The mansion was musty, dusty and falling down, but Lucy could tell as soon as she walked through its lopsided front door that it must have been amazing once. A large chandelier hung crookedly, wearing a canopy of cobwebs and grime, from the center of a water-stained cathedral ceiling. It was missing a few of the teardrop-shaped dirt-colored bits that might have been crystal prisms. There were lumps of furniture covered in filthy sheets, bookcases without any books, dust and spiderwebs everywhere. A few paintings still hung on the walls, but they were too filthy to see very well. A woman in a gown from some other century. A man on a horse. A landscape. The place smelled of damp plaster, mothballs and that instantly recognizable old house smell. And it felt sad, abandoned and lonely.

"This way," James told her, leading her through the foyer with one hand on her elbow. The others had remained outside, Rhiannon moving toward the strangers near the gate and into the arms of the one in the cape.

Lucy moved along, letting James guide her toward the curving staircase with the thick banister and twisted newel posts that were probably works of art beneath the years of neglect. She didn't speak. She couldn't. Inspecting the house and musing mentally about what it must have looked like once was her way of trying to distract herself from her almost paralyzing fear and the odd, surreal sense of having just landed in the middle of an old Stoker novel or a Bela Lugosi film. This new reality-this impossible world-was all around her. She could see it, hear it, touch it. And yet it couldn't be real, this world where a pack of vampires lurked outside while their offspring walked her through their haunted mansion.

"I'm sorry about Rhiannon," James said. "She's...not overly fond of mortals."

That comment drew her gaze to his. "She's a...vampire." It was difficult to even say the word. Even more difficult to wrap her mind around the notion that she had just had a conversation-a very one-sided and unpleasant conversation-with a creature she had always known for sure was make-believe.

"Yes." He was leading her up the stairs now.

"And you're one, too."

"I'm one-quarter human, three-quarters vampire."

"I don't think that answers my question," she said softly. "Are you one of them-or one of us?"

He met her eyes. "Both. And neither. I'm...different."

"Because you can heal?"

"That's only one of the ways in which I'm different. There are others."

"Such as?" She was being pushy, demanding answers. That was unlike her. Her voice didn't even sound like her own. And she was as angry with James as if.... as if she had a right to be.

He shot her a look, as if he, too, had noticed the change in her attitude. "Unlike our vampiric relatives, Brigit and I can tolerate a normal diet-we can eat steak and baked potatoes if we want to. We don't need blood to survive, the way the undead do. We aren't compelled to sleep by day as they are. They can't resist it, you know. They fall asleep even if they try not to." He looked her way as they moved slowly up the surprisingly sturdy staircase.

"I didn't know that," she said.

"Sunlight doesn't do us any harm, either, though it would incinerate a full-blooded vampire. This way." He took her elbow lightly, turning at the top of the stairs to move along a wide hallway, with doors lining either side. There were light fixtures on the walls that appeared to be gas powered, or at least looked as if they had been once.

"So in what ways are you like them, then?" Lucy asked. "Aside from the fact that you believe yourself to be above the law and ordinary human ethics."

He stopped walking and searched her face, but she refused to meet his eyes, staring instead at the center of his chest, as if willing his heart to explode under the force of her quiet anger.

"Don't judge me, Lucy. You don't know anything about me."

"Don't judge you? You've brought me here against my will. You allowed that...that creature to threaten me, and you've made it abundantly clear that you intend to keep me here until I do whatever it is you want me to do." She lifted her eyes to his then, but only very briefly. She didn't like looking into his eyes. They were the eyes of an angel. Out of place and so deceptive in the face of a man whose heart was that of a demon. "For all I know, you'll murder me once you have no more use for me." She faced forward, began walking again, as if she knew where they were going when in fact she had no clue.

He gripped her shoulders, stopping her abruptly and turning her to face him. "Can't you fathom that we're in a desperate situation here? Do you not get that desperate measures had to be taken? We didn't have a choice-I didn't have a choice-in this."

"There's always a choice, James." She lowered her eyes. "God, I thought you were some kind of...guardian angel. My savior. I was such an idiot." Tears burned her eyes.

He gaped for a moment, then tightened his grip on her shoulders, gently, but firmly, as if trying to squeeze his point into her awareness. "I need you to understand that you are in no danger here. No one is going to hurt you. And...and I am not a monster. I'm not even one of them."

"It's true, Professor." Brigit's voice came from the bottom of the stairs, drawing Lucy's gaze her way. She was surprised to see anger-and perhaps hurt-in the female's Arctic-blue eyes. "He hasn't been one of us for a long, long time. He abandoned all of us years ago."

"It wasn't the life I wanted," James said, and he suddenly sounded defensive.

Lucy felt like crawling into a crack in the woodwork. This discussion was personal and passionate, and none of her business.

"You can't deny your own blood, J.W." Brigit skewered him with those potent eyes of hers. "You can't be other than what you are." She jerked her head toward the hallway above her. "And it's the door you just passed."

He looked guilty, then nodded. "It's been a while," he admitted, but quietly. Lucy didn't know if he was talking to her or to his sister, who had already turned away. She, Rhiannon and the other vampires she'd seen coming in through the front gate seemed to have their own business to attend to. And Lucy was relieved not to be surrounded by them. Relieved...and terrified.

James opened the door his sister had indicated, and they entered what must have been a beautiful bed room once. The wallpaper, old-fashioned, gold perhaps, beneath the grime, bore a pattern of swirls in deep red velvet, and had probably been wildly expensive and elegant at one time. The windows were tall, the glass in them so old it was thicker at the bottoms than at the tops, distorting the view even more than the filth covering them did.

James let go of Lucy's elbow and crossed the bedroom to the far wall, where he grabbed hold of the gaslight that was mounted there and pulled it forward. Lucy jumped in surprise, her mouth going bone dry as the wall began to slide sideways, vanishing into itself at a point that had appeared no more than a piece of wood trim.

Beyond it, she saw a void, total darkness. Until he reached beside him to flip a switch and lights came on. Electric lights. They illuminated a room that was entirely different. Modern. Clean.

Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined one wall, and they were loaded with volumes. Hundreds of them. To the left stood a large cherrywood desk with lion claw feet. It supported a computer with a thirty-inch flat-screen monitor, a cupful of pens, a stack of file folders. It was so out of place and so...so ordinary...that her brain didn't seem to want to process it at first.

"The DPI knows about this mansion," James told her. "But they believe we abandoned it decades ago. We prefer to keep that illusion intact. Believe me, it's the last place they'll look for us."

"DPI," she repeated. Trying to remember what it stood for. He'd told her, hadn't he? "That's the government agency you were talking about before."

"The Division of Paranormal Investigations. It's sort of a black op division of the CIA. The man who shot you was probably DPI."

"And they shot Mr. Folsom, too?"

"Yes, to keep him from exposing their existence-and ours." The wall slid closed behind them, and James led her across the large room toward a gleaming oval table that matched the desk. It was surrounded by expensive but comfortable-looking swivel chairs, upholstered in burnt-red leather studded with antique brass upholstery tacks. This place looked for all the world like an ordinary office in the ordinary world. But what caught her eye was a familiar-looking slab of hardened clay in the center of the conference table.

James kept on walking, opening a door on the far end of the office. "This hidden section of the mansion is laid out in a straight line, everything end to end, following the lines of the house, so nothing stands out. The outside windows are actually false-opaque. It's ingenious, really. But then, so is its designer."

She barely heard him. Her eyes were riveted to the ancient clay tablet that lay on the table. Its surface was covered with the lines and angles of cuneiform script, marks that had been made by a scribe pushing reeds through the clay when it had still been moist and pliant. Around three, perhaps four, thousand years ago, given the style of the markings.

"At any rate," James went on, "there are bedrooms and a kitchen through here. One working bathroom, too. All of them completely stocked for comfort and emergency use. And while I don't imagine there are a lot of supplies for human beings, there are always at least some basics. At least, there always used to be, back when-"

He stopped talking, and she knew he must have finally noticed that she was no longer behind him nor paying any attention to his guided tour of her prison. Her attention had been caught, and it wasn't coming back any time soon. Lucy laid her palm on the cool tablet, moving it slowly over the markings that another human being had painstakingly pressed into it tens of centuries ago. She closed her eyes, and in her mind she could see the scribe in his pristine white robes, with his bushy dark unibrow. He would have had raven black hair, and deep brown or even ebony eyes. He would have thought of himself as one of the black-headed people, and his job would have been a sacred one.

"Ah, the tablet is here already. Good. Rhiannon said she would try to get it by the time we arrived."

Lucy blinked out of her reverie, though she swore she could still smell the smoke of the scribe's oil lamp. Her eyes still on the clay tablet, she whispered, "Where did she get this?"

"From...a vampire. A very old one."

"And where did he get it?"

"Probably from the person who carved it."

Lucy swung her eyes toward his, felt them widen.

"He calls himself Damien now," James explained. "But that's not his real name. He had to change it. But when he was human, he was known as Gilgamesh."

She searched his face and without a word called him a liar. It couldn't be.

"It's true."

"The Gilgamesh?" she whispered. "King Gilgamesh, of Ancient Sumer, is...a vampire?"

"The first vampire, as a matter of fact." Sighing, James pulled out a chair for her. She only stared at it, her head spinning. "We have a history as old as yours...or nearly so," he told her. "And it begins in Sumer. I want to tell it to you, and believe me, Lucy, that's a big deal, because there are very few living mortals who know any of this, and even fewer who know it all. I would very much like for you to be one of those few. In fact, I need you to be one of them."

But Lucy was hardly listening, too busy searching the databases inside her mind for anything remotely like this in all her years of study, and she was finding almost nothing.

"There is no vampire lore in Sumerian legend," she said, though that wasn't entirely true. There was Lilith, but she was just the baby-killing demon invented to explain Sudden Infant Death Syndrome to a primitive people who equated every illness, death and stroke of bad luck to a supernatural being or demon of one sort or another. Lilith had only evolved into a vampire in far later tales, and then, later still, into Adam's first wife. The one who'd refused to submit.

"There is if you know where to look. I'll tell you, if you'll let me." Again he nodded at the chair he'd pulled out for her.

She stared at the chair. She wanted to argue with him, to refuse to listen or help or do anything at all to involve herself in a mess that was not her own. And yet...this was her area. Her passion. Ancient Sumer, the history, the archaeology, of it, its written language. This was what she did. Hell, it was her life. It had been her parents' lives before her. And their deaths, as well.

For just a moment she imagined her dad, with his sun-worn face, like old, old leather, and that ever-present fedora that was worn almost threadbare. She wondered what he would say if he were here, and she knew immediately that he would jump in with both feet. He would not hesitate out of something as trivial and meaningless as fear. He would dive into this, if only to find out more.

Knowledge was a drug to him. As it was to her, she was forced to admit.

And so she nodded and sank into the chair James offered, grateful to have something to distract her from her bitter disappointment in the man she had, for a few brief moments, thought of as some kind of hero. "All right," she said softly. "You have my attention. I'm listening. Tell me your story."

"You already know a lot of it. The tale of Utanapishtim, for example." He pulled out a chair and sat facing her. "Tell me what you know about him."

She frowned, tilting her head to one side, and fell into the comfort of the familiar. She began recounting the tale she'd told to countless groups of students. "Utanapishtim, also known as Ziasudra, a great king, was a righteous and wise man, beloved of the gods. And so, when it was decided to send the great flood down to wipe out mankind, he alone was chosen to receive mercy. He was instructed by the gods to build a massive ship, and because he obeyed, he and his family survived the great flood. As a reward for his faithfulness, the ancient one was given the secret to immortality."

When she looked up from her story, it was to see others gathering around her. Rhiannon was there, along with the cloaked stranger, who was dark and handsome and wearing a formal suit beneath the cape, as if he were embracing his own cliche. The black panther sat upright, its body pressed to Rhiannon's leg. Brigit was there, too, holding a bowl of fruit and a tall glass of water, which she placed on the table in front of Lucy.

Looking around at them, Lucy saw in their eyes the same fascination she always felt when she told this story, recorded on clay tablets long before the Hebrew Bible and its account of Noah and his ark had even been thought of. They were absorbed, riveted.

"But the thing is," she said quickly, "it's just a story. A legend. I mean, yes, the latest geological research shows that there probably was a flood at some point in history, one big enough to leave the impression that it destroyed the world and that only a few chosen ones survived to rebuild, but it was more than likely-"

"And Gilgamesh the King," James whispered softly. "Tell us his story, Lucy."

"I thought you were going to tell me."

"I will. Indulge me."

Blinking slowly, she took a grateful sip of the water. The others were making themselves comfortable, too. Rhiannon leaned against the dark man's shoulder, and his arm went around her. She pressed her free hand to his chest, and the cat lay down, now that she was no longer stroking its head. Brigit perched on the edge of the table, taking an apple from the bowl and biting into it.

"All right, I'll give you the short version," Lucy said, unable to resist her favorite topic. "Gilgamesh was a prideful and arrogant king, and not a very kind one, until he met a wild man of the forest called Enkidu, sent to teach him the error of his ways. Enkidu and the king fought when they first met, and were so equally matched that neither could prevail. They fought until they were too exhausted to stand, and in the end, they began to laugh and fell into each other's arms. From that day on, they were best friends. Enkidu seemed to be the king's opposite, wild, humble, a man of nature, not of palaces, and humility rather than power. And the king learned from him and became a better person. But when Enkidu was killed, the king lost his mind. He set out across the desert in search of the secret to immortality, hoping he could bring his friend back to life again. That search took him to the home of Utanapishtim, the flood survivor and only known immortal human being."

Her audience was riveted. She was almost enjoying herself, immersed in this tale that was, after all, her life's work.

"Utanapishtim gave that secret to him, but as the king set out across the desert again, it was stolen from him by a serpent. And that's how the story ends."

"That's only how you think it ends," Rhiannon said softly. She straightened away from the dark man, becoming the center of attention. Lucy got the feeling that was usually the case with her. "You see, Utanapishtim had sworn an oath to the gods that he would never share the gift of immortality with another living being. He'd obeyed, even to the point of watching his own family grow old and die, while he lived on, ever young, ever alone."

Several heads nodded.

Brigit picked up the tale from there. "But he could not refuse the command of his own king. He gave Gilgamesh the gift of immortality-but it didn't work quite the same way in him, as on the man to whom had been bestowed, because Gilgamesh received it not from the gods but in direct disobedience of their dictates. Gilgamesh became more and more sensitive to sunlight, and he craved human blood, the elixir his new self needed in order to survive. He was, in fact, the first vampire. And yes, he is still alive today."

Lucy could barely believe it. "I must meet him," she whispered. And then her gaze shot to the cloaked stranger. "Is it you?"

He smiled, and it was warm, affectionate even. "No, child. Not me. I'm Roland de Courtemanche, and I'm a mere eight centuries old, give or take." He bowed deeply, and she had to blink her vision clear.

"You will meet Damien. I give you my word," James said.

She could hardly believe it was possible. "If he's still alive, then why can't he translate the tablet for you?"

"It's a dialect from a different time than his," James told her.

"And what about Utanapishtim?" she asked, mesmerized by the tale to the point where she had momentarily forgotten that these people were holding her against her will. Or were they?

"He was punished by the gods, who took away his ability to live forever but did not take away his immortality," James said. "I know that seems like a contradiction, but it's how the story came down to us. We don't know what it means. Except that, at that very moment, he began to age, to die. And when King Gilgamesh's mortal enemy, Anthar, arrived later, having followed the great king and spied on events, he demanded that he, too, be given the gift. Utanapishtim tried to refuse, but that evil one forced him, and then he beheaded the old man, leaving him for dead, and took his faithful servant, a young man barely out of his teens, as his own slave."

"So this Anthar was...the second vampire."

"Yes, and he soon made the servant into the third-thinking to make for himself a stronger, more resilient slave. But all that did was allow the boy-a man by then-to escape," James said.

"And the first thing the boy did," said Brigit, "was return to the old man's home to see to his remains. But they were gone."

"We need to know what happened to Utanapishtim's remains," Rhiannon said. "That is why we've brought you here. We believe there is a clue on that tablet you've been caressing so lovingly throughout this conversation. It's been among us forever. Even Gilgamesh doesn't know its source. But we've always known to keep it safe, because it would save our race one day."

"And you believe that day is here."

Rhiannon nodded slowly. Lucy turned her gaze from the intimidating vampiress to James. "But why do you need to find his remains? Surely there's nothing left but dust by now. What good can that possibly do you?"

He lowered his head. "Can you translate the tablet for us, Lucy?"

She blinked rapidly. "If I had access to my books, to my notes, to my lab..."

"We'll get you whatever you need. But the work will have to be done here," Rhiannon said. "And despite what I said earlier, no harm will come to you. So long as you do as we ask."

"No harm will come to you either way, Lucy," James said.

"J.W." Rhiannon's tone held a warning.

"No, this is bullshit." James put a hand on Lucy's shoulders. "The fact is, Lucy, no one here could hurt you even if they wanted to. They're incapable of it, compelled to protect you instead, as a matter of fact."

She frowned up at him. "But why?"

He shrugged. "You're sort of...related."

Her frown deepened, but he explained no more. Instead, he dropped down to his knees in front of her chair. "Stay with us, translate this tablet for us, and I give you my solemn vow, you'll be safe. And as soon as it's done, I'll personally return you to your home."

She couldn't hold his gaze. If she did, he would hypnotize her into saying yes. They could do that, couldn't they? So she lowered her eyes and found herself struggling, torn between her fascination with the Sumerian connection, her curiosity about what this tablet might reveal, and her lifelong fear of conflict, of danger, of confrontation, of ever getting involved in...much of anything.

"Do I really have a choice?" she asked softly.

He swallowed hard. "No. I'm afraid you don't."

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***