“We’ve got to get her back to the hotel,” Melanie said.
“How?” Rainier demanded.
Scott stepped forward, sized her up and took aim. He planted a firm right hook on her jaw. Vampire or no, she went down flat.
“That’ll do,” Melanie said. “Until we can take better measures. Rainier, we can’t let her get too close to Scott, we can’t take the chance. Help me. We’ll make it look as if she’s drunk.”
They each slipped an arm around her. She wasn’t walking at all; they had to drag her, but she was slight and small, and it worked. Scott looked around for any of their paraphernalia they might have left, then headed after them, cross at the ready.
They got her to the car easy enough. At the hotel, Melanie explained to Signor Marchetto that her young niece had gotten in with the wrong crowd, and she was going to take care of her.
Scott had the feeling that Marchetto knew the girl wasn’t Melanie’s niece. He also had the feeling that Signor Marchetto knew exactly what Melanie and Rainier were.
They got her to the suite. Rainier set her in one of the upholstered chairs. She lolled back, still out cold.
Scott sat down across the room from her, staring at her and trying to rub away the tension in his neck. She looked like a kid, no more than eighteen or nineteen. Slumped down and unconscious, she could have been a sweet sorority girl, one who’d had a few too many at a fraternity bash.
“Watch out,” Melanie warned.
“She’s just a kid,” Scott said.
“She had enough evil in her for him to be able to use her,” Melanie warned.
“Do bad vamps ever go good?” he asked.
Melanie hesitated, looking at Rainier. He shrugged. “It’s rare, but it’s happened,” he said. “But Mel is right—you have to watch out for her.” He moved as he spoke, and Scott realized that he was ringing her chair with crosses. Melanie took a vial of holy water and splashed that around the chair in a circle, as well.
Scott found himself thinking of something Lucien had said that night in the bar in L.A. The blood of the pure is toxic to the darkness of evil. Strange. Well, he wasn’t pure—and it was damned certain that her fangs scraping his neck hadn’t been at all toxic to her. He had no better idea now of what those cryptic words meant than he had then.
He said them out loud.
“The blood of the pure is toxic to the darkness of evil.”
“What?” Rainier asked him.
“Something Lucien said,” Scott explained.
Rainier smiled grimly. “Well, don’t be worried. You’re hardly pure, and I promise you, we aren’t planning on using you as a human sacrifice.”
Just then the girl began to stir.
Her eyes flew open as she came to. She looked at them, and her face—so sweet and innocent in her stupor—instantly turned into a snarling mask of hatred and venom, teeth bared, fangs glistening and wet. She started to bolt from the chair, then fell back, a growl of fury escaping her.
Rainier said something to her in rapid Italian, and she curled up on the chair, looking coy. “My English is quite excellent,” she told them imperiously, and smiled at Scott. “Americano! Bello Americano.” She leaned forward slightly. “Help me, signor. Help me, per favore. They don’t understand.”
“Can it,” Melody told her. “We all understand perfectly.”
Scott touched his neck without thinking; the scratch was still burning.
The mask of fury quickly returned to her face. She let out a hissing sound and stared at Melanie. “He will make you suffer. He will win, and you will burn and burn. He will take your soul, and your soul will burn in agony. You might have been one of his, but now you will suffer agony forever and ever, when he finally takes you down.”
“Who exactly is he? Where exactly is he, and why doesn’t he have the courage to come out and meet us himself? Why does he use sad lost souls—like you?” Melanie asked.
The girl had big hazel eyes and long blond hair, and she put on a look of great injury. “You hit me. You hurt me,” she told Scott plaintively.
“Sorry.”
She clutched her stomach and bent over suddenly, moaning, then looked up again, a pained look that lacked cunning in her eyes. “I’m hungry. So hungry. The pain is unbearable. You must know,” she said to Melanie.
Melanie looked uncomfortable; Rainier just shrugged. “Si, ha fame. We know the hunger. It is terrible. It burns, and it gets worse and worse.”
“Then…help me,” the girl whispered.
Scott leaned forward. “We intend to help you. But first you have to help us.”
The girl sat back, her face pale and ashen. “He will destroy me.”
“Hey, I was already about to destroy you. Melanie saved you,” Scott said.
“Just help us and we’ll take care of you,” Rainier said. “The hunger will grow worse and worse. It begins slowly, in the pit of your stomach, and then it spreads. It’s like poison ripping through your muscles and bones. Your head aches as if it will explode. It feels as if rats are eating away at your insides.”
She stared at him, stricken at first; then she snarled again. “You don’t know anything. Rats! That’s what you’ll be, all of you, rats in a cage, tearing one another up, cannibals. Not just the monsters like you, either, but all of those who think they’re so good. One thing will happen, and then another. The earth will tremble, and all the dead and undead he has drawn to him will spew forth. He has created the doorways for us, and his essence will come out and possess those who think they are so good, so holy, and they will be like rats!”
Scott felt his blood run cold at the venom of her words. The hairs at the base of his neck began to rise. But he forced his voice to stay calm when he told her, “But first you’ll writhe in agony. You’ll want to die, but you won’t be able to. You’re starving now, aren’t you?”
“Of course she’s starving,” Melanie said. “She thinks that her dark commander will gain control of us, but he’s had control of her and the others like her for a long time.” She turned to the girl. “He’s used you as cruel men have used dogs throughout the years, starving them before a hunt.”
The girl blinked, snarled. She was out of arguments.
A moment later, she let out a cry, gripping her stomach.
Melanie strode into her room, and Scott watched her go. She returned immediately with one of the bottles from her refrigerator—the ones that didn’t contain cherry soda.
She sat down in front of the girl, slowly uncapped it and sipped, letting a little sigh of complete pleasure escape her.
The girl started to surge forward, then screamed, her flesh suddenly sizzling, as she tried to burst through the ring of crosses and holy water.
She began to spew every oath imaginable at Melanie, obscenity raining down upon obscenity. Melanie only smiled and watched her. She didn’t move a muscle.
Scott glanced at Rainier, who gave him a barely perceptible nod, telling him to try whatever tack he thought might work.
Scott moved in closer, keeping his distance just outside the edge of the circle. “We know so much already—and, in case you haven’t noticed yet, we took on your boss’s army of bones and bloodsuckers, and won. We know that he has evil escaping from fissures across the world.”
“There are a lot of us out here,” Rainier said. “Your leader doesn’t have that much strength, because he’s just a demon. Just a demon, trying to prove his worth to Satan. He has to start this ball of destruction rolling, or he’ll be an outcast before his own vile kind. He has used his base below the church for a long, long time, and he has worked hard to animate the bones of the long dead. As to your kind…I’m assuming he started beckoning you with promises of an eternal place where hunger and every vile expression of greed, lust and vanity were free to be reveled in forever.”
“But we can kill your kind, and we will,” Scott said.
She snarled suddenly and let out a laugh that was unearthly and unnerving. “He is killing your Ora
cle. The old hag! She will die. He enters her dreams, and he lets her know that she has failed. He makes her believe that she will betray you, and because she believes it, it will happen, and you will all die even before the end of days. I think that’s too kind. I think you should be destroyed slowly. You should suffer. You should starve. Perhaps he will manage that. Or perhaps he’ll send you swiftly into the fires of eternal damnation, just to rid himself of the annoyance you cause.”
Melanie stood up, casting her head back languidly and draining the last drop from her bottle of blood. She licked her lips, staring at the girl. “One a day. Just a pint. And the world is wonderful. Food tastes good, and wine with it. And there’s no pain. We cause no pain, and we don’t feel any. It’s a great way to live. We don’t have to hunt anyone down, so we don’t risk a stake, a lynch mob, and no one wants to lop off our heads…. But we do stop murderers of any kind, and we will kill you, if that’s what’s necessary.” She smiled.
“Know what? A nice meal sounds pretty good to me right now. We should check out the dining room here.”
“I could definitely eat something,” Rainier said.
“Sounds good to me,” Scott agreed.
They started out of the room.
“No, come back here. Per piacere!” the girl cried. “You can’t leave me here like this. You can’t let me starve.” They kept heading for the door. “I’ll scream. I’ll bring the servants, and I’ll eat them up when they come to help me. And then the foolish politizia will arrest you! So let me go. Let me go this instant!”
They stepped into the hall and closed the door.
“We’re really just going to leave her?” Scott asked.
“No…give it a minute,” Melanie said.
They heard the girl sobbing then. Terrible sobs that tore at Scott’s heart. She still looked like a kid—when she wasn’t baring her teeth.
“Come back! Please, I’ll tell you…I’ll tell you where to find him,” she cried.
They opened the door to the suite and went back in. The girl was strained, her features contorted. There were tears streaming down her cheeks.
Scott stood in front of her again, making sure to stay outside the circle that kept her in her chair. “Look, I’m very sorry for you, despite the fact that you were determined to make a meal of me. I’d like to help you, but I know that you’ll just lie, no matter what we ask you.”
She began to rattle off a flurry of oaths in Italian then.
“She isn’t going to help us,” Melanie said. “I say we stake her right here, right now.”
“No,” the girl moaned softly. “No, no, no, no.”
“Like I said, I’d really like to help you,” Scott said. “But my friends…they seem to know your kind better than I do.”
She stopped crying for a moment, looking at him with a sudden cunning in her eyes. “They’re the evil ones. You can’t see it, because they’ve blinded you. They will kill you and cut you to pieces, drink your blood and eat your flesh. They’ve seduced you, and now they’re just waiting for their chance to strike. You think they’re your friends, but they’re not.”
“They can stop the hunger, the pain,” Scott said. “They can give you sustenance.”
She leaned toward him. “So can you,” she told him. A flash of coquettish mischief touched her eyes. Scott hadn’t realized how close he had leaned in until she jerked forward and almost sank her teeth into his neck. He threw himself back behind the invisible walls of her prison.
“We really should stake her—now,” Maggie warned.
“No!” The girl sat up and looked at Maggie with a hate-filled gaze, and yet she spoke with a real plea in her voice.
“Please,” she moaned.
Rainier looked at Scott, shaking his head. “She isn’t giving us anything. I think we do have to destroy her. It’s going to be messy, though. She’s a young vampire. She won’t just disappear in a cloud of dust. She’ll become a pretty nasty corpse, and we’ll have to get her out of here.”
“No, no, please, you can trust me,” the girl said. Suddenly she was speaking in a rush. “My name is Celia. Celia Mero. I was at a club down off the Spanish Steps when…I don’t know who made me, but I just wanted to get through my last year of school here and go to America for college. I learned my English well, yes? I am not…bad.
“Haven’t you ever known the hunger?” the girl whispered.
“Yes, I have,” Melanie said. “We all know it, we all feel it. And some of us make the choice to sate that hunger without killing. I don’t think you were a killer before you became one of us. I think you were a flirt, a tease, but a normal girl. You went to a club, where you met someone who wasn’t normal. He turned you, and he taught you to be cruel, taught you that the only way to ease the pain was to kill. He left you open to the demon’s influence. You’re still young—in life and in death. You might have had a chance to find a place among those of us who have learned the way and are always ready to welcome others. You might still. But you have to be strong. You weren’t strong when it happened. But you didn’t know—you couldn’t know. He is not one of us. He calls to those who are hungry, those who are afraid, and those who are cruel now just as they were cruel in life, and he makes them seduce and kill for him. Those who are long dead no longer have souls to offer up, but he can make their remains dance to his tune, make them do battle for him. Many prophecies have warned that this time will come, but they have also said that we who have free will can fight—and win.”
Celia stared at Melanie dully. “He doesn’t have to force his minions to seduce and kill. We do it for fun, just like him. Don’t you understand? He can kill you no matter what you do, because he can slip into your mind. He makes you see things, feel things, believe things.”
“We know that,” Scott told her. “But what you must believe is that he can be fought.”
Celia glared at him. She looked worn out, beaten. “How? How can you fight him when he comes first as if he is gentle and charming, handsome to a fault? How can you fight what starts off as comfortable as a pillow? As a whisper? When he welcomes you in, and you find that you’re where you belong, and there are others like you?” she whispered.
“We can help you,” Melanie said. “You saw that—I have what you want, what you need. But you have to give us what we need first.”
Celia looked at them and shook her head. “You two…” she said to Melanie and Rainier. “He will destroy you. You should be his already, but you’ve fought him. And you—” she broke off to stare at Scott “—you’re already as good as dead, and you just don’t know it.”
“Believe what you want. I know that I will fight him tooth and nail—and win,” Scott told her.
Melanie let out a long sigh. “Should we give her more time? Or just get it over with now?”
Again, the girl started to sob.
Lucien had chosen to fly, in order to save his energy. But because he was traveling at the last minute, he hadn’t been able to get a direct flight. Now he was flying against time, and the day was waning.
Perhaps flying had been a mistake.
Because he hadn’t been able to close his eyes without seeing not his own dream, but the Oracle’s. He had closed his eyes, and somewhere in her heart, Sister Maria Elizabeta had cried out to him, knowing that the demon was in her mind, in her dream. And the demon was growing stronger, making it hard for him to reach her in time.
He had barely made it, and now he was exhausted.
He glanced at his watch. Two more hours. Two more hours and he would be there.
Scott opened his eyes. Somewhere along the way he’d fallen into a doze.
Celia had been crying. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she sat inside her prison of crosses, holy water and belief.
“Scott, you must get away quickly. She’s going to kill you. Don’t you see? She’s a vampire, an old vampire. She’s been using you. Don’t you know? Haven’t you seen? She’s playing with you. Defend yourself!”
He turne
d swiftly. Beside his chair, Melanie was on her knees. Beautiful, sleek, as graceful and sinuous as a cat. She was reaching for him, her lips parting, and he could see her fangs as they glistened in the stray beam of moonlight that fought its way through the shadows.
Fear shot through him like a bolt of electricity. He started to jump up; there was a sharpened cross by his side, and his fingers curled around it.
But…
Distantly, so distantly, he heard the demon’s laughter.
He turned away from the image of Melanie, wondering if he’d killed her in his dream, would she have died in reality.
“Bull,” he told Celia flatly. Except that she wasn’t real, either, he realized. She was just something that Bael had somehow made him see in his mind.
She faded away. In her place he saw red glowing eyes that seemed to hover in front of him, staring, before fading away. Bael. Scott smelled something disgusting, like burning flesh, and then…
14
The plane landed. Lucien couldn’t afford the time to go through customs or to deal with his baggage, so he didn’t.
He closed his eyes for a moment, imagining himself as wind and air, moving swiftly through time and space.
Shape shifting. Not all vampires could do it. But he was old. He had learned a lot through the years, and he knew that he was strong.
He hoped he was strong enough.
He opened his eyes and saw the church hidden in the woods along the Apia Antica. He heard the chants of the nuns as they let their prayers rise toward the heavens.
He saw Sister Maria Elizabeta lying on the pew, barely breathing—and barely blinking. She did not want to fall asleep again.
He burst through the doorway of the church, and everything was as he had seen it in his dreams, as he had known it before, so many years ago. Sister Ana leapt up as he entered, like a true soldier, though she knew she might face certain death.
“He’s come!” Sister Maria Elizabeta gasped out. “Don’t be afraid. The Oracle has come.”