I woke up two hours later, feeling not a bit better than before. After I took a shower, Doris came in.
“You took all your pills?” she asked while I was checking the prescription bottle.
“I have a few more. It should be enough,” I said, hopefully.
“What’s wrong, then?”
“Umm, Tertius once mentioned that I shouldn’t take them at all. And it kind of stuck with me.”
“He did? I always find it scary to hear that the Vocati knew many things upfront. Many of our things.” She shivered dramatically.
“What do you mean?”
“Some of the things throughout our history,” she said, and just when I thought she wasn’t going to go on, she elaborated.
“Somehow they knew Sango’s visions.”
“Visions?” That was a first.
“Yeah, he has that ability.” Visions. Cool!
“His visions were about epic things, like the births of the other Elders. And it was his recipe that gave birth to the Vocati.”
“Really? Did he know about its misuse as well?”
“Maybe he was aware of the possibility, but his visions were rare and about general major events. He’s not psychic, though.”
So it was Sango who gave the instructions to breed Vocati in case the vamp community was ever attacked by humans. But things had played out differently. A weapon that was supposed to defend them was now the weapon of their destruction.
“The Vocati somehow knew about all of his visions. Once they even tried to take an Elder before we came for him,” she added.
“Why?”
“Nobody knows. We don’t even know how they got the information in the first place!”
“A mole?” I asked.
“Elders played with that theory for a while, but in the end they rejected it.”
I tried to imagine a person who could know all those secrets and betray his own race. That Priest Doroteo, for one.
“Who was the Elder they tried to take?”
“Baldur. But Sango’s vision was clear enough for the Warriors to come for him first.”
“What happened with new Elders?” I had never found this information in the books I’d read.
“They would take him to Sango’s court and introduce him to our history,” she looked at me mysteriously.
“What?”
“Well, the introduction wasn’t exactly a bedtime story. A newly made Elder would bite all of the previous Elders, gaining the experience and history through their blood.”
Wow, that sounded nasty; yet awkwardly practical.
“And who knows what else happened that we ‘normals’ have no idea about.”
I rolled my eyes and shoved her lightly. If she was normal, then what was I—an imaginary worm?
Maybe Sango’s visions were the reason why she put so much stock into decoding her dreams. He received visions. My mind twirled around the thought for some time.
His only two lineages destroyed. No offspring.
“Doris, how were his families destroyed?” I asked, unpacking my bag.
“Seven of his offspring were killed in a battle, and the rest were sacrificed.”
“Sacrificed?” I couldn’t remember anything that I’d read that would imply . . . Unless—!
“Doroteo?” I asked, and she nodded, looking through the window.
“How many of them?”
“Four. One for each of the Original Vocati,” Doris said in a low voice.
“How did the Priest trick them?”
“He did it by calling them in on a false matter and locking them in a room. Then he raised up the Originals and let them into the room to feed off of Sango’s offspring.”
I had always thought that the Vocati needed the blood to raise up in the first place, but I must have been wrong.
“When they had fed, the Priest came and let the Lolo into them. The day-flying moth was the end of the ritual.”
“And nobody knows the ritual itself?”
“No. I guess Sango would know it though.”
“But who all knew about it then, I mean?”
“Besides Doroteo? Two other Priests who died in the first wave of the Vocati attacks.”
“Four Original Vocati for four noble families as retaliation for the killing of the Rogues. What families were those anyway?” I asked.
“Both the families of Sango, and also Belun’s and mine.”
It shocked me; I wasn’t expecting that answer.
“Of Belun’s family, there remained only Andrei and his father. Mine was luckier, more family members survived.”
These were amazingly useful things to know. I was glad that Doris had finally opened up and trusted me with these stories.
“Does your cousin have offspring?”
“Yep, but they’re older and scattered across the world.”
“Doris, is it possible for a noble to be older than an Elder?”
“Sure. All families are older, except Baldur’s and Kyrill’s.”
“Then why are they called Elders?” It seemed a very logical question to me.
“They come from human families, they were born human. Later on, Sango, Udama, and Ixtab together decided to work on creating a vampire community. Before that, they were murdering their children.”
“They—what?”
“They didn’t know that vampires were created the same way that human children were. Only after Sango’s vision did they start to work on it.”
“But why murdering?”
“I know how it sounds. But think about their timeframe. They thought of themselves as abominations—it wasn’t exactly cool being so different then. It’s not cool even nowadays, so imagine what ignorant superstitious people thought back then. What they thought back then.”
I tried. I failed.
“So the Elders were born that way to human families?”
“Yes, but with the years, the differences became more and more obvious. They would leave their villages or tribes, discovering their own path.”
“It must have been so hard,” I said, thinking of those confused and lonely children who had to wander around for ages.
“Jeez, I can’t even begin to understand how they must have felt. Being born and raised as humans, and then things beginning to change. You begin to change . . .” She shook her head.
When dinnertime came, Doris told me to dress up. So I opted for a knee-length black dress that seemed decent and classy enough.
Dinner was served on a large balcony, and we weren’t the only guests at the table. There were a dozen people or more. All dressed up, and all speaking Spanish. My Spanish wasn’t bad—much better than my French—but the rest just assumed I didn’t know the language. They’d give me polite smiles and continue their conversations, which was perfectly fine with me—because they were terribly boring. All politics and the economy.
And they all rose from their seats when the cousin arrived. Oh yeah, he was fashionably late to his own dinner party. He smoothed down his blond hair, and his amber eyes sparkled with arrogant calm.
“Good evening, dear guests,” he said, his mouth tilting just a touch. I guessed it was an attempt at a smile.
He was wearing a different suit that looked even pricier than the one I’d seen him in earlier. Also he had tucked a neck scarf under his jacket, giving him a whiff of Gatsby. How pretentious.
“What’s your cousin’s name?” I asked Doris, getting tired of calling him the cousin—it was too much like The Godfather.
“David.” So. David Lazar. The snob.
The food that was served was predictably pretentious, along with the table discussions. It was clear that these people were in some kind of contest to see who could stick their nose further up David’s butt. And for dessert—eggplant in chocolate. Awful.
“I heard that Eleanor Roosevelt liked to dip parts of an onion into chocolate,” Doris told me, but I was clearly no Roosevelt, nor Lazar. There was no way I was going to appreciate awful veg
etables with chocolate dressing.
“Have you heard of Oswald Gray?” I asked her, after a piano player started his tune. Oh, right, there was a baby grand piano on the balcony, too.
“Sure. Why?”
“He was the one who brought me to Tromsø.”
“Yeah, his team captured the Original.”
“Tertius,” I corrected her.
“How many teams are there anyway?” I added.
“Oh, I don’t know. Several, I guess.”
Most of the guests stood, whether to dance or to admire the view—which, by the way, was breathtaking. Doris and I leaned on the stone fence, looking out at the streets and the sea.
“Do they work only for Baldur?”
“The teams? No, they work for Gazini, Inc., which is primarily Sango’s, but the rest of the Elders are also shareholders. In the last several decades, however, Baldur took most of the work upon himself, I guess. By the way, gazini means blood in Zulu.”
“How convenient,” I muttered, and she nodded, grinning.
“And what about Kyrill. What does he do?”
“Nothing as attractive as Baldur, that’s for sure. He plays judge in important situations, and he gives advice. And . . . some other things.” Okay, that made him sound like an ancient Santa Claus who was too lazy to get up from his TV barcalounger. But then again, Matthews had told me how slow the Elders could be—and that Baldur was an exception. However, it sounded like there was more to Doris’s story than she was willing to tell now. Which was fine by me; she had already told me way more than I had expected today.
When she started talking to some guests, it seemed like the “party” was just going to drag on. There was no way I was gonna stay there any longer. So I winked at her, mouthing that I was going to go running.
Leaving the palace was a huge relief, and I headed for the beach.
The sound of the waves was calming, along with the sound of the palm trees moving in the breeze. Everything I learned today, plus my previous questions, raced along with my shoes on the sand. There was no way to escape them, even if I had wanted to.
Sango’s visions were a huge mystery. And the fact that the Vocati had known them and had raced against the vamps to steal their newly developed Elder? That was big. I recalled Tertius answering my question of what the Vocati wanted, with: “Their place in the order of things.” What had he meant? In the order of the race, maybe? Maybe the Vocati thought that they were above the vamps based on the food chain, so they wanted the ruling stick. If anything, that was Kyrill’s philosophy as far as I’d understood it. He didn’t respect humans since vamps were “so far superior” to us. And even if he had already thought that, it’s not so strange to assume that the Vocati could share the thought. Although, to their own advantage.
Maybe the Vocati wanted to kill Baldur before he completed his transformation into being an Elder. Maybe that’s why they had tried to reach him first. That was probably it. I mean, as many Elders as there were, Vocati would have had more immortal enemies. It was 5:4, and now it was 2:4 in favor of the Vocati. Could a freshly-not-yet-turned Elder die? Since they had not been born as immortals, but had turned immortal at some point in their young lives, I guessed they could die.
My relationship with Tertius was blinding me. I had created a connection with him, and I had humanized him completely. But those four Vocati that had attacked us—they weren’t that friendly. Which kind of begged the question: why was Tertius?
Then I felt it.
A strong pain in my chest that knocked me to my knees.
All of my muscles froze while the pain spread throughout my whole body. I fell face down, wet sand on my skin. I couldn’t even breathe; the pain was so strong that it overtook all my other senses. But I didn’t faint. Instead I was fully aware of a zillion sharp nails drilling into my head, my face, my chests, my arms, my legs.
I wasn’t sure how long it lasted, but when it was gone, I stayed spread out on the sand for what seemed to be hours. I was shivering heavily; it was like I was having a seizure that wouldn’t stop.
Chapter 25
The Awakening
When I finally reached my room, it was late and quiet. Under my blanket, still shivering from shock or fear, I took a pill. Dawn was slipping up the horizon when I finally calmed down enough to sink into sleep.
I tossed and turned a lot and the images seemed hazy, and later, when I opened my eyes, they felt too heavy. I lay there, trying to remember my dreams, but the only thing I could recall was a place that looked like the boiler room in “Titanic,” where I stood looking at the wall of interlaced red pipes that struck me as a labyrinth, or an awkward family tree. Then Doris burst into my room.
“Something’s happened!” she said in a high voice, sitting next to me on bed.
“What’s wrong?” I propped myself up on the pillows, feeling a light dizziness.
“I called you before but you didn’t pick up.”
“I just woke up. What’s going on, Doris?”
“I spent the whole night in a conference call, talking with Dad and David. It’s a . . .” Her tired eyes shot right through me. “Sango’s awakened.”
Silence.
“What!? The first Elder, Sango? Like now??”
“Yes, Nika. Now.”
“He’s asleep from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century and now he’s walking, talking, thinking?”
“Sorta.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s awakened, but he’ll need some time to gain his strength.” Clearly I hadn’t understood, so she added. “He, Udama, and Ixtab are each in a special sarcophagus with feeding mechanisms. They don’t feed regularly like us, but they do receive blood occasionally. So now, Sango’s body needs to recover. He gained his conscience for several minutes and then he lost it again.”
Oh My God! The First Elder had awakened after seven friggin’ centuries! I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it. And Doris seemed pretty shaken by it as well; she looked afraid and confused and she seemed paler than usual.
“So how are you?” I asked awkwardly, not knowing what exactly to think about the whole thing.
“Weird. Scared too, I guess.” Doris lowered her gaze.
“When did it happen?”
“Last night. David’s assistant came with the news, and since then we’ve been in my cousin’s office handling the situation,” she sighed. “For the last several hours I’ve been swallowing down my panic and horror. I mean, they all were shocked, but nobody exactly fainted or anything, so I had to keep a hold of myself. It was expected of me, ‘cause I’m a Lazar. And by the way, you look like shit too.”
“Yeah, I feel like it,” I said, and she reached for my forehead.
“You’ve got a fever.”
“Maybe. Last night, I . . .” I didn’t know what to say had happened. It was a pain that had come out of nowhere; the most horrible thing had I felt in my entire life. Even the very thought of it made my muscles cramp in fear of its return.
“You should stay in bed. Want me to call a doctor?”
“I don’t think so. I had a complete checkup in Tromsø a few weeks ago, so it couldn’t be anything serious.” But still, the pain had been devastating. Oh, the hell with that—Sango had awakened!
“What does it mean, Doris?”
“I don’t know. But that’s not all.”
“There’s more?!”
“Sango awakened so he could tell us his new vision.” The tension thickened.
“He said he saw a birth of the Sixth Elder, and that things would grow darker. For all.”
I let out a breath that I wasn’t even aware I had been holding, and my heart seemed to be beating too loudly. That wasn’t good. A new Elder? Things would grow darker for all? I swallowed hard. Only no prophecy was good prophecy.
“When?” I managed to ask.
“Soon, I guess. That was all he said, and now we have to wait for him to become conscious again to know more,” she answered.
“Bad things are coming, Nika.”
“What do you mean ‘bad’?”
“Bad enough to bring dark times upon our races.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“No, that’s all.”
I covered her hand with mine. It was strange, I didn’t know how to feel exactly.
“What did your father and cousin say?”
“Dad was more composed, as if he was dealing with any other Council business. But David seemed pretty nervous. We mostly talked with people about spreading the information of Sango and his vision.”
“Is your dad still in Tromsø?”
“Yeah,” she said, arranging a pillow for herself, and spreading out on the bed next to me.
“What’re Baldur’s thoughts on all of this?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything of him.”
“Is Sango more powerful than the other Elders?” I asked, thinking of her cousin’s nervousness.
“He’s the most respected. He’s the oldest one . . . so I guess he is the most powerful vampire.”
“I have a new causality dilemma—who came first, Sango or Homo sapiens?”
“Huh, but not new. There are many philosophical dilemmas throughout our history.”
“Just kidding. But is it possible?”
“What? That we can philosophize?” Doris asked.
“No, that you’re stealing our ‘chicken-and-egg’ thing,” I said, and she poked me lightly in the ribs.
“Very funny. I see your fever is getting the better of you.”
I imagined human scientists debating the topic of Sango vs. Homo sapiens, and it was indeed pure science fiction. But it lightened our mood a bit. And the breakfast Doris had ordered earlier arrived, not that I was hungry.
Still, what were the bad things that had appeared to Sango?
“What is he like—Sango, I mean?” I asked.
“I don’t know, and to be honest the whole thing scares me. I always knew that they would wake up from their catatonic states, but I never gave much thought to it.”
“So, how does one become an Elder? At what age does transformation happen?”
“There’s no formula, it happens differently for everyone. Sango and Ixtab knew they were different since the time they could think. Udama’s transformation started at age six, Baldur was a few years younger, and Kyrill was twelve when it happened. The Elders are not like other vampires, they didn’t have a need for blood before their transformation. Even afterward, they still didn’t need it like the rest of us did. We were born with the vamp equipment, unlike them. That’s why the transformation was so painful in their case.”
Darkling Page 29
