“But not you,” Sylvie said. It was a statement, not a question.
“Perhaps…”
She patted his leg. “Don’t worry. God is on our side, right?”
“Yeah, how many times have I heard that over the centuries, just as some army was about to massacre some other army? Funny thing is, until the battle started, both sides were convinced God was on their side.”
“You were chosen by Michael,” Sylvie pointed out.
“Oh, what a load of crap!” Terrill cried. “I knew Michael better than anyone, and he was just like the rest of us, except a lot older. Don’t believe all this nonsense Marc is putting out. I don’t know where he’s getting it. Michael was just a guy. Just another vampire.”
“But you aren’t,” Sylvie said. “I saw you Turn from vampire to human, and that wouldn’t have happened if the good, the light, God, whatever you want to call it, wasn’t on your side.”
Terrill didn’t respond at first. There was a time when he would have accepted this mantle of power. He would have thought it his due. He would have reveled in it. He wouldn’t have had any doubts. Funny thing about that, he thought. It wasn’t until I had doubts that I was given this power.
“That still doesn’t keep you safe,” he said finally. “You’re too vulnerable. I think we should leave you here in La Pine, book a room in one of the motels. I’ll come get you when it’s over.”
“Do you really believe I’ll be safe here if you lose?” she asked.
Terrill groaned and threw his head back into his pillow. “Shit, shit! Probably not.”
Sylvie reached over and ran a soft hand across his cheek. “Poor Golden Vampire,” she murmured. She leaned over and kissed him, then ran her hand down his body and grabbed hold of him.
He kissed her back as if was the last time, and he realized it might really be. He knew she wouldn’t stay here, anyway, no matter how much he tried to convince her.
This time, they didn’t worry about the motor home rocking, and when the springs began to squeak, they couldn’t help but laugh even as they continued to make love.
#
Darkness was falling when Terrill woke up. Sylvie was leaning over him, gazing at his face with a gentle expression. “OK,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
“Do what? You’ll stay here?” His heart leapt. If she were safe here in La Pine, it would be so much easier to fight in the coming battle.
“I will let you Turn me.”
The words didn’t penetrate at first. And then the world shifted and clicked into place, and everything was all right. It was the final piece of the puzzle, somehow. Damn, he thought. I’m getting as mystical as Marc. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“I’m very sure,” she said. A flicker of doubt crossed her face, but her voice didn’t reflect it.
“What… what made you change your mind?”
She put her head back on her pillow and stared at the ceiling. “You were right. It was unfair of me to make you worry. I don’t want you to make the wrong decision in the heat of battle because of something I’ve done…”
Her voice trailed off, and Terrill sensed there was more. “And?”
She sat up and took his hands. “I was being a hypocrite, Terrill. How could I love you and think you’re good, and be so certain that you’re on the side of right, and yet at the same time think that vampires are unnatural? It’s fear. That’s all it is. I was afraid of what I might become, but not anymore. I trust you, Terrill. I trust that you’ll keep me from becoming evil. Promise me.”
“Oh, I don’t think you have to worry about that!” Terrill said. “You’ll become one of us. Like Jamie and me. Trust me, Sylvie. You won’t have to do anything against your scruples.”
She smiled sadly. “I know.”
They heard a knock on the door and then Jamie’s voice. “You guys ready to head out?”
“Give us one hour,” Terrill shouted.
“Geez,” he heard Jamie mutter. “How many times can you do it in one day, already?”
Terrill felt completely energized. It is all going to work out, he thought.
“This will be a little different,” he said, getting out of bed and throwing his clothes on. “I have to Turn you into a vampire first. With this new strain, you’ll be… out… for about half an hour.”
Sylvie lay in bed, a serene expression on her face. Terrill’s fangs came out and he leaned over her, then pulled back. “Uh, this might hurt a little,” he warned her.
“You think?”
He leaned down over her neck and stared at the veins in her skin. Have I ever wondered if it hurt? he thought. I don’t think it ever occurred to me. He hesitated, smelling her clean porcelain skin. He was going to lose the human Sylvie forever. But there would be no difference, right? She would still be Sylvie, only stronger, nearly invulnerable. Isn’t that what he believed?
It wasn’t turning out to be so easy to overcome the centuries when he had believed differently, when he had known he was evil, that all vampires were evil. Beautiful Sylvie. Could he bear to Turn her into one of them?
The blood of gold gives us the power to choose right over wrong, Terrill thought. It sounded like one of Marc’s sayings, but he was certain he had just made it up.
“You’re starting to make me nervous,” Sylvie said.
“Sorry.” He leaned down, and hesitated one last time. “Ready?”
“Just do it already.”
He sank his fangs into the deep red blood and drank, and it was ambrosia. The taste for human blood is still in me, he thought. And this is the blood of the one I love.
Sylvie jerked once or twice as her human body resisted dying, but she never made a sound, and soon she was lying pale and ghostly in the moonlight that slanted through the windows of the motor home. She had never looked so beautiful. There was a sharp contrast between her black hair and white skin. Her brown eyes were growing dim.
Terrill waited by her side as the minutes passed. He was so absorbed in watching her that he was startled when someone pounded on the metal door. “What’s holding you up, Terrill?” Jamie shouted. “We’ve got to get moving if we’re going to get there tonight!”
Had it been an hour already? He looked down at Sylvie, but she hadn’t moved. Strange, he thought. She should’ve revived a long time ago.
He heard the other cars and motor homes in the caravan starting up, so he climbed into the driver’s seat, and with one last troubled look back, led the way out of the park and onto the highway.
#
Terrill’s panic grew with every minute, with every mile.
Finally, a few hours later, as they reached the outskirts of Grants Pass in Southern Oregon, he couldn’t stand it any longer and pulled over to the side of the road.
Jamie pulled up behind him as he was scrambling out of the driver’s seat, and moments later, she swung open the motor home’s door and came inside. “The cops aren’t going to like this many cars on the side of the road, Terrill,” she warned. “Do we really want to call attention to ourselves?”
“It’s Sylvie!” he cried. She still hadn’t moved. Her eyes had the milky look of death.
“What do you mean?” Jamie said, rushing to his side.
“She wanted to be Turned.”
Jamie looked down at her little sister with wide eyes. “Oh, Sylvie. Why?” She whirled on Terrill. “Why’d you do this?”
“She asked me to!”
“And you just went ahead, you selfish bastard?” Jamie snapped. “Did you really believe that’s what she wanted? I’ve never seen a human as happily alive as Sylvie. And look what you’ve done to her!”
“I don’t understand why she hasn’t Turned,” he said, feeling calmer now that another person was screaming the same blame at him that he was feeling himself. I deserve it, he thought. But I’ve got to fix it.
“If this was an old-style Turning,” Jamie said, also calming down a bit, “we wouldn’t be worried. That took days.”
“True,”
he said.
“For all your vaunted powers, Terrill, you weren’t the vampire who started creating Wilderings,” Jamie said. “I was. Maybe, somehow, you don’t have the same strain of vampirism.”
“Shit,” Terrill said. “Why didn’t I think of that?” Still, he started to feel relieved. Then he remembered that only one in a hundred attempted Turnings by old-style vampires had been successful, and he started to panic again.
Jamie grabbed him by the arm. “Have a little faith, Terrill. We can’t have come all this way, have gone through so much, only to lose her now.”
He nodded, but found he otherwise couldn’t move.
“I’ll get someone to drive the rig and we’ll sit here with her, OK?” Jamie said kindly.
Again he nodded. He sat down at Sylvie’s side and gently brushed back her hair. “I’ll wait,” he said.
A couple of hours later, Terrill looked up to see that Robert Jurgenson was driving and they were passing into California.
Later, on one of the winding roads of the coastal mountains, he became aware of his surroundings again as red and blue lights flashed through the windows and a loud siren whooped. Jamie was driving now. Somewhere along the way, they must have stopped, and she had taken her lover’s place.
Terrill felt stiff, as if he hadn’t moved in hours. He had no idea where the time had gone. All he could remember was staring at Sylvie, willing her to move.
He heard Jamie swearing as she pulled over for the cop car. He heard her talking to the officer, and then their voices started to rise in anger. “I don’t give you permission to search this vehicle!” he heard Jamie shout as the door of the motor home swung open.
The cop was huge, fat as well as tall, and Terrill sized him up as having muscles beneath the fat. This man was used to literally throwing his weight around. He stood there at the door, staring at Terrill and Sylvie for a second, then said, “What the… ?” and started to pull his weapon.
Jamie or Terrill probably would have gotten to the cop before he could draw his gun, but before either of them could act, Sylvie came flying off the bed with a banshee screech and landed on top of the policeman, who fell backward onto the road. Terrill heard a loud crack as the man’s head hit the pavement.
Jamie got to Sylvie first and trapped the wild girl in her arms. Terrill grabbed Sylvie’s kicking feet and they hauled her back into the motor home.
“We need rope!” Jamie shouted.
Terrill ran to the bench seats, threw off the cushions and started rummaging through the storage space beneath. His hands landed on some plastic rope almost immediately, and they soon had the screaming, spitting new vampire tied to the bed.
“Wow,” Jamie said. “Was I like this?”
“Probably,” Terrill said. “A little. Vampires have a saying: The stronger the spirit, the stronger the hunger.”
“Big surprise,” Jamie said, “little sister has a big hunger.”
They were both relieved, if a bit alarmed. “I’ll get the raw meat,” Terrill said. “You take care of the cop. If he’s all right, try to glamour him. If not, we’ll try to find a hospital.”
He almost couldn’t believe those last words. The old Terrill would have left the officer by the side of the road and thought nothing of it, or he would have eaten him.
As they fed Sylvie big chunks of red meat, Robert managed to get the policeman up and seated in his squad car, placating him with some cop talk. The officer was dazed and confused. When they finally drove off, he was completely convinced he’d been in a fender bender of some kind.
They got the caravan moving again.
Chapter 24
The small, dapper man Hoss had known as Combs was gone, replaced by a… by a demon. Hoss couldn’t think of any other word for it. He was a demon from the Pit, made of cold and darkness and pain. The humans had it all wrong: hell wasn’t filled with fire, it was empty, a void, a black nothingness.
Once transformed into the Master of Shadow, Combs never again appeared in bodily form. He was a void that blotted out anything and everything it touched. Fitzsimmons was his mouthpiece, and Hoss could sense the former Council president’s horror and humiliation at what he was being turned into, but also his savage joy in his new powers.
In a hollow voice, Fitzsimmons ordered the entire Council to board the private jet that the president usually reserved for himself. No one disobeyed.
Hoss and Jared and some of their allies, the young, tech-savvy vampires who had thought to overthrow the Council, pressed up against the wall, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed. Fitzsimmons left the room, and Hoss let out a big sigh of relief. He turned to Jared, about to say that they needed to get out of there fast. Blend into the countryside. Be old-style vampires.
“You, too,” came an echoing voice from the doorway. All Hoss could see was a dark hallway, but he could sense the malevolent presence behind the darkness. “You’re coming with me.”
#
At the airport, more vampires appeared, as if summoned. The other two jets owned by the Council were also filled: every seat, every inch of the aisles and every storage unit and compartment, pressurized or not. There were dozens of vampires Hoss had never seen before. All of these new vampires had a mantle of darkness, an outline of shadow, a sucking emptiness around them.
They sat on the tarmac for an hour, even though by all appearances they were ready to depart. What are we waiting for? Hoss wondered. He looked out the window and saw Peterson approaching the plane, escorted by four large vampires who blended with the darkness outside.
Peterson stumbled into the plane, pushed from behind. He looked old, not only in appearance, but in demeanor. He didn’t look anyone in the face, just straightened his clothing and marched down the aisle to the front of the plane, where he sat in the last available seat.
The plane taxied for takeoff. Hoss looked longingly at the bright lights of London. A small-town boy he might have been, but in his heart, he was a big-city vampire. He suspected he might never see London again.
Fitzsimmons and He-Who-Had-Once-Been-Combs were together at the back of the plane, and it was as if the metal frame of the aircraft had disappeared back there and been replaced by a starless night, empty of oxygen, warmth and substance.
Hoss, Jared and the younger vampires huddled together near the center of the plane, silent, trying to be unobtrusive. Jodie sat next to Hoss, and perched in the seats in front of him were Jimmy and Pete.
At the front of the compartment, the other councilors were conferring. At first they seemed frightened, but as they continued to talk among themselves, they seemed to gain courage from each other. Hoss could see them regaining their confidence. These five vampires had been among the most powerful in the world. They’d always been more ruthless, more cunning, more savage than all their brethren.
In addition to Peterson, there was the big Dutch vampire, Belinda Hanson. She may have had a baby-girl voice, but that didn’t fool anyone. She was no pushover.
There was Jerome Bacher, the German representative, who came from a district that had long been infested with vampires––yet he had risen to the top.
There was Isaac Hargraves, who looked like a small boy, but was perhaps the most devious of them all, a survivor who used his appearance to seem harmless while he manipulated those bigger and stronger than himself.
And there was Bogdan Kovalev, from Russia, who had survived decades of police state and a kleptocracy, and was richer and more powerful in his homeland than any of them.
Overnight, all their power had been stripped away.
Only Peterson stayed out of the debate, merely glancing over at them with dull eyes whenever they asked him something. They spoke in tones so low that even vampires a few seats away couldn’t hear them, but no one had to hear anything to realize a conspiracy was being hatched.
Hoss looked nervously over his shoulder at the darkness that enveloped the back of the plane. He could barely make out the form of Fitzsimmons sitting there, facing forward, u
nmoving. The rest of the darkness was lifeless, implacable.
The argument among the councilors became heated. It appeared that Hanson was insisting on something, while Hargraves was still in doubt. Finally, they fell silent.
Hoss eyed them uneasily. This isn’t the time to challenge the Shadow, he wanted to warn them. He could sense the vast power beneath the emptiness. It was the power to nullify anything thrown against it, to take in the assault and make it disappear. Strength didn’t matter, speed didn’t matter, willpower didn’t matter. The Shadow would swallow anything that opposed it.
Hanson stood up and glared at the other councilors, who stood up a little less eagerly. She led the way to the back of the plane. Peterson remained seated, seemingly unaware of or uncaring about the coming confrontation.
Hanson looked at Hoss challengingly as she passed. Get up, you coward, she seemed to be saying with her eyes. They’d never gotten along, but her look suggested she thought they had a mutual enemy. Hoss turned his head away.
Outside the windows, it was dark, but it was a warm, natural darkness, the darkness of the Earth, filled with the currents of life. It was as if it glowed from underneath. Behind him, the Shadow gave off no such warmth.
Fitzsimmons stood as they approached. His face was blank and his eyes had turned completely black.
“We insist on a vote of the Council,” Hanson said, her voice rising shrilly with every syllable. Faced with the vacuum that was the Master, she seemed less sure of herself. She backed away a little, stopping between Bacher and Kovalev as if they would protect her, but they backed away as well, leaving her stranded.
Fitzsimmons turned his head ever so slightly, as if listening to instructions only he could hear. “Vote?”
“We have a quorum.” Bacher spoke up, his voice loud, as if the louder he got, the braver he got. “There are eight councilors on this plane.”
“What do you wish to vote on?” Fitzsimmons’s voice was toneless, neutral, yet threatening.
The Vampire Evolution Trilogy (Book 3): Blood of Gold Page 20