CHRIS

"Of course I’m sure," Dezi said impatiently.

He knew that he was being annoying, but he really couldn’t help it. Fear gnawed at his guts with the surety that he was going to die. It was definitely not a comforting kind of thing.

He knew that he wasn’t really all that brave, he never had been. It was just the way he was.

Becoming a vampire hadn’t changed the way he was made. It just meant that he had less worry of being killed, so he might have been mistaken for someone with a bit of bravery. Really though, just the thought of having his heart ripped out was terrible enough that he wanted to run away. Far and fast.

"Where exactly is this place we’re going?" Chris asked.

Dezi held out her right hand. Across the palm was an address written in black ink. "Right here."

He glanced at her hand quickly, then kept his eyes on the way they were going. He wasn’t much of a flier and he had a fear of falling and being staked by a tree or something equally stupid.

Dezi seemed to sense what he was feeling, because she reached out and threaded her arm through his. She hugged his arm comfortingly, and things were suddenly a little bit all right.

Chris sighed and reined in his fear. There were times for everything, and though he might have thought this was a time to be afraid he couldn’t let the fear control him. There were things to be done, and that was just the way it was.

LIANNDRA

After searching eight bedrooms, four bathrooms, a living room, kitchen, dining room, two rec rooms and three basements, he was about ready to give up. That was when he went back up into the kitchen and searched the adjoining pantry for good measure. There was nothing wrong with being thorough.

He had to congratulate himself on his anal tendencies when he found a hidden door behind a shelf of old cans. It had a tricky little latch and opened to reveal dark, narrow stairs that went down, down, deep into the earth.

Shrugging, he made his slow way down, stopping every few steps to listen for movements or any other suspicious sounds that could mean a trap.

Perhaps he was listening too hard to really hear anything, because the next thing he knew, he was tumbling down the stairs, the world whirling around him as he fell. He tried to stop himself, but there wasn’t anything to grab onto, just bare walls that seemed to be laughing at him.

For the second time that night, he hit the ground with a thump and swirled down into darkness. The last thing he felt was anger that someone could have come up behind him and pushed him. That anyone could have ever gotten the best of him.

LIANNDRA

He groaned and lifted himself off the floor. This was most definitely not his night for being comfortable, that was for sure. He stretched and checked himself, seeing what might have been done to him. Looking himself over, he found his shoulder holster was empty and that his little .22 was gone as well, though he still had the arm sheath, which was pretty useless.

Complaining under his breath, he stalked across the room and opened the door a crack to peer out.

It was a huge, circular room. There was a bed in the center of the room on a pedestal with gauzy curtains hanging down around it. There were curved couches around the walls, making some obscure design with their shape.

His eyes were drawn to one particular couch and its inhabitant. He felt the blood draining from his face, leaving his cheeks colorless and cold. He had thought he was beyond his fear, that he had finally overcome it. But now he knew that that wasn’t the case, that his fear was just as strong as ever. If he could have, he might have run away, but this was the only way out of the small room. Into the lion’s den.

"Come Lianndra, don’t be shy." That terrible voice came to him straight out of his nightmares.

He drew in his courage and stepped out to face his fate. There wasn’t anything else to do. He had a job and that was that.

Magnus lay on the couch nude, his huge body wrapped in tendons and muscles that bulged. He was huge, close to seven feet tall with enough muscle to take on a Siberian wolf barehanded.

Looking at him, Lianndra was amazed at what he saw. He had known that some vampires were able to survive the cruel rays of the sun, but the man was completely unchanged from how he had been before.

The Council had deemed it necessary to execute Magnus by leaving him out in the sun for a whole day until he was crispy. The process seemed not to have worked. Only his first journey into the sun had marked him and the wound was as horrible as ever, but not as bad as it might have been. It would have been worse if it had covered his whole body; as it was, only his face was marked. Lianndra had been praying for the advantage a wound would have given him, but he saw now that he had been praying in vain.

As soon as he saw that Lianndra had finished his close inspection of his well-muscled body, Magnus stood in a fluid movement. Bodybuilders with muscles like his were usually rather slow and clumsy, but not Magnus. The muscles rippled under his skin as he moved, but other than that, there was no way to tell that he had moved at all. One moment he had been lying there on the couch, limp and lazy, and the next he was standing, prepared to do battle if necessary.

"So, how have you been, little Lianndra?" Magnus asked, reaching for the shirt and pants that had been thrown precariously over a chair back.

Lianndra grit his teeth in the semblance of a smile. "Wonderful. I made a fortune in Microsoft stock in the eighties and I managed to buy up that land I wanted in California. How ‘bout you?" He was trying as hard as he could to sound casual and not as he really was, which was terrified. He was so afraid of this man that it felt as if little bolts of energy were shooting along his nerves at light speed. If he’d been mortal, he would have already wet himself in fear.

Magnus just laughed as he zipped up his pants. "Life’s good; the present is much better than the past. I don’t have to worry about being burned at the stake here, and even when I tell someone that I’m a vampire they don’t believe it. Not at all like in the mother country," his voice was still tainted by the Russian accent of his past.

Lianndra shook his head. "You’re still the same even after all this time. You’ve been gone for how long, a hundred years? Yet you still think the world revolves around you. Egoist."

Magnus guffawed. "The world does revolve around me, it always has. I am the Dark Stalker. I am Magnus the Magnificent One, born to rule this Earth next to my lovely Queen."

Lianndra snorted. "Do you really think she wants you? She can have any vampire she wants, so why would she want a dumb, ignorant savage like you?"

Magnus swatted him like a bug, sending him careening across the room into a wall. "Shut up! I am as smart as you are! She wants me! I am strong, I am great, I am Magnus!" He roared his own name out like he was some kind of enraged bull.

Lianndra peeled himself off the wall, barely even noticing the inch thick imprint of his body he left behind in the stone. "You’re not strong, you’re nothing. This is the real world now, not some dream you’re having in your grave. This world is based on intelligence and what one does with it; you are at a definite disadvantage and always will be. Don’t think you’re just going to come waltzing in and take over. It just ain’t gonna happen."

Magnus’ face flushed, showing that he’d drunk his fill of blood. "You just keep your mouth shut, boy," he yelled. "You don’t know anything about anything. You’re lucky you’re still alive now. If I hadn’t been playing around when we were fighting the first time, you’d be gone. Be glad that you’ve had as much life as you’ve had. Death will be upon you soon."

"I don’t think so," Lianndra said, only to be knocked to the floor with one swing of Magnus’ ham-sized fist.

"It’s good to be back," Magnus said, stretching mightily, reveling in the power of his huge arms.

"Over my dead body!" Lianndra shouted defiantly, leaping back to his feet.

"Okay."

The adult vampire threw himself forward at the vampire boy. Lianndra gave a shout as the bigger vampire slammed into his stomach with enough force to send them both flying backward to smack into the wall and leave a dent. Lianndra was under Magnus when they hit and he heard a popping noise at impact.

He fell to the ground with Magnus lying on top of him, the heavy weight enough that he couldn’t lift his arms, no matter how much he wanted to. He groaned, feeling blood-saliva drool out of his mouth and trek slowly down his chin, leaving a trail of red-tinted slime.

His eyes rolled up in his head and consciousness left him.

Magnus pulled himself to his feet and looked down at the limp form of Lianndra. He had heard the popping sound too, and unlike Lianndra he knew what the sound was. It had been the sound of the boy’s spine being broken into two separate pieces with nothing connecting them. A razor-sharp chunk of Lianndra’s spinal column had severed his spinal cord.

Magnus grinned to himself. From what Ralsbet had said, Lianndra was stronger than ever before, yet here he was hurt so easily.

He bent over the limp form and hoisted Lianndra up onto his wide shoulders. The fun was just beginning.

Lianndra became aware that he was not in any place he recognized. He groaned and tried to sit up. It took him a moment to realize that he couldn’t move his legs. His eyes went wide with horror as he lifted his head to survey himself.

His body looked normal, his arms and hands moved, and when he flexed, his stomach went tight, but below his waist he couldn’t feel anything. That’s when he felt it--the pain when he tried to move.

Since he’d had every bone in his body broken by Magnus, he understood what had happened almost immediately. His spine had been broken.

He shifted his head around. The horror he had felt at first was lessened by the realization of what had happened. The only thing wrong with him was that his spine was broken. He had been worried that maybe the lower half of his body had been cut off. The last time that happened, it had been one of the most painful things he’d ever experienced, even worse than the time he got his eyes gouged out and his throat cut.

If he’d been cut in half, it would have taken a long time for a new lower half of his body to be regenerated. As it was, it would take a few hours for his spine to repair itself.

He was relieved, but only slightly. He still had to get away. The only problem was how could he escape if he couldn’t run? He wished his arm had been broken instead, or one leg cut off; it would have made running so much easier.

He looked up to figure out what kind of room he was in and how he could get out.

It was rather dismaying to find that he was in a small storage-type room with only cupboards along the wall, a blue painted door and the metal table he was lying on. The only possible escape was through the door, so he did the only thing he could think to do. He jerked his arms to one side, back flat, to one side, back flat and then with one last hard jerk rolled himself off the table.

He grunted as he hit the floor with a hard thump that jarred his newly broken spine. He winced at the sharp pain, then rolled himself over onto his stomach and began to drag himself across the floor with his hands and elbows.

Just as he was almost to the door, it opened. He tipped his head back and looked up and up and up. Magnus had returned.

"What’s this, the little worm is trying to crawl away before the fun can really begin? Why, whatever is the matter Lianndra, did you hurt yourself?"

"You… you… you… I curse you to a shallow grave, worms, coyotes and a slow eternity in a hell of your own devising," Lianndra managed to get out slowly and painfully. He said it in such a grating and terrible voice that Magnus took a step back before he could catch himself.

"Be quiet boy," Magnus said, his voice like iron. He combined that voice with the visibly rippling strength of his arms as he bent down and grabbed Lianndra under his right knee and by his shoulder.

Lianndra groaned as Magnus slung him over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes and carried him from the small room and down a darkened hallway. He beat his fists ineffectually against the bulgingly muscled shoulders of his enemy.

"Let me go, you bastard!" he screamed, his fear momentarily overtaken by his rage.

The adult vampire held him steady with one hand, then tipped his head down with one fist in his hair. Magnus smiled, exposing his teeth. They had been filed over a length of hundreds of years to such razor-sharp points that they could slice through cement slabs and probably had done so in the past.

"Shut up, Lianndra. As soon as you’re healed, I’ll take care of you, but until then you keep your mouth shut. Do you understand me?" the voice was vicious and slicing; it matched his teeth.

Lianndra squirmed, wincing at the horrible pain in his back. He opened his mouth to scream again, but Magnus yanked harder at his hair, causing him to yelp at the agony in his scalp.

They came to a thick wood door that Magnus kicked open. "I’ve got him," he said to the room’s occupant.

Lianndra twisted his head on his limp neck and stared over his shoulder at who stood there.

He started from the floor up. Leather slippers and a long white lace dress that only allowed a bit of her ankle-tight bloomers to show. The dress was old, he could tell that it was from the 1700’s by the modest style, the long sleeves and the age of it. Once it had been a stylishly expensive dress, but now it was only a rag not fit to scrub the filthiest of floors.

Tispith looked at him coldly, her eyes darkened with thought. He noticed that her cheeks were faintly flushed and she was fairly bouncing with suppressed energy. She had Fed and not all that long ago--minutes in fact. He could see a shoe sticking out from under one of the heavy wooden antique chairs. Even as he watched, the foot finished its death quiver and fell still, dead. There was no helping her victim; it was too late. All he could do was try to help himself, and one of the ways to do that was to keep his eyes open and try to figure out her weakness.

To follow through with that plan, he looked around the room he was in. When he calculated the age of the furniture, he realized for the first time what the situation was. The real Tispith hadn’t walked the earth as herself in over one hundred and eighty years; Chelsea had always been there with her. After she escaped from the tomb, there was only Chelsea in control, and only recently had Tispith begun to manifest her returning command of the body they both inhabited.

"So, if it isn’t darling little Lianndra, Donal’s boy wonder. How have you been, dear child?" The way she said it, she could have been one of the old and dear aunts from his childhood. Family always tastes better than strangers.

He moaned as Magnus dropped him on the floor with a thump, jolting his broken back. He heard the shuffle of feet as Magnus walked back through the door.

The older vampire called over his shoulder as he left: "See you later, Lianndra. Keep a spot on your dance card open, why don’t you. As soon as you’re done being a broken, whiny baby, I’ll take care of you." The man giggled a maniacal whinny that chilled the blood.

The door closed with a gentle click and Lianndra looked up at Tispith in growing despair. He was helpless before the Queen, the one place he definitely wished he wasn’t.

She was looking at him with a smile curving her rosy lips. Her eyes slowly traced down his limp form then came back up to his eyes; her own violet eyes glowed with suppressed energy as she found him completely at her mercy.

"It’s funny. I’ve watched a lot of TV of late, for about the last thirty years or so, you know how it is when you get bored. Anyway, Chelsea never did have very good taste, which is why I ended up watching so many episodes of Batman and Robin, the old ones from the seventies or whenever. Anyway, the one thing that always bothered me about that show was not how an older man was spending much too much time with a young boy, but that the plots were always so simple. Batman only had to concentrate for a minute, then he was off after the bad guys, ready to bring them to justice. That was how it was with you tonight. You were not paying very close attention to what went on around you. You just came running after me.

"Now look at you, broken spine, helpless. This ought to be some kind of lesson, you know, one of those, ‘this could be you’ sorts of things. Boy, you sure got yourself into a bit of a mess, huh? What made you try to fight Magnus? He’s tough," she said. "Well, he should be, I trained him after all."

Lianndra just groaned, which made her laugh.

"Wow, he really whupped your ass, didn’t he?" She leaned over him, twisting his head this way and that with the toe of her slipper, as if testing the dexterity of his vertebrae. "What would happen if I were to break this little bone right here?" She nudged the hard knot of bone under his ear. She pushed so hard that the pain had a kind of rippling affect that seemed to slam right into the roof of his skull. If the pain was that bad when she just touched it, how would it feel if she broke it? He really didn’t want to find out, he was in enough pain as it was.

"Sorry, I see that that idea doesn’t exactly appeal to you," she said. "Let me think a minute."

"About what?" Lianndra asked weakly.

Tispith giggled. "We’re going to play a little game, one I like to call ‘Ways to Die.’ I’ll name off some ways to die, and you tell me if they’re good ones, bad ones, or have already been done before. Ready?"

He nodded weakly, knowing there was no way out of it. If he said "No" she would go crazy and do much worse things than what she was going to be naming here.

She stepped backward and sat down on a chair without looking, her eyes distant as she thought of all of the many horrible tortures she’d ever seen, done, or only heard about. Her legs crossed at the ankles and for just a second he remembered her as she had been the first time he’d seen her.

She’d been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, her oval face perfectly proportioned to her slender body, her ash blond hair falling down her back in a cascade of white. She’d looked at him with a smile curving her perfect lips as she stood next to her victim, a rich man that didn’t know he was traveling with death at his side.

Lianndra himself had been with a mortal, so he hadn’t been able to ask her any questions about what she was doing. They had been in a ballroom filled with exquisitely dressed aristocrats, all dancing and swirling about gaily, while over to one side of the dance floor, two killers faced each other in the costume of young aristocrats.

That was how he always remembered his time in France, as a beautiful place he had loved and cherished, then been denied by the fact that the Queen sent him on to England.

He didn’t like to remember the bad things about France and all of the other major party places of that time. The stench for one thing, the poor people littering the streets, the dead bodies that were scooped out of gutters early most winter mornings and the attitude. When he was at balls he liked to imagine that everyone was putting their differences aside to have a good time, but he knew it wasn’t true.

A good ball was a place for highbred ladies to gossip about other high bred ladies, for men to talk politics and laugh at those less fortunate than themselves. He didn’t like to remember the many things people had said at the balls he had gone to; he just liked to remember the clothes and the food. He left conversation out of it.

The ball he had met Tispith at though, that had been a particularly traumatic experience that he was never able to forget. It was where he had decided once and for all that the Queen definitely was not needed in physical form, more as a martyr really.

It was after the ball that dissension against her had begun to pick up speed and the trouble with the Queen had started. But not before she had planned to ship him off to England and had ruined all his fun, for a little while at least. There were some good things about his being sent to England, like all of the blood he had drunk and all of the crazy yet extremely talented poets he’d run across. Still, Lianndra had been angry at the Queen for the way she had exiled him. Was still angry at her, though he was also afraid. She was very powerful and very evil. There were things that she could do to him that he didn’t even want to think about. Terrible, terrible things.

CHELSEA

The sounds were still there though, the demon noises that closed around her, constricting her throat and silencing her voice. She had long since ceased to be able to really cry. Dry sobs shook her, tearing her apart from the inside out. She huddled upon herself, exhausted, unable to even moan as the sounds pounded at her, never ending agony of the mind.

A shiver racked her body, but there was nothing for her to do. She was never going to be free. That light didn’t matter, it was just a figment of her imagination. There was no hope here. There was only torment.

This was her penance for being what she was, nosferatu. This was her penance for all of the lives she had changed in her quest to Feed her Hunger. This was what she deserved: to stay here in the darkness alone and afraid with no freedom in sight.

SCRITCH, SCRATCH, BA-BUMP, BA-BUMP. SCRITCH, SCRATCH, BA-BUMP, BA-BUMP. SCRITCH, SCRATCH, BA-BUMP, BA-BUMP. SCRITCH, SCRATCH, BA-BUMP, BA-BUMP…

What most people didn’t know was that sound could be even worse than monsters stalking the night. Because sound could pound at you, wearing down your defenses until there was nothing left, no thought, no hope, no light at the end of the tunnel, nothing.

If there was a real demon, she could hope that perhaps in some way, she would be able to fight it off. Would, at the last instant, escape back into the light, into freedom and the future, with all of its shadowy pathways and bright, glimmering hopes. But not sound. There was no escape from the sound, from the terrible, grinding pain that crashed upon her, with no monsters or demons behind it. There was no adversary for her to face and fight, there was only that terrible sound closing tighter and tighter. There was no beating it, there was no either facing it and winning or dying, there was nothing, but to endure.

In that moment, if she could have died, could have plunged a shard of glass into her heart, she would have. But there was nothing, nothing and more nothing. Just that terrible grinding pain in her brain closing around her like a noose, with no hope, not even for death.

She no longer prayed for freedom and escape, she now prayed for an ending of her pain, a surcease from this torture. She prayed, no, begged, for death. That was all that was left to her, the hope that in the next breath, in the next moment, her heart would stop, her eyes would shut one final time and her agony would end in the silence of the grave.

LIANNDRA

"I know, how ‘bout I just crack open your skull and suck your brains out with a straw?" She said it like she was joking, but he knew she wasn’t. She was asking him in deadly earnest if that was the end that he wanted for himself. She was going to kill him, and that was all there was to it. She just wanted to get a little feedback on the kind of death that he wanted from her.

He shrugged his shoulders weakly. "If you wanted to, I guess you could, but wouldn’t that be a little gross? Just because we’re bloodsucking monsters doesn’t mean we have to develop disgusting habits, now does it?"

She tapped her chin thoughtfully. "No doubt. Hm, how ‘bout this then," she said, "I’ll manacle you to a stone wall outside just before dawn comes and leave you there all day. When I bring you inside you ought to be really weak and low on energy, not to mention the fact that you’ll probably burst a few capillaries, that’s what happened to me my first time. Anyway, I’ll use a razorblade to trace the capillaries and suck the blood out, then when that’s done, I’ll crush every bone in your body one by one so that you’ll be like a bag filled with broken china. Then I’ll stick you outside one more time for a whole day, which will make you even weaker. I’ll do the razorblade thing again, rebreak all of the healed bones, then pour you into a steel jar that I’ll encase in cement and bury twelve feet underground. It’ll be a strange shaped jar too, so that even if your bones manage to repair themselves, they’ll be all twisted and malformed, making it impossible for you to dig your way out. How ‘bout that for a death out of legend?" She looked at him, as if begging for his approval.

He shrugged again. "I suppose, but didn’t you already do that with Nhial?"

"Oh."

Nhial had been one of her many companions, one that had managed to get on her bad side at the wrong time in her life. She buried him deep in an underground cavern, the kind that people go to so they can look at stalagmites and stalactites. Some people that visited that particular cavern later said that they heard what sounded like an animal wailing in agony coming from under a particularly beautiful mound of stalagmites.

"Oh well, I suppose I could just stake you out in the sunlight and have one of my servants chop off your head when you become weak and are close to unconsciousness," Tispith said. She shrugged her shoulders in an elegant circular motion. It didn’t matter to her, and she was growing tired of the game.

He licked his lips, trying to think of some tactic that would keep her from following that course of action. But really, there was none.

There was only one thing to do, and he really didn’t want to do it.

Long ago he had erected barriers in his mind to protect the regular people around him from what he held within him. The force he had walled off had grown in strength over the years and from contact with the Unspeakable. He had felt the force of the world and he had siphoned off some of that energy for himself without even really knowing it.

He raised his head and looked at Tispith where she sat, swinging her legs like the young girl she looked to be. He saw the evil and malicious humor reflected in her eyes and knew that he had no choice. He couldn’t really remember what he had trapped in his mind, but he knew that it was powerful, a last resort kind of powerful. But now he had no choice. It was either use that power, or die.

He closed his eyes and concentrated, entering deeply into his own mind. He felt his way along the many pathways and labyrinthine tunnels that went to all different places, memories, forgotten thoughts, his fears and his pleasures, everywhere.

He followed a path he hadn’t traveled for a long time, feeling his way along, careful of the traps he had laid in case of someone trying to enter his mind. He didn’t want to trigger one of his own defenses; there was no real way to tell what that might do to him, but he rather thought that it might kill him.

Finally, he reached that giant steel box of the mind that he had hidden all of his secrets inside of for so long that the lock was rusted. He drew himself tight, then sent out a bolt of thought that burst the box wide open, spilling out the light inside like a volcano spewing magma. It flowed out and filled him until he felt as though his skin was about to burst open like an overripe fruit. It was like pure energy, glowing and radiant, giving him the strength he had forsaken.

His mind filled with all of the things he hadn’t wanted to remember--the truths that he had tried to hide even from himself. At the same time, abilities that he had been frightened of were suddenly before him, offering him more than he had ever thought possible. He hadn’t been whole before now, had been so fractured and broken that he hadn’t even known that he had crippled himself. Now he was complete once again and with time he would train those abilities and strengths until they were just more weapons in his arsenal.

He was Lianndra de Voight, and he was more than any other vampire had ever been or ever would be. He knew suddenly that if he wanted to, he could make his body age and grow, could take on the aspects of a mortal: the ability to reproduce and further himself. At the same time he knew that he could be anything that he wanted to be, and that scared him.

He stemmed the flow of power and channeled it, taming it to his will so that it wasn’t quite so wild and free. Someday he would be able to use those powers with all of the confidence and control that he used what he already had, but until that day, he had to keep a tight rein on them. They were wild and dangerous and he couldn’t allow them to get out of control.

He returned to his outer self, feeling the pain of his broken back and ribs, the twinge of a concussion from hitting the floor.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked, his voice weak. Even though he had gained untold strength and knowledge, most of those powers didn’t affect his physical self, not unless he focused it and used it consciously, something he knew he wasn’t ready to do yet. It was better to rely on what he knew for now, rather than letting loose a flood of untamed power that he had no idea how to use and didn’t have the skill to really channel and stop.

Tispith looked down at him and laughed a bitter laugh. "Why do you think? I’m doing this because I can, and because you invaded my personal space." She leaped to her feet and stood over him, toeing him sharply with one slippered foot, her shapely leg clad in tights that showed the way her muscles flexed with the movement.

He winced as her sharp toes sent a broken rib into his right lung. He dragged himself by his arms over to the table and collapsed there, waiting for some of his worst wounds to heal themselves.

"What are you talking about?" Lianndra asked. "You were the one that started this whole situation, what with your murdering of the Elders and the way you stirred up Ralsbet then set him loose to hunt in my city."

"Your city?" she said, her feet spread wide, her arms crossed over her chest. She looked beautiful and bright, like a doll clothed in period dress. She laughed then. "Silly boy, you were Made by my brother, who was Made by me. Everything that you are belongs to me, so that city you are so willing to claim ownership of, actually belongs to me."

"You don’t understand," he croaked, trying to pull himself upright using the table leg.

She kicked him in the side, making him slide back down. He groaned a little in pain.

Her eyes gleamed brightly with vicious humor. "But I do understand, more than you can ever know. You probably think that my brother is older, but in reality, I am the eldest, the first. Which means that everything is mine, and if I want to destroy it, well I bloody well can and you can’t stop me." She had taken on the aspect of a spoiled child, something he found rather bemusing and no little frightening. Someone that old shouldn’t be such a… brat.

He drew in a gasping breath, feeling the moist sucking inside as his lung unclogged itself. He drew it out and spit out a red gobbet of meat, glad that that obstacle had been removed and that his speech was no longer garbled and blocked.

"Listen, you really don’t understand…" he started, only to stop as she began to laugh again, bitterly.

"No, it is you that doesn’t understand," she said, kicking him again. "You are a child, barely two hundred, while I count my years in centuries. You all say that I was granted the BloodTouch in the thirteen hundreds, but that is a lie. I am older than that. I am older than anything living. I am older than any standing monument. I have lived longer than anything ever has. I am older than memory itself.

"I was the older twin of the first children of the first people alive. Donal was my brother, that is true, but he should never have been able to grow to be an adult while I had to stay a child. You have no idea what it is like to be millions of years old and at the same time to always be seen as a barely adolescent child. Look at me!" she suddenly screamed, tearing her dress open, the buttons popping off to reveal that she was naked underneath.

"I will never lie with a man, I will never drive a car, I will never drink alcohol, I will never smoke, I will never have children, I will never die! I will always be like this, a helpless child forever, and all you can say is that I don’t understand?" Tears dripped from her eyes, the tiny amount of blood staining a path down the delicate, curved cheeks as they slid down. "I was only thirteen, I didn’t know what I was doing, how was I to? In those days, children were kept in the dark about the secrets of the world. They were never allowed to do, say, or think anything that the Gods would see as being wrong. This was before the God of today. This was when we lived under the Star of the Five Gods.

"We were the Children of the Gods, we were demigods in our own rights. We were the people that the Bible only hints at. We lived for hundreds of years at a time, barely aging. The key to it all was the BloodStone. It was the gift of the Gods, given to us at the beginning of time. The Elders kept it safe, but they couldn’t block it all the way. It was in the river that quenched all our thirsts. When the water ran over it, the water was changed. In essence, it was the fountain of youth.

"There were no old people, there were no disabled people, there was no sickness, not until I made my mistake. We, the children, were to be kept in the dark as I said, and one of the things they didn’t tell us was about the BloodStone and what it did. The secret was told when a person reached maturity, when you became forty years old.

"I was so innocent, I had no idea that what I did was wrong. I had no idea of what would happen, but it was still my fault. I took us out of the Garden of Eden and brought us to this sorry state.

"I snuck out of the valley, I was just playing. But then I saw it, the most beautiful thing imaginable, a stone the size of my two fists together, sitting in the river. I fished it out of course; I didn’t think anything of it. It was my pretty toy, my plaything, something to fill my time with. I hid it in the little pouch I always carried, then I went back into the valley, ready to do my chores. Ready to get on with my life. Ready to grow up and learn all of the secrets of the universe." She wiped her eyes furiously, but the tears still fell, it was like a dam had broken inside of her.

"Nothing happened for ten days, but then, all of a sudden, people started dying. People my age and older. I didn’t know what was happening, how was I to know? For the first time, we saw age and it was horrible. We saw people grow old so fast, so unbelievably fast. They grew old and they died in a matter of seconds, and nobody knew what to do.

"We were ageless you see, we stayed youthful all our lives until we deemed it was our time, then we lay down, closed our eyes and passed painlessly onto the next stage of life. We died with no transition. We died when we were ready, when our lives were over, when our times came, but we had never seen age before. We were so innocent and that horrible thing called age wiped most of us out.

"Two-thirds of the valley people died in two days. My parents died; all that was left was a pile of ashes on their grass mat. But strangely, I was unaffected. Everyone else was growing old, but I stayed young, and at first my brother did too.

"That was when it hit me--I had done this thing. I had killed my people over a pretty rock. I tried to get rid of it, but I couldn’t. I’d leave it somewhere and when I’d turn around, it would be back with me. That was when I felt it happen, the change. The change that all vampires go through to become what we are. I began to vomit out my mortal life; all that was left was my immortal self. I died and was reborn to walk the earth for eternity, eaten up inside by my guilt and my self-hatred. Then there was the Hunger.

"The first thing I did was Feed, while at the same time, my brother aged. He became twenty years old in an hour. I went to him, trying to figure out what to do. And that was when it happened, the stone spoke.

"It told me that it had changed me because it deemed that was to be my punishment for killing my people. I would always be young, but to survive, I would have to drink the blood of mortals, stealing parts of their lives. The Gods were angry with what I had done, and so they Made me what I am as I Made you what you are.

"It then told me about the BloodTouch and what I had to do to save my beloved brother, and I did it. Everyone in the valley died, all except my brother and I, we were the only ones left. But that didn’t mean we were unchanged.

"I was still a child, but he was a man. I don’t know what happened, the years passed and we lived together in the wreckage of the valley, Feeding on small animals. At the same time, humans from other valleys began to spread throughout the world. Soon they found our village. They accepted us as their own, and we reveled in the Feed, but it could not last, heaven is not forever. I began to hate him and he hated me. We fought, often violently, until he left one night with a caravan heading toward some place that I had only heard of.

"For awhile, a few thousand years, I was alone, but the stone began to talk to me again. That was when I began to make my vampire army. It wasn’t to give you life or to make you immortal. It was to destroy my brother who the stone said was raising an army of his own--the Brethren.

"We, the vampires, have been amongst our mortal cousins throughout all of history. In fact, if you count me as the first, starting with when I was born, then we were here first. I was here first, and they are the usurpers.

"Some scientists say that there was a valley where a small culture of humanity developed that was the template for the rest of modern man, a valley populated by people who evolved before the rest of humanity was even ready. Well, I came from that valley. I was the one that destroyed it after all. Donal and I are like Adam and Eve, we had paradise, but now it’s gone. Like Adam and Eve, who spawned all of humanity, we spawned you. Don’t you feel proud? Doesn’t that just make you want to retch?

"There I was, Queen of you all, feeling so secure in my position, preparing to topple my brother off his moral high horse. I spent years planning and Making more of you vampire children, wondering and plotting Donal’s downfall.

"Hundreds of thousands of years went by, and then, just before I was ready for my great attack, I was deemed too unstable by the ones I had chosen to be my warriors. They entombed me in a hill, but I managed to take the stone with me. I still had the pouch tied around my neck as I had always worn it. Magic I had learned from a mortal sorcerer gave me the skill to weave an illusion around it. That was all that mattered; the stone was safe, the people were safe and I was safe.

"Hundreds of years passed, and one day I became aware that something was missing. I searched the tomb to find that the stone had disappeared. Someone had stolen it. And I know who it was."

She looked down at him, her eyes somehow sad and empty at the same time, like a stone statue weeping with the loss of its creator. "Why did you do it Lianndra? I know you’re not as young as you say," Tispith said, "you understand far too much. And all I can ask is, why?"

Lianndra lifted his face up from where he had buried it in the carpet. He felt the tingling, sliding feeling of his spinal cord slithering along the newly grown bone of the spinal column as the broken cord endings tried to match up. He knew that if he just had ten more minutes he would be able to get up and run away. Until then, he would be trapped here, forced to endure any torture she devised.

He looked at her and felt that monumental rage rise up inside of him, strengthened by the memories he had hidden from himself, the memories that had been kept fresh and raw deep inside of his mind where he hadn’t had to deal with them. "Do you know why I did it? Do you really want to know why I did it?" At her nod, Lianndra answered: "I did it for revenge. I hate you. I hate you and I hate your brother, it’s your fault that I am what I am."

She frowned. "What are you talking about? Without Donal, and thus without me, you’d long since have been dead and rotting in your dirt grave, so what do you have to be angry about? We gave you immortality! What more did you want?"

He laughed bitterly. "You don’t even know who and what I am, do you? You don’t know a thing about my family, yet you did it anyway."

"Did what?"

His lips were twisted into a hard double line. "My name is Lianndra de Voight and I was born in the year of our Lord, 1777. I was Made into a vampire in 1784 by Donal, your twin brother. Before that I was a simple child without a care in the world, my family was well-to-do and we had many properties and estates. I was destined to inherit it all, prince of my own little kingdom.

"The only problem was that when I came home a vampire, I was no longer deemed worthy to be the heir. I was a child and that was all I would ever be. My father disinherited me and locked me in the basement as punishment. He meant to leave me there until I starved to death. Do you have any idea what that was like? My own father was trying to kill me, all because I wasn’t what he wanted me to be, all because I was never going to age and die, he was going to kill me at least seventy years ahead of my time." The voice that had spoken those horrible things was unemotional, the tone belied the face that said them. Lianndra’s face was set in a grimace of horrible agony, his eyes focused on that long ago pain.

Tispith cocked her head. "I thought your family was the perfect little unit. From the way you always talked about it, I thought nothing ever went wrong. In fact, I seem to remember you saying that you still see your family. Why would you want to visit the people that tried to kill you?"

He laughed that bitter laugh again. "Who said I visited them? That was my first family, I only visit my adopted one."

"Your adopted family? You were adopted after you became a vampire?" Her voice was disbelieving.

He nodded. "Yes," he said. "That night, after I was turned into a vampire, I did what any normal person would do in such a situation--I went crazy. Donal, he was terrified. There I was, his beloved one, screaming like some kind of wild thing, throwing three hundred pound dressers and bureaus around as if they were bits of sand.

"He got frantic when he realized what a horrendous error he had made in turning me into a vampire, so he did the only thing he could have done to make up for his evil mistake. He used the magic he had learned and sent me through a Gate to another Earth, this one."

Her eyes popped. "You’re not from here? Oh my God, you’re some kind of horrible monster creature from another reality. I shouldn’t be talking to you!"

The oldest rule in the book: vampires from other worlds are off-limits, they tend to be weird little tyrants that carry communicable diseases.

Lianndra took a strange delight in coughing on her shoe. She shrieked and leaped backward, the great Tispith, Black Queen and ruler, afraid of a little cough.

"Don’t worry, I don’t have any diseases or anything. The world I come from is almost exactly like this one. Anyway, your brother sent me here and I was so mad that I did what any lost little boy would do--I went home to my mother. Only it was a different home here. My real home was a dark and gloomy place that I absolutely detested because my father was so tightfisted he wouldn’t even give up the money for the paints that the place so badly needed. The place here, on the other hand, was absolutely beautiful, but I didn’t really notice it.

"I went inside without even knocking and automatically went to the solar where my mother spent her time sewing and writing in her diary. She was there, a sad little figure in a black dress. She looked the oldest I had ever seen her.

"When she saw me, she screamed; in this world, the Lianndra that was born had a bad heart. The night before I came, he died. He had a fever and it became pneumonia, he strained so hard that his heart just gave out. I know this sounds mean and cruel, but I’m rather glad he died. If he’d still been around, I would have had to go somewhere else to live, and I couldn’t do that. I just did not know what to do. If my mother hadn’t been so grief-stricken, if she had sent me away, I wouldn’t have had anywhere to go. As it was, she accepted me without question as being her son from another world.

"It was rather pathetic how grateful she was that I had come to live with her; if I could have, I would have hung myself. As it was, I settled in as comfortably as I could into a life as a vampire and spent my time with my mother. You should have seen her, she was so sad and lonely. In this world, I was all that she had had. My little brother Harrison was never born in this world since my father was hit by a carriage and killed when the other me was only three. Harrison was born when I was five. He was never conceived in this world. I’m kind of glad that he was there in my regular world, he was such a sweet little fellow that I always felt bad he was not going to inherit very much. As it was, he got it all.

"I was accepted into this world as if I was born here. My mother devised a crafty little story that said I had been very sick with rheumatism and had become a stunted little dwarfling that couldn’t leave my bed. It was horrible; they all thought I was some kind of ugly little troll without ever having seen me. That’s why my mother got away with grieving so strongly the night and day before I appeared. She told everyone that she was mourning the little boy I used to be and that that boy had died and I should always be remembered like that, as her beautiful, angelic little boy. They all thought she was crazy, but they understood how she felt, a widowed woman with only a stunted and malformed son.

"We lived for three years as just the two of us, then a Colonel Rufus Gathers started the courting process and she wanted children and grandchildren so badly she married him. After the wedding she had to tell him about me though, since he thought I had long since died. When he found out that I was alive and had never been sick, he was ecstatic. He had a son and he hadn’t even had to work for it. Then he found out what I really was and he was terrified. Do you know what I had to do?

"I had to use my eyes and hypnotize him, but I wasn’t good enough at it. My natural abilities had been affected by my being Made into a vampire and I lost control and managed to turn him into a walking vegetable. He was never the same again. He would do anything he was told and that was how my brothers and sisters were born. My mother ordered him to make love to her every night that she knew she was fertile, all just to have someone that she could care for, someone alive in the way that I could never be.

"After awhile Rufus got a little better and was able to actually speak his own mind, but he was never again the man he was before and it was my fault. He eventually died of a brain tumor. I must have left something behind in his mind on accident.

"Eventually my brothers and sisters grew to hate and resent me and I was forced to leave the home I had made here and go find someplace else to live. I passed my time Feeding and hunting mortals, not because I Hungered, but because I was lonely and I was trying to find something to make my life better. Then I met the Donal that lived on this world; he was like his counterpart in his first kindness, but like that other Donal, he was just another user.

"He sent me on errands into families to lure the children of those families away from them. He used me like that for twenty years before I finally couldn’t take it anymore. That’s when I first came upon you, only you don’t remember it, do you?"

She was staring at him in horror. "What did you do Lianndra? What did you do to me?"

He smiled vilely. "It was about that time that the other vampires noticed that you were acting crazier and crazier, wasn’t it? It was at that time that you killed your brother Donal, isn’t it?"

"You didn’t?!?"

Lianndra’s eyes were ice-flecked. "Didn’t I? Words can do a lot and a broadcasting telepath can do even more," he said. "That’s one of the differences between my birth world and yours: people are born with the powers of the mind and the de Voight family is one of the best and well-known.

"Well, when I became a vampire it messed up my Talents so that when I tried to affect the Colonel’s mind, it didn’t exactly work out right. But after awhile I managed to compensate for the power boost the vampire virus gave me. I compensated for it so well that I turned you into a ravening beast, Donal into a weakling that couldn’t match you and all of the other vampires into believers of what I said.

"When I suggested to Baldwin that you might be too dangerous to keep around, he believed me and planned the whole entombing thing himself. I finally got my revenge on you and Donal. Donal for what he Made me and you for what you Made him.

"If you two hadn’t interfered in my life, I might have had it all. I would have lived for at least a hundred and fifty years with the rejuvenation treatments we had devised on my world. I would have eventually died, but I would have died an adult. As it is, I will live forever as a child, never to have the power that I always craved. I could have been someone, but now it’s too late.

"As it is, I broke into your tomb to ask you if you knew anything about how I could possibly be returned to mortal form, or at least turned into an adult. The only problem was that you wouldn’t Wake up. And it was strange, you were glowing red, your entire body just glowing like a stoplight. My curiosity got the better of me and I searched around until I found what was causing the glow, a stone in a little sachet around your neck. So I did what any curious person might do--I stole it and I used it to strengthen my own powers. It is the Unspeakable and it is part of me."

"Where is it?" she breathed, her eyes locked on his.

He smiled. "I put it in the one place no one would ever look."

"Where?" she demanded.

"Under the tomb," he said.

Tispith’s eyes widened. "No, you couldn’t have, I would have felt it, I would have! I would have… oh my God. It is under the tomb… the earthquake when we fought. The stone is there and it felt us fighting. I must get it, I must." She turned, the dusty rags of her dress brushing against her thighs as she ran past him toward the door.

With a scream of agony as new grown muscles and sinews were stretched to their limits, he threw himself across the floor to hit her hard behind the knees. He had wasted so much time talking that his spine had managed to fix itself; he would be able to walk soon, but for now he was glad to have the use of his legs’ boosting ability.

He scrabbled across the carpet and up over her back to keep her from getting up. She screamed in rage, trying to buck him off.

"It’s not going to happen," he said. "The stone is just fine where it is, and I’m not going to let you have it."

She squirmed under his smaller body, but he held onto the doorway so hard that his fingers left grooves in the wood. Still he held on, not even thinking about the possibility of releasing her. "If you have that stone, you’re going to keep on doing what you used to do, you’re going to keep on ruining peoples’ lives, and I just won’t stand for it."

With a concentration of his mental energies, he focused in on her and merged with her mind, searching for what he knew had to be there.

There. In the very back of her mind was what looked like a steel box with a heavy padlock. She had managed to trap the other part of her personality in what she thought was an unbreakable mind trap. What she didn’t know was that Lianndra was well-trained and had a lot of practice in breaking mind locks.

The box was surrounded by monstrous shadowy forms that stalked around it, snuffling and groaning, howling and moaning. He dispatched them with surprising ease, sending them flying off into the darkness, into the nothingness of the void. They were nothing more than thought’s creation, having only the solidity of the belief that had birthed them--and Tispith did not believe in monsters, only in herself.

With a twist of his mind, he focused in on the lock of the box, twisting a skeleton key of the mind, then finally jerking it off with a powerful yank, breaking it, sending pieces scattering off and away. Light burst out of the box and Tispith screamed in the real world.

Lianndra pulled himself away; this wasn’t his fight so he wouldn’t interfere. Besides, from what he knew of fighting, two is usually the limit and three is a little unfair if it’s two against one. Even Tispith deserved a fair fight, no matter what she had done to others.

He watched Tispith’s face writhe as the fight began. She started to make throaty little groaning sounds and her arms and legs twitched as the struggle began to heat up.

He thumped his butt down on the floor and waited, watching as Tispith’s body began to move like worms were flowing under the surface of her skin. She gave a scream that was like a soul burning in hell, then went still. A few seconds later she gave another scream, a kind of sputtering scream that died on her lips after five, two second bursts. She lay still for a moment then gave another, longer scream that seemed to go on forever to his ears, but probably only lasted for about thirty seconds. When the scream sputtered off, she lay deathly still.

Her vampire skin made her look like some kind of corpse as she lay there unmoving. Her legs were stretched out on the floor, her arms were limp and her head was tipped laxly backward, her rose colored lips parted slightly. She looked like a doll, broken and discarded by some petulant child, to be forgotten, lost to time.

For a minute she stayed like that, then she started to twitch. Her fingers and feet beat out a staccato burst on the oak wood floor. Her rolled-back eyes jerked to the right, to the left and then focused in on his face. She blinked, he blinked, and she sat up, dragging herself to a sitting position, her head flopping a little on her neck.

"Lianndra?" Her voice was hoarse, but it was her.

He smiled. "How does it feel to be back?"

She smiled timidly at him. "It feels great," Chelsea said.

They laughed. He was careful not to mention that their laughter was more than just a touch hysterical. She didn’t say anything about it either.

"How did you know I was still inside?" she asked.

"It was easy," he said, sighing with relief. He had thought for a moment that he would be unable to stop laughing, that he would just keep on chortling like a madman forever. "How could anyone let someone as good and as beautiful as you get away? Not even Tispith was entirely shielded from your charm."

She blushed, a burst of excess blood streaking across her face to make her look like a mortal girl.

"Sometimes I think that if you were allowed to grow up, there would be no way to resist you," she said. "It’s like a magnetism, something that calls to everyone around you, and if you had ever become an adult there would be no way to stop you. You would have been ruling the world within an hour of your eighteenth birthday." She reached out and placed the flat of her palm against his cool cheek, almost caressing.

Anyone watching this scene might have seen it in two ways: The first was a small boy being comforted by an older sister or friend, both incredibly beautiful and pale. The other was the image of a god allowing himself to be touched by a disciple, letting the other enjoy the wonder and glory of his presence and caring. The only thing wrong with the second idea would be that Lianndra would not be what one would call a merciful god. He was one that passed out fairness and justice when it suited him, weeded out the weak and unworthy from his following and revealed his true self only to the strong and brave of heart. Otherwise he was just a helpless little boy lying in wait for the ones that whetted his appetite and ignited his Hunger.

It was at that moment, with her hand on his cheek, that Chelsea suddenly stiffened. Her back arched in agony and the immensely beautiful and evil voice of the Queen spoke. It was a voice that echoed with age and cruelty, one that offered not solace for the helpless, but a long and drawn out death.

"Did you really think that you could get rid of me so easily? Just call up Chelsea and have her vanquish me? Well, that worked in its way, I can’t take over again, lucky, lucky. Even though I myself may forever be gone, never think that my legacy is as well, you have not heard the last of me and mine.

"The Brethren were my brother’s army, but none have ever seen my army. They walk among you and are welcomed. Older by years and stronger than any you have ever known. Beware, beware beautiful and arrogant Lianndra, for when you least expect it, I will get my revenge. You walk the jagged edge, and someday you will be pushed over it. Beware!" She gave a cackling laugh that rose up into a high-pitched shriek loud enough to shatter mortal eardrums.

Lianndra’s face twisted in pain as she gouged her long fingernails into his skin. Two blood-tinted tears of pain traced down his cheeks to fall into his lap, but he did not bother to wipe them away or rip her hand from his face. This was simply the last dying scream of a diseased soul; she could not hurt him in any permanent way, and perhaps, in some manner, he deserved what he received from her.

She was as his mother, yet he had repelled her and thrown off the ties that bound them together. Ties of blood that went back years incalculable. At the very beginning of time was when she had lived, a time when aging was unknown. She had come from the past, forward, ever forward, to give her blood-gift to those around her.

Call eternity a curse or a gift, either way, it was something he had received from her. In thanks for that gift he had banished her from the very world in which she was born. As long as she could not really hurt him, there was no reason to beat her to a bloody pulp. Besides, already he felt the darkly dangerous presence receding and the lighter, more airy presence of Chelsea returning.

Chelsea sat panting. Her hand fell back to her lap, her bloody fingertips and fingernails staining the yellow-aged dress. Her beautiful face changed as he watched, the evil disappearing to be replaced with the innocence that belonged there.

Her chin rounded with that childish curve, her eyes lost their hard edge and her stark, makeup-less face wasn’t quite as dangerous looking, was more the face of a girl. Though she had lived for hundreds of years as Chelsea, her innocence had never been damaged or wiped entirely away.

Being a vampire was all that she had ever known. She did not remember being mortal at all. Only when she was Tispith did all of the true memories return to her. Now, as herself alone, those memories were like a dream, things she had watched happening to someone else. It was not so very surprising that none of the entirely human moralities had laid their weight on her mind and heart.

In such a way was she as any animal hunting prey. She Fed on her victims, lived among them, cared for them in her manner, but it was just that. She did not hate them or feel disgust at them; they were simply other living things. She Fed because she Hungered or because she needed the blood. They died occasionally, but she was no more at fault than a lion tearing down a zebra. It was the natural order of things. Life lives off life. Meat eaters feed off of vegetable eaters, it’s as simple as that. The food chain leads all the way up to mortals, but though they did not know it, they were not truly at the very top of the pyramid. Above them are the vampires that skim the mortal herd, be they blood drinkers or emotional vampires, some of them were even mortal themselves. And perhaps, unknowing to them, there were beings that fed off of vampires. There is always one more level to everything.

"That was pretty weird, huh?" Chelsea said, slowly climbing to her feet.

Lianndra nodded, feeling the skin that Tispith had torn away already healing. The cells stretched and meshed together, leaving perfect, unblemished skin behind. Skin that was baby soft and fine, the ultimate draw in when he went hunting.

"Yeah, that was weird," Lianndra said, also getting to his feet. "Come on, we better get out of here before anymore of her ‘friends’ come across us. I don’t want to have to fight Magnus again, one loss per night is my limit."

She nodded and followed him across the room, through the door, down the hallway and through the seemingly endless and maze-like corridors and down endless flights of stairs to the front door. He didn’t say anything about the fact that Chelsea knew exactly where she was going. He thought that maybe it would upset her to realize that she was traveling along as though she herself had been here before and not her alter ego the Black Queen.

Lianndra followed Chelsea, saying nothing.

They left quietly with the surefooted grace of two cats, leaving no trace that they had ever passed, not even a disturbed dust mote or torn spider-web. They held hands as they sprinted across the overgrown lawn toward where the road sounds were coming from. They had to get back to Gregor’s place before Dezi and Chris came in search of them. They shared no words as they ran, but at the same moment, they leapt, as if their joined hands offered more of a connection than just flesh against flesh. As they leaped, their vampire blood worked its magic and they soared through the air, higher and higher, only their consciousness’ holding them aloft.