Eternal Hunger

by Cameron Dean

  I saw a flicker of belief flash through Bibi’s eyes. “So it really was Sloane who attacked Randolph?”

  I nodded.

  “What about the third Emblem?” Chet asked.

  “We have it,” I said. “Or we think we do, Ash and I. There are hieroglyphics on it. Ash managed to translate some of it but it seemed meaningless. We were running out of time. So we put together a plan to slow the Board down, to try and grab the scarab back from Sloane. That’s what your little rescue interrupted. Thanks to you, the whole thing got screwed up. Now Sloane has Ash and…”

  At the thought of the pain I’d felt, what Sloane must have done to Ash to cause it, my voice cracked and I broke off.

  “Where is the Emblem now?” Chet asked, after a moment.

  “At Ash’s house,” I said. And suddenly I saw what must be done. “We have to figure out what it really means,” I said. “We have to try.”

  “And if we do, then what?” Bibi asked.

  “Then we do whatever it takes to get to Ash and try to stop the Board.”

  Fifteen

  “Well,” Bibi said, a short time later, and I could tell she was struggling to find the right tone. “This is all we needed, ancient Egyptian vampires. I’ll never be able to set foot in the Luxor again.”

  We were in Chet’s car on the way to Ash’s house, to find the piece of paper that might now be our only way to stop the Board. Chet had offered to help translate the hieroglyphics. I was dubious. If Ash couldn’t make sense of them, what luck would Chet have? Still, I accepted Chet’s offer of help, and the three of us had formed a slightly uneasy alliance.

  We sat together now, across Chet’s front seat, Bibi hugging the passenger door as if she still wasn’t quite sure she really wanted to touch me. I wasn’t sure I could blame her, but still, it hurt. She’s Bibi; she’s agreed to help you, Candace, I thought. That’s what counts.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” Chet suddenly spoke up as we approached the Ravenswood gates. After a quick glance into the car, the security guard passed us through. “If this third Emblem is on a piece of paper, why don’t you just destroy it? Wouldn’t that prevent the ritual from being performed?”

  “It would,” I admitted. “But it would also leave the Board operational and whole. What Ash wanted, what we both want, is a way to stop the Board, once and for all. He believed that by possessing the Emblems himself, he might be able to use their power against the Board. I don’t understand very much of this, but Ash has been studying the Board and its history for years.”

  “Maybe translating the hieroglyphics will help us understand,” Chet said.

  “Let’s hope so,” I replied.

  A few moments later, I was ushering Chet and Bibi into the house, trying without success to push my worry for Ash to the back of my mind. But I could still feel it, humming through my veins, making me nervous and jumpy in spite of my weariness.

  “The study’s at the end of the hall,” I said. “I’ll go get the paper, then meet you there. Go ahead and power up the laptop. Do whatever you need to get set up.”

  Quickly, I walked to the bedroom, retrieved Ash’s picture from my shoulder bag. I did my best not to focus on the room, itself. Not Ash’s shirt, thrown casually over the back of the chair by the bed. Definitely not the bed, itself. If I gave way to my fears, my sense of loss, I would stumble on the path I had laid out for myself.

  Who the hell are you kidding, Candace? I thought. I’d fall and be unable to get up. I was all but on my knees now, facing the worst-case scenario. Me, alone, against the Board. And you’ll never get anywhere if you stand around feeling sorry for yourself, now will you? I thought. Besides, you’re not alone. You have two friends right down the hall. Friends who are putting themselves in danger just by being here. I pivoted, walked swiftly out the bedroom door, quietly closed the door behind me.

  “That’s Ash’s picture,” Bibi said, her tone surprised, when I returned to the study.

  “Actually,” I said, as I turned it over and placed it on the desk, “Ash’s picture is just camouflage. This is the thing that is important.” I gestured to the tiny red image visible in the lower-right-hand corner. “The image itself is called the Mark of Thoth. What we need to figure out is what the hieroglyphics underneath it mean.”

  Chet squinted intently at the hieroglyphics. “It can’t hurt for me to try. Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes…Maybe Ash was too close to the problem.” He lifted up his glasses, made a face, then dropped them back down onto his nose. “Actually, the whole thing is kind of hard to see.”

  “There’s an OED on the bookshelf,” I said, going over to it and retrieving the magnifying glass.

  “Great,” Chet replied as I handed it to him. He held the glass over the small red splotch, squinting again. “Okay, okay. This is good. The image itself is very definitely Thoth. He’s wearing that crescent headdress and holding a papyrus in one hand.”

  Bibi gave a sudden shudder. “This Egyptian stuff is starting to creep me out. All those human bodies with animal heads.”

  Chet nodded again. “It is pretty primal stuff. So, what we have is three basic hieroglyphs…” His voice trailed off.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said, making quick eye contact with Bibi. She nodded. Together, we left the study. I don’t think Chet even noticed we were gone.

  “I have to take care of a couple of things,” I said. “Not to sound weird but, make yourself at home.”

  “You don’t want company?” she asked quickly.

  “Maybe a little later,” I said.

  “Ash has been a vampire for a long time, hasn’t he?” she asked suddenly.

  “Not compared to the Board. But long enough so that it’s hard for me to imagine.” I reached out, touched her on the arm. She twitched slightly, as if her mind was overriding her body’s natural instinct to pull away. “You sure you’ll be all right? You could stay with Chet.”

  “No,” she said, with a shake of her head. “I’ll be fine.”

  I let my hand drop away. “I won’t be too long.”

  “Okay,” she said. And it came to me suddenly that I couldn’t ever remember hearing Bibi sound so lost.

  “Thanks for coming, Bibi.”

  “Oh, hey,” she said. “Fearless vampire-killer, that’s me.”

  “I’m glad to hear that one of us is fearless,” I replied.

  I turned, then moved off down the hall. The last thing I saw before I turned the corner, out of sight, was Bibi standing with her hand over the place my fingers had touched.

  I went to the pool. Stripped down, I entered the cool water, felt it enclose me in its satin depths. Cleanse me, I thought. Heal me. Heal Ash. Help us to be reborn.

  I ducked my head under, propelled myself through the soft, cool dark. I surfaced at the far end of the pool, treading water for a moment then lifting myself up onto the shelf where Ash and I had once made love. I stretched out, resting one hand on my arm while, with my other hand, I trailed my fingers in the water. Doing nothing more complicated than savoring the feel of the liquid against my skin.

  I’m sorry, Ash, I thought. I hope you’ll understand.

  I was going to break my promise.

  I was going to go after Ash even though my chances of success were so slim as to be almost impossible. If Ash thought I was going to leave him to face the Board alone…he didn’t know me very well.

  “I will never abandon you, Ash,” I whispered. “Not while any part of me can still make a choice.”

  I heard a sound then, at the end of the pool. I lifted up my head. “Bibi, is that you?” I called.

  “Oh, Candace,” she said, and I could tell by her tone that she was embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I just thought…if the pain should come back. I know you wanted to be alone, but…”

  “You’re trying to tell me you’re worried about me,” I said.

  There was a pause. “Pretty stupid, huh?” Bibi finally said.


  Bibi was sitting on the edge with her legs in the water, just like a child. I swam to her, got out, pulled on a robe, and sat beside her, dangling my legs in the water alongside hers.

  Bibi turned her head to look at me. I kept my eyes fixed on the water. “You sound okay,” she said. “I mean, you know, like yourself.”

  “I am myself, Bibi,” I answered quietly. “In all the ways that count.”

  “I would like to believe that,” she said. “It’s just…you let him do it. You let him make you a vampire.”

  “Sloane attacked me,” I said. “He did exactly what he did to Randolph, except even worse. I thought my life was over, Bibi. I was literally moments away from death, and all I could think was that I didn’t want to die. There were too many things I wanted to do. There still are. So I let Ash save me the only way he could. I let him make me a vampire.”

  I turned toward her, as if by holding her gaze I could make her understand. Make her do what I had done: view the world through new and different eyes.

  “If you could have seen Ash that night…I know you would feel differently about him. The fact that he’s a vampire doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me, Bibi. And whether you like it or not, can accept it or not, the truth is that Ash is the one great love of my life.”

  “That’s quite a speech, Candace,” she said after a moment.

  “It was, wasn’t it?” I said. “Sorry.”

  We each held out about ten seconds before we began to laugh.

  “I can’t believe it,” Bibi gasped. “How in hell can we be laughing at a time like this?

  “Candace,” she suddenly said. “About what happened, when I came here the other night—”

  “Oh, don’t,” I protested, cutting her off. “You’ve been my truest friend, Bibi. I’ve never doubted that, or you, not even for a moment.”

  “Well, shit,” she said. “Now look what you’ve done. You’ve made me cry.”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” I said. And before I knew it, I had put an arm around her. She settled her head down onto my shoulder. For several silent moments we sat, just like that, arms around each other, our feet dangling in the satin water.

  “You’re going to do this, aren’t you?” Bibi finally asked, her voice quiet. “You’re going to go after Ash, to try and stop the Board.”

  “I have to,” I answered. “The Board has to be stopped.”

  “And Ash?” Bibi asked.

  “I can’t leave him to be destroyed by them, Bibi. I love him too much.”

  She lifted up her head then, and I could see the conflicting emotions flickering in her eyes.

  “How?” she burst out finally. “Honestly, I want to understand. But every time I try to fathom how you can know what Ash is, what he has to do to exist, and still love him, it’s like running straight into a brick wall. I simply cannot comprehend how you can go on loving him.”

  “Of course you can,” I said. “It’s the same way you can say you love Randolph when you know he’s married and never going to leave his rich wife. No, of course I don’t equate the two of them,” I said as I saw her stiffen. “What I’m saying is that love isn’t just something that sneaks up on you without you realizing it or sweeps you away, though, if you’re lucky, you get to feel those aspects of it.

  “Love is a conscious, deliberate choice.”

  “That’s just a little simplistic, don’t you think?”

  “No,” I answered. “These days, I honestly don’t. We’ve told ourselves that I’ve struggled against my feelings for Ash for two long years, Bibi. It isn’t true. Somewhere along the line, I made a choice. A choice to keep on loving him.

  “We tell ourselves the heart wants what it wants, that we can’t control it, but that’s just a convenient romantic lie. We choose our loves, Bibi. Second by second, minute by minute, day by day, year in and year out. If we’re lucky, what we choose makes us happy. If we’re not so lucky, it doesn’t. Going after Ash now is just another point on the continuum. I’m still choosing love.”

  She was silent for so long, I thought she wasn’t going to answer. But finally, she spoke.

  “I really can’t talk you out of this, can I?”

  “No, you can’t. If you love me, don’t try to stop me.”

  She gave a quick, unamused laugh. “Now I know just how Carl felt. You don’t fight fair, Candace.”

  “That’s because I’m fighting to win,” I said. “Fair doesn’t always count. I have to finish this, Bibi. One way or the other.”

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” she said. “I really, truly don’t.”

  “Tell me that you’re still my friend,” I said as, once again, I felt the tears begin to fill my eyes.

  “Candace,” a new voice said. “I think I’ve got something.”

  Bibi and I turned toward the sound. Chet was standing at the entrance to the grotto. I wiped tears from my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “What do you mean?”

  “You know what?” Chet said. “I really, truly think I figured it out. The hieroglyphics were kind of unusual. I can explain upstairs. I don’t want to bring the paper down here, and I think looking at it will help.”

  “We’re on our way,” I said. “Meet you in the study?”

  “Great,” Chet said.

  Bibi stood up first. She held out a hand, pulled me up. Abruptly, the room swam and I swayed on my feet. Bibi’s grip tightened.

  “Candace, what is it?” she asked, her tone sharp with concern. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I answered. A one-syllable lie. “I think I just stood up too quickly. That’s all.”

  She peered down at me. “You don’t look fine, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. I took a step and swayed once more, the weakness pulling at me like a riptide.

  “You are not fine,” Bibi declared as she put one arm around my back to steady me. “You’re not fine at all. What is it? Is it Ash—that rapport thing again?”

  I shook my head. “No.” It was the lack of him, I realized. Without Ash’s blood to sustain me, how long could I survive? “Honestly,” I went on. “I’m all right. I’m just a little tired. That’s all. Just help me get upstairs. Let’s see what Chet has discovered.”

  And, I added silently, let’s hope that whatever strength I have left will be enough.

  Sixteen

  “Okay, so,” Chet said. The three of us were leaning over the desk in Ash’s study. Chet was holding the magnifying glass over the Mark of Thoth. “When you take a really good look, you can see that what looks like just three hieroglyphs turns out to be a whole lot more. Each individual image is actually made up of many smaller hieroglyphs. My guess is that’s why it didn’t get translated before.”

  “But you figured it out,” I said.

  “I had help. I used a decoding program. It turns out the hieroglyphs were also a clever cipher. Once the computer figured out the pattern, I could eliminate all the hieroglyphs that had no meaning—a straight translation is total gobbledygook. There are actually only three distinct pictographs that matter. In order, I think they translate as Breath, Light, and Time.” He shrugged. “The only problem is, I’m not sure how those concepts help us.”

  I sat down in the desk chair, aware of both Chet and Bibi’s anxious eyes upon me. “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m not sure I do, either. I’m also not sure that makes any difference. I still have to try and stop the Board.”

  “What if we just hide the paper somehow?” Bibi asked. “Try and buy some more time.”

  I shook my head. “You guys are forgetting what happened to Randolph. He had what the Board wanted, and they came and took it. If this is the third Emblem, they’ll come for this, too. And they won’t care about hurting anyone who gets in their way. If I go to them, at least I stop making the two of you targets.”

  “Maybe we don’t want you to sacrifice yourself for our sakes,” Bibi began.

  “Stop,” I said, holding up my hand
s for silence. “Just stop, both of you. I have to go. I have no choice.”

  Chet was silent for a moment, regarding me steadily. “When will you go?” he finally asked.

  I ran a hand through my hair, suddenly realizing I had no idea what time it was. A thousand years seemed to have passed between the moment I’d been snatched away from Ash and this one.

  “What time is it now?”

  Chet consulted his high-tech watch. “About five a.m.”

  That ruled out “immediately,” I thought. The sun was already up, and its power, its ability to sap what little strength I had was only going to get stronger as the day went on. Waiting until it was past its zenith, waiting at all, was a calculated risk, but one I would have to take. My only consolation was that not even Sloane would want to be out when the power of the sun was at its peak.

  “I’ll wait until the sun goes down,” I answered, praying that neither Bibi nor Chet would see through the lie. I wouldn’t wait nearly that long, but would set out as soon as the sun began its descent across the sky. Its power would still be strong, but it would be on the wane.

  “Until then, I’ll rest,” I said. “Conserve my strength as best I can.” I slid the paper with Ash’s image on one side and the Mark of Thoth on the other toward me. “I think I’ll study this a little more.”

  “We should stay with you,” Bibi said.

  I shook my head. “No, I think it’s better if I’m alone. Being around humans is only going to get more difficult as time goes on.”

  “But,” Chet began. Bibi reached out and laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Oh.”

  “We’ll come back just before sundown,” Bibi said.

  “I’ll be fine between now and then,” I said. “I just need some time alone.”

  Silently, the three of us filed out of the study and headed for the front door. It was sort of like seeing guests out after the world’s most miserable dinner party.

  “Take care, Candace,” Chet said as I opened the door.