LIANNDRA

He yawned himself Awake and checked first thing to see that Chris hadn’t made another escape. If the boy had managed to get away again, he would definitely be pissed.

Chris was still with them though. With the sun going down, he had reverted to a more humanlike sleep, which involved a gentle, snorting kind of snore that reminded of a little puppy sleeping off a hard day’s play.

Lianndra smiled down at that still face and threw himself off the bed, using his vampiric strength without a thought. He hurtled through the air eight feet off the ground to execute a perfect one-eighty that got him turned around so that his head wasn’t facing the floor and his feet were. He landed with a little thump that was barely audible, especially to a sleeping person’s ears.

He stretched and padded across the room to the door, cracking it open silently and heading down the hall for the living room and the mail that had been slid through the mail slot during the day.

He retrieved the mail, his nakedness immaterial. No one would be watching since he owned the penthouse and the two floors beneath it. He actually owned the whole building, but he only considered these three floors his, because this was where he lived when he was in the city.

He also owned places in Boston, Maine, North Dakota, Colorado, a little place in a town called Poulsbo that was in Washington State and a mansion in rural Ireland. Then there was his castle in Wales, his holdings in England and his cottage in France. Those were the places that he went to mostly. He owned little places all over the world. Places where he could hide and get away from his life and be someone other than himself, or maybe be a little more himself and less the monster that he had become.

Lianndra didn’t like to rent because owners got suspicious after the first two decades of wondering how the renter always looked the same every time he came to visit. So he owned a lot of living space along with all of the businesses he owned. But his three top favorite places were this apartment, the cottage in France and the little place in Poulsbo. The first two were understandable, but the little place in Poulsbo?

From what he understood of his own personality, he thought that he liked the place for the quaintness of the little Norwegian town located across the water from Seattle.

The place that he owned was an ugly little house that had been around for a hundred years and was located on the fringes of Poulsbo. Just out of the town and away from the general hustle and bustle, but close enough to walk it if he wanted to.

There wasn’t really all that much to Poulsbo. All there really was, was a library, a couple of grocery stores, about a dozen fast food places and restaurants, and a waterfront area near the bay called the Village that was packed with little stores that brought the "little Norwegian town" concept straight to the forefront of the mind. There were also plenty of little houses built sugarplum sweet, looking more like gingerbread houses than actual living domiciles. It was a nice little town, in its own way.

He sighed in reminiscence of Poulsbo. It wasn’t a rich town, but it was a good place to visit. It was such a nice little town. The people were so welcoming and the traffic was always fairly light so that there were plenty of places to go. And if all the mini-storage areas in the place didn’t decide to take over the town, it would be a nice place to go to for a few years yet. It was somewhere to raise children or take a sabbatical to write a book.

That was one of the best things about Poulsbo. There were trees and empty areas that were perfect for a writer to write novels about. There were some fairly interesting people, and under the quaint town façade there bubbled a primordial ooze of stories just waiting to be released onto the pages of a book.

Lianndra wouldn’t want to live in Poulsbo year round because of the rainy winters, but during the summer it was a nice place to visit. So he rented his house out to a family that received the money he gave them gladly and pretended that it was their house. He had them pay the bills for him through a monthly wire transfer into their bank account and they repaid him by welcoming him into their home and not notifying anyone that he was there.

It would seem to anyone watching them that they owned the house themselves, but it was his house as they were his. They lived under one of his fake last names and only sent the house payments in for him and kept the house in fairly good order.

They were nice people and didn’t think that having to live under a false name was so wrong. They had been doing it for thirty-some years, ever since they moved in from Kansas and the name had become a part of who they were. The father had lived in the house first, but he finally gave it to his son and his family. Lianndra liked that better because the son was trying to fix the place up and the man’s oldest daughter, Michelle, was a fairly nice person that wrote stories that she let him read whenever he visited. It felt almost as though they were his family, the things that they did were a part of him.

As he was flipping through his mail, idly tossing the junk mail into the recycle basket near the door, he found a letter from Michelle herself. She liked to write, so he could expect the occasional letter from her. It wasn’t as though he were having precognitive thoughts or anything.

Using one manicured fingernail, he slit the envelope open and slid the single sheet of paper out. It was regular lined paper, but the ink that it was written in was purple. That was one of her quirks. She’d always been into purple.

He sighed and set out to decipher the message that she’d written in her horrible handwriting. It really wasn’t so bad, it was just that she had once written in cursive all of the time and it affected the closeness of some of her letters, like E’s, I’s, A’s and C’s. Her words just sort of blurred together.

He reread the part about the scar six times, then began to curse in three languages. There was only one vampire that he knew with a scar like that and Magnus was supposed to be dead.

If the vampire really was Magnus, there was going to be big trouble, since the vampire had been the most trusted companion to the Queen next to Maude and had been psychotically insane since the day he’d been Made. Without the Queen to tame him, he had been ten times worse than he had before the entombing. There was no way to stop a creature like that, and a creature was what he was. He had a kind of animal cunning, but that was about it. He was dangerous because he didn’t seem to have a conscience at all and mostly preyed on the weak and helpless--someone like a tenth grade girl of about fifteen.

The scar had been branded onto his face about a year after he’d been Made. A pair of vampire hunters had gotten into the abandoned house he had been using as a Sleeping place and had broken one of the boards that covered the glassless window so that they could have some light to see by. It was luck alone they’d done it. Because after they cleared the window, they had opened up the large steamer chest that he Slept in while he was traveling and had gotten ready to stake him.

He Woke as they were positioning the stake over his heart and killed the one that was going to do the staking. But as the man had fallen, the sunlight, which had been filtering in through the window onto the man’s back, had its last obstacle removed and a bar of direct light had shone straight onto Magnus’ face.

The living vampire hunter made his escape at that point and moved to a whole other country where he changed his name and never went after vampires again. He had learned a powerful lesson--vampires were not things to be treated lightly and the stories were wrong. There was no real easy way to kill a vampire, because even when they should have been helpless, they weren’t.

Magnus was left with a scar from the experience. The sun had burned him horribly. It had been a burn beyond mortal reckoning. The kind that would make any living being long for death, since the burn had been so bad that the bones had shone through scorched and blackened. It was thought to have been rather painful.

The sunlight had crossed his face from the right side of his face just above the chin to streak up his cheek, across his right eye and disappeared into his hairline. The skin had grown back over the bones, which had been a stretch even for a vampire’s amazing healing. Still, the scar had never healed all the way and the flesh that had been touched by the sun was dead and horrible looking, as if when it had healed a ripple had been left beneath the surface of his skin.

His eye still worked because he had managed to shut it just as he jerked the steamer trunk’s lid closed, but it was now a kind of milky-white from the sun’s bleaching effect. The color had literally been burned out of his eye by the sun. He could see to hunt, but his victims often ran away when they saw him and his horribly scarred face and staring white eye.

He hated for anyone to look at his scar and often killed people that he thought looked at it wrong. The only good thing about the scar wasn’t even good for him. It allowed vampires and Others to recognize him and get out of his way. It allowed his enemies to know when he was coming and to make their escape. And it had allowed the Council of the Night to entrap him and set him out into the sun to have the rest of his body burned, to leave him there to be cremated alive.

There was only one thing. It seemed that he wasn’t dead after all. It seemed that he had somehow escaped his fate and was obviously pissed.

Lianndra had been working for the Council at the time of Magnus’ sentencing and had in fact been very vocal with his agreement for Magnus’ death. He had had a score to settle with Magnus and had only truly felt safe after he was certain that the other was dead forever. Now he was finding out that he had been living a lie. The nightmare still walked the earth, free and unchecked.

A sound escaped his throat.

DEZI

When Dezi came out of the bedroom she found Lianndra sitting hunched nude in a chair, a frown marring the perfection of his face. This wasn’t exactly unusual for him, he usually wore clothes and his feet were usually on the floor, but he often wore a frown of concentration.

Then why did she feel a chill shimmer down her spine when she saw him sitting there?

It took her a moment to see what was wrong. This was not his usual frown of adult concentration. This was the frown of an unhappy child. This was the frown of someone that knew the problem they were trying to figure out was hopeless. This was a frown of overpowering fear.

She shuddered when she saw that frown. Lianndra was not afraid of anything. She had seen him face the terrifying Blood Trackers with a smile. Something that could frighten a person like that was something that she really didn’t want to face, but she somehow knew that she was going to be facing that something. And soon.

When he felt her presence he looked up, and she gasped.

He looked so vulnerable. The eyes that were usually so in control all the time were a kind of liquid blue with fear. It was as if all of the ice in them had melted. His lower lip quivered and there was a tick in his left cheek that somehow made her think of someone nervously biting off all of their fingernails. The pale hair that usually waved perfectly alongside his face to the middle of his ears hung lankly down his forehead into his eyes in straggled lengths. His chin was rounded in fear and his hands writhed across his knees. He looked like a small boy that had had a horrible nightmare and needed comforting.

He was terrified of whatever it was, so terrified that tears were streaming down his cheeks, the blood in them darker than in any vampires’ tears that she had ever seen. The tears made it look as if someone had slashed his face open with an extremely sharp knife. He looked like an abused child whose tormentor was coming for him.

"Lianndra?" she asked quietly, almost whispering.

Where was the tower of strength that she depended on so much? Where was that somehow reassuring devil-may-care aura that usually hung around his head like a halo? Where was the adult maturity of two hundred and twenty-one years of experience? Where was the vampire Lianndra and who was this changeling?

The boy stared at her for a second without recognition, then his eyes cleared and he leaped out of the chair like some kind of agile monkey to grab her. She had the body of a sixteen-year old girl while he had the body of a tall seven-year old. This meant that he only came to the bottoms of her breasts. Still, he wasn’t tall at all. Not at all like she saw him in her mind.

When he leapt and grabbed her, he climbed her like she was some kind of human-shaped jungle gym. He gripped his arms around her neck, wrapped his legs tight around her waist and leaned his head on her shoulder. He trembled in her arms, just holding her like her little brother had when he’d been afraid or needed some kind of comforting. The thought of Lianndra ever needing the childish comfort that her brother had needed would never have been something that she would have thought possible, yet here he was in her arms like a real seven-year old.

"Lianndra? Lianndra, what’s wrong?" she asked, trying not to scare him. Trying not to scare herself.

He clutched her tighter, than lifted his face away from her neck. "Dezi, I need you. You can’t let him get me. He’ll kill me, or worse. Please Dezi, I’m scared. I’m so scared."

She patted his back, trying to think who "he" was and how powerful he had to be to scare someone like Lianndra. "Who is it? Who’s going to get you?" she asked with a slight quaver in her voice.

He stared into her eyes for a second, as if wondering if he trusted her enough to tell her. He studied her, then, in a hoarse little voice, he said: "Magnus is back."

Dezi swayed on her feet like a small tree in the wind, then collapsed to the floor in a dead faint, Lianndra still clutched in her arms.

When she opened her eyes, Chris was hanging over her head. His face was worried and his eyes traveled over her face as if trying to figure out what was wrong with her.

"What happened?" he asked fearfully.

Dezi turned her head on the carpet and saw that Lianndra was huddled against the back of the chair he’d been sitting in. She shifted back to Chris.

"He’s coming," she said, knowing that she sounded as childishly frightened as Lianndra had earlier.

She felt as if she were a real sixteen-year old that had undergone a great and traumatic experience. She was acting like a mortal and knew it, but what could she do? She was so scared that it was a wonder she could speak at all.

"Who’s coming?" he asked, as puzzled as she’d been earlier.

"Magnus is coming."

If she had thought that he was going to go into the same kind of shock that she had, she was wrong. He didn’t even recognize the name Magnus, so why should he have been afraid of the man behind the name?

He frowned. "Who’s Magnus?"

"The Dark Stalker, he that kills his own." When he still looked puzzled she elaborated, "The Queen’s henchman, her lackey, the one that wreaks the punishments she devises. If he’s around then she is too, and if she’s still after us and is willing to wake up that killer, then she will wake up the most horrible of them all."

"And who might that be?"

The small voice of Lianndra spoke finally. "The Dragon."

"You mean like the dragon blood you keep in the box? The stuff that almost killed me?" Chris obviously didn’t understand, he just didn’t hear the capital letter in the word "Dragon." All he heard was the word, as if Lianndra were saying that there was a real dragon running around.

Dezi saw the misunderstanding immediately and shook her head. "No, not a real dragon, a vampire named the Dragon, like Magnus is called the Dark Stalker and Lianndra is called the Angel of Fire, or how I’m called the Daughter of Darkness. They’re just names that a vampire picks up that are supposed to stand for who they are and the things that they do. The lesser known vampires are lucky enough never to pick up such silly little monikers, but we’re too well-known for that."

"He’s called the Dragon because he’s supposed to be the son of Vlad Tepes who was known as the Dragon," Lianndra said. "Also, some say that he is able to change his shape at will. He is the Dragon."

Chris was looking at them as if they were crazy. He was too young to know that he should be afraid. "You guys are really scared, huh?"

Dezi looked at Lianndra, who was still trembling, then thought how she must look. "I guess we are. We were there during the War and we helped when Magnus was being banished. He hates us, both me and Lianndra, and since Lianndra Made you it must be assumed that he’d hate you too."

Chris’ eyes were wide. "He hates me just because I’m with you guys? What is he, some kind of whacked out freak?"

Her lips twisted in almost-humor. "Yes."

He stared at her in bemusement, not quite understanding.

"He’s a registered psychopath that kills by association," she said. "If he doesn’t like one person, he doesn’t like them, their family, their friends, all the people on their block and all the people that they ever talked too. Given the chance, he’d kill everyone on the planet. That’s why he was tried and sentenced to death by the Council."

"If he’s dead, how is he going to get you?" he asked.

Dezi looked into the face of the boy she loved and smiled a bitter little smile. She knew what was going to happen to him if she didn’t do something to stop it. "It seems that he’s not really dead after all, just like a lot of people don’t seem to be."

"That’s really weird," he said. "What are you talking about?"

Lianndra spoke from where he huddled, "He’s not really dead. He walks the Earth searching for prey. Ralsbet wasn’t dead either. All the old evil ones are coming back, which can mean only one thing. Tispith is mad and she’s going to be coming after us soon.

"Magnus obeys only her and he’s got the power and energy to kill every vampire alive today. That’s why we’re so scared. He commands such strength that if Tispith tells him where we are…"

"He’ll come after us," Dezi finished.

Chris stared at them. There was something in their voices that scared him. There was no real fear in the words they spoke, only a kind of dry knowledge. It was as if they knew that they were going to die and didn’t know how to stop it. They spoke as if they were already dead. It was as if they had already given up all hope of survival and were just waiting for their deaths to come claim them.

"What will he do when he gets you?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

Dezi smiled a terrible smile. "He’ll slowly strip our flesh from our bones and eat our hearts. Then he’ll set us out in the sun and let us bake until there is nothing left, not even burned up ashes."

"How do you know he’ll do that? Why would he want to do such a horrible thing?" he asked.

"Because," she said, "he’s done it before."

Lianndra whimpered on the floor. "Just had to remind me about that, huh? Why did you have to actually say it?"

Dezi looked at him in concern. He was acting more and more like a child and less and less like his usual self-confident self.

Chris seemed to agree with her because he was staring at Lianndra as if he had never met him before.

"What’s wrong with him?" Chris whispered to her, so low that Lianndra wouldn’t be able to hear, especially with the way he was in his own little world.

She leaned forward. "He’s fought Magnus before, and he lost."

"Lianndra? Lianndra lost?" There was disbelief there, a kind of disbelief that Dezi could understand.

For as long as Dezi had known him, Lianndra had been the immovable wall, had never lost anything--except for that once.

It had been a horrible thing to watch: Magnus foaming at the mouth, his eyes burning as he strode toward the small shape of Lianndra. Magnus was about seven feet tall with the kind of muscles a medieval blacksmith would have been jealous of. Lianndra had been so tiny in comparison. It had definitely not been a fair fight.

She had been horrified. Every time Magnus kicked Lianndra, the boy would give a scream as each of the different bones in his body were broken one by one. And even after he had given up, Magnus would not stop. She had been so relieved when Baldwin had intervened and sent some big vampires in to subdue Magnus. It had taken twelve hugely muscular and powerful vampires to stop Magnus’ rampage, and even then it had been a near thing.

For something like two years Lianndra was an invalid. His bones healed, but they were so mashed up that they healed crookedly with little knots where they were rejoined. When bones heal like that, they have to be broken and held still until they heal themselves again. Every bone in his body had to be broken and reset one at a time, from the inside out.

The inner bones had to be broken first, shards had to be removed from his lungs, spleen, liver and heart, which was not a common operation in the early 1900’s. It had been painful as well. Watching his agony had been almost as bad as watching while Magnus wiped the floor with him.

Some of the bones, like the ones in his nose, his ribs and his fingers and toes, had to be broken six and seven times before they healed correctly. He had been in agony for the entire time they were healing, and the ones that healed wrong also pained him, because when he walked or moved the knots rubbed against the inside of his skin.

She shuddered in memory of that horrible time. He had been a bad patient as well as someone unused to such terrible agony. That had been where he had learned true patience, as well as the slow burning rage that he used so well. It was in his bed while he was healing that he had learned what a slow revenge would be like. He had told her a lot of the plans he had for his enemies, some of them so gruesome that she would remember nightmares when she Woke at sundown.

That was always something that she wondered. When a vampire Slept during the day, did they dream? She remembered images when she Woke, but they were disjointed and she thought that they might be memories from the day before or something. Maybe she really did dream during the day or while the sun was shining its last rays before it slipped below the mountains. She would probably always wonder about it, but from what she knew of the pain Lianndra had experienced, she knew that if vampires could dream, he would have had nightmares about Magnus. She did, or at least, she thought she did.

"Let’s just say that it wasn’t a pretty fight," she said to Chris. She could barely remember what she had said a minute before, but she knew that she had to say something.

That was one of the things about reliving the past while one was talking. A minute later there was no memory of what was just said, there was just this kind of a hazy outline of a memory that involved your mouth moving and words coming out.

It looked like she must have matched up with her previous words because Chris nodded. Either that or he was thinking his own thoughts and hadn’t heard a thing she’d said anyway, that worked too. It meant that whatever she’d been saying wouldn’t be remembered by him forever and he wouldn’t bring it up later on.

She hated that kind of thing. One moment everything would be going fine, then she would say or do something that even she knew was stupid. It was always so nerve racking to do something stupid because she always wondered hours, days, or even years later if that other person remembered it. She hoped that all the stupid things she did would automatically be forgotten by everyone, or if they remembered, they would keep their mouths shut about it… forever.

All she needed was someone with a memory of her when she had first become a vampire coming up to her and telling her all of the stupid things that she had said and done. That was supposed to be one of the good things about being immortal. Everyone that knew you when you were a kid and made the most mistakes, were long dead by the time you finally became a mature individual.

In about a hundred years she would finally be mature enough to forget all of her mistakes and how dumb they were. She hoped.

"Wasn’t a pretty fight?" Lianndra demanded angrily. "It wasn’t a fight at all, it was a massacre! He whupped my ass so bad that it took me two years to finally be able to stand and walk normally. He left that fight perfectly fine, all he got was one little scratch on his cheek that healed in about five seconds. I got every single bone in my body broken and was hemorrhaging so bad and in so many different places that there was no way to stop it. Even the vampire doctors said that it was hopeless and that I would be messed up for the rest of my life. Can you even imagine what that would be like? An eternity of pain and agony?"

Chris shook his head. "That would be horrible."

"I spent that whole two years wondering if I was ever going to be able to walk again. Then when I was finally able to walk I was so relieved, but I had horrible images in my head of him coming back and getting me, and either being dead or having to start the healing process all over again.

"I was so happy when the Law was made that no vampire can kill another vampire outside of Challenge on pain of exile into the sun. I was the first victim of Magnus that ever got any compensation for my pain. They used me as a reason to send him out into the sun where he was supposed to be fried to death. It was like I had gone to heaven for a little while, only now I know how stupid all the relief I felt was. He’s not dead. He’s alive and he’s going to get me again, only this time no one’s going to be able to stop him from killing me, no one!" There was a note of hysteria in his voice.

Dezi went over to Lianndra and hugged him like the child he so much appeared to be. "Don’t worry, you’re stronger now than you ever were before. When you faced him the first time you weren’t as strong as you are now."

He leaned his head against her arm and closed his eyes, tears leaking out from under his lids to drip onto her bare arm.

"Are you sure I’m stronger than I was before? I don’t feel all that strong, especially when I think about Magnus and how much he hurt me." That voice was still not the one that she was used to hearing. It quavered with an all too audible fright that didn’t go with her mental image of how Lianndra should be.

She tightened her arms around him and cradled him with his head under her chin. "You’re going to have to face him eventually. You can’t spend your life running away from him, because he won’t ever leave you alone. You know that if you don’t go to him he’s going to come here, or somewhere else that you’re at, and you won’t be ready for it. He’ll get you and you won’t even be able to put up a fight because it’ll be too much of a surprise. He’ll have the high ground and you’ll lose everything you’ve worked so hard for.

"There’s only one thing you can do: pick a place for the two of you to face off and stick with it. Do you understand? Don’t let him pick the ground you’re going to face him on. Don’t give him the upper hand. Get your butt down there and face him, am I making myself clear to you?" She knew that it was cruel to be mean to someone in such an obviously shocky state, but she also knew that it was the only thing that she could do to help him. All she could do was knock him out of his hysteria. He had to make his own peace with his fears. But until then he had to be ready for any contingency, even the appearance of Magnus himself.

He wasn’t just facing the Dark Stalker. He was facing the Queen. For as everyone knows, when Magnus starts acting smarter than he is, the Queen is with him.

No one could possibly stop the Queen, no one but Lianndra, one of the greatest vampires or mortals ever born. If he would only realize that fact and get his head out of his ass, everything would be perfectly fine. Or they would at least have some small chance of success.

Dezi had to trust that when the time came, he would be strong enough to do what he had to do and that she would be strong enough to stand by him while he did it. If she even let herself think for a moment that they might fail, she would go screaming off into the night and would probably never return. So she didn’t really think about it. She just couldn’t handle the mental pressure of such thoughts. Instead, she focused on Lianndra and getting him on his feet and coherent. The one thing that she didn’t want to think about was the fact that the Dragon was known to be stronger than Magnus. Much stronger. So that even if Lianndra somehow managed to defeat Magnus, there was still the Dragon to face.