At Death's Door (Wraith's Rebellion Book 1)

by Aya DeAniege

  I pulled out my phone and held it out. He spoke the phrase again, this time a little slower. Within moments I had the clip sent off to Jerry, not even caring about the data use.

  “What’s the translation for that?”

  “It doesn’t translate well,” was all he said as he pulled to a stop in front of the cafe.

  What can we discuss now that we’re back at the cafe and must start over?

  How about going back to where you left off?

  Very well.

  My lord was called Lu. Don’t laugh, seriously. It’s not funny. That’s his full name. No family name even, just Lu. I hope you don’t do that if you meet him. He certainly wouldn’t find it funny.

  Stop it, already!

  My goodness. You’d think I told you he was a clown or something.

  Clowns aren’t funny anymore.

  Clowns will always be funny.

  Anyhow, my lord’s name was Lu. He was a merchant of sorts. I’d rather not get into the details of what he traded in. Though in my early years, I don’t recall.

  He held a house in the city. It wasn’t a grand house, but it worked well for his purposes. He had several servants, and we lived in the city for the next twenty-three years.

  Even through the illness?

  Yes, it swung through almost a year later, I believe. History may remember my family as some of the first to become sick.

  The city was hit hard by the sickness. Many people died, almost all of Lu’s house passed in the first wave of the illness. He had barely replaced them when more became ill.

  It was terrifying for me to be amid it all once more. Lu was firm, however, and in his strength, I found courage.

  Despite...?

  Despite the fact that he raped me. Repeatedly. He is the sort of predatory that makes you believe you could do no better, that he’s actually gentle and kind. He made me feel like if I went out in the world, someone would do a great deal worse to me.

  I came to believe that he loved me, and so came to love him. In his strength, I found strength.

  The deaths didn’t bother him in the least. By the time the sickness came to the city, I knew on some level that my Lord didn’t age. I didn’t know that he was a vampire, but I also had no word for the term. Not then anyhow.

  For my part, of course, the deaths bothered me. They bothered me a great deal. After losing my village, I thought I was safe in the city. I was not. Not under my master, not in the city.

  Don’t give me that look. It was a slip of the tongue.

  I did not take ill. Not so much as a sniffle. My lord seemed disturbed by that. Puzzled, most definitely. He asked after my health every day. When the Emperor fell ill, I swear there was a comparison.

  Lu was surprised that I had gone through the illness twice and been untouched.

  Are you immune to bubonic plague?

  I’m immune to what caused the illness. While I agree that the symptoms are similar and I’ve watched the studies over the years, I have to question. Yes, bubonic plague was present at that time, it did claim hundreds of people.

  But there’s something off about it. Bubonic came in, it flooded through an already weakened population and killed. But in the weeks leading up to that, something else swept through. Like a sniffle and a cough. Those who took ill with that, fell almost immediately to bubonic.

  Like someone crammed open the door to their immunities to allow bubonic to ravage them, using them as incubators for the more dangerous disease.

  Why do you say it like that?

  Mind reading and moving items are the least of what those of us with powers can do.

  Anyhow, I didn’t take ill. My lord was apparently confused about it, as if he expected me to become sick.

  I was young at the time, but history says something like forty percent of the population of the city died. Animals too, not just human. That’s not common among illnesses. Animals might die off from lack of food, but not from the disease itself.

  I remember watching a stray in the street taking its last breaths. I couldn’t see the necrosis, but I knew what was happening. For some reason that broke my heart more than witnessing the others in the house die.

  You were numbed to the deaths of humans.

  I suppose I must have been. So many humans were dying but that was the first animal I watched die. When it took its last breath, I just stood there staring at the body, waiting for it to take another. When it didn’t come, I just—I just stood there watching it.

  My lord found me there after the sun had set. He collected me and took me home. There, he washed me and put me to bed, laying with me until I fell asleep.

  That was the first time I had felt comfortable since my forever and ever had been taken from me.

  As cruel as Lu could be, he had his moments. That was one of them. One of those moments when his immortal life was put on hold. All he did for the next three days was care for me when I refused to leave the bed. He brought me food, allowed me to be morose.

  On the fourth day, I woke to a basket of puppies.

  Life was cruel to them, or so I thought. Looking back, I’m almost certain that Lu killed the other pups. But as the city healed and the puppies grew, their number dwindled to one.

  I had him until his death over a decade later, yet I cannot recall what I named him. His name has faded, and for that, I feel morose sometimes. The names of my family have also passed from my mind, but I was just a boy of five then.

  I had him more than twice the length of time that my family was in my life. There are details I can remember clear as day, of us stealing food the summer Lu kicked me out of the house. Of romping through the streets laughing with other children. Begging money from the Empress’s ladies when they had wandered through the city.

  But I cannot for the life of me recall his name.

  I haven’t had an animal since. Except for horses but I was no more attached to them than I am to this car. If it breaks, I will move on. Watching my dog die was simply too much for me to handle.

  Once the sickness passed, life slowly went back to almost normal. Lu called in tutors and taught me all that was known about the world at the time. He selected carefully, snipping away the maybes and what had been proven false by that time.

  I learned five different languages while still mortal. Thankfully, I took well to that. Four living and one dead.

  Mathematics and written language, not just one written language either.

  Over the time that I grew up and was taught, many illnesses visited on the house. Several times my lord had to replace the entire staff. They may not have died from the illness itself, but quit while claiming he was cursed.

  In a way, I suppose he was.

  I was a very healthy young man, grew quickly.

  When my tutors could teach me no more, Lu took over my lessons. He wanted to teach me Sumerian, a language for people I had never heard of before. There were always mentions of ancient peoples, but the area where the Sumerians lived was months away. It might as well have been on the other side of the world.

  They weren’t Latin based. They had never been a part of the great Roman Empire. So, I learned little of them.

  At that time, I was fifteen and thought myself a man. If the tutors could think of nothing more to teach me, surely it was time for me to be apprenticed, time to take on a profession.

  I questioned my lord and why I had to learn all the things. I fancied myself his lover, for that continued for all those years, and had decided I had no more need of learning.

  He struck me, calling me cruel things as he beat and tore at my clothing. Thought I was spoiled, I suppose.

  What I said in my defense is lost to me. It seems I may have said something about being his lover, and therefore not needing an education. He took that as a challenge.

  He had me hard and fast, then beat me until I was black and blue. Then he did it again and again. For seven days that was my life. I learned that he had paced his appetite to match what I could handle, but
in that week he let it go completely.

  On the eighth day, he sat me down and resumed the lesson he had been teaching before my attempted rebellion. I was more than happy to move on to something else. My body was in agony. I hadn’t enjoyed anything about the previous seven days.

  He hadn’t broken anything on me. Not skin or bone. I was bruised, battered, and in absolute agony, but I would survive.

  I have to ask, as it’s obviously a running theme. Did he... I mean...

  Sex was a weapon only that time. It was involved in and around discipline, but I never again felt like it was a part of the punishment, so much as just a side effect. His torturing a body aroused him, I knew that by then.

  He never lent me to others or invited others to join us. He has been the only man I have ever been with.

  He, on the other hand, had many lovers. Male mainly. Hates women. Won’t even drink their blood.

  And you had a female lover?

  That summer he kicked me out, I slept with a girl. Neither of us was old enough to understand sex. It was clumsy and foolish.

  Lu found out centuries later and threatened to kill me.

  Over a childhood romp?

  Over a child who founded a line that spread like wildfire. Vampires are not supposed to be made from those who have children. Though, in my defense, even I didn’t know she had become pregnant from our trysts. I never saw her again, never saw the child.

  Lu was a severely jealous man as a mortal. It was amplified when he was turned. I was to be out of reach of everyone but him. Unavailable to everyone but him. I was alive only to serve his purposes, never my own.

  Under him, I learned about Sumerian culture. I saw some echoes of it in the modern culture. The past always ripples forward. Even small things can make big changes.

  Such as?

  Such as an orphan child who took after his father and passed that on to his children, and their children. My blood would leave the empire, spreading across the world. When the Black Death struck centuries later, the human population would have suffered a great deal more, had my immunity not been spread through what is now known as the Old World.

  I am immune, or was immune, to a great many more things. To things which spread and ate away at the human population. Over the generations, it has spread thinner in many places, but the direct descendants maintain the immunity.

  How do you know?

  They are my stock. I took them on because I found two young men who looked like my brothers. I was sentimental, but their blood is sweet and almost honeyed, but not too sweet. Others say the same.

  I maintain the stock carefully. With genetics coming out, we’ve been testing our stock, even ourselves. It is an amazing process. That was when I learned what I had accidentally done, just how far my genetics had spread.

  Lu learned I had had a child in eight hundred and ninety-eight when he found a young woman who looked exactly like me and shared my immunity. I already had the stock going by then and thought them nothing more than oddities.

  Throughout the centuries, I’ve witnessed many who look like others who came before them. A beggar who was once an emperor. A king who was once a great philosopher. So, I thought nothing of it because I had seen it happen again and again over the centuries.

  You’ve seen us all before.

  Some days I feel like that, yes.

  Why did he turn you?

  I don’t know.

  I was twenty-eight when I was turned. By that time, I was still learning and still not working. I no longer thought about it.

  Rarely did I leave the estate or talk to others at that point. I knew too much, saw the world in a different way than those people did. I found the world disappointing. My life was half over by then, and everything seemed bleak.

  I began to write. That was foolish of me, but I didn’t know all of Lu’s quirks at the time. I didn’t know that he collects books. All the books of the world, it seems. He keeps great libraries of them and has transcribed many with his hand to preserve them for ages more.

  He read my writings and then told me he burned them, destroying all my hard work. I never understood why he did that. He knows the works of every author.

  Perhaps not every author. With today’s flood of indie authors, bloggers, and mass paperbacks, there are simply too many for any one person to read in a lifetime, even in six.

  It was my work he destroyed. He has read poems about poop, and shit writing in general, and it was my work he destroyed.

  Fuck that guy.

  The things I did do were art based. Lu could teach me words and the world, but he knew nothing about art. The Hagia Sophia had just been completed. The artwork of then might seem clunky to the masters of later centuries, but it was breathtakingly beautiful to my eyes.

  The mosaics and artwork added later, I think, destroyed the beauty of the original Hagia Sophia. But it is still a thing of magnificence.

  Seeing it there, from the eyes of someone of that time, then seeing others coming in and shitting all over the original just pisses me off. That would be like taking something from Salvador Dali and painting over it. Adding a happy little bunny because that would brighten the piece up.

  Like gluing leaves to statues or painting over penis depictions because you’re an amateur moron.

  I’m guessing you’re an art person?

  Absolutely. I have invested in many artists across the centuries, asking them for two things. One is a portrait of me, one a self-portrait. Art is the social glue that binds us.

  Language may be the building blocks, but without artwork, we are nothing more than robots pecking away at predetermined lives.

  The destruction of artwork enrages me. Over the centuries, I have watched amazing things be built and created, only to have someone come through and try to make them better. It’s like making a film and revisiting it thirty years later to change all the things around.

  It sounds like you’re an old man standing on his lawn, shouting at the kids to get off your lawn.

  I’ve accepted that change is a part of my life. That cities will tumble, and things will be built over the graves of my friends. But there’s no need to change the artwork of the past and claim you’ve made it better.

  Of course, the Hagia Sophia was the only place I would visit when I was still mortal. I was even blessed enough to have the opportunity to attend several masses. It was an awe-inspiring experience.

  When I was twenty-eight, the Emperor took ill. I was greatly upset by that. By then I knew that the death of an emperor without a blood heir would cause strife. The next emperor might order the Hagia Sophia torn down. Where would I go then? I would never leave the estate!

  Lu left for a work trip. He was gone four months and returned greatly disturbed. Weakened even, he leaned heavily, as he had the day when he visited my village the first time.

  I think he was more weakened than he was then, for he went straight to bed and did not move for days. I tried to get him to eat something without avail.

  It occurred to me that I could lose my lord. I didn’t dare call for a physician, as I knew Lu had a strong dislike of them. He would never allow one of them to check him over. He believed they were all death bringers.

  It was the tenth day he had returned that I began to lament, thinking him not long for the world. He seemed to say something, and I leaned in, begging him to stay in the land of the living.

  He raised a hand weakly, and I climbed into the bed beside him. If he was going to pass away, I would remain near him as he did, so that he didn’t have to die alone. He wrapped his arms around me and drew me almost into a kiss. I simply moved with him. When his lips found my neck, I thought little of it.

  Then his teeth pricked my skin, then drove into the meat of my neck.

  There is nothing romantic about being bitten by a vampire. Our teeth have microscopic tubular things attached to sacks in our upper jaw. It doesn’t take much pressure, and the venom is injected into the flesh. The venom keeps the blood from c
lotting.

  With practice, or by milking the sacks, we can bite without turning a mortal.

  Without milking, the venom does not harden but does become more potent over time. I have not milked my teeth in five hundred years. If another vampire is to be made, I am one of sixteen on the list of possible Makers.

  Is that a possibility?

  One of the reasons for the law against turning was to keep our numbers low enough that mortals did not notice us. Now all the world knows of our existence, even if some ignore us. So, yes, it is a possibility.

  The venom prevents clotting from occurring, but it also burns like fire. It has an effect on nerves, but the pain that quickly overcomes the body prevents movement at the same time.

  My blood flowed readily. Lu’s grip on me tightened to a death grip very quickly. I could hear him drinking, hear my heartbeat over it all.

  In those moments, I recalled the events of our travel away from my village. Most especially the man that Lu had killed and drunk the blood of. Until that moment the memory had remained in a fog, as memories of childhood tend to be.

  I was certain I would die. I tried to speak, but my tongue felt heavy and thick. Air didn’t seem to want to move as easily into my chest. As I struggled to get my body to move, I felt his teeth biting again, ripping into my flesh once more.

  I still don’t have the words to describe the agony. Pain is necessary at times, but it seems dimmed, compared to what I felt in those last few moments as a mortal.

  In all, Lu was latched onto me for perhaps two minutes. He pierced my skin more than four times, and I couldn’t figure out why he would do that. Why was he being such a...

  Dick bag? Your Maker is a dick bag.

  That’s not a nice thing to call anyone.

  I passed out from blood loss. Truth be told, I thought I was dying and then dead. I dreamed of heaven. My family was there. I saw them as they were all those years before. They were on the field, calling my name, searching for me. I was right there in front of them, and they couldn’t see me.

  As they searched, I chased after them, trying to get their attention. Nothing I did drew their attention. While they searched, it became dark. A figure appeared in the darkness, but my family lit torches and continued to search for me.