Page 51 of The Undead

When I’d been vacationing with relatives in New Mexico once, I’d come upon a local sport, invented by children with natural cleverness and natural cruelty. My cousin had found a Mexican brown scorpion in the desert. He and the other children built a fire, cleared a little circle in the center of it, and dumped the scorpion in. It ran in scuttling terror from the fire, turning in confused circles while the heat baked and boiled it. The stinger rose and fell, glistening with suicidal poison, a convulsive self-mutilation that went on and on until the body had slowly collapsed and life had left it. My cousin had turned to me, flushed with the heat and excitement, and slapped me on the shoulder.

I’d shoved him out of the way and lost my lunch all over the New Mexico sand. I remembered the incident vividly now, looking at Adam, at the quiet human fear and well-disguised rage in his eyes. The skin under his eyes looked bruised and darkly translucent. I could sense the horror turning under those eyes, the knowledge that he was prisoner of something far older, far stronger—as the scorpion had been prisoner of the fire, and my cousin.

“I understand,” I told him unevenly. He nodded and looked away, no special expression on his face. “You said you thought you’d killed him, Sylvia.”

“Adam brought me home after my—my troubles. He stayed with us for a while, me and my father and my sister Krista. He kept talking about leaving, but it was hard for us … Anyway, one night while be was gone, William came with two of his—converts. They killed my father right off, but they kept me and Krista alive, waiting for Adam; William gave him a choice, you see, my life or Krista’s. I don’t remember much of what happened.” Sylvia’s dark eyes filled with tears, but the effect wasn’t softening. Under the water her eyes were as cold and dark as the night sky. “She was only sixteen, Michael. There wasn’t much left of her to bury”

Adam’s eyes flared briefly, brown to red, and subsided. He let go of Sylvia and nervously retied his hair in a ponytail, fingers working with quick, elegant gestures. It was meant to distract me from the way his eyes were changing, an automatic misdirection that he probably no longer even controlled.

“Sylvia burned the house down when the sun came up and we all slept. She got me out. William couldn’t have gotten away; even if he had, the sun would have caught him. He would have died.”

“He didn’t,” she said flatly, and stood up. The blanket slid down with a woolly hiss to the floor, an oatmeal-colored lump that looked like a twisted body. “You knew that, didn’t you? You let me go on thinking everything was all right, that we’d won, and you knew we hadn’t. You knew he’d come back. You lied to me.”

“No,” Adam said, but the word was bare and unadorned by any kind of emotional sincerity. She took her anger and focused it on him with the directness and power of a laser.

“No? Bullshit, Adam. You knew, you used me, you let him stalk us and you never even told me—”

“I didn’t!” he shouted, and came out of the chair like a striking snake. I pressed myself further into the embrace of the sofa, but Sylvia didn’t flinch, though she must have felt the tense rage in him, the fury of a hunted and wounded animal. Her heart was hammering, and the scent of fury and grief rose from her body and mingled with the scent of her rich blood. The combination ran through me like a bolt of electricity, and the rush of hunger took me by surprise. Adam reached out and grabbed her wrists, then jerked her hard against his body. They froze there for a moment, and then he let go of her. His arms went around her in an entirely human embrace, hiding her face in his shoulder as she trembled and, finally, wept. He looked over her shoulder at me, and his eyes were wild and red, hunger warring with love and fear. He closed them.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and kissed her cheek. “I would have left you, Sylvia. I would have made sure you were safe, if I’d known. It’s too late now. All I can do is find some way to stop him.”

“We’ll have to hunt him down,” I said. His eyes opened, brown again, weary and cool.

“No. No, well never find him. He’s old, and this is his game. His only great love. He’s played against older, better players than any of us, and he’s always won.”

“Then what are our choices?” I prodded him patiently. Adam smiled slightly, but there was fear still simmering in him, gnawing at him from inside.

“We only have two. Kill him, or die trying. So far the score is ‘kill him’ zero, ‘die trying’ fifty-eight. He’s killed a lot of vampires, Mike; I don’t even count the humans he’s killed in order to sweeten his victories. That would put his total somewhere over three hundred.”

“You know a lot about him,” I observed. Adam nodded, and smoothed Sylvia’s hair with a gentle stroke of his hand.

“Oh, yes. I have reason to.” Adam let go of his lover and stepped back from her; Sylvia wiped at her eyes, then attempted a smile. He led her back to a chair and sat her down, then bent and picked up the afghan. As he tucked it in around her with gentle, mothering movements, he looked back at me with raised eyebrows. “What else did William say to you?”

“He—’” The words stuck in my throat. I didn’t want to repeat it, because William had dangled it in front of me like poisoned bait, but I had to. Adam needed to know. “He said to ask you if you knew who’d killed Julie.”

Silence. Frozen, stunned silence; I watched Adam freeze to the depths of his soul. There was death in his eyes, cold and very close, and an inhuman rage that frightened me. In that moment he looked more like William than anything human.

“Julie,” Sylvia murmured, stricken. “Oh, no, it can’t be. It can’t be.”

“She came here to the house, two days before,” Adam said, and his eyes pierced me, went through me as if I weren’t there. He did something, in that moment, that chilled me far more than his rage. The anger was understandable, at least. As I watched, he consciously, willingly shut his emotion away. I saw the shadows dear from his eyes, leaving an incredible, limpid clarity. I wasn’t certain if that ability made him a genius—or a sociopath.

“Julie was my friend who died in the hospital, Michael. The rape victim.” He put some strange emphasis on the word “rape.” Sylvia flinched. Adam’s lips shaped an expression that I didn’t want to call a smile. “Here’s your answer, Mike—William’s answer. I killed her. I did.”

“No!” Sylvia protested. He didn’t even look at her. “No, you didn’t, William did that. He did it to punish you, that’s all. To make you hurt.”

“I am responsible.” Adam’s smile stayed on his lips, hideously fixed. His eyes glittered, faceted pieces of ice. “You know why he raped her, Michael? Because hecm.I can’t, but he can. He can do anything.”

“You aren’t responsible!” Sylvia shot back desperately. “God damn you, Adam, stop it! It isn’t your fault.”

“Isn’t it? Really?” Adam sounded as if he didn’t particularly care, but that wasn’t what was frozen under his eyes and in the mocking, tormented smile. “If not for me, she’d be alive. If not for me, you’d still have a family. Screw the excuses, Sylvia; she died because of me, she died in pain, in anguish, and if that isn’t ‘killing her,’ I don’t know what is. I killed her. And I’ll probably kill you, too.”

The silence was long and aching. Adam turned, a barely heard scrape of shoes on the hardwood floor, and went back to the window. Sylvia had her shaking hands pressed to her mouth, fighting back tears, but she didn’t go to him. There was something wild and vicious in the set of his shoulders.

“Foster,” he finally said. “Foster knows, and Foster has to be stopped. That will be a problem. Too many to fight, too much distraction. They know where we are, how vulnerable we are; they’ll be closing in like sharks.”

“Then what do we do?” I asked. He laughed, faintly.

“Do? We wait, Michael. Sooner or later, they will come to us. And when they do, I will kill them.” His teeth flashed, nacreous and sharp, a brief vision that reminded me oddly of the scorpion’s stinger as it rose and fell in madness. “All of them.”

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