Read SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy for Free Online Page B

from the Predators. Working and working and buying.
    It was not true that the blood went into their stomachs as had the food they'd eaten as human beings. The digestive system never worked in the same way again after the moment of death. All vampires took blood through their fangs, which sped that warm blood, alive with living cells, throughout their blood system, reviving them, keeping their skin supple, brains functioning, and their muscles hard. Though they never aged again, they were able to keep the body functioning for a normal human lifespan of seventy to a hundred years. Then they had to migrate to another body, preferably a youthful one.
    The body, though supplied with living blood, was still no more than a physical specimen. As the years moved past, the wear and tear on that physical form eventually caused the inner organs to fail, one by one, just as they did in humans.
    Mentor had lived in so many bodies he hardly recognized his own face when he saw it reflected from a mirror. In fact, the body he possessed now was elderly. He would have to migrate in the next few years.
    He mused on the first time he had had to change bodies. There were but hundreds of his kind then, a new race, and not many of them had realized they had to or could change from one human shell to another. Mentor was one of the first, sitting alone one night in a cold, drafty castle high up in the Swiss mountains. He had hidden himself away from the world. His wife, a human, had died in Scotland, a country he'd fled. Like his wife's, his own body was aged and decrepit. He just wanted to be alone and forgotten, if possible. He had reverted to his predatory ways once his wife had passed. He swept down from the mountain retreat into nearby villages, taking humans at will, leaving behind drained corpses. He had no more care for humans and their world. They were frail and they died so easily, just as his wife had.
    Misery and grief tore at him, robbing him of the humanity he'd been able to forge as a beloved husband.
    Then one night he'd been on the prowl, sweeping in with a blizzard into a village, moving swiftly toward fresh blood. He smelled it on the icy wind. He following the scent, his hunger like a siren call in his veins.
    He found the human, a young man trudging through hip-deep snowdrifts toward a lighted pub. Mentor appeared before him out of nowhere, halting his progress.
    The human, frightened out of his wits, began to stutter and tried to run away. Mentor caught him by the coat collar and hauled him down to the ground. Just as he was ripping into his victim's neck, something began to happen. The blood suffusing Mentor's body seemed to stop along the way and coagulate in dry, dead veins. The heart inside his chest would not revive to life, the veins, arteries, and capillaries began to break and splatter the new warm infusion of blood throughout the old body. He was hemorrhaging all inside from hundreds of tiny spigots of broken vessels.
    Mentor's human form was so worn out the veins and arteries had lost all elasticity. They were shutting down or bursting all along the pathways from neck to limbs.
    Mentor fell back from the young dying man in the snowdrift and gasped, blood dripping from his fangs to spot the pristine snow. He knew what was the matter. He had intimate knowledge of the inner workings of his human body. He could feel the old arterial system failing. He looked about wildly, the light from the pub a yellow beacon. But he could not go there. He could not be saved by medicine or a surgeon, no more than an ancient human could be saved. He fell onto his back next to the young man and stared up into the frenzy of the white blowing blizzard.
    Where will I go, he wondered. What will happen to me now? Will I be allowed to die and meet with my beloved?
    Even as he asked himself these questions, he knew the answers. He would not die, but the body he inhabited was going to. If he stayed in it much longer he would be trapped, a living