His skin was very nearly the color of a penny, albeit less metallic, and his hair was a tattered mess of black sticking out in every direction around his face and coated in stone dust. He had broad, square features and thick eyebrows, and he could have been anywhere from twenty-five years old to fifty; Siobhan couldn’t tell. By that point, she was fairly sure that ‘ageless’ was just a trait of the Vampire Lords, as eerie and unnerving as it was.
He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his pants were about as minimal as they could be, and they were moldering through in patches. Allambee’s hands were folded peacefully in his lap, his legs were curled beneath him, and his chin dipped toward his chest.
Carefully, as if the Lord might wake up at any errant motion, Jack tipped Allambee’s chin back before biting into his own wrist. The first drops of blood fell, and both Jack and Siobhan nearly leaped away, their backs meeting the damp walls, and Barton retreated a few steps back up the incline.
Even with the mental link more or less contained, Siobhan could still feel Jack’s caution mirroring her own, and it made her feel a bit like her skin was crawling. Absentmindedly, she dragged her nails up and down along her upper arms.
Allambee twitched, his hands jerking away from his lap and falling to his sides with a splash. His face scrunched up, his nose wrinkling, his brows drawing together, and his mouth turning down at the corners, until finally his eyes slowly opened.
“What in the world is that supposed to be?” were the first words out of his mouth, as he scowled at Siobhan’s phone in befuddlement.
Quickly, she turned the light off and tucked the phone back into her pocket so that only the barest amount of light filtered down along the column’s length.
Allambee shook his head briefly, evidently deciding that the phone was a puzzle he could figure out later. He cleared his throat and then coughed outright, and Siobhan cringed at the cloud of stone dust that burst passed his lips.
Heedless of all that, as if coughing up dust was an everyday occurrence, he got to his feet, planting his hands on his hips. He looked between Siobhan, Jack, and Barton, and observed after a moment, “Well, at least there are still dogs. Harendra’s had his turn, then?”
Siobhan blinked slowly, trying to figure out who Harendra was.
“He hasn’t,” Jack corrected. “It’s still Regina’s turn. But we’ve been tasked with waking everyone up,” he explained, gesturing between himself and Siobhan as he said it.
Allambee’s eyes narrowed dubiously. “That ought to be a story,” he mused slowly, looking at them expectantly.
*
Allambee took the story well, all things considered. He waited patiently as Jack and Siobhan explained it, his expression placid and his hands linked together behind his back. Once the story was out, though, Siobhan expected him to just be…gone, like the others before him. She expected him to just vanish and be on his way.
Instead, he walked with them back up the path along the column, and he kept pace with them as they walked back through the caves, letting Barton lead them back to moonlight once again.
They were roughly halfway back to the entrance when Siobhan finally dredged up the courage to actually talk to him.
“So, when other vampires just get…suitably old, I guess, do they become Vampire Lords, too?”
Allambee stared at her a moment, as if he hadn’t actually expected her to say a word to him. And then he grinned, bright and beaming, his fangs on full display. “Nothing like that,” he replied. “Most vampires don’t really see much of an increase in power as they get older, unless they figure out how to wield fire somewhere down the line.”
At Siobhan’s bemused look, he carried on. “See, a Vampire Lord can’t bite someone without turning them into a vampire. We can’t just incidentally feed. When we bite people, it matters. As a compromise, we only pass on a fraction of our abilities.”
“Then how do you wind up with a Vampire Lord?” Siobhan asked after a moment, when it became apparent that Allambee wasn’t going to add anything else. “I seriously doubt you were just born like normal, but oh, that’s funny, this one drinks blood and teleports at will.”
“True enough,” he agreed pleasantly, his beaming grin settling into a smaller, placid smile. “That would be a bit farfetched.”
“So, what?” Siobhan asked, doing her best to rein in her own impatience. “Did you just crawl up out of holes in the ground?”
“More like holes in the world,” he corrected cheerfully. “But what about you?” he asked, not even leaving a space for her to ask any further questions. “Where did you come from? You smell new.”
“I got attacked by an angel,” she answered, her shoulders drooping with a sigh as she realized none of her questions were going to be answered. Not productively, at any rate. “Jack saved me. It’s barely been two weeks.”
“A very productive two weeks, though,” Jack supplied, “considering you’re the third Lord we’ve woken up. We could definitely be doing worse.”
“And we killed an angel,” Siobhan nearly squealed, clapping her hands together as she added even more jubilantly, “and an archangel!”
Allambee looked strangely fond as he watched her. Even with his evasiveness, Siobhan found she preferred him to Osamu’s stoicism and Dask’iya’s flaming temper (and literal fire). Even if he wasn’t answering her questions as fully as she wanted, at least he wasn’t trying to kill them or politely ignore them.
Eventually, the walls narrowed again, and Barton bounded ahead, worming his way through the crevice and emerging onto dusty ground bathed in starlight. Siobhan could hear him barking and the sound of his paws storming off, and she assumed he was chasing off another dingo.
One by one, they emerged into the silver light of nighttime. Barton paced back and forth just a few yards away, warning away a pair of dingoes that were very keen on some of the leftovers from earlier. (Siobhan noted that the pile of leftovers was actually smaller, though she found herself unwilling to put much thought into that observation.)
Haltingly, Jack asked Allambee, “Do you need any help finding the others?”
With a snort of laughter, Allambee ruffled Jack’s hair. “I’ll manage just fine on my own.” And with that, he was gone, leaving nary a trace behind, as if he had never been there.
With a sigh, Siobhan began collecting her misplaced collection of feathers once again. Despite the ruckus of the earlier fight and how far off the feathers had been flung, they were still in remarkably good condition. The perks of previously belonging to an unearthly creature, she supposed.
She even managed to find a few new ones to add to the collection. And as she did that, Jack began gather up their supplies once again, until all that was left to do was to properly fold the tarp up and shove it back into one of the bags.
“So, where to next?” Siobhan asked, as Jack shouldered both bags and she picked Barton up for the trip back to town. “Where do we find this Harendra?”
Jack dusted himself off, though it was rather a lost cause at that point. “Next up, we’re off to India.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The ship to India was smaller than the one to Japan or the one to Australia, and though there were fewer passengers than on either of those ships, it felt more crowded. Within just a few hours, Siobhan was about ready to scratch herself out of her skin if that would get her away from them. She missed her cabin and her forest and her quiet. She refrained from wandering the ship during the day, keeping to the small cabin she shared with Jack and Barton. Barton stuck close to her side, acting as the support dog he was only masquerading as.
Her growing hunger wasn’t making the trip any more comfortable. Jack hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that blood from an animal wasn’t as filling, and she wished they had taken the time to get in one last hunt before getting on the ship. Hindsight was always better than foresight, she supposed.
When night fell, Siobhan would emerge from the cabin and venture up to the comparatively empty deck with Bart
on, her eyes focused on the sky. Even when it was overcast, she took comfort in that. It was one of the few constants across the entire world.
Jack would join them, eventually. They didn’t speak much. He didn’t like the crowding any more than she did, and just like her, most of his mental reserves during the day went toward functioning like a regular human being. By the time night fell and most of the other passengers were asleep, he had little left to offer.
Even so, it was nice to sprawl out together on an empty portion of the deck, to watch the stars pass overhead. Occasionally, Jack toyed with one of Siobhan’s hands, his grip on her palm loose as he absentmindedly curled and straightened her fingers like he wasn’t even aware he was doing it.
(It was sort of cute.)
(Not that Siobhan was going to say that out loud.)
It was not a comfortable trip, but the nights at least made it bearable, and she had good company, even if she was frazzled. Still, she was beyond grateful when the ship finally pulled into port and they were allowed to disembark. The fact that it was the middle of the afternoon was a little annoying, but at that point, they were willing to put up with the inconvenience, and they were only slightly pink by the time they made it into the shade of a nearby market.
Everything smelled sort of like fish from the fishmonger’s shop, but shade was shade, and Siobhan was past the point of being picky by then. Even if she had never been a huge fan of seafood.
(She was pretty sure it was the eyes. A fish’s eyes just didn’t look appreciably different from alive to not alive. Nature was strange and off-putting sometimes, and very good at putting Siobhan off of her lunch.)
They meandered listlessly through the market as the sun passed overhead, their path determined by where the shadows fell. Barton trotted away now and then, investigating things that smelled strange, only to return to Siobhan’s side a few moments later. On one occasion, as Siobhan and Jack reclined against the shaded side of a building beside a vendor’s stall, the vendor surreptitiously dropped a few bites for the dog to snatch up. Deciding he had a new best friend, Barton sprawled out on the ground at the vendor’s feet until eventually Siobhan and Jack moved on yet again.
Slowly, they trio made their way from one end of the market to the other, until at last the sun was sinking close enough to the horizon that they could set off down the road.
Their first stop was a hospital.
“Why do you know the passcode for India but not for Australia?” Siobhan asked, baffled, as they stepped inside.
“I can only remember so many,” Jack huffed in return, waving her off.
Holding her hands up in surrender, Siobhan fell back as Jack approached the first nurse he could find to speak with her. Within ten minutes, both Jack and Siobhan were feeding out of plastic bags in the darkness beside the hospital.
As she drained her bag, a line of tension she hadn’t even known was there gradually eased across Siobhan’s shoulders as that gnawing hole in her gut filled and eased.
“Do vampires ever just get so hungry that they snap and attack someone?” she asked eventually, as she crinkled up the bag and passed it from hand to hand, uncaring of the drops of leftover blood that got on her fingers. She tossed the bag in the trash and licked her fingers clean.
“Occasionally,” Jack answered, shrugging one shoulder after he finished his own meal. “It’s generally sort of a bad time for all people involved.”
“Does it just, like, turn into a giant scandal or something?” she wondered, scrubbing her hands off on her pants.
“For a while, no, because who was going to notice? Some guy gets bitten in a back alley in 1724, hardly anyone is going to believe it wasn’t just a dog bite or whatever.” He snorted. “It’s a bit more of a concern now, since basically everyone has a camera all the time. We’ve sort of lucked out, since most people are pretty ready to believe it’s a hoax, and the people who don’t think it’s a hoax are…not really taken seriously.”
“Ah, conspiracy theorists,” Siobhan sighed with feigned fondness. “I bet they’ve been blowing up about the death-by-dropping phenomenon.”
“You have no idea,” Jack deadpanned in return before returning to the original topic. “Assuming it doesn’t go viral, we try to find whomever got bit and introduce them to a nonhuman capable of hypnosis to convince them they were bitten by something else.”
“Has anyone ever tried to turn an animal?” she asked, idly scratching the top of Barton’s head with one hand.
Jack slid her a bland look. “You’re not turning your dog into a vampire,” he informed her flatly. Not swayed in the least by the innocent look she gave him, he added, “Imagine a blood-drinker without the reasoning skills of a human. He’d go killing people left and right because he was a bit peckish.”
Siobhan pouted and curled her fingers around one of Barton’s ears. “Fiiiine,” she sighed, turning Barton’s face toward her hip as if to shield him from something. “Don’t you listen to him,” she cooed down at him. “He’s just being rude.”
“Doesn’t mean I’m not right,” Jack drawled in return.
Barton, unperturbed, turned to seek attention from Jack. Because if they weren’t both showering him with affection, clearly, he was being neglected horrifically.
Siobhan shook her head down at him, mouthing the word traitor to herself. Such a fickle, easily pleased creature he was.
Jack rolled his eyes and threw the plastic bag away before he picked up his bag and then Siobhan’s. “You grab him, and we’ll get moving. We don’t need a hotel tonight; we just need to get to our actual destination.”
“And what are we doing once we get there?” Siobhan asked warily. Less because she didn’t want to deal with the Vampire Lord, but because she still felt strung out from the journey and the day avoiding the sun.
“Then we spend the rest of tonight and tomorrow, and possibly tomorrow night and the day after sitting on our asses and staring at the ceiling,” Jack answered, evidently just as done with being a functional adult as Siobhan was.
With a sigh of relief, she picked Barton up. Resigned to his fate of being toted along, he sulked on her shoulder like a toddler.
*
It wasn’t an especially eventful jog. Perhaps it would have been if they had actually been paying any attention to their surroundings, but they weren’t concerned with any of it for the moment. They just wanted to get where they needed to go and call it a day.
There was only a brief moment that interrupted the monotonous jog, when they had to grind to a halt and carry on at a walk as an electric scooter with a couple on it went zipping by. It slowed as it passed them, so the man and the woman could stare at them in confusion.
…Well, mostly so they could stare at Siobhan. Considering Barton was nearly as large as her, she supposed she could understand their bewilderment.
It was only a brief pause, though, and soon enough, the scooter puttered on ahead, and as soon as it took a turn, Jack and Siobhan burst back into a sprint.
She wasn’t actually sure where they were going. Asking about it had slipped her mind, so she was largely just following wherever Jack was leading. If she were lucky, it would be as nice as the hot spring inn back in Japan. (She wasn’t particularly lucky of late, though, so she would settle for it at least being better than a roadside motel.)
Once they arrived, Siobhan supposed that, while it wasn’t quite as much of a vacation destination as the hot spring, it was still beautiful. She set Barton down to let him appreciate it just as well as she did.
The manor…didn’t fit in with most of the rest of the architecture they had passed. In fact, it looked more like it belonged in the English countryside. The amount of land surrounding it was truly impressive.
The manor sat on a rise at the end of an intricate, weaving network of paths made of multicolored paving stones, all of the paths curling through and around various gardens, small ponds, and fountains.
Stretching out into the distance behind the manor we
re rows upon rows of green, leafy plants. Or they looked like rows upon rows at first, though as Siobhan stared, she could see that they were weaving in on themselves. If they made any sort of pattern, she couldn’t discern what it was, but it was at least apparent that they had been planted that way on purpose.
Meandering peacefully off to the side, between the divide of the picturesque gardens and the organized chaos of the rest of the plants, there was…
“There’s an elephant over there,” Siobhan observed softly, her words awestruck.
Jack was staring at it just as intently. “I…guess no one here is really going to bother it, so why wouldn’t it hang around?” he suggested, followed by, “I kind of want to go pet it.”
“I’m not saving you if it tries to trample you,” Siobhan informed him, though the impact of the words was ruined by how amazed she still was. “What is this place?”
The Vampire's Bond: A Vampire Romance For Adults (The Bonded Series Book 1) Page 12
