Billie Sue Mosiman [Vampire Nat Legions of the Dark

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.The wise men who had trained him in human psychology during the time of the ancients when there were so few of his kind could never have envisioned their teaching would have to sustain him throughout not one lifetime, but dozens of lifetimes.Certainly he had kept up with psychology and both the human and vampire spirits.He had augmented his education over progressive generations until finally, one day near the beginning of the new millennium in the year 2000, he turned away from scholarship and said to himself, "Enough.I can learn no more.”Yet even that was a lie he told to himself.He learned something new about spirit every time he was called upon to minister to someone as sick and miserable and dying as the girl now lying on her bed in a comalile trance.It was this challenge that kept him going, the task that drove away his own misery long enough so that he could reach out to vampire children such as Dell.What he had learned already from the girl was that teens today were just as earnest, needful, and as full of pure light as their predecessors had been.Some parents had tried to tell him the young people were subversive, rebellious, uncontrollable, and sometimes conscienceless, as if born with deformed hearts.Mentor knew that was wrongheaded at the outset.But Dell Cambian was further proof.He could sense her true essence, and it was as uncontaminated by fraud, evil, and envy as a newborn babe's.Dell Cambian was worth saving, worth bringing into the Natural life.He would fight for her soul and show her how to fight for it.He would guide her to the other side and bring her back whole again.Changed, of course, yes, changed.But whole and saved from the baser life of a Predator.Or, God forbid, the nonlife of a Craven.Most of his kind believed that what one became—Natural, Predator, or Craven—had to do with the progression and mutation of the disease.For many years it was what he thought, too, but he came to realize it just was not so.Many of the Naturals had entered medical research trying to find an end to the disease.The first discovery they made was about the nature of the actual human death.Mentor had been trying to spread the truth of the matter.The disease that made vampires, the mutation that killed and made men live again, did not determine a man's state of moral being.All it did was turn human into vampire.What sort of vampire one became had to do with the state of the soul.And how hard that soul fought for freedom from the prevailing darkness.If the patient brought back too much of the darkness, he was Predator—vile, often depraved, without empathy, and truly heartless.A wicked creature.If the darkness brought back was less, the vampire suffered physical weaknesses, a faint hold on the world, and a depression that never relented.They were called the Craven.They were the cowardly and weak, useless to themselves and society.The Naturals brought back the least darkness from their encounter with death, and they were never as human as they once had been, but they longed to be, and that made all the difference."You must fight off the dark wood," Mentor whispered to the now comatose Dell.He projected his firm thought with the spoken words.He knew she could hear him on some level."Take her through it, Mentor," Dell's mother pleaded at his side."Don't let her be lost to us."Mentor looked up at the mother, a handsome woman with blonde hair and dark skin, her eyes shiny with tears.If she shed them they would be her blood and weaken her.He took her hand for a moment.She was as strong now as when he'd helped her through her own change."Go and pray," he said."God doesn't listen to me.I prayed that neither of my children would ever get sick, and my prayers went unanswered.""You merely prayed for the wrong result," Mentor said."God does not bargain."Dell's father approached the bed and behind him in the shadows came Eddie, Dell's younger sibling.The rest of the family gathered together in a corner of the room, standing close, holding a silent vigil.The elder Cambian said, "I would give my soul if this could be stopped."Mentor knew his job included the family, not just Dell.He could not have any more mention of sacrifice.That simply created shame, when the sacrifice could not be given.Even now, he could see how the father's hands shook in rage and how the mother's face belied her pain, and even the boy child had bared his teeth, the incisors growing of their own accord, as if he might rip open a vein in his own arm and feed his sister to hurry her back to the world.Mentor did not know if prayer helped, of if God even existed, but he encouraged his people to believe.Believing might create truth.It was written in Romans, in the Bible, "I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God." If a man believed, then he always had God on his side."Go with your wife, take your son, and pray for Dell," he said, gesturing them away.He turned to the assemblage and commanded, "Leave us alone.Let me save what I can.We need to be alone for the journey."When they'd left the room, Mentor placed his hands on each side of Dell's temples and turned her sweaty face toward him.He leaned in dose."I'm coming, Dell.I won't let you walk through the dark without me."2She was alone, dreadfully so.Not just alone as she had been at home before, when her parents were out and her brother not yet home from school.Not alone the way she'd felt one day at the mall with her friends when they shopped for clothes and she discovered that she hadn't any interest in fashion.This time, she was alone in a terrible place, a reality she never had known existed.It was a barren, scraggly wood where the moon was an improbable blood red and there was no path, no starlight, no hope [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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