LIANNDRA

He drew in a deep breath and headed for the exercise room that he didn’t visit very often. He was a vampire, why would he need to exercise? He would always have the same body and shape that he was Made with. He could only add to what he already had, and then he could only do little things.

Once there, he locked the door, turned the tap in the middle of the room on full and dived into the faintly blue water. He liked how clear and cool the water looked when it was seen through the darkening glaze of the cerulean blue tub with its small tiles that had white grout in-between the thin cracks like the foam on the ocean, or a Mary Engelbreit drawing.

The water sluiced around him, cool and refreshing. The tub was big enough that some would have considered it a miniature swimming pool. He just considered it comfortable.

Lianndra sliced through the water with one kick of his leg, shooting under the surface smoothly. He swam for a minute, trying to clear his mind as best he could, and when that didn’t work as well as he liked he stopped in the middle of the tub and rested against the bottom.

The water level was high enough that when he was sitting down regularly, it covered his head with a good six inches needed to reach the surface. He lay down and closed his eyes, his small body spread out across the cool surface of the tub like a stingray lying on the sandy bottom of the sea, waiting.

He floated on the bottom of the tub and thought about why he was so afraid and why he didn’t want to confront his fears once and for all. The major reason that came back to him was that he remembered the horrible pain and humiliation he had experienced during that time, a time when he had been too new to even think of ways to speed up the healing processes.

If he’d had victims brought in, he could have used their blood to make him heal faster. He’d been too new though, he didn’t even think about doing that. He had just lain there and taken the pain as it came to him, in horrible waves that were sometimes just a dull throb and at other times a never-ending fire against his nerves that made him just scream and scream and scream.

He quivered slightly and popped his eyes open as he shot to the surface. It just wasn’t working. He had to find some way to battle down his fear or something bad was going to happen. Something that he was going to be so fear-blinded by that he wasn’t going to even see it coming.

He pulled himself out of the water and stepped onto the furry blue bathmat that sat in front of the tub, ready for his wet feet.

As he thought, he stood in the cool air of the exercise room and waited for his body to naturally dry itself. Droplets of water quivered on the edges of his pores; he swept them off, leaving no trace of wetness behind on his skin.

His eyes were glazed as he looked around the room. His mind was working at such a level that all he really saw of the outside world was a blur that he wouldn’t be able to remember later.

The weightlifting equipment, the martial arts practice pads rolled into a corner, the weapons’ locker, the miniature firing range, the tennis/ volleyball/ racquetball net and poles that were sitting in a corner and the meditation mats. They were all ready and waiting for him to come in bored and frustrated and try to work his feelings away.

The weights for weightlifting were an example of vampire strength. There were no ten-pound or twenty-pound weights. The lightest weight was exactly three hundred and fifty-six pounds. He could pick it up with one hand without any strain whatsoever.

Lianndra wasn’t much into heavy exercise, it was just something that he did every once and awhile when he needed to take his mind off what was going on around him. Right now he definitely needed something to take his mind off his problems, but he knew that there wasn’t enough time to waste with unneeded muscle building.

From what Michelle had said in her letter, he knew that time was an issue and that he didn’t have all that much of it, certainly not enough to throwaway. Magnus was just building himself back up to strength, just beginning to reform the network of contacts that had joined him to his minions. He was weak now, something he wouldn’t be for long.

Lianndra sighed and went to the weapons cupboard.

Inside there was a sawed-off shotgun, an M-16 lightweight belt fed machine gun, a 1929 Luger man-killer and a set of weapons he’d had specially made for himself to compensate for his small size and stature--little hands weren’t made for big guns and swords.

The specials included a kind of harness/bodysuit that he pulled on over his bare skin. The coldness of the metallic fabric would have made a mortal shiver. It went around his arms and chest like a short-sleeved jacket and over his legs like a tight-fitting pair of pants. It was a bodysuit that left small pockets above his hips bare so that he could slide things into the secret sheathes there. If he had been mortal, he would have been worried about having to go to the bathroom, but since he was a vampire it was something he could only think about clinically and without fear. He never did it, he just sort of remembered doing it a long time ago.

He grabbed up a thin glass vial that was protected by a metal case that kept the glass from shattering. He slid the vial into the right hip sheath in such a way that if he needed it quickly, he could slide it out without fear of it going down into his pants where he couldn’t reach it. In the left sheath he slid a fingernail-thin, razor-sharp blade that had the dull gleam of poison on its tip and down the sharp part of the blade. Both of these were his secret weapons that he would only use as a last resort they were so dangerous.

The bodysuit that he wore was of a lightweight protective material that helped his vampire skin repel bullets.

Bullets don’t kill a vampire, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t injure one. With his suit on, though, he had the added bonus of a metallic mesh that wouldn’t break.

A bullet could punch through an unprotected vampire’s body, but it really took the force out of the bullet, which meant that a bullet was more likely to lodge under the skin’s surface and stay there rather than go straight through. The bodysuit didn’t stop the force of the bullet, it just kept it from going through the skin. It was sort of like someone throwing a slow moving baseball at a backdoor screen. The ball hits, pushes inward, but bounces back out.

One time a bullet had slammed into his stomach and pushed in. When it bounced back out again, it left a small indent in his skin that was the exact shape of the bullet’s head. The mark had taken close to a week to disappear. He’d been faintly embarrassed by it, but he was glad the bullet hadn’t gone in. It was so messy to have a bullet removed. He hated the way the knife would flash as it cut into his flesh. It was sort of like watching the victims of a car accident being carted away by the ambulance attendants. It was horrible, yet fascinating. That was another reason he didn’t like to watch a knife cutting into his flesh. It was kind of disgusting, not to mention troublingly exciting.

One shouldn’t want to eat one’s own flesh.

He shifted the sleeve of his bodysuit and reached into the dark recesses of the cupboard. He pulled out a pair of black jeans, a black tee shirt and a black trench coat. They were not regular clothes though, no matter what they looked like. He wasn’t about to go into a serious situation like what he thought he would be facing in the kind of clothes he wore everyday.

The fabric these clothes were made from was different from regular fabric material, not to mention about ten times heavier. He moved with the same catlike grace that he normally had since it wasn’t really a strain for him, but for a mortal child of the same age and muscle tone, the clothes would have been impossible to walk in without straining.

The clothes were more durable than regular material. They were lined in a polypeptide microfibular compound he had invented in his private labs. He called the material Roalin after his two friends Roul and Alin Shubert, the Brothers Grin as he’d liked to call them. Both had grinned their whole lives, right until they were decapitated and had their heads placed on sharpened poles staked into the ground in the late 1800’s. Sad really, he would always miss them. They could always make him laugh, even at the worst of times. Oh well.

Lianndra had seen a lot of bad things in his life, but he would always remember their pain filled cries as their heads were being chopped off with heavy strokes of a red handled, dull-edged fire axe. They hadn’t been very smart men, but they hadn’t deserved such a terrible fate. No one did. It just showed that people were not nice to those that they thought were different and strange. It was further proof that even though there was kindness and goodness in the world, there wasn’t much of it.

All the brothers had wanted was to never die, and so he had granted them their wish, long after the twins’ bodies were dead and burned. He gave them the immortality of naming a whole new technology after them. It was all they would ever have.

It was a technology that was both chemical and computer, the tiny fibers that flowed through the material gave him the ability to fool motion detectors, monitors and computers into thinking he was invisible. The fabric itself had the capability of making him invulnerable to flesh penetration, an added protection when combined with the bodysuit.

He pulled the jeans up over his legs and hips and yanked the shirt over his head, hardly minding the twinge as the cloth caught on his ears. He slipped a shoulder holster on, checking the safety on his Luger, making sure that he wasn’t going to shoot himself in the foot again. Once was enough, that was for sure. Carelessness and guns were not friends.

He stretched, making sure he could move freely. When he saw that he could move regularly, he clipped a harness around his shoulder that flowed down his arm in a prosthetic-type arrangement that allowed him to bend his arm, but worked. The small .22 went into its place with a click as it settled into the little groove provided, slightly above the wrist.

With a flex of his arm muscles, the gun flipped out into his palm, his fingers folded around it. He flipped it back into its place, snapped it back out, flipped it back in, then snapped it back into place with an air of finality.

He snapped on an equipment belt that held some of the things that he figured he might need. A small flashlight, a bit of string in case he needed to use magic, a garrote in case he felt like a little bit of subtlety, a calculator, a pocket knife and a packet of watermelon bubble gum. The last was only for his cover, for when he needed to play the part of an innocent little kid with no clue as to why anyone would ever notice him.

He glanced in the mirror that hung on the door of the cupboard, seeing what he knew mortals would see. A small, slender boy of about six or seven with ash blond hair, bright blue eyes and the delicate features of an elf child. The reflected image wore a trench coat with all the clasps snapped into place all the way up to its collar. The legs of his jeans stuck out of the bottom, showing off the luminescent white of his feet and the tininess of his toes, like peas with tiny oval nails, perfect as a baby’s.

Lianndra smiled at his image. Being a child forever was not something he might ever have wished for, but it did have its perks.

He was not only cute and adorable. He was the one person that no one would ever suspect of murder. Who would ever think that such a sweet little boy would ever hurt a fly, much less a person? He could kill and walk away from the crime scene with a pout and some watery tears, no one even giving him a suspicious thought, thinking instead that he was a sweet little boy in need of a little love and affection. The affection coming in the line of money, toys, or their lives.

He accepted their affections as his due, knowing that if he were an adult he wouldn’t get nearly half as much as he did as a child. It might have been nice to have experienced what it was like to walk around as an adult, but there was no use wailing and moaning over what was never going to be.

His smile turned into a smug little smirk. Besides, where he was going, being an innocent child was better than being an adult. There was less chance of anyone thinking that he might have been the killer. He expected that by the time he returned from his little trip there would be a lot of bodies left behind. The Queen always was into having a lot of servants around her at all times--a lot of loyal servants with delicious blood.

He licked his lips. He felt a little Hungry. Maybe he should go out for a snack before the trip.

His smile widened into a pumpkin grin, one that rivaled all the little kids’ on TV, the ones that did macaroni, cereal, or juice commercials. He was just plain cute.

It was times like these that he thought of his almost-favorite poem, one that had been written for him by Michelle Shimoto herself. He liked the poem because it had been written for him and because it vibrated with a kind of simple truth, a message that only he was prepared to receive.

Anyway, the poem had been written particularly for him. She had named it "Hunter." It had been one of the first poems that she had ever written, so though it lacked the polish of her later works, it did have a kind of raw charm that appealed to him.

She hadn’t meant that he was going to become weak and get killed or anything. She had meant that his inner turmoil would finally come to a head and he would have to make his final decision on what he was and what he did. It was a warning, that if he didn’t make a final decision soon, he would end up a victim of his own fears and inhibitions. He was either good or he was bad or he was a mixture of the two, but there was no way that he could be entirely both with nothing in-between.

Lianndra had liked the poem. It spoke to him in some way. It wasn’t the best he had ever heard, but he liked it. Someday Michelle would be a good writer, but for now she had talent if not the skill needed, the skill that only came with time and practice. Maturity.

There was another thing that he liked about the poem at the moment. If he considered the Queen and Magnus as hunters and himself as the prey, he felt a little bit of hope.

Better watch out, he thought, this hunted creature isn’t going to play anymore. The hunter becomes the hunted. This game is at an end.

He smiled.

LIANNDRA

He glanced at his watch, exactly five-oh-nine, time enough for him to call the airlines and line up some tickets and make it to Washington before he needed to Sleep again.

He glided across the floor to the telephone against the wall. He didn’t need to get out the phonebook because he had made this call millions of times before and had long since put the number on speed dial. A certain wealthy, well-known airline wasn’t as innocent as it appeared to mortals. It had existed for hundreds of years, not solely as an airline, but as a magic carpet dealership in times when no one looked at the sky, a carriage service and a coach rental.

Vampires had been going to this particular company for years, which was one of the secrets of how such a well-known business had stayed in service for so long. There was only the occasional changing of names when a new one was necessary, like when mortals were starting to act a little suspicious.

Some people would have thought it rather strange that beings that could "fly" would want to take an airplane to different places, but it was very easy to explain. People flying through the air are not an everyday thing and most mortals find it highly unsettling. Not to mention the fact that even vampires can have a lousy sense of direction and being hundreds of feet above the ground doesn’t exactly help any.

Vampires have to fly so high because to go too low could result in smashing into objects and scaring both people and animals, which had been something that Lianndra had enjoyed when he was "younger" and the frightened mooing of cows had been like music to his ears. Besides, air currents weren’t as favorable when going so low. Turbulence was a fact, which meant having to go high enough so as not to be swept away by air currents, which about tripled the chance of being spotted out of the window of some passing airplane.

And so vampires traveled by plane to most long distance places--an added bonus to the practice being that flight time was cut by about a hundred since jets went so fast compared to normal vampire flight speeds. There was less chance of being caught by the rising sun if one took an airplane with posted flight times. The airline that he and most other vampires used was well known for getting their planes on the ground when and where it said it would, even if it included the strange disappearances of boarding terrorists before they could cause any trouble.

Lianndra dialed with quick little twitches of his fingers, listening to the ring of the phone on the other end.

"Yes?" a voice asked without bothering with such pleasantries as a company name.

This was the private line only used by vampires in a hurry. What vampire wants to give away their travel plans either to an enemy or a stake-wielding mortal? This was much safer. Much.

"This is Lian," he said, pronouncing it "Lee-on", but with a slightly different emphasis, one that the person on the other end would recognize as being a message in itself. "I would like three, first-class two-way tickets to Sea-Tac airport in Washington State on the next flight out. When is the flight due?"

There was a slight pause as the person on the other end no doubt flicked at their computer keyboard, calling up flight times.

"I’m terrible sorry Lian," the voice was politely cordial. "The next flight is leaving in an hour, but it is booked solid. All I can offer you is a one-way ticket to Florida, a ticket to South Dakota and a ticket to Cincinnati. Can I interest you in any of those flights?"

Lianndra closed his eyes and slowly counted to ten, then counted backwards from ten. This was obviously a new person and there was no reason to get mad. It was strange though, everyone that worked for the airline knew that vampires took precedence and mortals were either food or entertainment and nothing more.

He unclenched his hand from around the phone. The handset felt slightly strange. "No I do not want a ticket to Florida. I would like a ticket to Washington State. You are going to have to bump someone. Offer them each two thousand dollars for their tickets if they will take a later flight out. I must get to Seattle, it is very important, do you understand?" He added just a hint of threat to that last statement. He was getting a little tired with having to put up with the pomposity of others.

There was the sound of nervous throat clearing. "All right, I’ll bump three onto the nine o’clock flight. You have to be here no later than ten minutes before the flight to pick up your tickets, otherwise the counter will be run by a regular employee and I’ll be on my dinner break."

"Fine," he growled, slamming the phone back on its hook. Why did such a venerated company have to hire such a jerk to run their counter? And why did they have to keep regular employees on staff? If the person didn’t know about vampires and their special needs, why did they need a job with the airline? It was pretty frustrating for a poor vampire in a hurry like he was.

As he was stepping away from the phone, he noticed that the plastic casing of the handset had been bent slightly inwards by the force of his frustrations. He was going to have to watch that. His anger was getting out of control and showing itself in truly physical ways.

He noticed that the trench coat was moving over the side of one of his shoulders and twitched it straight, surveying himself one more time, taking stock of his appearance.

He finally decided that he needed a new hair-do.

He scrunched his eyebrows as he concentrated his whole being into what he was doing. He waved his right hand over his head and whispered words that reverberated with power.

Magic flared and he felt the change begin.

He opened his eyes and stretched. Even vampires got sore muscles from too much concentration. Though mostly he thought that it was just a carry over affect from his mortal life, a memory of discomfort that he just couldn’t let go of, not even after all of these years. Whatever.

He glanced in the still open cupboard’s mirror and preened. He looked like a regular mortal, if rather pale.

His skin was still luminously white, but it was more along the lines of someone that has spent weeks indoors. Other than the extreme paleness of his skin and the brightness of his eyes, he looked like any other mortal. There was nothing about him to suggest that he might be a vampire, not unless he wasn’t careful and made a mistake.

Now all he had to do was catch that plane and remember not to do anything that a real mortal wouldn’t do. Passing as a mortal was going to be one of the easiest parts of his trip since he had played the part countless times before. He was an old hand at passing. Now he just had to hope that the plane trip was a harbinger of the rest of the trip. Dying was definitely not on his itinerary.

Walking down the hall, Lianndra couldn’t help but to run his fingers through his new hair. When he stepped back through the large archway that led into the living room, he posed dramatically in the opening, waiting for praise.

Dezi was the first to see him. She gave an exclamation of surprise as she looked him up and down. Her eyes were wide as she examined him, but she finally grinned, pleased.

Chris glanced up, then looked back down. Then he went into the classic double take, which Lianndra had never actually seen done in real life before.

"What happened to you?" Chris asked, sounding more than surprised.

Lianndra smiled, running a hand through his straight black hair. "Like it? I figured I needed a little bit of a change so that people don’t automatically recognize who I am." Seeing Chris’ shock, he shrugged his shoulders. "What, you thought dye-jobs were just for mortals?"

Knowledge flooded Chris’ eyes. "You know, I just realized something. A lot of those vampires at the club had different colored hair. I didn’t even really notice when I saw them, but I know that I must have realized that there was something different about them on some other level of my mind. Weird." After a second, the boy frowned. "From what you said, I got the impression that that vampire guy Phang would want to have normal looking hair. Why doesn’t he dye his?"

Lianndra smiled at the boy. "He used to dye his hair and he still does occasionally, but now he mostly leaves it the vampire color. Dyes don’t last for long in our hair, the color is sort of bleached away. After awhile nearly everyone gets tired of having to dye their hair every few months, and magic spells are expensive and even they only last a few years at most. It’s easier just to pretend that the white-blond is a personal choice and that you’re making some kind of fashion statement."

"That’s pretty weird," Chris said, shaking his head. He didn’t look very happy.

Dezi flowed to her feet in one smooth movement. She lay a gentle hand on Chris’ shoulder, sending him a silent message. "Your hair looks very nice," she said to Lianndra. "It’s good to know that you’re finally getting over your pain." She knew him too well.

Lianndra had refused for all the time he was a vampire to change the way he looked because of how angry he was inside. He hadn’t known that he could change his appearance while his mother had been alive. It was something he had only learned after she was gone, when it was too late. Her heart had already been broken when he finally figured out what he could do. Her heart was broken and she was six feet underground, a place that she would never come back from. She would never see him as he had been before he was Made, back when he was just her little boy. She would never see the boy that he had once been, no matter how much he wished that she could have.

He cleared his throat, knowing that his eyes were going misty. All he needed were a bunch of blood tears to ruin the clearness of his skin and make him that less human.

"I just didn’t want to end up looking like everyone else," Lianndra said. "I look good as a blond." He fluttered his lashes and pouted his lips.

Dezi laughed, but Chris frowned. "Whoa, I just had a thought. If we can change the way we look, even if it doesn’t last, how come Ralsbet didn’t change his appearance? I mean, if he hadn’t such a distinctive appearance you wouldn’t have been able to track him so easy."

Lianndra couldn’t help it--he snickered. "Well, a vampire that happened to look like a sweet teenage girl laid a spell on him that he was never able to break. A spell that kept his body from producing the necessary melanin needed to add color to his skin and hair, even after he had an excess of energy. And any dyes that he uses will automatically be sucked into his skin and hair with no affect."

Chris looked at Dezi with wide eyes. She smiled smugly. "Thank you, thank you," she called, her hands in fists over her head. "The champion accepts her just deserves, the great one speaketh, salaam and good night everybody, I’ll be here all week!"

Lianndra looked at her mock seriously, one eyebrow raised. "Ego, ego, ego."

Dezi laughed. "Eggo, eggo, eggo, leggo my eggo."

He couldn’t help laughing. Sometimes her childishness overcame his commonsense and sent him into rounds of hilarity.

"You guys are weird," Chris said, looking from one to the other as if they were complete strangers.

Dezi looked at him, rolled her eyes and fell flat on her back on the floor, giggling madly. Lianndra found that he couldn’t stop laughing, he went into rounds of "ack, ack, acking." Chris finally laughed too. His laugh was a soundless trembling of his whole body, tears streaming from his eyes.

About ten minutes later they’d managed to get themselves under control.

"Look what you made me do," Lianndra complained plaintively.

Chris snorted. "Look at what you made me do." He gestured at the blood/tear trails that had flowed down his cheeks to stain his shirt.

"Oh no, oh no, no, no," Lianndra cried in mock-horror, as if it were the worst thing he’d ever seen happen.

"What were we laughing about anyway?" Chris asked, making a face and trying to pull himself together. "It was kind of stupid."

"Sometimes you either have to laugh or cry," Lianndra said. "I thought that it was rather refreshing that I could ever be so silly."

Dezi snickered, then looked at him seriously, her eyes bright and curious. "Where are you going dressed like that? Lianndra?"

"Dressed like what?" he asked innocently.

She tightened her lips. "Dressed like that. I know your killing clothes when I see them, so don’t think you can fool me. Who are you going after now?"

He rubbed his face, a habit leftover from when he was mortal no doubt. "I’m taking your advice. I can’t just run away for the rest of my life. I’m going after Magnus and Tispith." At her shocked expression he gave a weary smile. "I thought maybe you two might want to come along with me."

Dezi looked at him suspiciously for a minute. "This better not be one of your little tricks to keep us safe. We’re almost as tough as you are and we won’t let you wrap us up in tissue paper and pack us away like some kind of Ming vase. Capiche?" She snapped her fingers at him.

He mockingly bowed. "Esham, esham, quaesemquam vos pinarae Ego voli facio, [[AUTHOR'S NOTE: "Yes, yes, whatever you want I will do." Basically, Your wish is my command" in Demonspeak]] perchance the two of you might dress in more appropriate attire so that we can catch our flight?"

"You’re a very strange kind of guy, you know that?" Chris asked, smiling at him fondly.

Lianndra thought about that for a minute, then shrugged. "Oh well. Now, run along and get dressed, why don’t you? I’ll call the car to come around." He squinted his eyes at them. "You might wish to at least wash your faces, don’t you think?"

They got up, but before they went to the bathroom, Dezi gave him another sharply suspicious glance. "You better watch it, this better not be a trick so that we’re out of the way while you make your escape. I can track you down, you better believe that."

He grinned as she and Chris disappeared down the hall, the only sound the slight patter of their feet against the polished wood.

Lianndra dug his bare feet into the thickness of the living room carpet, which served as a kind of reminder that he needed some shoes.

He picked up the touch-tone phone and headed for the closet that stood in the middle of the front hall. With one hand he dialed, while with the other he went through the rows of shoes that filled the closet. Just as someone picked up on the other end, he chose a pair of black and blue Vans he hadn’t worn for awhile.

Inside them was a clean pair of socks. There were socks in every pair of shoes that he had in fact. During the day while he Slept, his servants always tidied up after him, making sure that the things he demanded regularly were always in stock around the apartment. They pampered him like nobody’s business, not wanting their meal ticket to ever decide that they weren’t worth the trouble.

"John Dee at your service," a cheerful voice answered on the other end of the line.

"John, this is Lianndra, bring the car around, will you?" He made it sound like a question, but it wasn’t really. It was more along the lines of a command that absolutely had to be followed letter perfect with death and dismemberment the alternative.

The voice changed, "Yes master, I’ll be right there. This is John Dee signing off, hail to the master race."

Jonathan DeVille had always been a rather strange individual and time hadn’t exactly improved him any. He was still a little too hyperactive for his own good, not to mention the fact that he was a little too cocky to be considered for bloodstock. He was more along the lines of a lower member of the vampire hierarchy.

John Dee was the name he went by in the regular world. He played the part of a rather sly hot-stepper to the hilt. He did "favors" for fees, was willing to fence anything that was "legal," and had been known to offer good deals on nearly brand new stereo equipment. That was the image he showed the mortals. His other life was that of a lifetime servant and lackey of Lianndra. The man was only twenty-eight years old, but he’d been in Lianndra’s service since he was ten. His one hope was that he might one day be included as a stud for Lianndra’s bloodstock of humans and Others.

Lianndra felt really bad about having to someday disappoint him, but what was a vampire to do? He smiled to himself. What was John Dee going to do when he found out what was in store for him? It was a wonder.

Lianndra had always wondered how Dee was going to feel when he found out that even though he had always assumed he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps that he never was. He was probably going to be a little disappointed. As a descendant of Bruen Hasselhof, one of Lianndra’s first servants, he had always expected to be like all of his brothers and sisters and spend the rest of his life making babies.

Strange chance had made John Dee into a special kind of person, one that could not be ignored. Lianndra absolutely could not see wasting the man’s natural gifts. So even though Dee would be a little upset at not living a life of decadence, Lianndra was sure that he’d get over it soon enough. Or he would if he knew what was good for him.

"Are you guys ready yet?" Lianndra yelled over his shoulder impatiently. He had never been the kind of person to like waiting.

"Almost," Dezi called back, her voice rather breathless.

Lianndra frowned to himself. Children, they were always showing off. Take Dezi and Chris for example: every chance they got, they proved to each other the power of their affections, never mind the fact that he was in a hurry and didn’t have time to waste.

Finally they came out; both wearing jeans and sweatshirts, looking almost like twins. Dezi was in an ash knit sweatshirt, Chris in a plain hunter green sweatshirt with a white tee shirt underneath. They looked casual, like they were just going out for groceries. Lianndra, on the other hand, knew that he looked like he had some kind of bad attitude and had places to go, like juvenile hall, junior division.

He groaned when he saw them, realizing the first snag in their little trip. They looked like they were just stepping out; he looked like the young rebel. There was just something wrong with that.

"Nice, real nice," he said dryly. He didn’t really want to ruin the obvious good humor they were in with a dose of reality, so he said it quietly. Maybe everyone that saw them all together would think that Chris and Dezi were the well-mannered ones and he was the trouble-making younger brother.

Now all he had to do was change their hair for them. It would be a little strange to anyone that saw them that there would be two whitish-blond kids and one with black hair. It just didn’t seem to match up. Maybe if he had blond or light brown hair or something, but not raven-wing black.

"Hold it," Lianndra said, waving his hands in separate waves and saying the words of change one more time. There was a shimmer that wavered over them, and they were just different.

Dezi returned to her natural honey-blond, her skin changing to its living hue of a kind of tanned gold. She looked like some kind of beach babe, not a sun reviling bloodsucking monster.

He had to whistle his appreciation when he saw her. He hadn’t seen how she looked when she was alive, but he had known that Dezi had to have been beautiful--otherwise Donal wouldn’t have paid any attention to her--and there were remnants of that living beauty in her vampiric incarnation.

In vampire form she was stunning, but in mortal appearance she was only slightly less beautiful, and that only because she didn’t have any of the natural mortal qualities that came with life. Becoming a vampire wiped away all traces of mortal living, which meant that there were none of the little lines and wrinkles that came with laughing, frowning, or squinting. There were none of the little blemishes that came with puberty. Even the most perfect-skinned mortal had slight blemishes on their skin, they were hard to see with the naked eye, but they were there. Being a vampire meant that none of them had those little imperfections.

Looking at Dezi, that absence was more felt than seen, even if there were a few slight discrepancies in her appearance. It had something to do with the absolute perfection of her: the way she moved, the way she talked and the way she looked. She could have put any supermodel to shame, that was how great she looked in either form. It was just that looking at her closely made one think that something wasn’t quite right.

Chris, on the other hand, still had a bit of that mortal quality about him. He had reverted to the way he had been before the change--it was just that all of the little marks on his skin had disappeared. He was as perfectly beautiful as Dezi, his brown eyes bright in his lightly tanned face.

He still moved as a mortal, something that was an embarrassment for a vampire, but was a blessing when pretending to be mortal. He looked more relaxed and confident than he had when he’d been mortal, but that only heightened his beauty.

Chris could have passed for any mortal off the street, undeniably handsome but all too normal. Until one happened to glance into his eyes and saw the fabulously rich color glowing there. That was one of the things that Lianndra had always loved about the vampire condition, the way that it enhanced the colors of a persons’ eyes, turning regular and rather plain colors into colors that were not to be found in any known spectrum.

"You guys look better now," Lianndra said blandly as they examined each other’s new appearances with surprised amazement and cautious delight.

They were looking at each other in shock. They evidently hadn’t expected a change such as this. Not even Dezi knew the limits of his power. He knew that she certainly hadn’t known that he would have been able to change their appearances with a few words. He didn’t really need all the hand waving; it was just a kind of warning to the unInitiated and a cause for congratulation from those that saw his hand waving as a sign that he was the one that was doing all the work.

"Look at you," Chris said, a catch in his voice. "You look just so beautiful. I mean, you usually look beautiful, but this is really different. I mean, wow!"

Dezi examined him from head to toe then gave her own signs of surprised joy. "I never saw you when you were mortal, just afterward. You look so handsome," she said, her eyes glowing like stars. "It’s like I never really saw you before. Do you know what I mean? Whenever I looked at you, I saw a vampire boy that I like and admire a great deal, someone that I could spend the rest of eternity with. Now I see that you’re also an incredibly great looking guy."

Lianndra cleared his throat loudly even though he didn’t need to. He just wanted to get them out of the apartment before they started thinking they really were mortal. Even vampires can sometimes get a little out of control and lose track of what they should be doing.

"Are you guys ready to go now?" he asked, adding just a hint of impatience to his voice.

He didn’t really want to face Magnus, but he knew that if he didn’t do it someone else would have to. It was his duty as a powerful vampire lord to handle the situation; otherwise he was totally undeserving of the great power he commanded. So what he really needed to do was leave the apartment, board a plane and try his best to handle a rather difficult situation.

Dezi had known him for a long time, she recognized that he was fighting his fear by putting on an extremely brave front. She knew that as a sublet living in his apartment and Feeding off his human bloodstock that it was her duty to help him out by getting off her tail and going with him to battle the danger that faced them all.

Not to mention the fact that she knew that if their situations had been reversed, Lianndra would have already been out in the car waiting for her. He would back her up if she needed it, so she needed to back him up now when he needed her. That was just the way things were.

"Yeah, let’s go."

Lianndra grinned. They were finally going to leave the apartment, what joy. Now if he could only force himself to get on that plane and fly to Washington, one of the major problems that was facing him would finally be out of the way and they’d be off to finish something he knew he should have finished a long time ago.

Stepping out of the elevator, he commanded his brain to calm down and stop thinking. He didn’t need to think through everything so thoroughly, he just needed to do the things he needed to do.

It was like a man he’d met about thirty years ago. The man thought about everything he did to an extreme, which was all right at first, until he found out that Lianndra wasn’t quite the innocent child he appeared and was in fact a vampire.

The man thought about it so much he went crazy and wrote a strange book he called Remembrance of a Killer’s Companion. He was absolutely convinced Lianndra was some kind of murdering psychopath and practically said it outright in his book. His most famous line in the whole misguided journal was: "Through midnight years and countless eons, when all thought that they were safe, the darkness parts to reveal what’s hid--that the killer walks amongst us."

Mortals thought he was talking about some psychopathic killer and labeled the book a kind of psychologist’s notebook, the kind of thing that analysts write in an attempt to get farther into a patient’s head. They all figured that he’d interviewed a bunch of murderers and wrote about how strange people live among the normal people; people that appear normal, but really aren’t, people like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy.

What he was really talking about were vampires and how they looked mortal on the outside, but aren’t. It made an old monster like Lianndra feel a little put out, that some jerk of a quack was writing about him behind his back and saying such awful things. That just biased him toward all psychologists. The man was the first and the last one that he ever talked to.

He still figured that the man hadn’t seen him so much as himself, but as a reflection of the man’s own guilty conscience. He had used Lianndra as a mule to unload all of his emotional baggage on. It was just a little aggravating.

Lianndra figured that since he had never gone to see a psychologist again he was past the first stage of crazy and was well in the land of loony tunes. He found it rather funny personally, even if he never told anyone his little hypothesis.

Now he was finally ridding himself of a few of his psychosis’, among which were the Queen and that asshole Magnus. He figured he deserved a bit of a pat on the back for going out and facing his own problems for once instead of sending one of his lackeys to do it for him.

Lianndra shook his head and led the way to the lobby doors, his hands swinging freely at his sides.

Everything just seemed to be getting more and more complicated as he got older. He remembered a time when all he had to worry about was who he was going to eat and when. Now the weight of the world was on his shoulders and so much was expected of him that he just didn’t know what to do. There was so much that he wished he didn’t have to worry about, but he knew that there was no other way. He was just too responsible for his own good. It was his one true downfall.

Sometimes he just wished he could turn his brain off. If he didn’t think about things so much, his life would be much easier. He could live a life of moral freedom, never having to worry about feelings of guilt or worries about his soul. He would be a true monster then, just as he had always wanted to be.

He blew out his cheeks and hurried after Chris and Dezi, stretching his short legs. On an impulse, he grabbed a newspaper off a stack at the newsstand just outside the hotel, his hand shooting out so fast that the man didn’t even see as one of his newspapers disappeared.

John Dee and the car pulled up at the curb, the tall young man hopping out to open the door for them. They climbed in, a bunch of rich kids on a drive in a seventy thousand dollar car.

"You made very good time," Lianndra said as Dee slammed the door and slipped back in front of the wheel.

John Dee looked at him in the rearview mirror and grinned. "Of course. When the great Lianndra calls, all shall answer. Most assuredly the loyalist of his servants would be on time to take him to the place he wants to go. So, where to, master?"

Whenever anyone called him "master" in that tone of voice, Lianndra felt as though he were some kind of fat slave owner. It made him feel just a bit embarrassed, as if they were back in the early-1800’s and he was a landowner’s son or something.

He had lived through a time when slavery was perfectly acceptable on this world. So now, when any of his people called him "master," he felt guilty, as though he were trying to remake the slave-system. It was completely ridiculous, but he couldn’t help the way that he felt.

John Dee was the only one that he allowed to call him master, mostly because he knew that the boy was only making fun of himself. When he called Lianndra "master," he said it in such a way that Lianndra knew that he was laughing at them both. It was a kind of private joke between them, a joke that no one else would ever be able to understand, because it wasn’t funny at all, and it wasn’t a "ha, ha" kind of joke either. It was the kind of thing that made a person know that if they didn’t laugh soon, they were going to start crying. That was the way of their whole relationship.

There was something so undeniably sad about Dee--something that matched up with the sadness that rested in Lianndra’s own heart. They were the same kind of spirits. They went together like only twin personalities could.

That was why Lianndra gave John more leeway than he usually gave anyone else. They went way back, him and Dee, even if Dee wasn’t the same as when he had met him.

Lianndra remembered his own surprise when he had found the illegitimate child of one of his bloodstock mortals, Richard, living in a rat-infested hole of an apartment by himself. The boy had been four years old and his mother was a month dead. The little boy had been locked in the apartment with no way out, but he had somehow managed to survive on a moldering box of crackers, some green cheese, half a loaf of bread and a twelve pack of Coke for over a month.

When someone had finally thought to wonder what the horrible smell floating from the apartment was, the boy had already been suffering from a bad case of malnutrition, had long since run out of soda and was on the brink of madness and death. Trapped in an apartment with his dead mother, thinking that he was going to die soon too.

Lianndra had been the only person on the woman’s emergency number list, since her family was all dead. He had never met her, but it seemed that Richard had given her the number, telling her to call it in case she ever needed help in a bad way. She had never bothered to use the number, but it had come through for her son when he was in the hospital and the medical personnel had come across the card in her wallet.

As quick as he could, Lianndra had hurried down and gotten the kid, making sure that he brought his lawyer along. It wouldn’t have been exactly right for a child to be the legal guardian of another child. It was kind of a requirement for an adult to be on hand at all times.

In the first few minutes they were alone, Dee had figured out that Lianndra was the boss and it was something he had followed to the letter for the next twenty-four years. He had done everything his aunt and uncle had told him, but he had always been Lianndra’s man, even before he ever became one.

Richard’s family had accepted Dee without question once Lianndra told them that he was of their blood. That was all that really mattered to them. As long as he was family, he was welcome. It was kind of sad that his father had never bothered to tell the boy’s mother that.

If she had known that she could have brought her son and come live with her husband’s family, she wouldn’t have died at twenty-seven. The two of them would have come to live with Lianndra after Dee’s father died and they could have had a happy life together. Instead, John had come to live with his aunt and uncle after his mother was already buried, when it was too late for her to have the quiet and peaceful life she had always wanted. It was rather depressing.

It made Lianndra feel a little guilty that he hadn’t known of John Dee’s existence. If he had only kept a better eye on Richard Hasselhof, then Dee wouldn’t have had such a miserable childhood. The boy would have been raised in a world of privilege and possibility, knowing that he had a future no matter where he had come from and what he decided to do.

Nowadays Lianndra had the mortals’ vampire keepers check their thoughts to make sure they weren’t doing things they weren’t supposed to be doing, things like having illegitimate children and not telling anyone. Even if the children were born out of marriage, it was all right because it introduced new bloodstock, but if no one said anything, it caused undo misery for everyone involved, the children most especially.

That was why he didn’t object to Dee calling him "master." He knew that to the young man it was all just a kind of game that he played with himself, a kind of painful irony. Still, Lianndra winced just a little when he heard the word. It was like a knife twisting in his guts, and like that hypothetical knife it wouldn’t kill him, only wound him a bit.

"Take us to the airport, would you?" Lianndra said.

The car moved like a powerful black whale through a sea of small clumsy fish. Lianndra relaxed back against the seat, Dezi and Chris opposite him. He noted in amusement that they were holding hands and whispering to each other in the usual new-lover style.

Dezi said something that made Chris laugh and blush bright red at the same time. She stretched and turned her face so that it was facing Lianndra. She wasn’t talking to him though. She was talking over her shoulder.

"Hey Dee, how ya been lately?" she asked lazily.

Lianndra watched as Dee grinned into the rearview mirror. "Life’s been good to me, baby. I got this girl that lives Upper West, she’s totally in for me. If I asked her to rip off her own arm, she would.

"You just would not believe the luck with women I been havin’ ever since we got this new car. The bitches are linin’ up clear ‘round the corner just to get a little taste of my swanking whoozer. Damn man, I could have a real orgy if I wanted to--me and thirty girls writhin’ around in a dog pile with a hundred gallons of whipped cream. It’s enough to make a man thank his lucky stars.

"I’m so glad that I signed up with this operation, otherwise I’d just be another horny almost-thirty year old livin’ in a dive somewhere. Either that or I’d still be livin’ with my Aunt and Uncle, watchin’ cartoons and havin’ my life mapped out for me in Cheerios.

"I’m all for goin’ for stud when I’m older, but not now. Now I want to have some kind of adventure, something to think back on in my boring middle-age hood. This is the most exciting job I’ve ever had, bein’ your guys’ driver and all, a lot better than what I would have experienced as a worker monkey in the regular world. Can you imagine me with some kind of regular, everyday, mundane job? I’d be bored outta my mind, not to mention the absence of all the perks I get here with this swanky car and all you vampires running around.

"Yep, I got da good life, I don’t plan on ever givin’ it up, not never. Plus, there’s the fact that I always know where I stand with you guys and don’t have to worry about getting my neck bit off, not like I would if I were just another regular John on the street."

Lianndra listened to this John Dee-type spiel with half an ear, while at the same time floating through the man’s thoughts.

From the way Dee talked, most people would think that he was just another lackey, an illiterate slimeball willing to do anything for a dollar, polluting the world with his presence, but Lianndra knew better. He had personally put the boy through four years at Yale. The man’s thoughts were a well ordered machine, flowing smooth and beautiful with an elegant symmetry that could not be denied.

"…hey, Lianndra? Lianndra? Are you there?""

From the way it was said it was obvious that his name had been repeated a dozen times at the very least, maybe even more.

Lianndra blinked his eyes clear and really looked at John for the first time in at least two minutes. He had been drifting through Dee’s mind and had lost track of the outside world. Sometimes it was hard to differentiate between what was being said and what was being thought.

"I’m sorry," he said. "My mind must have been wandering. What is it that you want?" There was a definite accent to his words. He couldn’t help it. Hundreds of years could not be wiped away in a second. He sometimes reverted to his old mannerisms, the ones that had seen him as the darling of his mother’s circle of friends and companions.

Without thinking he could go back to the way he used to be many years ago, right down to the slight French inflections to the things he said. Or sometimes there was the faint hint of a British accent when he was excited or inattentive to what he was saying, all the years of his life making its way into his voice.

Nowadays there was a definite American-cant to his voice, one that had held him through his years in America, even if it had slipped a bit in the time of the Beetles. That had been expected though, everyone was bringing up these fake accents that had nothing to do with who or what they were or where their roots really began.

Teenagers were always overwhelmed by the madness of impulse and he’d been right in the thick of it. Unable to escape because he was young looking and all kids are expected to stick together through whatever comes along, as long as it isn’t something they can really be punished for.

He remembered the student protests of the 1960’s and the many midnight raids on pharmaceutical companies in the ‘70’s. Life had been good for him, but it all came back down to his roots, which involved a life in England and France, a life as a wealthy aristocrat that had walked the steps of Byron and dreamed the dreams of Shakespeare on a warm night in midsummer.

He was Lianndra de Voight. He was a vampire lord and he looked like he was a darling little seven-year old. Life had thrown him a pie in the face in the shape of the ultimate irony, forever childhood without the benefit of a safety belt.