LIANNDRA

Lianndra drew in his courage and began to speak: "Ralsbet is a true monster. He is a deranged psychopathic killer that doesn’t limit his madness to mortals… he wants to kill us all. He’s out there right now, planning his next murder. He’s not going to be stopped by wishes alone. We have to rally the hunt and find him. Does anybody have any ideas?"

That seemed to bring them all back into the real world. For a moment at least.

He watched with satisfaction as the others began to speak calmly and clearly, which meant that quite a few of them had already thought of the idea and were not overly surprised. They just hadn’t wanted it to be true, so they had kept quiet in the hopes that if no one said it, it wouldn’t happen. That Ralsbet would still be dead and there would be nothing to worry about.

"Been suspecting something along these lines would pop up," a man in his fifties, by his appearance, at least, said. His name was George Hamilton and he was a member of the Society of the Dark.

The Society of the Dark was made up of a group of vampires that had been older than average when given the BloodTouch. They had all been around forty or fifty years old when they were Made, which meant that they tended to have a rather superior attitude. As though the fact that they looked to be middle-aged somehow made them better than everyone that had been in their mid-twenties or younger when Made. And George Hamilton was one of the worst, attitude-wise.

Personally, Lianndra didn’t like the man. George tended to treat those that were younger than him as though they were idiots. What he couldn’t seem to understand was that Lianndra was older than he appeared to be. It was as if George were still mortal. He thought in the context that as old as a person looked was as old as they were.

If he had counted the seven years before his rebirth as a vampire, Lianndra was two hundred and twenty-one years old, while George was two hundred and twenty-seven. There was only six years difference between them, so it wasn’t as if Lianndra was so very much younger. Six years wasn’t much of a big deal when you have an eternity waiting for you.

"We should have all suspected something like this would happen. Throwing people out into the sunlight has forever been chancy. Why we didn’t do something else for a death sentence before, is beyond me. The way we use now works rather well, but we were all much younger then," Joseph said in his stuffy voice.

Joseph had always held firm to his convictions, no matter what anyone else said or thought. He had once been the head of a large household and had a load of residual beliefs that had no business in the modern world.

"Oh shut up Joseph! You’ve been rubbing my nose in my actions ever since 1812," Alexander growled. "It served him right. He should have been wearing sunscreen if he wanted to take a walk so close to dawn."

That got a weak laugh. Alexander may have been around for a long time, but he wasn’t as stiff as he might have been.

He and Joseph had been at each other’s throats for hundreds of years. When they really went at it, they were almost like overgrown children, picking at each other until the people around them wanted to scream.

Most didn’t know what it was between them. It had something to do with the war between the British in 1812 and Alexander Making one of the generals on the other side into a vampire just so he could throw him out into the sunlight to die. Joseph had thought it a childish act and had no objections against saying so at the top of his lungs. Especially since he had been rooting for the side of the killed general.

"Please, back to the issue at hand," Baldwin said, looking at Lianndra. "How do we know it was Ralsbet?"

Lianndra looked at him without flinching, or blinking for that matter. "Who else could, or would, do such a thing? The only one that would have the power to murder an Elder, would be an Elder, and Ralsbet was most definitely that. It’s either that, or one of these here did the deed, and I very much doubt it."

"Why? What makes you so sure that Ralsbet has returned?" Baldwin’s bluish-green eyes were still pools in his face, giving nothing away.

Lianndra carefully held his face expressionless, trying to match that untroubled calm and knowing that he didn’t manage half so well. Baldwin had had centuries to practice his cool, and it showed. "I have researched each one of you to determine your innocence," Lianndra said. "Ralsbet is certainly strong enough to kill three such powerful vampires, and he is the only one that isn’t here or doesn’t have an alibi of some sort or other. It has to be him."

MAUDE

Maude watched the boy, for a boy he was. She was at least three hundred years older than he was, but in most ways it was almost as if he were older than she was, which was rather hard to explain.

She looked the same as she had on that day, oh so long ago, when she had first met Tispith. She had thought that Tispith was a normal girl until too late and even now she thought of Tispith as just being a girl, an innocent child misunderstood by those around her.

Tispith had thought the same about Maude.

Maude was boyishly slim with a young face and the energy of a girl of no older then sixteen and looked it too. Tispith had been her best friend and had still acted like a normal girl then, back before she changed and became a creature with no morality whatsoever.

It had truly hurt Maude when Tispith had been entombed. The Black Queen had screamed at the thought of starving into a coma. For two months screams had come from inside the tomb, until one day there was only silence. In some ways, the silence was worse than the screams had ever been. Some had been afraid that somehow she had managed to escape when no one was looking. And yet no one was willing to check, for fear that it was true.

This boy was like Tispith had been, only stronger in some ways, which was hard to believe. There was a kind of inner strength to him that Tispith had never possessed, as though he were prepared to do whatever was necessary to accomplish his goals.

If he ever went insane as Tispith had, there would be no way to stop him. He had his own army of vampires that obeyed him and only him. He had Made them all himself, thousands of immortal soldiers that held him in awe and fright and would walk into the very inferno that was called the sun for him. Yet she just could not see that happening to someone with such a strong will. He just didn’t seem to be the type to break under the strain.

Neither did Tispith, a cold voice murmured in the back of her mind. She shut it out and tried not to listen, but she could hear it anyway. It spoke of how strong Tispith had seemed, right up until the end.

Her thoughts were broken by the voice of the boy. He was retelling everything he had said before, his reasons for suspecting one of the supposedly dead.

Maude didn’t pay much attention though. She had caught it all the first time. She sat and watched him instead, trying to see what kind of person he was. All she could do was hope that he wouldn’t lose what morality he had, and maybe have a little talk with him about what might happen if he did lose it. That someday he might be entombed like Tispith had been, never to be Awakened with the scent of blood. The thought of it filled her with sorrow, but she knew that what would be, would be. Regrets meant nothing.

In some ways, he was a lot like her, a thought that sent a chill through her and made her that much more careful. Could she ever find herself entombed behind an impenetrable wall of rock, wood and helplessness?

She couldn’t imagine Lianndra lasting long without blood, he looked far too fragile, but there were some that could go for short periods of time without going into a blood Hunger coma. One had even been conscious for three years without blood before sinking away. He was still unconscious. The plan was to revive him in the year 2010. He had been unconscious for one hundred and thirty-four years so far.

She was still thinking about that experimental-boy--he had been seventeen years old when given the BloodTouch and had been painfully beautiful--when the meeting was adjourned. There was going to be another in Florida in six months, something that was almost unheard of. Two meetings timed so closely together? It had never been done.

She was shocked to note that the fact that the older, more powerful vampires were being killed off one by one seemed to have been forgotten in such a short period of time. Most acted as if they had been told that there was going to be a party. There was something suspicious about the way they were acting, almost as if they were under a spell, but she didn’t really have the time to think about it, not now, maybe later.

Maude stood and headed towards the door. She knew she must look like all of the others. The only difference was that she was thinking about ways to stop the murderer, permanent ways.

LIANNDRA

Lianndra growled at the guard standing in front of his apartment.

The man quickly backed off. If he had been able to sweat like a mortal, he would have caused a flood. He had been in the service of Lianndra for more than forty years and knew better than to do anything to make his master any angrier than he already was.

The people that worked for Lianndra knew that he wasn’t one to make angry. He was well known for the terribleness of his rage when it was fully stoked. Usually he could be thought of as being rather mild-mannered, but when he became angry… well, his underlings knew better than to interfere.

The guard had been with him long enough to know what his job was and what it wasn’t. He was not one of the few people that Lianndra found irreplaceable, so if he was smart, he wasn’t going to do anything to catch Lianndra’s attention.

The man stood as straight and stiff as if he had a broomstick shoved down his back. He held his face still and emotionless with an effort that showed in the blood-sweat that trickled down the side of his face to stain his white collar with the pink tinge of watered down blood.

Lianndra glared at the man for a moment longer, than stalked past. He didn’t have time to bother with such a nothing man.

They treated me like a fool. They talked about it, then passed it off as paranoia!

He threw himself on his bed fully clothed, barely bothering to kick off his shoes. He didn’t hear them fall. At the moment he was so angry that he was seeing red, the same hue of red that flowed so deliciously, appealingly, through mortal veins.

A bloodlust fell over him and he rolled off the bed. He was about to go as he was, but had the sudden thought that it would be more entertaining if he were dressed as he had in the 1800’s. Sort of a reliving of old memories and past success, a way to wipe away the sense of defeat that filled him tonight.

He slid out of his pants, shirt and dinner jacket and put on a full-sleeved white shirt with a black overcoat, then black trousers and shiny leather shoes. He added a long black cape, which he affixed with a silver pin. He glanced at his reflection in the mirror with a snake-like smile.

Tonight was going to be someone’s unlucky night.

He walked all over the city, tasting from all kinds of people, all except the junkies. Their blood almost always made him feel dizzy and sick. He had started to giggle uncontrollably once and had kept falling down, stumbling, bumping into people and things, exactly as if he had been the one to take all the drugs the junkie had ingested and injected. Never again would he allow it to happen. Ever since then he had stayed away from the junkies with their crazy eyes, strange pallor and murky aura of being not quite all there.

He had just about had enough and was thinking about going home when a gang of kids surrounded him. They ranged in age from twelve to seventeen, young and already on the hunt for death. The leader could easily be distinguished by the gun shoved into the waistband of his pants and the switchblade he was waving around like a magic wand.

Lianndra felt his lips twitch when he saw the gun. The boy was rather stupid to shove it down the front of his pants. That was a good way to get something important accidentally shot off.

"Well, what do we have here? Will you look at this kid? He looks like he stepped right out of a movie. Why don’t we see what he has under that cape?" The boy took a step forward.

A boy with a circular scar on his chin laughed as a thought hit him. "He probably thinks he’s Dracula! I vant to suck yer blood!" he said and cackled. He was fat and pasty looking. He reminded one of the Pillsbury Doughboy, all goofy and giggly, but with a jagged edge like ground glass just under the surface.

The others looked at him as if he were crazy then shrugged, a couple rolling their eyes at each other and snickering. Hiding their fear.

"You want to know why I look like Dracula?" Lianndra asked. "I look like him because I am something like him. I am that which stalks the night." He hadn’t spoken like that in a long time. It was like a flashback from a time long gone. The complete melodrama of the moment was a joy.

Usually he acted like a little boy, got up close to his victims, then bit them. The old clothes seemed to make him act as he used to, back when he was truly young and much more of a bad ass than these posers could even imagine being. He had once been one among many, the most frightening of them all. Mothers had been able to spot him a mile away and had tried, futilely, to protect their children. That was one of the things he had liked about the old days. They had given him more of a hunt.

The boys laughed at the idea that he could really believe he was a vampire. They were so stupid. He had revealed himself and they still refused to see.

"Oh are you? Well I wonder if you can stand being naked and dead." The boy laughed and came closer, his knife flashing with the reflection of streetlights.

Lianndra didn’t move. He wanted to see what the boy would do. The knife came down in a sweep that cut his belt so his loose pants fell. He still didn’t move, didn’t flinch, didn’t even blink.

He watched and listened to them gasp and murmur as they saw his skin. It was marble white and the moon’s weak glow--it had dimmed considerably due to all of the buildings--reflected back brighter than when it had started.

Lianndra looked at the boy and laughed softly, scornfully and pulled up his pants, tucking in the edges so they stayed up. Then, in a blindingly fast movement, he grabbed the knife and slit the boy’s throat from ear to ear. All the boy had time to do was open his mouth in an "O" of surprise before he fell, blood spraying everywhere.

The vampire boy laughed. He was feeling better already.

He stooped and pulled the gun out of the dead boy’s pants and shot all but one of the six boys. The last boy hadn’t done anything, had just watched.

"Why did you come at me? Did I appear to be easy prey?" Lianndra asked, really wondering.

The boy nodded dumbly. "They wanted to get you so they could have a little fun. I didn’t want to, but I had to come. If not, they would have beaten me up and kicked me out, and they’re all I have… had." His voice was hoarse with fright. His eyes were wide and brown, as innocent as any puppy’s.

On an impulse, Lianndra held out his hand to help the boy stand. He had tried to run at the last minute, but one of the bodies had tripped him up.

The boy looked into Lianndra’s eyes and took his hand slowly. His hand was sweaty and trembled.

When the boy was on his feet again, he stood head and shoulders above Lianndra. He looked to be about fifteen but was probably a little older.

For some reason, Lianndra was reminded of the boy in the hospital. The boy that had died totally at peace with himself and all that was around him. He decided to follow his impulsive feeling to wherever it led.

"Where do you live?" he asked. "I think I should walk you home. I have a terrible picture in my mind of you being set upon by hoodlums." He laughed at the absurdity of it all.

The boy shook his head. He didn’t really understand what was happening, everything was moving too fast. "That wouldn’t work. I don’t really have a home, you see. I just sort of went around with them all day and slept in different alleys each night.

"Oh, my name is Chris, what’s yours?"

"Lianndra. Here, you can come home with me. I can offer you a dry, warm place to stay and a change of clothes," he said.

He had never invited a mortal home without thoughts of Feeding on them. But this time it was different. He had no feeling of Hunger when he looked at the boy. Instead, he had a feeling of almost paternal pride, either that or the worry an older brother felt for his younger and more helpless sibling.

First though, something absolutely had to be done. He smiled sweetly and began the dark labors he needed so badly to do.

Lianndra didn’t look around when the boy groaned and fell to the ground in an unconscious heap. That’s what came from having a weak constitution.

CHRIS

It was strange. Everything was moving around him so fast and life had suddenly taken a strange turn. He didn’t know what had happened or where he was going, but he followed the younger boy to the rich part of the city. The boy walked as if he owned the very streets and only let people build apartments along them out of good will.

They came to a building with a doorman and everything.

The weird thing about it was that the doorman looked at the boy and nodded and said "Master" in this weird sort of voice that gave Chris the creeps. Everyone they passed nodded and called the boy "Master;" it was all very strange.

On the wall above the front desk was a picture of the boy. In fact, on almost every wall there were pictures of the boy. In one he was dressed as he was now, in another he was wearing a derby and short pants, and then there was a picture of him dressed all in black, standing in front of this same building. He wasn’t smiling in that one, just looking out with this sort of non-expression about him that said a lot.

Some of the pictures were painted, others were snapshots and still others were those posed kind of photos that took a professional cameraman to get so perfect; in most of them Lianndra had this kind of smile on his lips that said he was laughing at everyone behind his face. It gave the pictures a kind of fascinating quality, as though there was something there that they couldn’t really see. That if they could just look a little farther to the right of where Lianndra stood, they would see something spectacularly destructive, or beautiful, or something just great.

It was weird, but someone had gone to a lot of trouble to give some of the photos that sort of yellowish-brown cast that old-fashioned pictures used to have. What was once considered black and white, but wasn’t really. Just the image of the boy standing in an oval, with buildings in the background and… what looked to be an old fashioned sedan, the kind with the wind up start motor and that classic box shape. Chris wasn’t much into old cars, but he could tell if something was just old or expensive-old. The car was most definitely expensive-old.

He shook his head. When his mother was alive she used to dress him up in what was called "period dress" and have black and white pictures taken of him and her together. It was expensive, but fun.

He could practically feel the tickle of her feather boa, giving him that sort of pressured feeling behind his nose that said his body wanted him to sneeze. He could almost hear the sound of her laughter as they posed dramatically, the fake leather violin case clutched in his hand, his pinstriped suit and fedora a little too large. He could almost…

Chris shook his head again and blinked quickly a couple of times. He didn’t want to remember. That part of his life was long gone and he had nothing left of it but the pain that built up behind his eyes and tried to push its way out his eyeballs when he thought of her.

He drew in a deep breath and hurried to catch up with the boy.

Lianndra turned his head to look at him for a silent moment then led him toward the elevator and a quick ride up the building. There were no painful memories in that.

When they reached Lianndra’s apartment, they came across a man standing in front of the door as if he were guarding it. He nodded at them and turned the knob, holding the door open so they could pass through. When he moved his arm out, Chris saw the bulge of a holster and gun tucked under his armpit. It gave him a weird shivery feeling way down deep. A feeling like he was entering into something he didn’t really want to be a part of. He stepped through anyway.

Inside, the apartment was expensive looking. There was a plush white carpet, a white couch and pale blue walls. The whole place looked as if everything had just been bought and the owner had never had the chance to live in it.

"Where are your parents?" he whispered. He had a sudden vision of them being asleep and if he woke them up they’d come charging out of their bedroom, grab him and throw him out. Either that or they’d call the cops on him, charging him with something like accosting their son. Chris was definitely not the kind of guy that rich people wanted their kids to hang out with. He was not the kind of person they would ever think to invite into their home. He was poor street trash and that was the bottom line.

"I don’t have any parents," Lianndra said absentmindedly. He had gone to a glass-faced cabinet and gotten out a bottle of red wine. He was trying to get it open without spilling any of it. The cork was firmly planted.

Finally the boy got so fed up that he jerked out the corkscrew and smashed the neck of the bottle on the edge of a table. Without even thinking of the glass that might have gotten into it, he poured himself a drink, the deep red liquid splashing into an ancient looking goblet that appeared to be made out of solid gold.

Chris watched with wide eyes as Lianndra started to drink, his throat working, thin rivulets drooling down his chin slowly. Chris watched, unable to look away. It looked almost like blood, thick and terrible. His mouth filled with spit and he felt like he had touched his tongue to something sour, something gritty that pressed against his teeth. His stomach roiled and for a second he thought he was going to throw up… then his vision cleared and it was just red wine.

Lianndra put down the goblet and looked at Chris with a friendly smile. "You must want a shower. I’ll find some clothes for you," he said. "Yours are a little dirty. And after you wash, if you want, I can help you get the knots out of your hair before I take my own shower."

He led Chris to the huge bathroom. It had a shower, a bathtub, a sink, a toilet and a little towel closet. Everything sparkled bright and clean and somehow new.

For some reason, Chris didn’t find the way Lianndra acted as weird as he should have. Something strange was going on, so why wasn’t he out the door, down the hall and walking out the lobby doors right now? It was all very weird.

After Lianndra left, he stripped and got into the shower. He scrubbed himself ruthlessly and quickly, then washed his hair in the same fashion, washing out the gobs of blood and gore that had splashed onto him.

Chris felt guilty all of a sudden. He hadn’t even thought about how his friends were dead. He had just followed their killer home and made friends with him. He had to get clean. He had to…

The hot water washed his guilt away with the dirt and grime. He turned the taps off and stepped out of the shower onto a furry blue bathmat. He grabbed a towel out of the closet and dried himself quickly. He looked around, but his clothes were gone.

He grimaced and wrapped the towel around himself. He didn’t want to walk around naked.

Chris left the bathroom in search of Lianndra.

He couldn’t find the boy in any of the rooms he had been shown, but saw a light under a door, so he went in. He felt a little as though he was an invader, like he didn’t belong. He wondered if he was going to get yelled at, then shrugged and decided to play it cool. He didn’t exactly have anything to lose.

It appeared to be Lianndra’s room. At least, the clothes all looked to be child-sized. There were four closets, their doors open. They were overflowing with clothes that looked as if they had just been bought. There were three shelves next to each closet covered in shoes, knickknacks and expensive looking bits of jewelry.

The bed was huge. It covered almost a whole wall in length. It was mussed as if someone had been on it then had to leave in a hurry. There was a desk covered in neat folders, each labeled with a word in some foreign language. The room was totally windowless. There was a swivel chair in front of the desk and there was a straight-backed chair in one corner. That was all that was in the room, that and the painting.

The painting was a masterpiece; even he could see that. It showed Lianndra sitting in a chair wearing old-fashioned clothes and makeup. The makeup highlighted his dark blue eyes, making them stand out brightly. He was wearing a full-sleeved white shirt, black pants, a heavy necklace and rings. His hair was long and curled into ringlets. He smiled slightly as if he were sharing a secret.

Lianndra looked wonderful in the painting. He looked not handsome, but beautiful. He didn’t look like a child. He looked like an adult given a child’s body and playing along with the joke.

Chris’ breath caught in his throat and he wished suddenly and fervently that he could be in the painting. In the background at least. Wished that he could reach out and touch that Lianndra of oils and paint, that beautiful creature that gazed out with such knowing eyes, those lips curved in a smile. He wanted to be in that painting so bad it was almost a pain in his guts; the need to be part of something special. To be there beside Lianndra, permanently there so that no matter what happened to his real self, a bit of him would still be there forever, maybe knowing as much as that fantasy boy did.

He was startled by a soft, silvery laugh behind him. He turned and saw that it was just Lianndra. The boy had taken off his old clothes and was wearing a simple white terrycloth robe.

"It’s a good painting, isn’t it?" Lianndra said. "It was worth the money I paid for it. That was in Paris a long time ago. Now and again, I wish that I could have kept my hair like that, but it had gone quite out of fashion. It was just too late for that look to be revived. Besides, it was just too much trouble to keep up." He shook his head with another soft laugh and tossed a bundle at Chris.

It was a pair of clean but worn jeans and a plain white tee shirt.

"Here, these are for tomorrow, I have to take a shower. In one of my closets is a pair of pajama bottoms I bought by mistake. They’re too big for me, but they might fit you." He untied the robe and dropped it.

Lianndra stood there in all his natural beauty. He stretched, then turned and headed for the door.

"You’ll have to share the bed with me," he said, not even looking back over his shoulder to see Chris’ face or to hear the boy’s reply.

Chris stood there stupidly. Lianndra had said they’d have to share a bed together, but that wasn’t what had stunned him. It was the fact that a little kid could ever be so well muscled. It was the body of a natural born dancer or martial artist that had spent plenty of time working out and toning up. Not really a child’s body at all. As though an adult had crammed himself down into the size and shape of a child, trying to appear young and innocent, but not fully able to pull it off.

LIANNDRA

Lianndra came back from his shower to find the room dark and the boy asleep.

He stood there for a second looking down at Chris, watching the way his chest rose and fell, in life, out life, in life, out life. The boy lay on his back with his right arm crossed over his stomach, his face peaceful in sleep, the wariness that had been there while he was awake gone for the time being.

Lianndra stood there for a moment then turned and went to his desk. He tore a piece of paper off the personalized notepad there and quickly scrawled a message on it. Dawn was fast approaching and he needed to Sleep.