LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) Read online

  Dell gazed down at herself. Someone had changed her clothes and dressed her in a long granny nightgown. She tried to remember it. Maybe she'd gotten it for Christmas or Aunt Celia had given it to her for her birthday. She was closest to her Aunt Celia of all her aunts, but she had to admit Aunt Celia always gave her old-fashioned things that a girl her age privately shunned. Carolyn often complained that her mother belonged in another age, one of long dresses to the ankles and button-up shoes.

  It was not only the gown she did not recognize. She found herself alien. A cold hard body. With a working brain. No air in her lungs. No beating of a live heart in her chest. It all seemed unholy. Why must she go on with knowledge of life when she was not alive?

  It was enough to drive her mad.

  ~*~

  Life among the undead had been nearly as normal as for someone who lived with a human family. Dell remembered early memories that lay in her distant past like shiny shards of mirrors reflecting bits of her childhood. When she was almost five, living in the daydream that children dreamed, she recalled a sunny spring day with her mother. Her brother was a newborn, lying in a bassinet in the living room while her mother attended to her regimen of household cleaning. The blinds were drawn against the bright light that threatened to spill around the edges of the windows. She remembered the dark drapes printed with large green leaves, the marching-soldier columns of plastic blinds, and the light peeking around all the edges with a golden aura.

  Dell stood at the corner of an Early American maple coffee table, clutching a baby doll, her attention switching from the brightly outlined windows to her mother's swift movements with a dust cloth. Suddenly her mother lifted off her feet and was first near the top of the television and then in a blink she was across the room, without ever touching the floor, and dusting a tall bookshelf full of porcelain ladies in frilly dresses.

  It was not at all startling. She had seen her mother do strange things before and thought nothing of it. If her mother could levitate and fly through the air, if she could move like a tornado, or if she could appear and disappear in a twinkling, then that is just how the world was arranged. Surely all mothers could do the same.

  Another mirrored memory was of her father on a hot summer day. He stood in the backyard turning hamburger patties on a grill. Mom had gone indoors to make a pitcher of lemonade. The scent of the searing meat made Dell's mouth water. She was so hungry that her stomach growled. She had noticed that only she and Eddie ever ate hamburgers. Her parents carried on a conversation as their children ate and didn't even have a plate setting before them. None of that mattered, of course, just so long as she got her own fat hamburger with the juices squeezing into the bun and the mayo and ketchup dripping over the sides.

  Eddie found the old crape myrtle at the back of the privacy fence and began to climb it, the brown peeling bark of the limbs flaking off in his small hands. Dell must have been seven and Eddie almost three. Dell watched him from the swing set where she pushed herself back and forth lazily. She could have told her father that Eddie was doing something he shouldn't, but she was curious to see if her brother could make the climb she had been making for some time already. If he could, then they might have races up the tree to see which one reached the top first. But only if he didn't fall now, didn't prove he was too little for the game.

  Eddie made it to the very top of the old tree before his father noticed. Dell turned her head at her father's cry. "Eddie! Get down from there."

  Eddie, startled, lost his hold, gazing out in his dumbfounded way from between the pendulous white blooms, and began to plummet.

  That was when her father sped across the lawn in a blur, in a motion that was inhuman, and leaped into the air, catching his son in mid-fall.

  "Wow," Dell recalled whispering below her breath. "Gee."

  When Dell was a few years older, she understood that her parents' abilities might be above and beyond normal parental behavior. No one else could do what they did. Not a single soul. Children climbed trees and fell, no rescuers in sight. Mothers dusted in a thoroughly mundane way, slowly, on two feet. Most refrigerators held more food and no blood bags. Parents ate the same food as their children.

  When Eddie got sick and began to change, her parents sat Dell down and explained everything. The blood, the swiftness of movement, the appearing and disappearing acts, the way they were never ill, not even with a cold, not even with a fever. They told her why they might be caught standing in the hall or the kitchen, napping. When Eddie got sick, Dell faced the numbing truth. Her family wasn't really human anymore. And she was about to lose her brother, too.

  Eddie was twelve when he got sick. The disease came on rapidly and waylaid him one winter afternoon when he was lying on the sofa reading comics. It was Dell who found him prostrate, sweating, unconscious. His body was covered with sores and his lips were pulled tightly back from his teeth so that he looked as if he were in great pain. One look at him spurred Dell to the telephone to call her mother at work. "Mom, Mom, come quick, Eddie's dying."

  While her father took care of Eddie, Dell's mother sat with her at the kitchen breakfast counter and told her what was happening. And what might happen to her one day. They carried the genes for a terrible disease that merely crippled and killed humans, but in them it caused death and then life again, but a life that changed their very molecular structure and made them hunger for blood. There was no escape and no cure. A group of Naturals were working on a cure, but it seemed they were making no headway yet.

  Now it was Dell's turn to change, to become what she'd hoped never to be. It was an affliction that had plagued their kind, those who carried the deformed genes, for more than four thousand years. As she lay on her bed in the long gown, unable to handle her fate, unable to move or speak, her eyes staring into Mentor's at her bedside, she wondered if she had the courage for this. How had little Eddie been able to accept it? How had her parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents? Why hadn't they all long since found a way to die rather than live this way?

  She could see Mentor sitting nearby, gazing at her. She tried to blink to let him know she was cognizant of him. Her eyelids came down halfway, then went up again.

  "I know you're there. I can hear your thoughts. I didn't ask permission, so I hope it's all right." She blinked just halfway again.

  How do I ever act human again? she asked him in her thoughts. How do any of you stand this?

  "We live because we must, Dell, and so will you. There's a place in the world for us or we wouldn't be here. You'll learn to be yourself again. Your human self. You'll learn it so well, you'll be a natural at it." He smiled at the play on the word they used for those who continued on as if human.

  Dell rolled her eyes back into her head and fiercely tried to sit up. She couldn't even lift her head from the pillow. She sent messages to her legs to try to make them rise and they ignored her, lying like dead, fallen trees on the bed.

  Oh, God, she would never learn how to walk again, to talk, to brush her hair, and to do her trig assignments. She would never learn to smile or laugh or . . . hope.

  "Oh, yes, you will," Mentor said. "It just takes time and faith. You're not someone who will give up. I know you aren't."

  She didn't know that herself. Mentor might know more than she, but she wanted very much to shout in his face that he was wrong, he was totally wrong. She could give up if she wanted to and this felt like a time to want to. The alternative—to learn to live again—seemed impossible.

  3

  Charles Upton lay in his bed propped up on half a dozen pillows. His butler—a real one trained in London and transported to Houston, Texas by Upton's private jet—had left the room moments before to instruct the cook to prepare Charles his usual breakfast—a poached egg and dry toast. Butter—any kind of grease—nauseated him.

  On the bedside table rested a wood and ivory-inlaid tray filled with a stack of unopened mail. Charles looked at it with a wary eye, as if it contained bombs or poison glue on the envelo
pe seals. He would rather not handle the mail. Not today. Not any day. He should talk to David about rerouting the mail from his penthouse atop Upton Towers to the offices below so that David could sort through it. Daily tasks had become too much trouble to deal with anymore.

  Anyhow, none of it was personal mail. His family had all deserted him when he'd gotten ill. They thought it was contagious or something, or they just couldn't stomach the sight of him. If he'd ever married and had children, maybe he would have someone at his side now who cared. But then he doubted it. Women always betrayed you and took the money and ran. Children failed all your expectations and took your money and ran, too. He realized he pretty much hated women and children.

  He glanced across the large silvery-gray carpeted bedroom, decorated in an ornate Louis-the-Fifteenth style, to the gilt mirror over a writing desk. If he were to make the effort to get out of bed and sit at the desk, he would see his terrible image staring back at him. Well, he'd make the effort, by God! He wasn't so crippled yet that he had to lie in his bed like a dying man.

  He threw back the covers and swung his legs to the floor. He carefully pushed up with both his arms, putting weight on his legs, and felt stronger right away. He walked to the mirror over the desk and stood there without any assistance, staring at his reflection.

  Maybe soon he'd have all mirrors taken from the penthouse. He wasn't sure he could stand to look at himself anymore.

  The disease struck when he was in his mid-forties. Now, at sixty-eight, it had progressed to where he could not go out in public without being stared at. Just entering the elevator and running into one of his Upton employees on the descent to the Tower lobby could mean confronting the truth: he was a monster.

  His butler and cook, his doctors, and his partner, David, were used to his appearance. Everyone else in the world would be horrified, and it would show instantly on their faces. That was the reason two years ago he'd given over the public running of his oil and shipping empire to David. How long would it have taken his competitors to find ways to sabotage his business interests if the world ever found out he was so ill and so . . . deformed? Two weeks, max.

  The doctors had even begun referring to him, in private (or what they thought was private, because Charles had once inadvertently overheard them), as The Old Vampire.

  Vampire! How dare they. He'd fired them immediately, threatening to have their practices sued for millions. He then carried through with a suit for defamation. Not that he'd win, but it gave him satisfaction to haul his doctors into courtrooms. He had had to find other doctors as replacements, of course, who behind closed doors probably joked about him in the same way. Doctors couldn't help him any longer anyway, if ever they could. He kept finding sores on his body that would not heal despite having been prescribed every known antibiotic on and off the market. His flesh was riddled with oozing, red, open wounds. He had bandages on both arms where the sores were the worst, and there was a patch across the back of his neck that, without covering, would stain his pillows.

  He went closer to the mirror and stared deeply into his own eyes. His gaze was strong and determined, but the shell that housed the eyes was deteriorating rapidly. He began to glare at his own teeth, his stiff lips that were pulled back from the gums, and he snarled like an animal, cursing mentally the thing he had become.

  His eyes and his skin had become ultrasensitive to sunlight, so he stayed indoors and hid behind drawn drapes. They told him his body would be harmed if he were out in the sun for any length of time. As if it weren't already! The bottom half of his face had slowly grown rigid and his lips had pulled back into a rictus that made him look like a decayed mummy. His thin hair fell out in tufts, and scalded-looking spots covered the pink skin on his skull.

  Charles snarled once more before returning to the bed and plopping down on the side of the mattress. He clenched one fist. Raised it above the covers and let it fall. Raised it again, higher, and hit the bed with a solid thump. He would like to pound something more than the mattress. If he could get his hands around the throat of God, he'd strangle him and bring him to his knees. He'd pound him into oblivion for this curse placed upon him.

  Porphyria they called it. "The Old Vampire," they called him, because he was pale and his teeth showed like glistening wet fangs. And as he aged and retreated from the world, his thirst for revenge grew like a strange, alien wildflower in a fertilized pasture.

  Charles reached to the opened book lying on the covers. He lifted the leather volume carefully, smoothing the cream-colored pages. He squinted his eyes and began to read about the legend of the vampire. At first, his reading in this area had just been something to do, a diversion to keep his mind off his infirmities. He had researched the vampire myth to keep his mind busy. Since even his doctors referred to him as one of those creatures, perhaps he could find something within the literature to use to frighten them with. It was one more instance of an old, sick man reaching for a straw, he knew that, but he thought it would be grand to know enough about the myth to play into it when around the specialists who handled his case.

  You want a vampire, he thought. I will give you a vampire.

  After a few months of reading, however, his reason for reading about vampires began to change. Revenge against the medical community went by the wayside. He slowly began to discover traces of what might be truth tucked away in articles and books about vampires. In among the ridiculous fiction, he began to notice bits and pieces of reports in some more scholarly tomes that left him wondering. In one such article, published in a respected journal, he found reports of a "real" vampire who had been discovered. He flipped through the book in his hand until he found the page that contained the reprint.

  A True Vampire Story

  How It All Began …

  This is the story of Arnod Paole, one of the few vampire histories that has been sufficiently documented over the years to lend it historical validity. In the spring of 1727, Arnod Paole returned home from the military to settle in his hometown of Meduegna, near Belgrade. He bought some land, built a home, and began work as a farmer. After a short time, he married a local girl. Her father's land bordered his, and would be a fine addition, so the two were wed. Paole confided to his wife that he was haunted by nightmares. He dreamed that he would die early. In the military, he had been in Greece. Local beliefs there included myths about how the dead came back to haunt the living. They came back in the form of revenants or vampires. While in Greece, and hearing those tales, Paole believed he had been visited by an undead being. Afterward, he hunted down the unholy grave, on the advice of locals. He burned the corpse. However, what he'd done seemed so horrible to him, so frightening, he had to flee Greece. He resigned from the military and went home.

  Soon after marrying, Paole fell from a hayloft, and was brought, comatose, back to his home. Within a few days, and without regaining consciousness, he died and was buried in the town cemetery. A month later reports began to filter through the townspeople claiming Paole had been seen. Some said they'd seen him in their own homes, wandering like a ghost. Some weeks after those reports, many of the people who had seen Paole in their homes died under inexplicable circumstances. This caused the town fathers to sign a petition to exhume Arnod Paole. They must make sure he was dead.

  Two military officers, two army surgeons, and a local priest were called to the task. Upon opening the coffin they found Paole, but there was no decomposition of the body. He had new skin and nails, the old ones having fallen away. And on the corpse's lips they saw wet, fresh blood. They decided they must drive a stake through the body. They swore that when they did it, Paole screamed and fresh blood spilled out. Then they scattered garlic around the remains, and around each of the graves where Paole had sent his newest victims.

  All was quiet until 1732, when more inexplicable deaths began to occur. This time, the whole town went to the graveyard. What they found was written up in books over time, the reports given by three army surgeons, cosigned by a lieutenant colonel, a
nd a sublieutenant. Eleven disinterred corpses showed the same traits as the Paole corpse had earlier. No decomposition, new skin grown, fresh blood in the body. There was never an explanation for the second instance of vampirism, although one theory was that Paole had feasted on local cattle as well as people during his walking dead phase. Perhaps, they said, when the cows were killed for meat, the vampire qualities were consumed and came alive in anyone who ate the meat. It was the only conclusion they could find.

  Charles closed the volume and rested it on his knees. The evidence was sketchy, but it did point toward the possibility there might be something to the old myth. If he'd only found this one piece of truth, he might have dismissed it as hyperbole, as fancy, but he kept turning up more and more information in his studies that claimed there were, in the past and, even today, real vampires. People who had died and were yet not dead. People who lived on as immortals.

  He had brought it up to David on a recent visit. David had scoffed at first, thinking probably that his partner had finally lost his mind to the disease. When he'd seen Charles was serious, he rearranged his face and said quietly, "Is this what you believe?"

  "I don't know what I believe," Charles had responded, tossing aside the book from which he'd quoted. Then he calmed himself and stared at David. "But what if it's true?"

  David had hunched his shoulders as if to say, Well, what if it is?

  Charles knew he'd get nowhere with David. David was a brilliant businessman, shrewd and quite competent, a diplomat with the foreign offices, a super salesman of their oil tankers, but he was no scientist. He lacked imagination. He wasn't open to anything he could not put his hands on and know was real. He hadn't an idea about cell regeneration or the damning effects the porphyria was having on Charles' body. He couldn't imagine how desperate a man could become when the world shunned him and he was shut off from view, hiding behind closed doors and drawn drapes. He didn't know that a man needed . . . hope. However small and illogical it might seem to others, Charles was grasping for the hope he might survive his debilitating and fatal disease. Some way. Any way. Even if it meant turning to old myths and beginning to believe they might hold the secret of life for him.