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.The bed would smell of her scent.Her clothes would hang in the closet and her keys to the car would lie on the bureau chest.Only then might he accept anything at all.“Why was I brought here to you? Couldn’t Mentor have…” He couldn’t finish his thought.Couldn’t Mentor have what? Saved his mind from chaos? Watched over him in the greatest grief of his life?“Mentor,” Vohra said, “has been rather busy.There has been another uprising.”Mentor had tried to revenge Danielle’s death, of course.Mentor had gone out as a warrior to prevent an unraveling of the vampire nations.Upton had done all this.No matter who actually killed his wife, it was Upton whose hands were bloody.“Send me to him.” Malachi stood ready to depart for his home, his own continent, his destiny.He knew he must be in a Middle Eastern nation, perhaps Egypt.“How long have I been here?”“Only a week,” Vohra said, turning to him and taking him by both arms.“And now I will send you back.”A week! Danielle had been buried without him.A war had been fought while he slept.His son…his son…“Eli needs you.” Vohra had read his mind and answered his fear.“Needs me! Is he…? What…?”“I bid you good-bye until we meet again,” Vohra said in his frankly foreign, ancient way of speaking.Malachi heard the word good-bye echo and echo, as if down a long metal corridor, as he vaporized and vanished from the cool tile floors of the Egyptian’s home, his fearful thoughts flying before him.Chapter 18Malachi had never traveled this way before, not that he remembered.Perhaps his mother had taken him from the pit in Thailand this way, back to their ranch, but he had no recall of it.He had seen his mother transform and Mentor, and a few others, but never had he done it.He knew instinctively he could not have done it, never in his lifetime.He was mortal and without the ability to disintegrate and then come together again as a man.It must have been Vohra who did it to him, who caused him to sparkle into the atmosphere like a veil of mist and wink out altogether.He felt his whole self as if made of zillions of atoms, bumping one off the other, coming together in a surge of electrical activity.It was thought of his mortal self that saved him from scattering far out into the lonely universe.Thought of Eli.Thought of saving his son from whatever horrible fate was upon him.He wobbled on his feet and threw out his arms to catch hold of something.It was like stepping off a ride at the county fair, a ride that swung you up and over and down and out, leaving you breathless and weightless.He failed to grasp hold to anything, but his feet steadied on earth and the vault of a night sky overhead slowed in motion until it was a moonless, still dome.He drew in his breath, happy to be alive.His happiness evaporated the moment he could make out his surroundings.He stood on a desert floor, beneath that moonless, star-studded sky, and in front of him a horde of Predator vampires scurried like lumpy shadows as if on urgent missions.He looked around, but Vohra had vanished.He saw Mentor and stumbled toward him.He took him by the shoulder and turned him around saying, “Where is he? Where’s Eli?”The body Mentor possessed now was not as tall as Malachi, but it was strong in chest and the face was forbiddingly stern.The gray asphalt eyes rested on Malachi for just a moment, measuring him, before Mentor said from tight lips, “They have him hostage.In the caves.Down there.”Where he pointed Malachi saw the opening into the side of a mountain, a darker mouth than the night around it.Before it vampires grouped, an army ready for attack.Migrations of bats, disturbed by the influx of greater beings than themselves, flew from the cave’s mouth, swarming into the sky.“We’ve beat them back, Malachi.We drove them out of the city and they fled across the south until they reached here.Carlsbad.We’re in New Mexico.They couldn’t find a refuge until they reached here.These caverns go very deep, nearly four miles.They’re trapped.”Malachi made a move to rush toward the entrance, but Mentor halted him.“I want to tell you something.Yes, Upton did this.Upton orchestrated the whole thing, just as he did before.But it was a mortal who killed your wife.And the same mortal took your son from us.He slipped in while your parents slept, Dell exhausted with worry about you.She never felt an alarm because the man isn’t vampire.”Malachi stared at him, his own face growing flinty.“I’ll get him.Whoever he is, I’ll get him.”“His name is Jacques.The man you dreamed about.”Malachi flinched a little, remembering clearly the Frenchman toadying to Upton, the Frenchman who could see him even in spirit, the Frenchman who was as malicious as the devil himself.The memories skipped away.Malachi tore across the desert floor toward the cave entrance.It was time to tango.He had only half a heart left.The woman he loved was gone, taking the dead half heart with her into the grave.The other half belonged to Eli.If he failed to save his son, he might as well lift up his neck to the first enemy Predator who approached and let himself be drained dry of blood.He might as well be dead if this didn’t go well.He had, by Christ, suffered too much.All his life had been invaded and manipulated and ruined by Charles Upton, the mad Charles Upton.Upton, the mistake.The vampire who never should have been.In childhood Upton and Balthazar had stalked his dreams, threatening him.In youth Upton had caught him on the streets of Dallas and whisked him away to Thailand where he remained his prisoner for eighteen months, tortured beyond anything imaginable.And now Upton had murdered his wife and stolen his child.It would end here.It would definitely end here [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]