Twilight Hunger Part 2

My eyes widened, and panic choked me. "Sarafina!" I rasped, fear giving my voice new strength, though it still emerged as little more than a harsh whisper. "Please!"

"Trust me, my darling. You will not die."

"But... "

"You will not die," she said again.

I lay there, fading, fading, darkness closing in around the edges of my vision. I realized dully that she looked no different to me than she had when I'd seen her last. No older. No different at all.

"There now. That's better."

My eyes opened, fell closed, opened again. My breaths came shallow and spa.r.s.e, and I could feel my heartbeat. It pounded in my ears, ever slower... slower... slower...

"Listen to me, my special one," she said, and her voice seemed to come from very far away, as if she spoke to me from the depths of a cave. "You have a choice to make, and it must be made now. There will be no time to deliberate. Do you wish to die? Here and now? Or live, though it will mean living in exile, as I do? Hated by the family, outcast, and driven away."

I felt weak. As if I were becoming a shadow. I didn't understand her questions.

"Life or death, Dante? Speak your answer. If you delay, the choice will be gone. You will die. Tell me now. Which will it be? Life... or death?"

I strained to form the single word but never heard it emerge from my lips or felt them move at all. It was all I could do to think the word with the intention of speaking it aloud. Life.

"Good."

She moved. My vision was fading, so that I could not see where she went, what she did. Then she pressed something warm and wet to my lips and whispered, "Drink, Dante. This is the elixir that will make you live. Drink."

The warm, thick liquid touched my lips, and there was a quickening of my senses, followed at once by a shocking sensation of need. I closed my mouth around the font she offered and nursed at it like a suckling babe. Life seemed to awaken in me, along with a hunger such as I had never known. My arms moved, my hands clasping this bounty, holding it to my face, as I sucked at the luscious fluid that flowed into me.

"Enough!"

Sarafina gripped a handful of my hair and jerked my head away. And only then did I realize it had been her wrist at which I'd been so eagerly feeding. Her blood I had been drinking so hungrily. Even now, she pulled her forearm away, tugging a scarf from her hair and wrapping it tightly around the wound.

Horrified, I felt my stomach lurch, turning my head away from her and lifting my hand to swipe at my mouth.

"It's all right, Dante," she whispered. "It is the way the gift is shared."

I looked down at my hands, red with the blood I'd wiped from my mouth. But alive. Strong. I moved my fingers, made fists.

"What is this?" I asked her softly. "What... what does this mean?" And even as I said it, the numbness was receding down my body. The feeling rushed back into my torso, my legs and my feet, with heightened intensity.

My senses p.r.i.c.kled with keen new awareness. My skin tingled at the touch of the very air. My eyes seemed to see more vividly, more precisely, than ever they had. And strength surged through my veins.

She tore my shirt away, making strips of its fabric as she spoke. "It is a gift, young Dante, though the old one calls it a curse. It is a gift I have given to you. You will never die now. Never grow older. And though your family will turn against you, you will never be alone, as I have been. For I will be with you. Always."

Looking over my shoulder at her, for she was now wadding the fabric and stuffing it into the wound in my back, which caused me immense pain, I shook my head. I did not understand. She tied several strips tightly around me, to hold the wads in place, then reached down, clasped my hand and helped me to my feet, and even as I rose, I saw the old man's silhouette looming just behind her.

I opened my mouth to shout a warning.

Before I said a word, Sarafina turned with such speed she seemed a mere blur. The farmer's rifle went sailing through the air, out of sight, firing harmlessly into the woods as it hit the ground. And Sarafina, the beautiful, gracious woman by whom I had been so entranced, gripped the farmer's shirtfront and jerked him forward. Before I could even react, she had fastened her mouth to his throat.

I heard the sounds... I saw, very clearly in the darkness now, what she was doing. Drinking... his blood. Gorging herself at his throat. At first the farmer pounded her back and kicked at her... and then... then he simply surrendered. I heard his sigh, saw him close his eyes and even wrap his arms around her. He let his head fall backward, and I saw him grind his hips against Sarafina's as she continued to suck at his throat.

And then there was no life left in him at all.

She let go his shirt, and the corpse fell to the ground. Empty. A rag-poppet. Utterly drained.

With one of her scarfs, Sarafina dabbed delicately at her mouth as she turned to face me. I gaped at her, my mouth working soundlessly.

"Don't look so shocked, Dante. Are you telling me you're only just figuring it out? Hmm? We are Nosferatu. We are undead." She licked her lips, tilted her head and smiled very slightly at me. "Vampires," she whispered, and I swore the night wind picked up the word and repeated it a thousand times in a thousand voices.

Vampires.

A breeze from some unseen source made the candle flames leap and flicker. Morgan tore her eyes from the weathered pages and automatically looked behind her. But of course no one was there. Nothing was there. This wasn't real.

It wasn't real.

"Oh my G.o.d," Morgan whispered. "This isn't a diary. These aren't memoirs. It's... it's fiction. It's incredible, breathtaking fiction!"

Oh, maybe not to the man who had written it. The delightfully insane artist who had crafted this tale had, perhaps, even believed it. Imagine. A man who honestly thought he was a vampire. A man who had, in all likelihood, lived here. Right here. In this house.

Something sc.r.a.ped the window, and Morgan whirled, her hand flying to her chest as her heart leapt. But it was only a tree limb, bent and clawlike, scratching at the gla.s.s. Not some creature of the night who called himself Dante, come back to claim his diaries and his house. Of course not. Vampires were not real.

The sudden movement, the scare, left her slightly dizzy and made her chest pound. She waited for it to ease. The rush of breathlessness pa.s.sed, as it always did. She drew a few deep, cleansing breaths and glanced at her watch. She had been sitting in the dark, musty attic for hours, lost in the imaginary world of a madman. When she should have been working on her own tales of intrigue.

G.o.d, how was she ever going to have a saleable script ready for David in three months? Especially now, when all she wanted to do was read more of this incredible tale.

Vaguely she wondered how long it had taken the imaginative Dante to pen his fantasies. Not long, she thought... if every journal in this stack were filled. And even then, she didn't know how he had managed it all in one short lifetime.

He was dead, though. He had to be dead, because she had finally come upon a date, so there was no doubt. And his words, his tales... they just lay there, untouched. So vivid, so wonderfully written, it was almost heartbreaking that they hadn't been shared with the world. G.o.d, if she had written something this good and it had never been seen, she would have been...

Oh.

Oh. The thought that just occurred to her! This could be her work. For all anyone else knew, it could all be her work. Who the h.e.l.l would ever know the difference?

"No," she whispered aloud. "It wouldn't be right."

Wouldn't it? her mind argued. She had just decided it was criminal that this work hadn't been shared. She had just acknowledged that if she had been the author, she would have spent eternity regretting that the work lay here, undiscovered. The written word was meant to be read, after all. Not hidden away but... shared. Experienced.

She knelt again in front of the trunk, licked her dry lips. What harm would there be, she wondered? Dante was long dead, and no one else could possibly know of the existence of these diaries. Could they? Of course not! If they did, these journals wouldn't have been left here to molder in a dusty attic.

And there were so many of them!

"My G.o.d," she whispered. "This is a gold mine. I'm sitting on an absolute gold mine here." And as she sat there, staring down at the trunk full of stories, she knew that they were even more than that. They were the key to getting everything she wanted, to reclaiming everything she had lost. Wealth. Power. Fame. Her triumphant return to L.A. It was all right here. Almost like a gift... left just for her by some long-dead madman who'd called himself Dante and believed himself to be a vampire.

She took the first journal carefully, holding it to her breast like a lover as she straightened, and, turning, she carried it downstairs to her office.

This time, when she held her hands over the keyboard, Dante's journal was lying open on the table beside the computer. And this time, the words came.

Chapter 3.

*Maxine Stuart was watching JFK for about the twelfth time on the little VCR/TV combo in her bedroom, a copy of Catcher in the Rye in her lap, a half-dead can of c.o.ke on the bedside stand, when she heard the sirens. The sound stabbed her in the belly like an ice-cold blade and brought her slowly to her feet, though she couldn't have said why. She went to the window, pushed the curtains aside. She could see the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles pa.s.sing on the highway in the distance. Heading south. Her gaze turned in that direction, and she narrowed her eyes on the faint red glow in the distant night sky.

A familiar Jeep bounded into her driveway, and about a second later she heard the front door of the small house open, heard her mother speaking to Max's friends as she let them in. Maxine shut the TV off, turned and opened her bedroom door as they came hurrying through the house.

Her two best friends came around a corner into the hall and stopped when they saw her standing there. Something was up. Jason didn't shake easily, and he looked shaken. Storm-her real name was Tempest, but she hated it-was downright pale. Maxine's mom was right on their heels.

"So what is it, what's burning?" Max asked.

"It's Spook Central," Jason said without even missing a beat. "It's bad."

"It's awful," Stormy added, and her round jewel-blue eyes were damp. "I don't think anyone got out alive."

Spook Central was Maxine's pet name for the large, nameless government compound just outside town. The main building was huge and sat well back from the road behind a large, electrified fence, surrounded by surveillance cameras and shrouded in secrecy. A research lab-that was the party line, anyway, and so the gullible locals believed. Medical research was done there-they were working on finding cures for cancer and AIDS, stuff like that. Good work. Almost holy. Too sacred to mess with or poke around in. Who would question such a saintly mission?

Maxine had her own theories, as she did about most things, and right now she hoped to G.o.d the one she had always considered the most likely-that the place was a military lab working on germ warfare and chemical weapons-was dead wrong.

Nightmare images from Stephen King's The Stand coiled and uncoiled in her mind until she shook them away and stepped into action. She turned, reaching back into her room to s.n.a.t.c.h a jacket from the back of a chair. Then she was striding down the hall. "Let's go."

"Go? Go where?" her mother asked, falling into step behind the three of them as they headed for the front door. When no one replied, Ellen got around them, stepping right into their path. "Max, don't you go over there. You'll just get in the way and maybe get hurt."

"Come on, Mom, I'm twenty years old. I'm not going to bother the firefighters. I just want to know what's going on."

"Then read about it in the morning paper, like everyone else."

"G.o.d, how can you be so innocent?"

Ellen Stuart sighed, looking worried, but also resigned. No one had ever really been able to change Maxine's mind once it was made up about something, and her mother ought to be getting used to that by now, having experienced it firsthand from the day she brought the three-month-old orphan home for the first time. "Be careful."

"Always." Maxine yanked a mini-backpack off the hook by the door. An iron-on patch with the words Trust No One and the X-Files logo decorated its front. She slung it over her shoulder, and the three friends trooped out of the house.

They all piled into Jason's creamed-coffee colored Jeep Cherokee. He liked to joke that he had picked the color to match his skin. And it did, pretty closely. Maxine took the back seat. Stormy, a pixie-sized psych major with short, spiky, bleached hair, got into the front with Jason, closing her door just as he backed out into the street and headed out of town.

Maxine sat on the edge of her seat, her head between the two in the front. "You can see the fire from here. Look at that."

They did. Stormy shivered, lowered her eyes. Jason stared as if mesmerized for a moment, then snapped out of it, flicking on the radio, turning the dial. "I knew you'd want to go," he said. "It came over my brother's scanner. If he wasn't a volunteer firefighter, I probably still wouldn't know."

"Still nothing about it on the radio, Jay?" Stormy asked. She was nervous; playing with her eyebrow ring was always a sign of that.

He kept flicking the dial, then gave up, shaking his head slowly. "I expected special reports, c.r.a.p like that, but there hasn't been a word."

"They report what they're told to report," Maxine said. "Despite my mother's gullible belief in the system, the phrase 'free press' is an oxymoron in this country."

"I like your mom," Jason put in.

Max blinked at him as if he were speaking another language. "I like her, too. What the h.e.l.l does that have to do with anything?"

"I just don't think you ought to be calling her gullible. She wouldn't like it."

Maxine closed her eyes, shook her head, then glanced at Stormy for backup.

"He's right," Stormy said. "Your mom is cool. You're so lucky."

"Of course she's cool! h.e.l.l, I would have gotten a dorm room or an apartment or gone to college out of town if she wasn't cool, instead of staying home and going to a local school. But this has nothing to do with my mother or how cool she may or may not be! I'm talking about the government here. Cover-ups. Covert operations."

Stormy shrugged, averting her eyes. Topics like this always made her uncomfortable. But Maxine wasn't uncomfortable discussing it. She was more uncomfortable having lived practically in the shadow of that huge, fenced in, well-guarded compound all her life, and never once knowing what went on inside.

She knew only one thing for sure. It wasn't cancer research. She would have given her eyeteeth for a look beyond the tall, electrified fences of that place. Just one look. Now maybe no one would ever know the truth.

Jason drove on, pulling the Jeep over onto the right-hand shoulder before they got to the point where emergency vehicles lined both sides of the road. Highway flares lay across the pavement. Orange and white striped sawhorses with red reflectors were lined up behind them, forming a boundary that was supposed to tell them to keep out. They got out of the Jeep. Flames in the distance licked at the night sky, and Max could already taste the smoke in her mouth with every breath.

"This way." Maxine walked along the road's right shoulder, beyond the parked vehicles, and her friends followed. The burning compound was on the left, at the end of a long curving drive. She led the others forward until they were directly across the street from the entrance to the compound. Firefighters were across the street, partway along the drive, facing away from them. They were completely focused on their work, anyway. Maxine crouched near an ambulance, tugging the others down with her.

The fire trucks had apparently driven straight through the gate at the head of the drive. The guardhouse nearby was empty, the gate itself lying flat. The fence to the left and right of it was buckled and broken. The surveillance cameras that had been mounted on poles lay smashed to bits. Volunteer firefighters in yellow jackets marked with glowing silver reflective tape manned huge hoses attached to tanker trucks in the curving paved drive. Every time they beat the flames down a little, the trucks would roll closer, the men pushing farther into the fury.

"I don't know how they can stand it. G.o.d, I can feel the heat from here," Stormy said, pressing a palm to her face.

"I'm surprised their hoses aren't melting," Jason whispered. "If they move any closer... "

"If they move any closer, we'll be able to get in."

The other two looked at Maxine as if she had sprouted horns.

"What?" she asked.

"You gotta be out of your freaking mind, Max," Jason told her, while Storm just shook her head. "We can't go in there."

"No one's watching the entrance. They're all distracted, fighting the fire. We can get in without even trying."

"Okay, I'll rephrase that. We can go in there. But we shouldn't."

Now it was Maxine's turn to gape. "What are you, crazy? I've been dying to get behind those gates since I was old enough to see through that lame cancer research cover story they've been using."

"Which was when she was about six," Stormy muttered.

Max shot her a look but hurried on. "Don't you guys get it? This is our chance. No guards, nothing. We can finally see something besides the lie."

"And just what do you think there's gonna be left to see, Max?" Jason pointed at the place. "It's completely engulfed in flames."

"I won't know until I try."

He sighed, lowering his shaved head and running a hand over it. No one spoke again for a long time as they crouched and waited and watched. Twenty minutes went by before the firefighters pushed a few yards closer. Max shot to her feet, glanced both ways and ran across the street. Her two friends hesitated, then followed. They crossed the pavement and jogged through the opening, right over the mesh of the toppled gate, past the abandoned guardhouse and into the trees that lined the driveway. There were a lot of them. The better to block the place from the view of casual pa.s.sersby, Max thought. Pines. Of course they were pines. Year-round-camouflage for whatever went on inside.

They ducked beneath one of the trees, and Max stared ahead. The fire was being steadily beaten down. Those firefighters were something else, she thought, wondering if Jay's older brother, Mike, was among them. They never gave up, even though they had to realize by now that it was a lost cause.