THE VAMPIRE APOCALYPSE: BOOK ONE--REVELATIONS PRELUDE
Beautiful. It had been a long time since he had
seen such beauty.
She lay sleeping on a small bed where she was supposed
to be safe, her black hair spread over a pink flowered pillowcase, black
lashes against ivory cheeks. Six years old, he thought. She might
remember. He wished he could have found her earlier, so all that happened
tonight would be forgotten.
He knelt beside the bed. She’d dropped her teddy
bear onto the pink carpet. He picked it up and held it a moment, looking
into the empty gaze of its plastic eyes. Gently, he laid it aside.
His fingers touched her throat, just below her ear,
feeling her pulse. It pattered beneath his touch, a child’s heartbeat.
If there had been any doubt she was the one, it disappeared as her blood
moved beneath his fingers. A soft tingle passed over his skin.
Three, perhaps four humans out of nearly six billion,
and he’d found one. He couldn’t help but smile at the wonder of it.
She opened her eyes. His smile faded as fear
touched her face.
“Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.” The compulsion
in his voice quieted her, and she lay still, looking at him in wonderment.
“Don’t be afraid.”
He touched her face, then bent to her, and put his
teeth in her throat.
ONE
Lorelei Fletcher was in over her head. She should
have followed her instincts from the beginning. Too late for that now—she
just hoped she could get the hell out of here somehow.
On any other night but Halloween, she never would have
followed Dina east of Tompkins Square Park, dance club or no dance club.
But Halloween and her vampire costume made her feel invincible, so she’d
agreed.
They’d never made it to the dance club. Instead,
following directions given Dina by her latest boyfriend, they’d ended up
here. In a bizarre tenement building where all the rooms seemed to be
connected, and where no hallway seemed to be the same shape from moment to
moment. Lorelei was beginning to wonder if the weird smell in the place
was some kind of hallucinogen.
It would, at least, be a logical explanation for why
everyone was so weird.
Everybody in the place was dressed like a vampire.
It hadn’t seemed strange at first. It was Halloween, after all.
Lorelei herself made a stunning vampiress, or so she thought, with her black
hair and naturally milky complexion. But, unlike the weirdoes at this
party, she only played vampire one day a year.
She had to admit the image of the vampire intrigued
her, sometimes to the point of obsession. She could spend days watching
every vampire movie she could find, tracing dim, elusive memories. In
twenty years, she hadn’t found a mirror to the scene she remembered from childhood.
But compared to these nuts, she was a paragon of sanity.
She’d been accosted half a dozen times by guys with
razor blades, and, looking for the bathroom, she’d stumbled into a couple
of leather-clad women sucking each other’s wrists with an enthusiasm Lorelei
reserved for sex or good chocolate. She’d heard about things like this,
but she’d never really believed people could be so freaky. So much
for unbridled optimism.
She wished she knew where Dina was. Lorelei had
lost track of her about an hour ago, when they’d split up to find the front
door. They were supposed to meet at a designated bathroom fifteen minutes
later, but Lorelei hadn’t seen Dina since. Nor had she seen the front
door.
Somewhere a clock began to strike. Lorelei looked
at her watch. Midnight. A woman in a bright red cape brushed
by her. A coppery smell of blood drifted in her wake.
“Excuse me,” Lorelei said, but the woman only cast
a grin over her shoulder and kept walking.
“Thank you so much.” Lorelei came to a halt and
crossed her arms. This was ridiculous. She could swear she’d
been down this stretch of hallway at least twice. Where the hell had
the front door gone? She thought a minute. If she went this way,
she should end up back at the bathroom...
“No!”
The voice, faint but frantic, seemed to come from around
a bend in the hall. Lorelei froze. Had it been—?
“No! Stop it, Nicky!”
“Dina!” Lorelei broke into a run.
“Get your hands off me, you bastard!”
“Dina!” Lorelei ran full-tilt into the closed
door. She was certain it was the bathroom—or a bathroom—and behind
it Dina’s voice rose, frantic.
“No! Nicky, no!” The voice sobbed now,
in terror.
Lorelei slammed herself into the door. “Dina!
Dina, hang on!”
Hang on to what? Lorelei had no idea what was
going on. Her breath tore in her throat, heaving toward panic.
Visions of razor blades and blood swam in her vision. She smashed herself
again and again into the door until she thought her shoulder would shatter.
Suddenly the door came open with the sickening sound of splintering wood.
There was Dina. There were no razor blades, but
there was blood.
A big, dark-haired man had her pinned against the wall,
face buried in the bend of her throat. Of course, Lorelei thought fleetingly.
If they thought they were vampires, of course they’d go for the throat.
Shallow cuts, probably, like the wrist cuts.
“Get away from her, you freak!” Lorelei grabbed
the man by the shoulder and dragged at him, trying to haul him off Dina.
But he was heavy, and stronger than she could have imagined...
Panic clawed up her throat. This wasn’t like
the wrist-sucking girls in the bathroom. Something more was going
on here. The room reeked of blood. From this angle, Lorelei
could see it, winding in a thick, red line down Dina’s bare shoulder, down
the length of her arm, dripping steadily from the end of her index finger.
Dina’s head was thrown back, the man’s mouth fastened to her throat...
He was killing her.
Lorelei struck him again, fruitlessly. Then,
so deep into panic she had no awareness of it anymore, she grabbed a handful
of his silky black hair and jerked as hard as she could.
The man’s head snapped back. Blood sprayed everywhere.
He turned toward Lorelei as Dina’s body slumped down to the floor, filling
the small room with a rhythmic spray of blood that suddenly subsided.
The man grabbed Lorelei’s hair on either side of her
face, holding her riveted. She’d thought the paleness of his skin
was makeup, skillfully applied. Now she saw it was only his skin,
smooth, seamless, painfully white. He opened his blood-filled mouth
and she saw white again, slender fangs.
Then his head bent to her throat.
***
Julian Cavanaugh had been sitting in the alley for
hours, chain smoking and smelling blood. He came here every Halloween,
to remind himself of what he'd been, and what he'd become.
Sometimes he wondered why he did it. With the
blood-smell in his nostrils the craving became almost unbearable even with
the aid of the cigarettes, which weren’t exactly over-the-counter Marlboros.
But if he could sit here from dusk until dawn, smelling the blood and not
giving into the need, he knew he could make it another year.
As of tonight, it would be two hundred and thirty-six.
Sometimes he thought it was a waste of time, namely
the hours he invested every week making the cigarettes. The tobacco
he could buy at the mall, nicely dried and prepared, but three of the other
ingredients were herbs which, as far as he knew, had been extinct on this
planet for a millennium. Except for the few plants preserved by a Native
American shaman, given to him by a god of blood, then passed on to Julian
two hundred and thirty-six years ago.
Deep, throaty laughter came from a second-story window.
Julian recognized the voice. Nicholas had been made a vampire three
years ago tonight, during the annual Halloween bloodbash. Vivian had
made him. As Julian recalled, she’d found him in a bar and brought
him home for the party. It was strange to Julian how many humans were
willing to come, to slash their wrists and lap each others’ blood, pretending
to be something they couldn’t begin to imagine.
Julian lit another cigarette from the tip of the butt
in his mouth and listened to Nicholas’ low laughter, his voice. A woman
answered him, first laughing with him, then, suddenly, in fear.
“No. No, Nicky, I told you I don’t want to play
your freaky games.”
“It’ll be easy. Nothing to it. It won’t
even hurt.”
“Get your hands off me—”
“Just relax, baby.”
“No!”
Julian closed his eyes tight and sucked hard on the
cigarette. He’d promised himself a long time ago to stay out of the
business of other vampires. But he hated to hear the taking of an unwilling
victim.
He should get up and walk away. Inside, the voices
rose. Another woman’s voice screamed from the other side of the door.
Julian snubbed the cigarette against the brick wall and put the butt in his
jacket pocket. Gathering himself, he leapt, catching the sill and
levering himself up on it. The cigarettes had stilled the need for
blood, but hadn’t affected his strength.
The victim’s head lolled against the partly-open window.
All Julian could see was a mass of gold-brown hair and Nicholas’ face pressed
into her neck. Julian grabbed the window and shoved upward. He
should have moved faster. Now it was too late to save her.
Suddenly the bathroom door burst inward and another
woman half-fell into the room. With an astonishing show of strength,
she tore Nicholas away from the dying blonde woman. And Nicholas, predictably,
turned on her.
Julian launched himself through the window and onto
Nicholas’ back, breaking him loose from his victim and knocking him to the
floor. The woman fell in a heap to the ground, all pale skin and black
hair, unconscious, not from blood loss, but from the beginning of the vampire’s
trance. Her throat had been pricked, but not penetrated.
Nicholas, interrupted at the beginning of a new feed,
stumbled. Julian grabbed his shoulder and shoved him down. The
younger vampire glared up at him, eyes glinting black.
“You,” he said, his voice still wet with blood from
the first girl.
“How observant,” said Julian dryly.
Nicholas leaped at him. Julian hadn’t expected
that and he threw up an arm to ward Nicholas off, but he landed hard against
him, threw a punch that smashed Julian’s lip against his teeth. The
taste of his own blood made Julian momentarily dizzy.
“Stop,” he said, his voice pitched low and deep.
Nicholas stopped. He was young, his three years
no match for Julian’s eight centuries. “Why?”
“There’s a Call out for you, man.”
Julian stared. There had been no Call put out
for a vampire for nearly two centuries. But under the compulsion, Nicholas
had no choice but to tell the truth.
“Sleep,” Julian said finally, and Nicholas slumped
to the floor.
Julian turned to the dark-haired woman. She was
alive. He could still help her. It was far too late for the other
woman. All he could do was get away from the smell of her blood as
quickly as possible. Gently, he lifted the living woman from the floor.
***
At home in the deep darkness of the early morning,
Julian put the woman in one of the spare bedrooms and tucked the blankets
around her. She'd be safe here until daybreak, if he could protect
her from himself.
Not that he was much of a threat at the moment.
His head ached from the effort of holding a compulsion over the cab driver
who’d brought them here. It was the only way he could get the unconscious
woman from the fringes of the vampire colony to his house in Connecticut
without awkward questions. The pain faded slowly as he knelt next to
the bed to watch her.
Her soft breathing and the slight movement of her eyes
under closed lids reassured him. The vampire trance seemed not to have
damaged her, seemed to be wearing off and weakening in the usual manner.
He touched her face, telling himself he was checking her temperature, the
texture of her skin, to judge her recovery. In truth, he only wanted
to touch her. Blood pulsed just below her skin, a tickle of sensation
under his fingers.
Leave her. Leave her before you kill her.
It was the best advice he’d heard all day. He
forced himself away from her bedside. She’d be safe alone. Safer,
even. He went downstairs, out onto the porch, and lit a cigarette.
“You have no idea.”
Startled, Julian dropped the cigarette he’d just lit.
“Show yourself,” he said, putting as much force into
the compulsion as he could while fumbling for the cigarette. The last
thing he needed was attention from his neighbors and setting his lawn on
fire would definitely bring that. Not to mention each butt represented
a half-hour of labor.
The voice came closer, laughing now, as a dark, hulking
shadow came into view. A human figure, yet not human, face shadowed
by the long, dark cloak that obscured the outlines of the rest of his body.
“Your voice tricks won’t work on me,” he went on.
“You’re far too young.”
He was right. Julian could feel it now, the age
rolling off the other vampire in waves, the power behind it. Julian
had only felt such a thing in the presence of the Senior. There was
no vampire older or more powerful than the Senior.
But this one was, and this one was not the Senior.
“Who are you?” Julian took a deep drag on the
cigarette. The appearance of the stranger had driven most of the thoughts
about the woman out of his head. The blast of smoke did the rest.
The stranger turned. Moonlight touched part of
his face, illuminating his jaw, one corner of his mouth. He smiled.
“I think the greater question is, ‘Who are you?’ Or, more precisely,
who are you becoming?”
The smoke had eased him, but the other vampire’s presence
tingled over his skin and through his blood like an electric shock.
Julian could barely hear over the drone of it. Still, the outrageous
words penetrated.
“I don’t understand.”
The other vampire reached toward Julian, plucked the
smoldering cigarette from his lips.
“How does it work, do you think?” He held the
cigarette up. Julian stared at the waning spark on the end of it, then
at the vampire’s big, long fingers. They tilted the cigarette back
to Julian. “Take it.”
Julian had it back between his lips before he realized
the order had been spoken as compulsion, so practiced and delicate, Julian
had barely felt the manipulation.
The other vampire shifted a little, seeming to come
closer, though in truth he'd barely moved at all.
“Have you thought about it at all? Why a vampire
must feed, and how you've been able to go so many years without?”
“How do you know me?”
“I make it my business to know. Answer.”
Julian opened his mouth, then closed it. He’d
expected the compulsion again, but there was none this time. The vampire
had merely spoken, in his deep voice with its odd, undefinable accent.
So Julian took a moment to think.
“The blood is alive. It’s the only thing within
us that is. When it dies, it must be replenished.” He paused
to take a long drag on the cigarette, feeling the nicotine and herb-smoke
rush through him—throat, lungs, blood—tingling to the tips of his fingers.
“The nicotine, the smoke, the herbs, whatever they are—the stimulation keeps
the blood alive, I think.”
The other vampire smiled again. “Ironic, isn’t
it, that something that would kill a living human sustains the undead.”
“Fitting, though.” Julian couldn’t restrain his
sarcasm. This stranger tried his patience. “Somehow I think there’s
more to it than that.”
This time the other vampire did step forward, a long,
powerful step. The movement brought his face partly out of shadow,
showing the bridge of a long, slightly misshapen nose and the piercing gray
of eyes so old even Julian couldn’t comprehend it.
“Yes, there’s more to it. More than you can possibly
understand.” He fell silent, his stillness like that of stone.
“I watch you. Always.”
And he disappeared.
Julian stared at the place where he'd been and sucked
the last bit of life out of his cigarette.
“Great,” he muttered. “That’s just what I need.”