by F. E. Arliss
The Oldest Blood
By
F.E. Arliss
No characters, names, locations, or events from this book are anything other than pure fiction. Any similarity is purely coincidental and for the sake of storytelling only.
Table of Contents
1.Flight From the Inevitable
2.Danger or Haven?
3.Hallucinations
4.The Items
5.The Flat
6.The Safety Deposit Box
7.A Break From It All
8.Settling
9.The Decision
10.The Shu Han
11.The Lessons
12.The Conversion Witnessed
13.Queen or Not?
14.The Coronation
15.Changes
16.Power
17.The Conclave of Clans
18.Rage
19.The Veil Sheared
20.Peace
Chapter One
Flight From the Inevitable
Remington Arana Hartsel was stoned. She’d gotten stoned on a glass of excellent red wine, an almost orgasmic brioche of foie gras, then a twenty-year old tawny port and a large, luscious portion of Iles de Flottante - basically an island of sweet-vanilla meringue floating in a rich sea of custard cream and topped with drizzled caramel and a scattering of crushed pecans.
It had been a mind-numbingly delicious meal in the most romantic of settings, a small cafe on a small side-street in the St. Germain des Prix district of Paris. The tiny cafe had been lit only with candles and the stone walls, cobbled-floor, padded with old Persian carpets, and the thick wooden beams overhead had closed out the world beyond the richly-patinated stained-glass doors as though she’d stepped into another world.
A white aproned Frenchman of indeterminate age had waited on her as though she was the Queen of Sheba and without her even knowing what she wanted, set her meal before her as though he’d read her mind. Later, she’d find out he had. Indeed, she’d stepped into another world inadvertently and no matter how hard the waiter had tried to steer her safely back to her hotel when she’d left the cafe, insisting on a taxi until she’d swatted him smartly on the arm, he’d stepped reluctantly out of her way.
She’d been sated and happy - and it was almost as though an invisible hand had reached down and turned her shoulders in the opposite direction of her hotel and shoved her gently down the darkened street towards the bridge she could see in the distance. The romance of it called to her. Perhaps because she had no romance in her life at all. Never had. She came from far too practical of a background to have ever had the luxury of romance. Business was their blood and that had been impressed on her from the cradle.
Until, that is, a few days ago when she’d simply had enough. The Covid 19 pandemic had them all sequestered together and the constant bickering - aggravated now by a series of lawsuits against defective weapons from their North Carolina plant - had finally sent her over the edge.
She’d been sick of being a pawn, sick of being used, sick of following her tyrannical father, grandfather and brothers dictates. She’d been sick of being a puppet that was supposed to look good, sound good and earn the family kudos for having such a beautiful daughter. She’d never been loved for herself - only for what she could do for the family. She was someone else’s asset.
Now that the restrictions were lessening, she’d snatched up one of the few available first class seats since the pandemic had forced the airlines to reduce the number of people on their planes - well at least on decent airlines anyway. Many of them had just continued to stuff as many passengers as possible into their over-crowded, virus-circulating cabins. She’d avoided those, which unfortunately, were the majority. Remington had walked out of her family’s New York mansion with only a purse stuffed with cash, a mostly empty suitcase, and very few clothes.
On the way to the airport she’d stopped at the bank where her trust fund was kept and cashed out most of it into untraceable bearer bonds. That rather large stash had filled up the rest of her empty suitcase.
She’d left her credit cards behind. Her family might be able to trace her flight to Paris, but after that, they would have more difficulty finding her in the City of Lights. She didn’t want to be found by them. Death followed her family everywhere and it was death that made them rich. She was sick of it. She was sick of being used as a bargaining chip and the eternal pressure to conform to society’s ideals of what the Hartsel family meant.
Remington’s grandfather had named her after the gun that made them their fortune. Mostly, her friends called her Remi. Coupled with what had been her long, fine ash-blond hair, gray eyes and tall, lithely-muscular frame, Remi stood out everywhere she went. She had a sort of innate elegance and commanding aura that screamed class. She didn’t work at it, it just was there. Often, the aura was a real pain in the ass. While it might get her things she wanted faster and easier - it was also very hard to escape into the mundane when one simply wanted some peace and quiet.
Add money to that equation and nothing in her life flew “under the radar” as the saying went. It was why she’d fled to Europe. Hopefully here, no one would know her. She could have some breathing space. Maybe, she could even escape the hovering accusations that always followed her. Being the daughter of a kingpin of industry that made weapons always came with the clustering vultures that wanted to pin every evil deed upon her family’s back.
Her family was immune to it. The harbingers of death only seemed to bother Remi. Her grandmother said she just needed to accept who she was. Probably she was right. She didn’t have to like it and she didn’t have to agree just yet. Her grandfather, father,and brothers had all forced her to drag along behind them when they went hunting since she was very young. If seeing a magnificent buck brought down with blood streaming from his nostrils bothered any of the others, it didn’t show. For Remi, it had been torture.
If it was that discord within her that made her ill, she didn’t know. All she knew now was that every auto-immune disease they could think of had begun attacking her five years ago. She couldn’t eat dairy or gluten. Her thyroid had begun acting up and her eyebrows fell out. The doctors had told her it was nothing. They’d put her on a thyroid medication and it had made her so nervous she’d wanted to gouge her eyes out. Finally, she’d convinced them to let her try an all-natural alternative, and it had seemed to work.
Unfortunately, it all seemed to be too late. Her hair had fallen out. Her heart’s arteries began to clog and by the time she was in her early thirties, she’d already had a stent placed in her heart. Finally, she just shaved her head and that, if nothing else, had finally driven the hoards of hangers-on and wannabes away.
There appeared to be nothing like baldness to put people off. If anyone still talked to her, Remi knew it was because they really did like her or were decent people. That wasn’t too many. Baldness seemed to embarrass people. Not for her, but for themselves. It was very weird. Like they thought it was catching. She supposed that was how people with cancer felt too. People usually thought she had cancer. She didn’t.
Once she’d gotten fed up with feeling like crap and the medications not helping anything several years into the baldness, she’d gone off most of the medication her well-meaning, but woefully inadequate, doctors had put her on. She began to feel better almost at once. Now, it was just a small dose of an alternative thyroid medication that kept her feeling well and she had been able to begin eating more interesting food. A diet of chicken and rice could get old.
This flight to Paris was her way of rebelling against what her family stood for - death - and as a declaration of the end of being told what to d
o with her own body and her own life. People tried. Doctors tried. In the end, she was the only one who knew what her body really needed. As for her life, she wanted freedom. Less stress. Protection from those who aimed to control her. Ahhh, Paris. It was a relief.
Chapter Two
Danger or Haven?
Entranced by the way the moon was flickering over the gently swaying waters of the Seine, Remi stopped and leaned against one of the stone pillars that served as bases for the centuries-old lanterns at the top of the slightly-arched bridge. Below, the water lapped gently at the bridge support, lulling her even further into the happy wine and food-induced coma she was savoring. Leaning her bald head against the cool stone of the ancient pillar, she simply enjoyed the sight before her. Paris -- quiet and tranquil this late in the evening. The moon glimmered softly on the water. It was magic.
It was only slowly that she became aware of something more in the night. Raising her head and scenting the wind like some of the packs of hunting dogs they had in Kentucky, where one of the Remington plants was, she sensed activity and the skin on the back of her neck began to prickle and writhe alarmingly. She’s always had a knack for detecting trouble and trouble was brewing nearby.
Turning her back to the pillar and shaking away the last dregs of the pleasantly lulling tranquility that had brought her here, she peered into the night. From the shadow of the old stone at her back, she sensed movement on either side of the bridge. She was hemmed in. By what, she didn’t know.
Slowly, to her right, a small knot of well-dressed men in business suits appeared at the foot of the bridge. A woman, also in an exquisitely cut pantsuit stood among them. As well-dressed and elegantly turned out as the group was, Remi felt nothing but mistrust towards them. In her family, a business suit always meant a conniving liar.
Light glinted off the woman’s neck and Remi shivered when she spotted the twisted choker-like necklace and matching earrings that adorned the woman’s thin neck and tugged heavily at the skinny flap of skin that made up her earlobes. Snakes. Not that Remi necessarily had anything against snakes. It was just that as an accessory, she wasn’t crazy about them.
A good old bug-eating garter snake in the strawberry patch, that was one thing. Or a black snake to catch the mice in the stable, that was also good with Remi. Around a woman’s neck and dripping from her ears, not so cool. They were knotted together around the woman’s neck. The ones dangling from her ears appeared to strain towards the ones at her neck as though seeking their rightful place in the wriggling nest. It was just...off-putting. Remi shivered.
Keeping as still as possible, she turned her eyes to the other end of the bridge. At her left, dark shapes in long garments seemed to waver in the night air. It was almost as though they weren’t really there.
The two groups advanced slowly onto the bridge. Animosity crackled in the air between them. Remi’s gut twisted in fear and every nerve-ending flared into excruciating life. Her instincts roared to the forefront. Did they know she was there?
“Come woman. We will protect you,” the Brioni-suited man at the front of the group of natty dressers held out a hand towards her. The woman behind him stepped forward and held out a hand too, smiling widely, in an attempt to look reassuring, Remi supposed. It SO didn’t work.
Crap, they knew she was there.
Remi turned her head towards the dark lumps of people at the other end of the bridge. They had come forward but still weren’t very visible. It was almost as though they didn’t want her to be able to see them.
Remi sighed, realizing the game was up and stepped out into the light of the pillar’s overhead lantern. The light glinted on her silkily-shaven head. She grinned. Would the suits be so friendly now? Their dark designer attire didn’t exactly go with her bald head, turquoise-wool vintage coat and enormous fluffy, hot pink, Mongolian lamb collar. Nor did the black biker boots she wore, inlaid with pearls on the heels or not, seem their sort of swag.
To her amazement, a wave of sound like sighs, rolled over her from the lumps to the left. Gargling sounds and things that sounded like nails over a chalkboard made the hair on her arms stand up. The entire group advanced into the light. The first thing she noticed...a sea of bald heads.
An unnaturally tall male in a long black, high-necked coat stepped forward. His bald head was huge, like a child with hydrocephalus she’d once seen at a hospital when she was doing charity work. Long, thick earlobes hung along his neck.
He was a study in contrasts. White skin, black clothes. The huge black irises of his eyes were rimmed with a thin, glowing circle of yellow, brilliantly shining into the night. Against the dark wool of his old-fashioned coat, his huge, pale hands were tipped with long, white, claw-like nails that curved slightly into the fine drape of his tailored pants. He was awe-inspiringly...well...horrible.
Remi’s mind cast over a few of the cartel guys she’d seen her father do deals with at the Kentucky plant. Weirdly, all-over face tattoos had the same sort of effect - imagination-capturing awfulness. She was pretty sure those guys in Kentucky were awful. Confoundingly, she wasn’t getting the massive vibes of vicious-evilness off this guy that she got off those cartel guys. Danger, yes. Death, yes. Intent to harm her - not so much. Those cartel guys always had violent power-sex and pain on their minds. She didn’t have to be a mind reader to feel that.
A tall woman stepped forward to stand next to the pale, bulbous-headed man. She too had a large bald head. However, her skin appeared a sort of chocolate mocha-latte color even in the dark. Perched atop her smooth, gauntly-defined skull was a tiny tophat with a black fingertip veil. A bunch of small red feathers peeked out of a diamond studded brooch on the hatband. Remi loved it immediately. She smiled in recognition of a kindred soul.
The woman wore a fitted black corset-style jacket with a low neck and wide-legged black silk pants. Heeled boots with metal spikes on the front glimmered in the lantern light. She was awesome. Remi grinned at her. She couldn’t help herself. It was like they had some sort of metaphysical connection.
The woman smiled back exposing longer than average canines in a blindingly white set of teeth which all appeared to have been filed into points. Ok, so the woman was weirdly-scary looking, but she exuded a powerful poise and a glamorous, slightly-repellant attraction. Remi’s eyes were glued to her.
Rhombus-shaped, pave-diamond earrings hung from her over-sized lobes. At the end of each was strung an intricately-carved intaglio of a jet-black skull. As she took another step forward, coming just to the shoulder of the male leader, Remi could see that the earrings had a large matching necklace that graced the long, swan-like neck of its wearer. It was so wide it was like a collar she’d once seen worn by Nephertiti in the museum in Cairo.
In the center of the choker necklace, surrounded by a row of rhombus-shaped plates that disappeared around the woman’s neck, hung an ornately inlaid, baroque cross. From that cross, hung another rhombus-shaped diamante-studded plate, and from that, hung the last, large intaglio black skull. Each rhombus shaped plate was paved with roughly-cut diamonds and edged in black baguette-shaped stones.
Remi could only supposed they were diamonds as well. The baroque cross was twisted with intricate engraving and embedded with a large pearl in each tip. The cross, the diamond-studded rhombus, then the black intaglio skull made for a strange juxtaposition of what most people felt was good with evil. It was the same aura of opposites that the woman’s appearance portrayed.
The woman’s eyes turned up slightly at the outer edges like a jaguar and her huge black pupils had a ring of amber around them instead of the male’s yellow. She looked like a Nubian queen or pagan goddess, or both.
Remi couldn’t stop looking at her. Then to the male leader. They were mesmerizing. So much more interesting than the suit-clad douchebags at the other end of the bridge.
“Come child. You must leave this place,” the darkly-draped Kojak-like man stated. His voice was deep and Remi could feel that it tried to compel her. Rem
i had felt that pull many times from cartel kingpins and her own male family members. People thought it had to do with the supernatural, the ability to compel, but she knew that it also was a gift given to charismatic humans intent on bending other people’s wills. Preachers occasionally had it. Politicians that went far, had it. Super salespeople had it. Sometimes, serial killers had it. Remi also knew successful businessmen often had it. Her father and grandfather had it. Some of her acquaintances at school had told her she had it.
She dropped her smile and gritted out, “Don’t try to get me to do anything I don’t want to. That said, I’m happy to get out of the middle of this...whatever it is,” Remi added, flapping a hand toward the suits, then towards the black lumps. “Wrong place, wrong time.”
“Look at them,” the elegantly clad snake-wearing woman hissed scornfully, flicking back a lock of dark red hair. “I understand you’re ill. But don’t mistake your cancer for theirs. Their cancer is that they are sewer rats, scrambling to hide in the underbellies of the world. Come to us and be safe. You can see that you can trust us,” she added, trying the smile again.
Remi visibly rolled her eyes. Creepy! A wave of snickers erupted from the sea of dark lumps. They’d seen the eye roll. Wow! That was some good eyesight!
