The Oldest Blood: A Vampire Paranormal Fantasy

by F. E. Arliss

  “Hmmm,” Remi whispered back. “They must really, really like me.”

  Another gurgle of what she was now taking as laughter. “Yesss, they must.”

  “Where are we?” Remi muttered as low as she possibly could and still be heard.

  “Guatemala,” came a barely audible reply. “Middle of nowhere in the jungle near some ruins called Tikal. Vamp camp. Drug factory. Blood bank,” this last was added with another gurgling wheeze.

  When Remi didn’t react, the lump added, “Ah, doesn’t surprise you that much, I take it?”

  “Hmmmm,” was her reply. With that, she willed herself back into a deep sleep. She needed to send a message. If she could teleport her whole body, she could surely teleport a message. All she needed to do, theoretically, was concentrate. What seemed like hours passed as she willed Saulaces to hear her message. “Guatemala. Tikal ruins. A clan.” As brief as that was, it was all she had for now.

  She’d tried to send energy into her bindings, but her brain just couldn’t seem to form the energy in a way that allowed it to enter the realm of physicality. When nothing happened, she almost cried. She’d clearly been heavily drugged. Willing herself back into a stupor, she concentrated on simply sending an idea. An idea was enough, if she could simply make it reach Saulaces.

  Eventually a door opened and two swarthy men came into the darkened room. From the fact that they didn’t need lights to see, she assumed they were strigoi. One unstrapped the lock on the collar that manacled her to the bedframe and the other undid the one that was manacled to the bedframe at her feet. They left the collar and ankle-chains in place. Nor did they bother to ask her to walk. They simply picked her up and carried her, letting her dangle like the pig for slaughter she felt like. She really needed some water. Maybe a nice glass of wine. She doubted that was going to happen, but a girl could hope.

  On the other side of the world, Saulaces had suddenly leapt to his feet and the entire clan had appeared at his side immediately. “Guatemala! Tikal! Middle of nowhere jungle,” he’d growled and the entire group had teleported within a split second of one another.

  They had not teleported to Tikal. Instead, the entire clan simply appeared in the heavily ornate drawing room of Queen Bai Ling of the Shu Han. Rather than appear startled, the oddly tall, entirely homely queen, simply bowed slightly and gestured to a knot of soldiers, including Remi’s guard, Jin. Each stepped into the embrace of one of the Colchi elders and were gone again in a second. Saulaces had said only three words to Bai Ling. “Guatemala. Tikal. A clan.”

  When the group materialized in the jungle near the ancient ruins of Tikal in Guatemala, it was raining. It rained a lot near Tikal. It also made it much harder to find the ruins...for humans that was. For the Colchi, they could smell it long before they saw it. The ruins, harboring chained humans as blood donors and cooking drugs for shipment, stunk to high heaven. Only a human wouldn’t smell the funk that hung over the ancient valley. The stench floated on the moist air and paved an invisible trail to the edge of the ruin.

  One road ran into what had once been a walled courtyard. Several mostly fallen, stone facades edged the rutted, heavily overgrown area. Two buildings had occupants. One was used to cook the drugs. The other housed the strigoi clan that controlled the area, their guests, and the hidden chambers deep underground.

  When Remi was carried limply into the daylight and deposited roughly on a Persian carpet in a beautifully decorated room, she wasn’t surprised. When a heavy boot rolled her over so she could face her father, Eliphalet Hartsel and her brother Paul, she still wasn’t surprised. The man standing behind the ornately upholstered sofa they sat on didn’t surprise her either. Isaac Frishkorn smirked. Her father smirked. Her brother, Paul, laughed out loud.

  “Would you look at that,” Paul sang, jubilation in his voice. “There are our shares on the hoof.”

  Her father scowled at his son, but simply continued to stare at Remi. Finally, he opened his mouth and sighed. “Are you ready to sign over your shares, Remington? The family is disappointed in the way you simply disappeared without a word. Really, it’s very bad behavior on your part.”

  Remi couldn’t help it, she rolled her eyes and snickered. It came out a bit wrong, as her dry mouth didn’t work as well as she’d anticipated. On the other hand, the Colchi blood was definitely coming back online. She could feel the zip ties weakening as the drug, whatever it had been, was beginning to wear off. She alternately pulsed energy into it and glared at her father.

  “I think you need to give her another shot of that stuff,” he growled at Isaac Frishkorn. “I can feel little daggers embedding themselves in my chest,” he added, this as he rubbed viciously at the spot Remi had imagined hurtling knives into just over his monogrammed dress-shirt pocket.

  “No,” her brother Paul protested. “If we knock her out again, she won’t be able to sign and we need her authentic signature.”

  “Joao says it’s quite a strong cocktail. You don’t want to kill her do you?” Issac Frishkorn asked her father, a leer scrolling across his face. Remi knew what he really wanted was to drain her of every last drop of blood. He didn’t give a crap about the Hartsel shares one way or the other. Her father probably had no idea that his good business buddies Joao Antunes and Isaac Frishkorn were the leaders of vampire clans.

  “I’m not giving you my authentic signature, you half-wit,” Remi snarled. “You’ll be dead before that anyway.” Throwing another bolt of mal-intent, this time she aimed it at her brother's head. He rubbed his forehead, muttering something about a headache.

  “I’ll give you a headache, you asshole. If Saulaces doesn’t lop your head off before I do,” Remi muttered this as she pulsed energy into the zip-ties on her hands.

  “What does she mean, Frishkorn? Who is Saulaces?” Paul muttered, grinding his knuckles into his temples in an attempt to ease the vice-like headache that gripped his head.

  “Don’t worry, Saulaces is on another continent and will be of no use to her here,” Frishkorn said smoothly, smug condescension oozed from the statement.

  Remi couldn’t believe he was so ill-informed that he didn't’ know the Colchi could teleport vast distances. It was clear that the Motetz Dam knew nothing of the true powers of the Colchi. They simply took them as the fang and claw wielding primitives they had been painted as in the last several centuries. Frishkorn knew they could teleport. He just didn’t know that it wasn’t a short-distance show.

  Remi started to laugh. She couldn’t help herself. Saulaces was already here. She could sense him. Between pulses of pain to her father and brother, and weakening arrows of energy to the bindings restraining her, she was also sending out summoning thoughts to her clan. Her finger was killing her. Every time she let the energy flow towards weakening the zip ties around her wrists, the finger pulsed with pain. What had those assholes done?

  She sensed Saulaces near. The clan were already here. One by one the guards surrounding the compound, strigoi or not, were being dismantled.

  Heads were literally rolling.

  When an enormous flurry of moths swirled around the room, Isaac Frishkorn suddenly realized that it was already too late. He started to run for the stairs. Opening his mouth in gasping breaths, eyes wide with fear, his head suddenly ceased to be. It flew across the room and thumped into the far wall, splattering blood across a freshly white-washed alcove.

  Paul screamed. Her father, a bit more contained, sprang to his feet. “What the hell is going on?” he raged at Remi, gasping as she finally snapped the zip-ties binding her and sat up, wringing her hands in order to get the blood pumping again. It was only then that she realized her forefinger was gone, and with it, the intaglio ring from her parure set.

  She’d begun to get cocky, her inner voice chided her. All those lessons with Gu Wei Mo had her thinking she couldn’t be hurt. Couldn’t feel pain. She certainly couldn’t have one of her limbs removed! Ok, so it was just a digit, but it was her whole finger! And it hurt! Excruciati
ngly, now that she could see the bloody stump of it. Ah, the wonders of the mind. Until she’d actually realized the finger was gone, it had throbbed with pain. Now it was a searing fire of agony. Later she would realize that as all the blood rushed back into her hands after the loosening of the zip ties, so had the pain receptors been activated. It wasn’t all in her mind. It was plain old physiology.

  “Saul!” Remi cried, her desperate voice cracking with emotion. For the first time ever she used the shortened version of his name out loud. That alone signalling her distress. When he whirled to face her, she held up her blood coated hand, waggling only four fingers in the air. The gap where her forefinger had been was scabbed over - her accelerated healing ability having stopped the blood flow. Looking at her wrist she could see that both skulls on her bracelets had their mouths open in silent screams.

  “Find her finger and the ring,” Saulaces thundered into the stillness, sending the wraith-like apparitions that hadn’t completely materialized into action. The command startled both remaining men, as the deeply chilling voice cracked with authority.

  “I’d like you to meet Saulaces,” Remi said quietly, gesturing with one stiff shoulder towards the scarily tall, black-clothed man, whose yellow eyes blazed with murderous intent. “Is Georgie all right?” she asked Saulaces, her voice a bit steadier, now that he’d started barking orders again. It was good to not have to be in charge ALL the time. At his nod, she relaxed a bit.

  Behind him, several more of the clan materialized. Screams echoed down ancient stone corridors and the distant sounds of gunfire rattled in the undergrowth.

  Several small Asian warriors appeared, slipping silently into the room. Jin slid onto the floor behind Remi and quickly broke the chains holding her ankles. He helped her to her feet, bowing so low his forehead almost touched the floor.

  “There is no need Jin; it was a clever ruse. Unfortunately, for Lord Lobishoman, he underestimated both myself, my clan, and my security,” Remi said, nodding towards the bodiless-head now oozing blood onto the old stone floor. She squeezed the young man’s shoulder reassuringly with her unmangled hand. Actually, he was probably several hundred years old, she’d have to ask him sometime.

  Another of Jin’s clan appeared holding a roll of black velvet. When it was laid on the desk and opened, Remi’s finger lay soaked in blood, the intaglio ring still screaming silently from the cloth.

  “It was proof of life,” Eliphalet Hartsel snapped in explanation.

  Remi shuddered as Saulaces picked up the finger and brought it across the room. He knelt next to her. JIn slid onto the floor behind her as Saulaces gently took her small hand in his enormous one and laid the finger into alignment with the blood-clotted stump. Stabbing one of his long claws into the ball of his thumb, he smeared the black ooze of his Cochi blood onto the stump of her finger and then onto the ragged edge of her knuckle.

  Remi reared back against Jin’s wiry frame as fire burned up her arm. Her flesh sought its own kind, tendons erupting from the ends of both her stump and severed finger. Sweat beaded on her forehead as the strands of flesh wound themselves together, hurried by the blood Saulaces had coated his own fingers with and then rubbed onto the raggedly exposed ends. She couldn’t tamp down the moan of pain that finally erupted against her will as the agony became too much to bear silently.

  “Holy mother!” her brother gasped.

  Gradually, the intaglio skull on the ring stopped screaming. Its mouth closed gently and though still grimacing in pain, no longer showed a jagged row of teeth parted in a grieving wail.

  Her father sat down. His legs collapsing under him as his daughter’s finger knit itself back together before his eyes.

  Paul had leapt from the couch and was now cowering behind the desk against the wall. Remi turned to her father, “You can no longer control me. What you have stumbled into is far outside your experience.” She yanked at the mesh collar still digging into the back of her skull.

  “Saulaces, would you be so kind as to remove this damn thing?”she asked the tall man exasperatedly.

  He extended one scythe-like claw and simply sliced it away from her skin. It fell to the floor with a resounding thud, punctuated by Paul’s wail of terror and her father’s gasp.

  “Thank you,” Remi said, bowing her head to Saulaces in thanks. Then reaching out and grasping his hugely-clawed hand, she squeezed it, saying, “It is good to see you.”

  “And you, my Queen. I am only sorry I was not faster,” he acknowledged, bending his upper body to her in a gesture of respect. The cluster of Shu Han and the rest of the Colchi elders also bowed.

  Her father, dumbfounded, simply stared. Her brother, Paul, whimpered. “What the hell is going on?” her father demanded.

  “Well, father, Isaac Frishkorn was a vampire. A rather weak one, it’s true. But a vampire nonetheless,” Remi explained as if talking to an idiot child. “Joao Antunes, while still alive, will soon be dead. He, too, is a vampire. Show them please Saulaces, would you?” she requested the dark tower of a man standing to her side.

  In a split second, Saulaces had grown his long claws out again to an impressive length of about six inches and his incisors had lowered into two inch fangs. Her father gaped. Paul whimpered. “You simply messed in a territory you were completely unprepared for when you came looking for me again,” Remi pointed this out to her father in a conversational tone.

  “Are you a vampire now, too?” her father demanded querulously.

  “No, I’m not. I’m their queen - with a few special powers like projecting images from my mind onto other surfaces. Would you like to see what Saulaces here might do to you?” she asked, then giggled slightly. Geez, that was so inappropriate, she chided herself. Then splayed the image of the conversion scene of Gerard Delon, the cancer victim, draining his best friend, Josiah Renee, who was also dying of cancer. These were the images she and Georgie had witnessed of Gerard being turned Colchi, onto the wall behind her.

  Her father clutched his chest. Paul wet himself.

  “I am undecided about whether or not to kill them, or simply terrorize them witless,” Remi said conversationally to Saulaces. “What do you think?”

  “I vote for killing them,” Jin stated briskly behind her. A chorus of ascending grunts rose from the rest of his clan. What was it with the Asian clans and grunting? It always seemed to mean ‘yes’.

  “Me too,” Saulaces said, his deep voice growling so low that the hair on Eliphalet Hartsel’s arms rose in response. Paul was rocking back and forth now, crying and grasping his opposing arms around himself.

  The other elders growled agreement.

  “I was never fond of you, father,” Remi said calmly. “You’re a terrible person and you were a truly catastrophically horrifying father.” Remi thought of all the magnificent animals her father had killed over the years, making her watch and then belittling her when she cried.

  “Grandmother told me once that your name meant, ‘god is release’,” she added, as though thinking to herself.

  Being forced to watch animals being purposely killed for sport in an attempt to - as her grandmother had put it - ‘toughen her up’, had hurt Remi more than anything in her childhood. Those animals hadn’t deserved to die. Sometimes, people did deserve it. Or so it seemed to her now.

  “I think perhaps I’ll take a walk and let the clans dine,” Remi said to Saulaces. Turning to her father, she nodded towards the enormously tall Colchi Lord, and said, “Eliphalet Hartsel, meet your god.” Then she was gone, having transported herself out of the room and into the hall. Not that she had any compunction about any of it. Blood was food. And those two reprehensible specimens of humanity were not her blood. Not anymore.

  Saulaces nodded to Jin and the Shu Han clan surrounded Eliphalet Hartsel and were soon feeding on his struggling body. Deep cuts spurted blood into gaping, hungry mouths.

  Paul fainted. Saulaces walked over and looked down at him with loathing. The only thing those modern vampire movies had e
ver had right was that the older a strigoi got, the less blood they needed. The Colchi elders didn’t need the blood of Paul Hartsel. Saulaces simply stepped on Paul’s head, crushing it like a bug’s shell under his boot.

  It crossed Remi’s mind, as she strolled the now empty courtyard, that she’d once seen a movie with Anna Kendrick in it called, ‘Mr. Right.’ In that movie the actress’s character had fallen in love with a dancing hitman with a moral code. He killed people that ordered hits because, well...killing was wrong.

  It struck her that she had just allowed her father and brother to be killed because, well...killing animals was wrong. And, of course, the fact that they were loathsome, horrible people. If the clans had to eat, it might as well be them.

  More to the point, they’d kidnapped her, tortured people, had a lot of innocent blood on their hands, and worst of all - had tried to screw with the Colchi. That was wrong. She might just be as screwed up as the characters in that movie. She’d thought it charmingly funny at the time. In truth, there was nothing funny or charming about any of the last twenty-four hours.