Turning toward the east, he lifted his gaze toward the horizon, watching in awe as the rising sun painted the heavenly blue canvas with brilliant slashes of pink and lavender and ochre.
It seemed fitting that his last sunrise should be the most beautiful one he had ever seen.
CHAPTER 2
The beauty of the sunrise was quickly forgotten as the sun's blinding light scorched his eyes and blistered his skin. The pain was far worse than anything he had anticipated, and he cried out in agony as his clothing began to smoke and his skin to burn.
He closed his eyes and Brenna Flanagan's image appeared before him. He groaned low in this throat, knowing this was how she must have felt when the flames began to lick her tender flesh.
"Brenna!" Her name was an anguished cry on his lips, a plea, a prayer.
He clenched his hands into tight fists. What madness was this? He couldn't destroy himself, not now. He didn't care what happened to the house or its furnishings, but he had made no provisions for the disposal of his library. He didn't want his collection sold at auction, or worse, sold for a few paltry dollars at a yard sale. He had spent centuries gathering his collection. It must go to a museum where it would be appreciated, where it could be shared with others who would recognize its worth.
And what of Brenna Flanagan? How would he rest in peace when there was still more to learn about her? He had barely scratched the surface. He wanted to find out more about her, wanted to know everything there was to know.
Hastening back into the house, he slammed the door against the glaring brightness of a new day.
He stood in the entryway a moment and then, with a strangled cry, he dropped to his hands and knees. Head hanging, panting heavily, he crawled down the hallway toward the narrow door that led to his lair. Made of the same wood and design as the wall, the door was less than three feet high. Its size and design made it almost impossible to find unless one knew where to look. It led down to a rectangular-shaped room he had built underground. One wall of his lair shared a wall with the basement. Another wall had a door in it that opened into a wall of earth. It was Roshan's bolt-hole. He could easily make his way up through the earth to the surface should the need arise.
Weakened by the rising sun and the excruciating pain that engulfed him, he hit the small lever that opened the hidden door and then, letting himself go limp, he rolled down the long, winding staircase until, with a gasp, he came to an abrupt halt at the bottom.
He lay there, too weak to move any farther. It took the last of his preternatural power to close and lock the door at the head of the stairs and then, with a low groan, he closed his eyes and surrendered to the darkness that dragged him down into blessed oblivion.
He rose with the setting sun, the burns from the day before nearly healed by the restorative powers of the Dark Sleep.
For the next two weeks, Roshan spent every waking moment searching for more information on the woman in the photograph. Brenna Flanagan. He haunted every library and museum within a thousand miles, scoured every search engine on the Web, saving every scrap of information that he found, though the available facts were pitifully few.
No one knew for sure where she had been born but it was presumed she had been born in Ireland. She had never married. It was said that she had never known love, that she had lived a solitary life and died a maiden, untouched by the hand of man.
"Who were you, Brenna Flanagan?" he wondered aloud. "Why did you live such a lonely life?"
Now, sitting in his favorite high-backed chair in front of the fireplace, Roshan was overcome with grief that one so young and lovely had met such a horrible fate. He stared at the flames crackling in the hearth, remembering how the sun's heat had scorched his own flesh. Her agony, endured to the point of death, would have lasted far longer and been infinitely worse.
Leaning forward, he braced his elbows on his knees and laced his fingers together. Like it or not, impossible or not, he was becoming obsessed with the need to see her, to know her. He was a supernatural creature, capable of feats beyond the powers and abilities of mere humans. He could change his shape. He could move faster than the human eye could follow. He had the strength of twenty mortal men. He could, simply by closing his eyes and willing it so, transport himself from one place to another, no matter what the distance.
"If I can transport myself across the world, why not into the past?" he mused aloud. Her past, of course. And if it was possible, would his going back in time change the future in any way?
He found the idea of time travel fascinating and he bought every book of fiction and non-fiction that he could find on the subject, and over the course of the next week and a half he read them all.
According to Einstein, space was curved, time was relative, and time travel was possible.
Stephen Hawking conjectured that the laws of physics disallowed the possibility of a time machine. One of his arguments was that, since we were not overrun with thousands of time travelers from the future, time travel was impossible.
Carl Sagan had several interesting ideas on the subject. His first was that it might be possible to build a time machine that could travel into the future, but not into the past. His second theory was that it might be possible to travel into the past, but that the farther back in time you went, the more expensive it got, and that the prohibitive cost had, thus far, prevented time travelers from making it back to the twenty-first century. Sagan's third idea was that time travel might be possible but you could only travel back to the time when a time machine was invented, and since we hadn't invented one yet, time travelers couldn't reach us.
Sagan went on to speculate that time travelers were already here, only we couldn't see them because they had invisibility cloaks, or that they were here and people did see them, only they were called something else, like ghosts or goblins or aliens. Sagan also mentioned the possibility that time travel was perfectly possible but would require a tremendous advance in our technology and that civilization would destroy itself before time travel was invented.
There was talk of black holes and white holes in space, and worm holes, which, if Roshan understood what he was reading correctly, were the hypothetical theoretical connection between the two.
One book put forth the theory that the past was totally defined, meaning that everything that had already happened or was supposed to happen was set in stone and could not be changed or undone. The author went on to say that if a man traveled back in time and tried to kill his grandfather, he would not be allowed to do so, that constant mishaps would prevent him from doing away with his grandfather, thus keeping the future intact.
A second theory held that if a man went back in time and killed his grandfather, it would immediately create a new quantum universe which would, in essence, be a parallel universe where the grandfather never existed and where the grandson had never been born. The original universe would still remain.
Another theory said that a man could not travel backward to a time when he didn't exist.
Even though Roshan didn't plan to use a time machine, the more he read on the subject of time travel, the more fascinated he became. He watched a number of movies about time travel— Kate and Leopold, The Time Machine, Contact, which had been written by Carl Sagan, and Somewhere in Time. The last was by far his favorite, perhaps because the hero in the film fell in love with a woman in a photograph. Not that he was in love with Brenna Flanagan. Vampires did not fall in love with mortals. It was the height of folly to do so. No sane vampire revealed what he was to another, not if he valued his existence.
No, he was not in love with Brenna Flanagan. He would never love again, but she had given him a new interest in life, a goal, however impossible it might be to achieve, to look forward to, and that was something he hadn't had in far too long. For that alone, he would save her life, should he be able to do so.
But before he attempted something most mortals considered impossible, he would need to be at his preternatural best, so to speak, and for that, he would need to feed.
Leaving the house, he ghosted through the darkness, a whisper of movement unseen and unheard by those he passed until he reached his favorite hunting ground in the city. As a young vampire, he had hunted among the poor and downtrodden. Hiding in doorways, lurking in shadows, he had preyed upon the dregs of humanity. But as he grew older and wiser, he left the slums behind and went hunting among the rich, the elite, those who dined at expensive restaurants and frequented exclusive clubs. They drove costly automobiles or rode in luxurious stretch limos. They lived in million-dollar houses behind high walls and electric fences and thought themselves safe from the rest of the world.
It was so easy to breach their puny mortal defenses, to probe their minds while they slept, to call them to him. Under his spell, they left their lavish chambers. Drawn by his voice, unable to resist his power, they came to him, willingly offering themselves up to him so that he might quench his insatiable thirst. The blood of the rich was ever so much sweeter than that of the poor. The skin of the wealthy smelled of soap instead of vomit, their hair was squeaky clean instead of matted with filth, their breath was sweet and clean, not sour with cheap wine.
The house he chose this night was like all the others on the street— large and well kept behind a high stone wall. He vaulted over the barrier effortlessly and made his way to the rear of the house. A middle-aged woman slept alone in a room on the ground floor. A servant perhaps. He gently probed her mind for her name, then called her to him.
Moments later, she was walking toward him, a tall, slender woman, her bare feet peeking out from beneath a blue cotton nightgown. Eyes open but unseeing, she made her way toward him.
The scent of her blood called to him; his fangs lengthened as she drew near. She offered no resistance when he drew her into his arms. Her body was warm, pliant as he bent her back over his arm.
"Do not be afraid, Monica," he whispered. "I will not hurt you."
He brushed her hair aside, stroked the smoothness of her throat with his fingertips, then lowered his head to her neck. Her sweetness filled his mouth as his fangs pierced her tender flesh. In the beginning, after he knew what he had become, he had been certain that feeding would be repugnant, had feared he would perish rather than succumb to the hunger that compelled him to such repulsive behavior. Ah, how wrong he had been!