by Irina Argo
Vampire Elite
A Novel of the Vampire Elite
Book 1
Irina Argo
Vampire Elite (Vampire Elite, Book 1).
Copyright © 2013 by Irina Argo.
All rights reserved.
Contents
Glossary
Prologue: An Ancient Legend
Part I: Prophecy
Part II: Keepers of the Key
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Full Copyright Page
Prologue: An Ancient Legend
Egypt
Predynastic period, approx. 6000 BC
Through torn patches of the universe, the gods bore witness to the devastation that had been wrought across Egypt. A dense veil of smoke coated the earth, and still more poured in billows from the fires that raged across the land, leaving only charred sand and rock in their wake. Densely populated cities and villages had been wiped off the face of the earth, temples reduced to piles of rubble, and broken and dismembered bodies lay scattered everywhere. The once prosperous and sacred land was now demolished, soaked with the blood of war.
Hathor, the Goddess of Love and Beauty, turned away from the devastation to face Ra, her eternal mate, the creator Sun God. In all their centuries together, he had never seen her eyes so bleak.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“I know, Amiti,” Ra replied, using his pet name for her, Beautiful One. He hugged her. “You were trying to protect me.”
Ra adored Hathor, the love of his life and his soul mate. They had been together since the beginning of time, traveling through galaxies and giving birth to new civilizations, and still she managed to astonish him with her creative powers. But he dreaded her almost as much as he loved her, because he knew that she harbored within her a goddess with a vengeance for destruction. And now his worst fears had finally materialized.
Ra closed his eyes and sighed. This holocaust was partially his fault. Hathor had warned him but, consumed by curiosity, he had insisted that his plan would work. He had always wanted to explore the human world from the earth, living among the humans, so Ra had temporarily suspended his immortality and descended to earth.
As a human pharaoh, he had ruled Egypt for many years, bringing the humans a golden age of prosperity and lush fertility. The Sun God had hoped that if his subjects were provided with everything in plenty, they would cease their wars and live in harmony. But they did not appreciate what came to them without effort and, as Hathor had anticipated, demanded more. When Ra finally refused to meet their ever-increasing demands, they began plotting to assassinate him.
Rumors about the plot reached Hathor’s ears, and the Goddess erupted with rage, unchaining her alter ego, the Great Lioness Sekhmet, the Destroyer. For millennia, Hathor had confined the Lioness deep within her consciousness in order to keep the world safe, choosing to manifest only her creative face to the world. But she knew that her lethal, savage Self could be awakened by rage, drawing on the energies of death and destruction within her and overpowering her beneficent form. The threat to Ra had turned out to be just what the Lioness needed. In a split second, the Goddess of Love disappeared—and in her place stood a fierce female with the head of a lioness and blazing eyes. She roared in fury as she descended on the human world.
Sekhmet swept through Egypt on a tide of blood, smothering the earth with all manner of natural disasters—earthquake, fire, storm, plague—and slaughtering every living thing in her path as she went. Intoxicated by bloodlust, she showed no mercy, relishing the devastation she wrought.
Terrified of the Lioness and her capacity for destruction, gods and humans alike tried to defend themselves and curtail her powers. They couldn’t kill Sekhmet, and they soon found that wounding her only intensified her fury. Sekhmet redoubled her deadly rampage, blood from her wounds trailing behind her. As each drop touched the sand, it brought forth a bloodthirsty immortal warrior who rose and joined the Lioness in her lethal mission, annihilating everything in their wake.
That is how, from Sekhmet’s blood and her bloodlust, the vampire race was born—the children of the Lioness Goddess.
Ra was horrified. All life on earth would come to an end if Sekhmet and her army were not stopped. Summoning his human servants, he ordered them to collect blood, mix it with beer, and pour the mixture into the meadows and streams surrounding the Lioness where she slept, depleted from the slaughter. The Goddess soon awoke, voracious. She gorged herself on blood and beer until her mind clouded, her rage subsided, and she forgot what she was.
Her disoriented state had allowed Hathor to take over as Alpha Goddess once again. She quickly chained Sekhmet back within her consciousness and returned with Ra to the dimension of the gods.
* * *
Hathor wrapped her arms around Ra’s powerful neck, her tears spilling freely. Her Sun God was saved, but the Goddess’s heart was broken. Her failure to contain her alter ego had allowed the Lioness to spawn a new race of bloodthirsty children. The vampires had already begun feeding on humans and slaughtering them. Their bloodlust was insatiable, they were physically stronger than humans, and they had the powers of Alpha predators: rapid movement, sharpened senses, hypnotic eyes. Humanity was doomed. The vampires must be destroyed.
Hathor turned away from Ra and raised her hand, intending to destroy the vampires, but then felt her soulmate urging her arm back down to her side. He reminded her that her strength was in creation, not destruction, and that just as she, the Goddess of Love, had been locked within the Lioness, so too must there be love lying hidden within the Lioness’s children. The vampire race had great potential, and having been brought to life, they should be allowed to exist and evolve.
“I will create a new race,” Hathor decided, “to unlock the love hidden within the vampires. This way, the vampires will learn to tame their rage, and humanity will be saved. I’ll call this race as you called me, the Amiti, the Beautiful. The vampires and Amiti will be drawn to each other like dynamic magnets, balancing opposite forces of the universe.”
Hathor closed her eyes, focused her energies, and with a sweep of her arm, animated the tears that had fallen from her eyes onto the ground. Where each drop touched the ancient stones, a being of pure beauty and love emerged. Soon, the spacious hall in the dimension of gods was filled with immortals whose eyes were turned to Hathor, awaiting her command.
Hathor endowed the Amiti with three gifts. First, she gave all of them two powers: the ability to shield their essences from other immortals, and the ability to mimic the form of particular human beings, living or dead. Second, she gave them additional powers that would vary from individual to individual and would grow over time. And finally, Hathor gave the Amiti the blood-bond, a mystical connection that opened between an Amiti and a vampire when the vampire took the Amiti’s vein. The blood-bond enabled enhanced communication and sharing of supernatural gifts; it also gave Amiti power over vampires by allowing the Amiti to restore the lives of vampires with whom they were blood-bonded—or, conversely, to kill them.
As an ultimate safeguard, Hathor gave the Amiti access to the Ankh, the Key of Life that unlocks the powers of the Egyptian gods. She appointed five Amiti to be the Keepers of the Ankh; if all else failed, they could come together, unlock the Key, and unleash the gods’ powers, limitless and infinite.
Hathor chose one of the five Keepers, the Keeper of the Mystery of Balance, to be Queen of the Amiti. The Queen would be responsible for appointing new Keepers upon the death of existing Keepers, and her role, unlike the other Keepers’, could only be passed down from mother to daughter. Hathor created the first Amiti queen, naming her Istara, the star. As Hathor dispatched the Amiti to Earth, Ra granted Istara his own gift, the po
wer to create, heal, and destroy with the energy of the Sun—the Gift of Ra.
When the Amiti appeared on earth, they sought out the vampires, opening their hearts to them and offering them love. Sadly, although the vampires were drawn by the pull of the blood-bond and the promises it offered, their suspicious nature prevented them from doing what Hathor had intended. Perceiving blood-bonding as a surrender, the vampires assumed that Amiti would misuse the power the blood-bond gave them, making it an instrument for dominating or even destroying vampires. Therefore, few blood-bonds were attempted.
The blood-bonds that did occur became notorious among vampires, with both their successes and failures exaggerated, transformed into legends of vampires whose access to Amiti abilities made them powerful beyond measure, but also horror stories of Amiti blood-bonds betraying and killing their vampire partners. These legends grew out of vampires’ fear of and longing for blood-bonds—and, in turn, they fed the flames of both.
But it was the mistrust and fear that prevailed, as they so often do, and vampires began to view Amiti as aggressors, a threat to be contained. They found that if they did not take Amiti blood directly from the vein, they could feed without triggering the blood-bond, and that draining Amitis’ blood this way suppressed their powers. The vampires began hunting Amiti and imprisoning them in underground cells, treating them like livestock to be bought, sold, and drained regularly of their blood for the vampires to drink.
As a defense, and later as a form of retaliation, the Amiti launched counteroffensives to liberate imprisoned bloodstock and prevent free Amiti from being captured. Their practices escalated until they were organizing hunting parties and slaughtering vampires indiscriminately, regardless of whether they were affiliated with the bloodstock industry.
And so began the millennia-long war between two immortal races originally destined to make each other whole.
At first, the two races’ powers were equally matched, but with every passing century, with every new generation, the number of free Amiti diminished, leaving fewer and fewer Amiti capable of fighting the vampires. Over the millennia, the majority of Amiti were eliminated or imprisoned as vampires’ bloodstock.
In this environment, with the survival of their people threatened, the Keepers of the Key tried repeatedly to come together and turn to their solution of last resort: turning the Key and unleashing the powers of the Gods to save the Amiti race. But the fifth Keeper, the Amiti Queen, had never agreed. She had her own agenda.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century of our era, the antagonism between the vampires and Amiti reached a crescendo. It became clear that they could not share the same planet. After an agonizing struggle, the Keepers finally decided to eliminate the Queen, turn the Key, and obliterate the entire vampire race.
Chapter 1
Santorini, Greece
20th century
Fifty Amiti walked in grim silence along the shore, toward a mammoth boulder and the secluded beach hidden behind it. Fifty-one, Queen Istara reminded herself bitterly from her position several paces ahead of the rest of them. Forgetting to include herself in the count was an apt metaphor, she realized, for the eight millennia she’d spent as reluctant leader of her people. She tried to ground herself by focusing on the pleasantly scratchy sensation of her feet in the warm sand, but she couldn’t avoid the irony there, either: she pictured her footprints being trampled into oblivion by the feet of the warriors following her. Close behind her, she felt the three remaining Keepers of the Key, and then the other members of the Eye of Ra, the Order fighting for the liberation of the Amiti people.
Taking a full breath of crystal night air, Istara raised her eyes to the sky in an effort to distract herself from her thoughts. Billions of cold distant mute stars watched her from the sky. Deep in her heart she refused to believe that she was about to leave this beautiful planet. Hathor, her Divine Mother, would save her. The Goddess would not allow the Order to murder her. She still had a chance: if seven—the sacred number of Hathor—of the Amiti present rejected her death sentence, Istara’s life would be spared.
Obsidian waves of indifferent sea rolled in and disappeared between the apathetic rocks surrounding the beach. Why didn’t she feel even a slightest degree of compassion from the planet she loved so much? There must be something wrong with her senses; her perception must have somehow gotten distorted.
Once again Istara tuned in to her surroundings, only to be hit by a wave of hostility emanating from the crowd. She closed her eyes in an effort to suppress the searing pain in her heart and the tears ready to spill from her eyes. If she was here to die, she would die as the Queen: with dignity. In the eyes of her people, she was just a selfish bitch without loyalty or integrity, a bitch who had sacrificed them all to satisfy her lust for the vampire male. But as Goddess was her witness, Istara had been portrayed wrong. She was the Queen who had never been understood by her people.
Yes, she had her shortcomings, and to some extent this sentence was not completely undeserved. Istara had committed a crime against her race; she had opened her heart to the enemy in the form of a vampire—and not just any vampire, but a member of the Vampire Elite, the upper caste of vampires, who were direct descendants of Sekhmet and called themselves Sekhmi in her honor. In the Amitis’ eyes, she had allowed herself to be deluded by romantic fantasies instead of standing her ground and being committed to her path as the Queen. Yes, she did covet personal happiness with a soul mate. But who does not? It was not her fault that the love of her life was a Sekhmi vampire. Istara could not tell her heart who to love. And she had lost her mind over Tor. Powerful and confident, with an iron will and astonishing magnetism and charisma, he epitomized everything she had dreamed about for millennia. She was willing to sacrifice everything for his love. She blood-bonded and shared the Gift of Ra with him, making Tor the strongest of the vampires, and soon he fought for and won the vampires’ throne and became their King.
What the Keepers did not know was that Istara had done everything possible to convince Tor to change his views regarding keeping Amiti as bloodstock. She had thought that her love would result in freeing the Amiti: surely once Tor was King, and given his love for her, he could not allow the bloodstock practice to continue.
When she realized how wrong she had been, her heart had broken and she’d spent endless sleepless nights soaking her pillow with tears. Tor didn’t care about Amiti. He argued that his people must feed, and that having bloodstock was the most convenient way for them to meet their needs. Enraged, Istara fought with him and yelled at him, even threatened to leave him. But nothing worked: Tor knew that Istara loved him unconditionally and would stay with him, supporting him with her powers, regardless of his policy.
When Tor suggested that she stop worrying about Amiti and focus on herself and her happiness, Istara, exhausted, had finally given up and convinced herself that the Amiti must take care of themselves; it was beyond her capacity now to help them.
Istara and Tor had been together for more than a thousand years, but this last year had been the most crucial for the couple. Their daughter Simone was born. The Keepers were enraged, not by Simone’s existence but by Istara’s decision to make the half-Amiti, half-Sekhmi Simone a Keeper. It was the Queen’s privilege to redistribute Keepers’ powers, and when the Keeper of the Mysteries of Life had died, she had given them to her daughter. Istara knew that the Keepers and all Amiti would interpret it as utter betrayal of her race. But all Istara wanted to achieve was to ensure that the Key would never be turned.
The Keepers believed that turning the Key would put all the powers of the Egyptian gods in their hands, under their control, but Istara was not delusional. As the oldest of the Amiti, she remembered that Hathor herself had failed to control even her own destructive powers. All her life, even before meeting Tor, Istara had tried to convince the Keepers that turning the Key was not a solution to the problem. She firmly believed that the Keepers’ rage would unleash the Goddess Sekhmet,
the primordial destructive power that would wipe out not only the vampires but all life on earth. Locked in their narrow-minded and grandiose perception of themselves, the Keepers were deaf to Istara’s words.
Because she was one of the five Keepers in addition to being the Queen, as long as Istara refused to cooperate, the Key could not be turned. But with each passing century the Keepers had grown more infuriated by her recalcitrance. Finally, Istara foresaw that one day she would be summoned to answer to them; she realized that if they could not change her mind, eventually they would try to eradicate her obstruction of their plans by eradicating her. To guarantee that whatever happened to her, the Key would never be turned, when a Keeper was killed shortly after Simone’s birth she had seized the opportunity and granted the vacant position to her half-blood daughter, the vampire princess. Istara trusted that Simone’s loyalty to her vampire family and race would prevent her from ever turning the Key and, perhaps without even knowing it, Simone would guarantee the continuity of life on earth.
This action was what finally broke the Keepers’ patience. Three months after Simone’s birth, Istara found a summons letter in her daughter’s crib—the delivery method also a chilling message of the threat to Simone if Istara ignored the Order’s call. After a final evening with her family, she had severed the connection enabling Tor to locate her, teleported to Greece, and turned herself in to the Keepers.
There, the Keepers had offered her the possibility of leniency if she agreed to conceive and give birth to a pureblooded Amiti daughter and then surrender the powers of the Queen to her, the Amiti Queen’s powers being transferable only from mother to daughter. Although she knew that it was probably a ruse, Istara agreed to the terms and, overcoming her repulsion, laid with the father chosen by the Keepers: Marcus, Keeper of the Mystery of Death.
In nine months she gave birth to a beautiful, healthy daughter. The tiny little girl resembled Marcus, with flaming red hair, golden skin and forest-green eyes. Marcus chose the name Arianna, “purity,” wishing for her to be pure not only in blood, but also in heart and soul. He declared that his daughter, unlike her mother, would be a true Queen of her people and stand for them until the last drop of her blood was shed. Istara grinned when she heard Marcus’s declaration. She had other plans for her newborn.
