I stared at the roof, following the ancient corridor down into the center of the mountain to a place of unimaginable power. For the moment, the idea of getting my blood sucked by a vampire cow didn't seem so bad.
Chapter Fourteen
"Things are looking up."
MICHELANGELO
The rest of the night just crawled past. Aahz and Tanda stayed on the couches with me for the longest time, studying the map and trying to figure out how we were going to get out of here. I noticed that, once Aahz discovered there was no golden cow, and that the map had been a sham to get someone to save Harold, he became very interested in just leaving. I supposed that was better late then never.
Aahz was sitting at one of the desks while Tanda and I stood beside him when the wall opened up and Harold stepped in. Through the opening I could see daylight flooding into the main area beyond the bathroom. It seemed we had survived another full-moon night in the land of cow vampires.
Harold stepped in and glanced at where Glenda was still sleeping. She hadn't moved at all during the night.
"Did she try to get away?" Harold asked.
"Only when the sun went down, and only for a few sec onds," Aahz said. "The rope held her."
"Then she's safe," Harold said.
"What did the rope do?" I asked, not really clear on the concept that a simple rope like that could hold even a child, let alone a person who wanted to be a vampire.
"Basically, the magik in the rope stopped her from chang ing," Harold said. "And leaving it on her all night cleaned her system of any chance of it ever happening. Check her neck if you want to make sure."
I moved over to Glenda. Drool had run out of her mouth and formed a wet spot on the blanket. And she was snoring lightly. I put a finger on her temple and eased her head over so I could see the vampire bite marks on her neck. Where her skin had been red and inflamed, it had now returned to normal. Only a few faint marks that looked more like freckles were left of the infection.
"Amazing," I said.
Aahz had moved up behind me. "It sure is."
"Leave the rope on her for a while longer and let her sleep," Harold said. "It will do her good, give her body time to replace the blood drained from it."
I glanced at Glenda again. For a moment I almost felt sorry for her. Almost. Then I remembered she had stranded me in this world with no thought of ever coming back for me, and the feeling-sorry emotion left quickly.
"So how did you survive the night?" Tanda asked.
Harold just shrugged. "The same way I have survived every full-moon night for more years than I want to think about. I turned into a cow, ate grass, and slept standing up."
"Oh," Tanda said. "You going to explain that to us in the rest of your story?"
Harold laughed. "It's a part of it." Then he looked around. "This is a pretty amazing room, isn't it?"
"It is," Aahz said. "We learned some interesting history from some of these books."
I noticed that Aahz didn't say anything about the ceiling map, and I sure wasn't going to either. I wondered if Harold even knew about it.
"Good," Harold said. "That will give you some more back ground on what happened with me, and how we got like this. Shall we go back out into the sunlight?"
"What about her?" I asked, motioning toward the sleepi ng Glenda.
Harold shrugged. "She won't wake up as long as the rope is on her. She'll be fine right there."
We followed him out into the main room. It felt great to see light again. Spending the night in a dusty room worrying about what might happen at any moment wasn't my ideal evening.
"Anyone like something to eat?" he asked, moving into the kitchen area. We stood around the counter, watching him.
"Anything but carrot juice," Aahz said, smiling at me.
"Not funny," I said.
Harold looked at both of us and shrugged, clearly having no idea what we were talking about. "I can make you a horse- steak sandwich, a cucumber sandwich, or a salad with fresh tomatoes. And I've got either orange juice or water to drink."
"Wow, you eat better than the rest of your people," Tanda said.
"I do?" he asked, surprised. "It's been so long since I've been out of these rooms, I wouldn't know."
"A lot better," I said, "but at the moment I'd just like a glass of water."
Aahz and Tanda agreed and as he got the water Aahz prompted him to start his story again. "You got up to the point where your people and Count Bovine's people had come to an agreement, his people were changed to cows for most of the month, and this place was sealed off. What changed?"
"Actually," Harold said, "I changed it."
"Why?" Aahz asked, a fraction of a second before I could.
"Because I thought I knew better, knew what was best for my people, knew how to change things back to a better world."
"Better back up and tell us how that kind of thinking got started," Tanda said.
Harold nodded. "I met a dimension traveler named Leila. I was running this little restaurant and bar just down the road from here when Leila walked in. We got talking, she told me about the big world outside of this dimension, and then of fered to let me be her apprentice. She said I had great magical potential."
I glanced at Aahz, who ignored me. Not once had Aahz ever said I had great magical potential, and I certainly wasn't going to ask him if I did. He'd just say no and laugh. Mostly laugh.
"Leila took me dimension-hopping with her, showed me hundreds of different places, taught me some basics of magik, then got killed by an assassin."
I could tell from the look in Harold's eyes that even though that had been some time ago, he still missed her. And might even have been in love with her.
"So after she was killed I got a D-Hopper and came back here. The magik block over this old castle was pretty basic, intended to just keep Count Bovine and my people out. But I had been trained in some magik, so I got in, knocking the block down.
"A little knowledge can be dangerous," Aahz said, glanc ing at me.
It was my turn to ignore him.
"It sure can be," Harold said. "I sat up house right here and found the room you stayed in last night, and started learning about what had happened to my people. And the more I read, the more convinced I became to try to save my people and wipe out the vampires once and for all."
"In other words," Tanda said, "you started the war again."
Harold nodded at Tanda's blunt statement. "Basically, I did. Yes."
"So what went wrong?" Aahz asked.
"Count Bovine came back," Harold said.
"What?" I said. "How could he? He'd have to be thousands and thousands of years old."
"He is," Harold said.
Aahz stared at me. "When are you going to get it through your head that powerful vampires, like powerful magicians, live a very long time?"
"Okay, okay," I said. "Go on with your story."
"I actually didn't know that Count Bovine could be alive either," Harold said. "Since I was free from the magical spell that kept the cows safe, I started gathering up help. One by one, I gathered a gang, broke the spell over them, and started planning. When there were about fifty of us, all trained and on horseback, we set about rounding up cows and killing them."