Free LEGIONS OF THE DARK (VAMPIRE NATIONS CHRONICLES) by Billie Sue Mosiman Page B

house."
    "Even better." Mentor smiled and turned for the stairs.
    "Mentor?"
    "Yes?" He paused on the bottom step, his hand on the rail.
    "I don't know how you do this. I don't know how you keep going year after year when there are so many of us who need you."
    Mentor went up the stairs. At the landing before the door he said, "If I didn't do it, I'd be like you are now. I'd turn myself to ash." He heard the old vampire's low growl of a laugh as he shut the door behind him and locked it with dead bolts. He didn't think what he'd admitted to was a laughing matter. But laughter was better than tears, so he forgave his houseguest, moved to the front door, and left him behind in the darkness of solitude.
     

7
     
     
     
     
    Dr. Alan Star had been working on Charles Upton's case for nearly a year. Upton's porphyria was unrelenting, taking the old man in one of the most horrible ways anyone could meet his end. The disease being quite rare, this was only the second case Alan had attended in his career as a specialist in blood diseases. The first one had been a woman in Birmingham, Alabama, where Alan had finished his residency. Maggie. She had been elderly like Upton, and finally untreatable, dying in the hospital while Alan sat by her side, watching and agonizing. Maggie of the bright eyes, dimming into stillness. Yet there had been no reproach there for him that he hadn't done all that he could.
    Alan hated to lose a patient. All doctors were wretched when it happened, but Alan truly counted a loss as a personal failure. With all the modern drugs and technology at his disposal, he couldn't believe something hadn't been found yet to counteract the finality of many blood diseases. Yes, people died; it was to be expected. Some came to him as a last resort, already too far gone to save. But that didn't matter. As a blood specialist, when Alan couldn't change the course of a disease or at least alleviate the worst symptoms, he felt devastated. He knew he wasn't responsible—he always did everything he could to prevent a death. Yet the few losses he'd suffered haunted him. They were never far from his mind.
    So when Charles Upton requested to see Alan at his penthouse, Alan found the time to make it. Perhaps it was best to talk to the old man and give him the bad news—that there was little that could be done now—in person, in his own home.
    It surprised Alan when he was let into the extravagant apartment and ushered by a man in uniform into Upton's private bedroom. On the edge of the bed sat the old man in the last stages of his disease, but he was brimming with energy and excitement. He stood and greeted Alan, shaking his hand before resuming his place on the bed.
    Most people had trouble even looking at Upton. The disease had deformed his face, caused hair to grow in tufts on the backs of his hands and in spots on his upper arms, and then there were the open sores covered by bandages. Upton was so swathed with white wrappings that he looked like a torn-up accident victim.
    "Dr. Star! What a lucky last name you have. Has it given you any trouble?"
    Alan wasn't quite sure what Upton meant. Had his name given him trouble? As in grade school when kids could be unusually cruel?
    "Uh … I don't think so," he said cautiously.
    "Never mind, come and sit down. I have a proposition to put to you."
    Alan sat in an imported French ivory-and-gold chair that he guessed might be worth more than a Porsche. Money had never humbled him, but this kind of money, out of all proportion to common incomes, could daunt anyone.
    What Upton had just said intrigued him. Everyone knew Charles Upton had more money than God. Most of Alan's colleagues knew Alan sought capital for a new research center for blood diseases. Maybe Upton had found that out, and was about to finance his dream. Maybe today was not the best of times to give the bad news to the old man. It could wait … at least a little while. Upton's demise wasn't imminent. Yet.
    "What proposition