Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony (The Order Saga Book 1)

by Brian McKinley

  Caroline gave me a “told you so” look and put her arms around me, which I gladly reciprocated.

  “Sorry ‘bout the delay, Majesty,” the head of the six soldiers was saying to Sebastian. “Expected you was gonna come down from the house.” He was a medium-sized blonde guy in his mid-thirties with two bright blue eyes in the middle of a face full of old nicks and scars. This was “Major” Wilkes. The kind of guy who loved a good brawl if he was the only one carrying a weapon.

  “Herr Hegemon,” a voice interrupted before Sebastian could speak. A pudgy, bald-pated man in a white chef’s uniform inspected the cages and clucked his tongue. He turned back to Sebastian, his expression almost comical in its dismay. “Majesty, how can I give you my best work under these conditions? The donors, they must be turned at least once a day or else blood clots, pressure sores, infections, ja?”

  Sebastian just stared at him until the chef moved away from the cages, mopping his brow and muttering in German.

  “Okay, kiddies, washy time!” Wilkes sang out. He and another guard had unrolled a small fire hose from a wall compartment. The other guard started the pump and Wilkes sprayed the pressure jet of water into the cages. Noticing the extra attention a few of the younger women received, I couldn’t help but picture some of the things that must go on down there during their off-duty hours.

  The whole thing was like a cross between a Monty Python skit and a scene from Schindler’s List. Caroline looked as disgusted as I felt.

  After Wilkes finished, the chef went back to the cages with a few of the soldiers and pointed out which captives he wanted taken up to the kitchen and prepared. The whole time, he was making little verbal notes to himself about the proper “platelet count and coagulation time for the pudding,” the “absorption time necessary for cognac,” and giving the diabetics time to “ripen properly” for his sorbet and gelatins. Sure, Caroline had shown me a few tricks for seasoning the blood packs for a more flavorful meal but I’d never imagined the chef’s level of depraved ingenuity was possible.

  “So you’re hosting this year’s Gathering,” Caroline said, bringing Sebastian’s attention back. “I thought you were looking suspiciously well-groomed.”

  Sebastian growled low in his throat and loomed over us. “I was always too indulgent with thee, Caroline and thou hast shown me the error of those ways.” Sebastian pronounced her name kaar-o-line, by the way, while we both use care-a-lynn. He still sounded very calm, almost thoughtful. “Thou runs from me, thine Creator and master, then thou Creates without my leave. I’ve not, to my memory, Released thee from thine lawful bondage to me…”

  Literally in the time it took me to blink, he was face to face with me and his thick, long fingers curled around my neck far enough that he was able to squeeze both of my carotid arteries at once. He lifted me completely off the floor with no visible effort. “Which makes this Pupil unlawful and bastard in the eyes of our Order.”

  I tried to pound on his forearm and kick him but it was like hitting a statue.

  “Yet thou dares to demand the safety of this wretch from me?” He slammed me against the wall for emphasis, adding a near-concussion to my tunnel vision and gradual loss of consciousness.

  Caroline, of course, was on her feet again. “If I don’t make a certain check-in from my computer every night, all the records I’ve compiled will be published via the Internet. I’m talking organizational charts, council meeting transcripts, internal memos containing references to politicians and business leaders we control and my own writings. Now, put him down.”

  I love her when she’s forceful.

  “’Twould be seen for a hoax,” Sebastian said but I felt his grip loosen.

  I twisted my way out and noticed Wilkes smirking at me. Yeah, laugh it up, Sling Blade. Just because I can’t take Sebastian yet doesn’t mean I couldn’t snap your skinny ass in two…

  That was the first time I remember really thinking like a Vampyr.

  Caroline put herself between us again. “Iago would be more than happy to use it to have you executed since—as my Creator—my actions are your actions until my Release.” A quick look passed between Sebastian and Wilkes but she caught it. “And don’t think you can just backtrack from where you caught us. The package I dropped off tonight was only one of many. The others are already scanned in and ready to post.”

  She looked directly into his eyes, her voice holding no mockery or anger. Sebastian bent to her and began sniffing. She allowed herself to be subjected to this olfactory groping, standing still while Neanderthal Boy closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Putting his nose to the junction of her shoulder and neck, he seemed to almost swoon. Then he dropped to his knees and started sniffing his way lower.

  I felt like I was watching some twisted version of Beauty and the Beast where things hadn’t quite worked out between them and it bothered me. Not about to wait till he got around to sniffing her crotch, I pulled Caroline back before he could wrap his arms around her.

  “Sorry, Rover, those days are—”

  Before I could finish my Buffy-esque put-down, Sebastian plowed into me like an NFL linebacker and crushed me back against the wall. He yanked my jaw open and shoved one of his nasty, bloody hands with their long, thick, yellow nails into my mouth. “Thy little plaything will be much improved by the absence of a tongue.”

  “You know I’m not lying about the information.”

  The bastard just cocked his head to the side and smiled a blood-smeared smile. “It will grow back … no harm done…” That, ladies and gentlemen, was Sebastian’s idea of humor.

  “Then I’ll stay with him until it does,” Caroline said. “Your guests can wonder why I’m not around and what that means about the recent instability of your Domain.”

  The smile froze on Sebastian’s face. He pulled his fingers out of my mouth, threw me down with gratuitous violence and marched back to his soldiers.

  Caroline rushing to take me in her arms made all the pain worthwhile.

  “Thy both want for instruction in the offices of yer place. Instruction in the true way of the Vampyr.” He glared down at the both of us and said, “Ye’ll spend the rest of the night down here, I think, before schooling in the proper way to conduct oneself during the Gathering. I’ll not be shamed by ye in the presence of the Hegemons.” He turned to Wilkes. “Loose one of the humans from the pens. This boy needs practice I suspect his ‘Creator’ has not given. Bring something within his ability to hunt.”

  Wilkes smiled and went to the cages, dragging a ten or eleven-year-old girl out and bringing her back. The girl squealed through her tape and squirmed in her bonds and I felt my heart sink as I noticed something else.

  A sharp pang of hunger.

  Wilkes snickered as he set the girl down in front of us. “Best watch yourself, boy, looks like this one’s a fighter!”

  “Well, though one begins moderately, Major, one must still learn.” Sebastian smiled and Wilkes laughed like a good little flunky while he cut the bonds on the girl’s wrists and ankles. She scrambled away from him and into Caroline’s waiting arms.

  I kept my eyes away from her as much as possible. When I used to see moments like this in vampire movies, they always seemed overdone and melodramatic but this was the first time I understood what it meant to feel a deep, predatory hunger for another human being. The fact that she was a young, naked girl was the worst part. It made me feel like a child molester on top of everything else.

  Sebastian closed the gate to the passage and then he, Wilkes and the rest of the soldiers went back upstairs. Caroline made soft, reassuring sounds for the girl while she wept and I tried to look at other things or just closed my eyes and wished fervently that I couldn’t smell the girl so near, so clean, young and soft.

  I could resist it, of course and somehow that was the worst part. I think that if a Vampyr’s hunger for blood was the kind of irresistible supernatural compulsion you see so often in books and movies, it would be easier to live with. Something that’
s honestly beyond your control doesn’t cause you as much shame as something that you know you can fight if you’re strong enough. Most modern Americans have never actually starved. We can be hungry at times but food is usually easy to come by. So we eat, often to the point of excess. Like I did when I was human.

  It’s a hard habit to break as a Vampyr.

  I imagine that the hunger is similar to how addicts feel when confronted by their substance of choice. The more you try not to think about it, the more aware of it you are. You can have every good reason not to do it but if you don’t have something physically keeping you from the object of your desire, then it all comes down to willpower. When was the last time you were so thirsty your throat burned and you didn’t take a drink from a glass of water sitting on the table in front of you?

  “My insurance didn’t scare him,” Caroline said. “He’s planning something … something big.”

  I just nodded. I didn’t trust myself to speak because I could feel my mouth watering and my canines pushing down again. As my injuries healed, my body cried out for fresh energy to feed it. Energy it knew was readily available.

  “Avery, look at me.”

  I didn’t want to. I knew it would make it worse to see the little girl lying there against Caroline’s chest but after a deep breath, I turned and tried to stare into her eyes—only her eyes, because there was safety there.

  Caroline looked worried but with an underlying sadness that could only come from understanding. She nodded and said, “Give me your jacket.”

  I slipped out of the denim jacket I’d been wearing and gave it to her, grateful for something else to think about. Caroline wrapped the little girl up in it and gently settled her sleeping form down onto the floor beside her. With the temptation removed from my view, it was a little easier to concentrate on what she was saying.

  “Now do you understand that physical force and bold attempts aren’t going to be enough to get us out of here?”

  As much as I still wanted to entertain fantasies of pumping Sebastian full of machine gun fire, I’d realized by that point that it wasn’t gonna happen. I nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “Because I do have a few ideas about how we might but they depend on both of us playing The Game, as they call it. We have to make Sebastian believe that we’re submitting to him. We have to be allowed to move around when the Gathering occurs. I can’t go into much detail now but I need to know that I can count on you to follow my lead even if it’s difficult.”

  I think I sensed even then that this wasn’t a small thing she was asking. So I didn’t just toss off the immediate “of course” that was my first reaction. Instead, I looked into her gorgeous green eyes for the love that I knew was there and when I found it, I leaned forward and kissed her. “You can always count on me. I swear.”

  Even concentrating on Caroline’s scent as we held each other, I still felt the smell of the girl’s skin tickling my nose and the throb of her tiny heart teasing its way into my ears. Caroline sensed this somehow and removed one of her earrings. Vampyrs should always carry multiple items that will allow them to draw blood if they don’t have their canines sharpened (as neither Caroline nor I do). You’d be surprised what you can use, if push comes to shove.

  She gave me the earring and as delicately as I could, I pierced one of the smaller arteries at the bottom of her neck. I handed the earring back to her and bent to drink. While I did, she punctured my neck in the same way and put her lips to the wound. This is probably the one major advantage a starving Vampyr has over a starving human, this mutual-cannibalism we can perform. I guess it’s a little like having sex while freezing just to generate bodily warmth but among Vampyrs, this is considered the purest form of lovemaking. It didn’t have the climactic intensity of sex but it was a warmer plateau, like riding that pre-orgasmic moment forever. Or, for those of a more gastronomic bent, imagine eating the best chocolate sundae you ever had and never reaching the bottom of the dish and never losing your appetite for it. It made me feel close to her in a way that was impossible with any other form of verbal or physical expression. At that moment, we were literally one being, one system circulating its life between our separate halves.

  We fed and kissed and comforted each other for the rest of the night. When sunrise came, we fell into our daytime hibernation coma holding each other. We never touched the girl.

  But I would have, except for Caroline. I know in my heart and in my soul that I would have broken sometime during those hours and torn into the flesh of that beautiful, innocent child to get at the blood I wanted. I’ve lived with that every night since.

  I suppose that was Sebastian’s first lesson.

  His second, I’m sorry to say, came the next night when we woke. The girl lay on the floor just as we’d left her but the blood from her slit throat had soaked into the fabric of my jacket and pooled on the stones around her. Caroline wept with a visible fury. I was pissed off and sickened of course but I was also still hungry and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a secret, cowardly part of me was relieved to have the option taken from me.

  I try to live with that too.

  * * * * *

  After Sebastian let us up from the “wine cellar,” we learned how to be good little house servants. For Caroline, it was more of a refresher course but I felt like I’d been enrolled in Butler School. Ash instructed us because of some protocol thing about only the Creator or his personal Dhampir being of high enough “standing” to give orders to Vampyrs, though sometimes the housekeeper, Mrs. Kai, helped him. Sebastian also poked his nose in to “check on our progress” and add little demeaning chores to my list of duties. I began to think I was back home with my stepfather.

  I half expected to have to mow the lawn and scoop up the shit from the guard dogs.

  After I’d demonstrated acceptable skill in bowing, groveling and waiting tables, Ash took me out to the maze.

  It was as ugly as advertised. Located behind the house, industrial size concrete blocks formed the walls with barbed wire and large halogen floodlights spaced evenly atop them. At the corner farthest from where we stood, I saw the steel gate that served as the above-ground entrance.

  Ash opened an inset panel of buttons. “Here’s the main controls. This set controls the gate: green for up, red for down.”

  “Would those be the ones marked ‘gate’?”

  “This set’s for the lights,” he continued. “And this last one turns on the electricity for the barbed wire—”

  “Wait, wait, I’m getting confused,” I said. “Which set turns on the lights again?”

  Ash fixed me with those hard storm-blue eyes that always bring Clint Eastwood to mind. His crew cut still has a lot of brown in with the gray and his skin has the rough tautness of a man who’s fought his body’s every attempt to sag in middle age. “Lose the attitude, son.”

  According to Caroline, Colonel Ashford D. Erikson refused to be elevated above the rank he’d earned in the Marines, unlike a certain “Major” Wilkes who’d served time in an Army prison for manslaughter and been dishonorably discharged at the rank of private.

  I’d been trying to get a rise out of Ash for the past few nights and so far, this was as close as I’d come. In a way, a sick asshole like Wilkes was reassuring because he was what I expected an Evil Vampire’s henchman to be like. Ash, in contrast, reminded me of the captain at my old security job: a decent, fair-minded guy who maybe took the rules a trifle too seriously. As Sebastian’s Bailiff and Dhampir, however, Ash ingested that filthy creature’s blood on a regular basis, ran a facility that kidnapped innocent human beings for the consumption of a tyrannical monster and had been doing so for decades. Was he an amiable sociopath, a fanatic who believed Sebastian to be some kind of god, or did he just drink himself into forgetful oblivion every night? I couldn’t figure him out.

  “Oh, gimme a break,” I told him. “This whole thing’s bullshit and you know it.”

  Ash hooked his fingers into the pants of his b
rown khaki uniform. “What I know is that Hegemon Blackwood specifically ordered you assigned to this duty.”

  “Yeah and of course, you always do what you’re told like a good little Nazi.”

  Stepping into my personal space, he stabbed his finger into my breastbone. “You listen to me, smart ass. You better check your facts before shooting your mouth off about things you don’t understand!”

  Knowing I had the moral high ground allowed me to meet his otherwise withering glare. “Yeah, well, I understand the difference between wine bottles and people!”

  The Dhampir’s eyes narrowed but they also couldn’t meet mine any longer. There was a guilty conscience inside the loyal solider after all. He turned and marched into the maze’s opening.

  I was familiar with Dhampirs as a type of half-vampire, born with the ability to see and slay the invisible vampires of Serbian folklore. Caroline, however, tells me the word originates back in the cloudy mists of Vampyr prehistory, along with Vampyr itself (which Order “historians” also claim predates its usage in the Slavic Mediterranean) and probably means something like “sub-Vampyr.” As long as they consume Vampyr blood regularly, their aging process is arrested and they gain some of the superior healing abilities of a Vampyr. As well as being daytime protectors and servants, Caroline’s historians also say Dhampirs were probably created as a means of extending one’s blood supply in areas where humans were hard to find after dark.

  “You’re gonna need to memorize the routes to the center and to the tunnel entrance,” Ash continued, like nothing had happened. “I’d suggest you take notes. This place can be a real pain in the ass if you get turned around.”

  The interior walls that formed the maze corridors were considerably shorter than the surrounding ones (about eight feet high) and made of mortared stone rather than concrete. I could see that this allowed the floodlights above to light everything. “Brighter than I expected,” I remarked. “With his eyes and all, I’d have figured Sebastian would want it dark.”