LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) (12 page)

To hell with fair. She'd been granted supernatural powers and decades on Earth to use them. It would be stupid to ignore her abilities. She wanted to test them.

She narrowed her eyes to slits and turned inward. She visualized Ryan behind her. His forest-green pullover T-shirt, his new denim jeans, his hands crossed on his desk, a class ring on his right hand from North Dallas. Although he would graduate now from Lyndon B. Johnson, his ring would be from the other school. It must be hard for him to change schools that way, right at the end. She imagined his face, his eyes on her back as she carefully breathed. Easy, easy, she told herself. Slip in easy so he won't know.

And then she was there, reading his thoughts, not shocked by how jumbled they were. Her parents had explained about that. How it wasn't as easy to read people as she thought. The brain, they said, was a storm of activity and thoughts were like snowflakes in a blizzard, flying everywhere, each snowflake a connecting thought to another until the ground of the brain was covered with hills and valleys of thoughts layered and packed down like snow in drifts.

She heard Ryan's thoughts as if they were being whispered in her ear. She got a snippet of this and one of that. She was not gifted enough in mind reading to be able to follow the several streams of thoughts in their completeness. She caught tail ends and bits and pieces . . . wonder if it's satin . . . long hair, I like long hair, why do most girls cut off their hair anyway? . . . she's so still . . . like a statue . . . breathing so gently . . . wait, is she even breathing? . . .

He had wondered if her blouse was made of satin. Silk, she could have told him. She'd given up her usual sweatshirt and jeans today in favor of a sky-blue silk blouse and a short tropical-printed skirt. She was a different person. She felt like dressing differently now.

He liked her hair long. She resisted an urge to slide her hand behind her neck and lift her hair up to let it fall. She knew it would catch the light and shine if she did that. Her hair, as unmanageable as it was, was almost metallic, like crinkled gold foil, when caught in a certain light.

Though she could read what he was thinking, she knew it was morally irresponsible to act on that knowledge for personal gain or ego. So she did not reach out and lift her hair for his benefit. For a full two minutes. Then, smiling, feeling happy she had the power to play with people even if it was not exactly fair, she reached back and lifted her long hair, letting it fall softly across her shoulders and cascade down her back again. That would get his attention.

And he had wondered why she was so still and if he'd really noticed she wasn't breathing for a time.

God!

She had lapsed in her breathing. How dangerous it was out here in the public view where she must be completely human and normal again. She must not let that happen again. This one time Ryan (and anyone else behind her who might have noticed) would put it down to their imaginations. She must be breathing, they just couldn't see her doing it, that's all. But if she made this mistake very often, someone somewhere, maybe even Ryan, would call attention to it, or even ask her outright—Why aren't you breathing? How can you not breathe?

She tumbled away from contact with Ryan's mind and concentrated only on her breathing. She took a deep breath, in fact, and let it out in a little quiet whoosh. There. Let him see that. Let him not wonder and puzzle over things that were none of his business.

Dell smiled again, and bit the inside of her lip. At least he was interested enough in her to be staring. He had noticed her. Probably only because she sat in front of him, but still . . . he liked her hair. He had wondered what her shirt was made of.

Then darkness surrounded her thoughts and she fell into a deep depression while her history teacher's voice droned in the background and the seconds ticked off on the schoolhouse clock on the wall above his head. It didn't matter if Ryan noticed her or not. He shouldn't, really. And she shouldn't care. They had no future, not even as friends.

Chancellor, her history teacher, was saying something about a myth concerning living forever, about eternity. She came to suddenly, focusing on his words. They had been studying the myths of primitive South American and African tribes for the past week. She guessed his recital now had something to do with it.

Chancellor said, "The Namibian people tell their children about the hare and the moon to teach a lesson about the afterlife. The hare asked the moon if the moon would ever die. The moon said that he rose each night without fail and the hare could live forever, too, if only he believed. The hare said that he could not believe in the eternal, he had seen too many of his kind die, sometimes horrible deaths, and they did not rise again to live.

"The moon told the hare that even though his fellow hares did not appear to be alive, nevertheless, they lived; no one could see them, that was all. Like when the moon disappeared in the daylight—it had not gone forever, but only for a time. The hare said he could not believe in eternity and so he guessed he would really die, no matter what the moon said. The Namibian parents told their children this story and it was the reason why animals and men appeared to die now and not live again. But the moon was eternal, riding the sky forever, because he believed that he would. And despite the way it looked, men and animals also lived on, invisible, but eternal."

Chancellor ended the story and asked for a show of hands from any students who knew of other myths of eternal life held by primitive people.

Dell, touched by the story of the Namibians, lowered her head and thought it all out. The myth was right. That's what her teacher did not know. Not only was the moon eternal, but all that lived beneath it, even the hares. And some of the eternal life walked among the living as if alive, too, and no one was the wiser. She was now an eternal creature, but even if she'd remained human and died human, she would have only been invisible, and not gone forever.

When the bell rang, indicating the end of class, Dell gathered her books and headed for the door, the thoughts of the Namibian tale still puzzling her. She felt someone tap her on the shoulder in the hall and she turned.

"Hi," he said. "My name's Ryan. You're Della?"

"Just Dell," she said. "My mom named me after a singer she liked." A lump rose in her throat to prevent her from speaking anymore. She'd had a few boyfriends, nothing serious, but she could not remember being this attracted or tongue-tied. Ridiculous, she told herself. Stop being so damn ridiculous.

Despite her own growing sense of foolishness, she sent out an intense thought that she knew would be embedded in his mind. Dell's special. Dell's the one for me. She couldn't help herself. She found him so attractive she felt she had to make sure he thought of her in the same way.

She said, clearing her throat first, "You're from North Dallas? How do you like it here?"

He fell into an easy walk at her side. "I like it just fine," he said. "Particularly all the different kinds of kids here. It's like being in another world." He gestured mildly toward some of the kids dressed in black walking in front of them.

Dell glanced over at him to see if he was for real. He liked the outcasts? He thought them cool? Kids who were only making their lives harder and cutting themselves off from whole groups of people?

"Really?" she said. Then she laughed, thinking how odd she was. "Well, we have a lot of different kinds of kids here, that's for sure."

They parted ways when she turned into her next classroom and his own class was in another wing of the school. "Nice to meet you, Dell," he said, as he sprinted away in order to beat the bell.

She stood watching him go and thought to herself, Yeah, nice to meet you, too. Now she knew for sure he liked her. So what was she going to do about that, beyond the thought she'd implanted? What could she do?

She could hardly wait for her meeting with Mentor after school. She was to go to his house every day where he would train and guide her until she was ready to go on her own. The first thing she would ask was about a vampire's personal life. Her responsibility to humans and her interaction with them. She really needed guidance. She hoped there was no strict rule against relationships with humans, especially since she would be walking and living among them. She envisioned a dreary thousand-year life without them.

~*~

The first thing that struck Dell on entering Mentor's house was how dark it was. He must have read her mind for he said, "I can turn on the lights if you'd like." He hit a switch that caused an overhead light to come on, though she noticed it was a small, sparkly chandelier holding three small bulbs. It gave out a weak glow that hardly chased the dark away. Shadows retreated, but not far, cringing in the corners of the room.

"No, the light doesn't bother me," he said as if she'd asked him a question. He motioned for her to sit on a sofa near the fireplace. "I've become accustomed to the dark. The sunlight won't bother you for long either. You'll be able to dispose of those soon."

Dell removed her sunglasses, folding the stems carefully and placing them in her lap. "I went back to school today."

"How did it go?" He sounded cheerful as he settled into an opposite sofa, stuffing a pillow behind his back.

"Okay, I guess. One of my best friends asked why I was wearing the sunglasses, but no one else seemed to care. Lots of kids wear them in school."

"Do they?"

"Yeah, sure. Kids into. . . well, alternative thinking, you might say. You know."

He smiled indulgently. "Well, contrary to common belief, I don't really know everything, Dell. I haven't been inside a high school in quite a few years."

She shrugged. "Okay, well, there's some kids who are outside the mainstream. They keep to themselves, they wear different kinds of clothes to distinguish them from others. They wear heavy eye makeup and sunglasses all day. Some of them . . ." she paused, wondering how he would take this, ". . . some of them want to be vampires." She hurried on, seeing his eyebrows raise, "They're just all disillusioned, kind of like the hippies in the Sixties, I guess. The Establishment sucks, that sort of thing. The really sad ones cut themselves on their arms. I don't know if it's for the pain, like they like it . . ." She shrugged. ". . . and sometimes they let others drink their blood, but it looks pretty dangerous to me. Some of them get their teeth filed down. Stuff like that. I always wanted to take them aside and tell them they shouldn't want to act that way. They should love walking in the sunlight and take good care of their bodies. They shouldn't want to live forever on nothing but blood; it's not natural."

She didn't know she'd thought all these things until she just now confessed them to Mentor. It was as if he drew things out of her, her deepest and most private thoughts. It could be a trick, but she suspected it was not. She was simply comfortable with him and knew he had her best interests at heart. She guessed that this was how people felt when they went to shrinks and talked openly about their problems.

That he did not know about the pretend-vampires at her school did not surprise her. Though they had been in the news now and then, most people just tried to pretend they didn't exist. She'd heard about a case where a "vampire" boy in the Northeast lost touch with reality and murdered his parents while they slept. He had self-inflicted cuts all over his arms, and he said vampirism gave him "freedom." She didn't think Mentor paid really close attention to what was going on in society, especially among the youth.

Mentor shifted uneasily on the sofa, stuffing the pillow at his back again. He said, "I didn't know some of your contemporaries were heading in that direction. Like you, I think that's a dangerous road to take. I suppose, because of the way the vampire is romanticized in American entertainment, it would be only natural for the disenchanted to rush toward the unknown, to seek it out, and to make it their own. The young have a way of finding something they think is new to believe in."

"What was that noise?" Dell asked abruptly, sitting forward on the sofa. It was from down below, in his basement, a terrible moaning. All her nerve ends began to tingle, and it was as if her brain came alert, red lights blinking in all corners of her mind as it checked for danger.

"Would you like to see for yourself?" He rose and took her hand. He led her to the kitchen and the basement door.

"No one I know in Texas has a basement," she said, fascinated.

"This was constructed especially for me. I felt it would come in handy. In rainy seasons it weeps a little, but otherwise it seems to do well."

She followed him down the narrow stairs into the soft gloom. There was a small lamp on an old wooden table along the wall facing the stairs, but it illuminated little. The place was damp and cool and smelled like wet metal. She sensed a being in the basement and knew he was their kind, but she was curious as to what he was doing in Mentor's basement and wondered at the despairing moan she'd heard.

Mentor stepped aside at the bottom of the stairs and put his arm around her shoulder. She looked over at the pitiful creature chained to the concrete wall. He lifted his head and opened his eyes. "Do you have to chain her, too?" he asked.

Reading her mind, Mentor said, "Dolan here almost did away with himself and the whole house of Cravens where he was living. I have talked him out of those desperate actions. Haven't I, Dolan?"