him.”
Jeremy sneaked a dark look at Ross. Ross pointed at him until he hung his head and looked at his feet.
“I don’t want you to go,” Ross said.
Sereny blinked back the watering in her eyes. “I know. But I can’t send him out on his own. I have to go with him.”
“If he was only…” Ross stopped abruptly. He shook his head. They both knew it was useless. The boy couldn’t be controlled.
Sereny stepped forward and hugged Ross to her. “I was happy here,” she whispered. “I’ll remember you.”
He took her face in his hands and looked into her eyes. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever cared for. If you can find a way one day, come back to me.”
She knew what he meant. If Jeremy died. Or if she could ever abandon him.
Ross pressed a block of money into her hand. He kissed her then turned his back and left the room. Sereny sighed. She reached for Jeremy’s hand. “Come on, let’s go.”
“I’m sorry, Sereny,” the boy said in a small voice.
“Yes, I know. I know.”
It was full dark, a good time to leave.
“Where will we go?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. But she dreamed of home, of Italy. “Maybe we’ll go to Rome.”
“Italy?”
She smiled, thinking of Rome, Georgia. “Yes, Italy.”
“Allll right!”
She gathered the boy into her arms, lifting him easily from the floor. He was small for his age and he would never grow an inch. He was stuck in the child’s body until the body gave out.
She walked out the front door of what had been her home for a long while. She had turned her back on a vampire she truly loved. She did not see herself as a martyr, but she must make this sacrifice. Children were not responsible. Jeremy hadn’t asked to become vampire. He was too young to learn control.
He was her charge. Her child. And she would keep him safe.
Chapter 23
Europe
2027
Two years had passed since the vampire uprising and the weeks spent on the Italian hillside. Jacques had not left Rome; rather, he took to the city like a native. He loved the cobbled old alleyways where the sandals of Roman soldiers had tread. He loved the deteriorating ruins, the hawkers of goods, the plethora of small, intimate cafes so dim one couldn’t see the neighbor at the next table. It was an ancient city, decadent, rooted in history by violence and blood. Yet it was urbane, open, and linked to the global village of the world, growing stronger as an economic power.
Jacques bought a small, luxurious apartment near the center of the bustling city. He spent time at the museums and libraries and universities. He soaked in the culture, honing his Italian as he interacted with the people.
Early on he was sought for and found. One by one, two by two, the remaining members of Upton’s Predator army searched him out. Each of them wanted to know if he would lead them. They had spent long years as rogues before joining with Upton. They didn’t want that life anymore. Couldn’t he help them?
And did he know Malachi was looking for him? They would be happy to guard him. He should leave Rome and hide out in some out of the way place, some village Malachi might never search.
“I’m not going to run from Malachi,” Jacques said, unworried.
“He’s Predator now,” they protested. “He’s a fierce vampire. Everyone’s afraid of him.”
So Malachi was no longer half human. Jacques understood why. He needed greater powers to track down the enemy. So let him. This fatalistic world view was liberating—as indeed it always had been. Who cared what happened when Malachi caught him?
He did not care.
He sent Upton’s scraggly vampires away, proclaiming he could be of no use to them, but they always came back. They were like lost souls looking for a god. He was their god now. Over and over he sent them away. They simply came back, or hung around his abode scratching at the door, startling him on the street, hissing at him from the shadows.
Finally, remembering what the little demon had predicted years before, Jacques gave in and began to board the vampires in the same building where he had the apartment. Finally, every human had been displaced, a Predator taking over each and every residence. The whole house was full of them.
Jacques made some of the vampires his close friends. There was Michael and John, the two Predators who had taken him on the trip to the caverns. They were a couple, reveling in their lifelong love. “We knew one another before we died, before we changed,” Matt said.
It was impossible to distinguish a heterosexual vampire from a homosexual one. They were outwardly two men who spent time together, old pals. Their sexual preference did not bother Jacques in the least. It was their other nature—that of vampire—that interested him most.
Another vampire housed in the building was Hasid, an Arabic vampire, formerly of Jordan. He became Jacques confidant. Hasid sometimes spoke in a singsong voice about a vampire older than Mentor.
“Where does this ancient creature live?” Jacques asked, curiosity piqued.
“In Egypt, I believe. Some say he knows our whole history. That he was living when men were coming upright onto their feet on the vast plains.”
“They came to their feet in order to run from vampires, no doubt,” Jacques said, laughing. But the idea of an incredibly old vampire who had seen the beginning of mankind intrigued Jacques. What secrets he would possess!
“One day would you take me to him?” Jacques asked.
Hasid nodded eagerly. “If I can find him,” he said, “surely I will take you.”
“I thought he was in Egypt.”
“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, no. He’s like many of us—elusive. If he does not wish to be found, he won’t.”
Hasid had been a Muslim, but these days he did not practice any religion. The idea that Mohammed had spoken with the angel Gabriel and hadn’t been told of a disease that made men die and live again made Hasid angry. Why hadn’t the Prophet been told?
“I don’t think Jesus was told either,” Jacques remarked. “Nor Buddha.”
Hasid pressed both his hands alongside his face and let his fangs lower. “I cannot stand to think it,” he said. “We must not talk about these things.”
Instead, they talked about the wars in the Middle East and how these wars had been going on for generations. Before he’d sickened and become vampire, Hasid had been a guerrilla fighter. The border between Jordan and Israel had changed during war, moving back and forth with incursions into both countries, and still they fought.
All the nuclear weapons had been made obsolete by satellite controls in the West that rendered the weapons useless. Ground conventional wars raged instead between Iraq and the United States, between Jordan and Palestine and Israel, between Pakistan and India, between Syria and Russia.
Even without nukes, blood found a way to be spilled. Hasid said, “We vampires won’t have to stage war on man. He does the job well enough himself.”
Jacques rarely thought about the difference between instrument and that which wielded it, messenger and he who sent the message. No further enlightenment had come to him on the matter. Once he asked Hasid, “Who do you think I am? Why do you think you came to me?”
Hasid acquired a secretive look. “I do not know.”
&nbs
p; “Who I am? Or why you came?”
“Who you are? You are a leader. That is all I know. And that is why I came to you.”
Jacques was reminded of those long minutes when he was crouched in the darkness of the New Mexico cavern, the vampire battle raging above him. He hadn’t led very well then, had he?
“Where shall I lead you, Hasid?”
“Into paradise.” The Arab answered without hesitation.
“Paradise,” Jacques mused. He thought it useless to try to disabuse these lost vampires from their wild beliefs. They had come to him and they would not leave. It didn’t matter what he said to them, they wouldn’t go.
Hasid left Jacques apartment smiling to himself. Jacques saw that smile and let his friend go. He knew him well enough to know he would say no more.
Paradise, indeed.
Chapter 24
Malachi went to Vohra first. As full vampire he was able to travel through dimensions, and in the beginning it was the only way he traveled. This travel left him rattled. He determined he would investigate it as soon as possible, try to find out exactly what transpired when he vanished and reappeared.
When he reached Vohra, the ancient being told him his mission of revenge was impossible. Jacques was a man. He could change his name, his personal information, and he could disappear more thoroughly than any vampire could hope to do. The multitudes in the world had already swallowed Jacques like a drop of rain in an ocean.
Malachi wouldn’t be discouraged. Just because they all thought he’d never find the man, that didn’t mean they were right. He had a lifetime now that would last longer than any mortal’s. He could spend it searching, if he wanted.
In London, Sereny came to him. She found he had left Texas the same week she did. She had Jeremy in tow. Malachi understood the child better now—his urges, his unquenchable hunger. Being Predator made you walk a fine edge where the smallest temptation might be too much. For a child, the temptations had to be too overwhelming to control.
He shook Jeremy’s small hand. “Hello again,” he said, smiling. “Do you still like chickens?” Jeremy had killed nearly every chicken in his mother’s hen house when Malachi had first brought him home.
“I like anything,” Jeremy said, a wild glint in his eye. “Anything alive,” he amended.
A knife twisted in Malachi’s heart. He had known the child when he was human. As Predator he’d hardened and grown cold. Though he smiled, it was not the smile of a child. This one was a torturer. Didn’t Sereny sense that in him? Surely Ross had and that is why he’d sent him away.
Sereny asked to stay in his suite in the hotel for a few days. She was taking Jeremy to Italy, she said, but now they were in London, and she needed to let him feed.
Malachi put them into the bedroom and took the sofa for himself. He never saw them at night, when they were out stalking. When it was day, they slept like angels in his bed, Sereny’s arm thrown over the boy as if protecting him in sleep.
Malachi spent his time contacting vampires in the city and questioning them. They had heard of Jacques, they admitted, knowing he had lived with Charles Upton. But they didn’t know where he was now. They hadn’t sensed him in their city, nor heard of anyone who had seen him.
By pure chance Malachi stumbled onto a society of vampires living in a brownstone near Hyde Park. Though they proved to be of no use in finding Jacques, they were more than a mild diversion.
He had been walking late at night in the park when two Predators strolled up to his side and kept his pace. They were very elegant, dressed expensively, expertly coifed, and educated in speech. It appeared to Malachi they were hedonists and that pleasure was their religion. They smelled of cologne, their faces were full from feasting, and they wore a great deal of gold jewelry adorned with gems.
“Do you know a Frenchman who walks with the vampires by the name of Jacques?” he asked them.
“If a man walked with us, we would kill him,” one of his companions said. “We have heard of you, though. We’ve heard of your quest for this man. If we get a sniff of him, we’ll contact you immediately.”
Malachi’s first impression of the two elegant vampires was right in the fact they were pleasure-seeking creatures. But until they took him to their lair in the brownstone, where more than a dozen of their comrades lived, he had no idea there was another side to the society. He soon discovered they were not always engaged in the pursuit of gratification.
“We call ourselves Synchers,” the leader said. He was dressed in silk pajamas and was smoking a fragrant cigar when Malachi was presented to him. His name was Ellington.
“I’m sorry, Synchers?”
“Short for synchronization. We have been trying to find the link that connects one dimension to another. We synchronize our lives, locking in these other dimensions in order to explore them, but we don’t know yet what the true link is.
“You realize that when we dematerialize and travel, we move into a dimension we never knew existed when human?”
“Yes.” Malachi had intended to research this phenomenon himself, but who had time?
“So far we have found there are at least sixteen dimensions.”
Malachi’s mouth dropped open. “No physicist imagined that many!”
Ellington nodded smugly. “I know. We’re moving past the present research. There are sixteen dimensions at the very least. We suspect many more.”
“What does it all mean?”
Ellington raised his brows and blew a ring of smoke at the high ceiling. It settled near a black wrought iron antique chandelier and hung there like Spanish moss from a tree limb. “It means a great many things,” Ellington said. “It’s possible we become vampire in one of those dimensions. It’s probable, actually. It’s certain that we travel in one of them. In another we have encountered a world like our own, but slightly off-synch—as if it is two paces behind this one. It’s only a matter of seconds, but it makes everything confusing for us. There we find ourselves repeating some action we’ve just acted out in this dimension. We know we’re doing it again because we remember.”
Malachi was stunned. A thought occurred to him. “Then could you change the course of the future in this dimension by changing it there?”
Ellington narrowed his eyes and Malachi knew he was trying to read him. “Unfortunately, no,” he said finally. He waved the cigar expansively. “If we could do that, we could change our deaths and not become vampire at all, correct?”
Malachi wasn’t thinking of that. He was wondering if he could step back in time some way and save Danielle. Save her from… Save her for…
His face must have betrayed him. Ellington had leaned forward and now he reached out and touched Malachi on the hand. “We know of your loss and we are sorry.”
Malachi tried not to flinch. His face hardened. “I didn’t think we could manipulate the past anyway. It was just a question.”
Ellington leaned back again and returned his gaze to the ceiling and the chandelier, his head resting on the back of his chair as he smoked. “I’m not saying that isn’t yet possible. We don’t know everything there is to know about other dimensions. There may be one, if we can find it, where anything is possible. Who knows?”
“What are the other dimensions like?” Malachi forcefully wrenched his thoughts from Danielle.
“Two of them are like black holes. They’ve sucked in our members and never spit them back again. Therefore, they’re still indecipherable. We don’t know what goes on there. In one dimension all the creatures are nightmarish. It is a…sort of hell. A team went there and barely escaped to tell the tale.”
“How did you find out you could explore these dimensions?”
“Do you have about a year? It would take me that long to explain. It has been a very long pursuit. I’ve been involved with this society for two hundred years already.”
Two hundred years. And they hadn’t found a way to change the past. Disappointed, Malachi frowned. “I guess I’m a product of my age. I w
ant quick answers.”
“And simple ones,” Ellington added. “I wish it were simple. I wish it didn’t take so much time. We’ve devoted ourselves to these missions and with our newest technologies, we’ve been able to crack some of the equations faster. But what if there are a hundred dimensions? A thousand? Ten thousand?”
“It sounds like dangerous work.” Malachi now thought he understood why this little society lived like hedonists. They took pleasure seriously because the work they were involved in might make them disappear suddenly, like a puff of smoke in a breeze. Immortality wasn’t so assured for them as it was for other vampires. Their lives were even more temporary and more in jeopardy than the life spans of mortal men. Although Ellington claimed to have been doing it for two hundred years, he knew the society had lost many of its members. Any of them could venture out and never come back, lost in the “black hole” dimensions that wouldn’t release them.
He and Ellington talked all night and when morning dawned, Malachi left the brownstone, wishing the group well. He was convinced the universe was not only infinite, it was multi-layered. He had learned enough from Ellington to keep his mind filled with philosophical questions for the rest of his life. Toward the end, when the sun was rising, Ellington said, “You might be someone who could join us one day. What do you think of that? Would it suit you?”
Malachi thought it over briefly and saw years stretching into decades, into centuries, all of it spent alone and aimless. He looked at Ellington and smiled. “I think that might be possible. One day.”
Still, the knowledge there were other dimensions and other worlds did not lessen his pain or his loneliness, and it did not bring Jacques to justice. He had given up his humanity for Jacques. He might have an eternity to live now and he couldn’t even begin exploring the deeper mysteries until he could find peace.
Back at his hotel, he found Sereny bathing Jeremy’s face. Malachi slouched into a chair and ran a hand over his eyes.
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