by Irina Argo
That night, while little Arianna slept in her cradle, Istara came to the nursery and glared at the baby for whom she felt no love nor even compassion. In her eyes, this little girl was a thief who had stolen Istara’s crown and whose purpose for existing was literally to ruin everything Istara had fought for during her entire life.
“I decree that your path will be difficult beyond measure,” she cursed her infant daughter, her voice cold. “You will suffer and bleed, and in order to save your people you will have to sacrifice your greatest love. That, you little witch, is my parting gift to you.”
At that moment the baby girl opened her eyes and glanced at Istara as if asking her why her mother hated her so much. To Istara’s shock, Arianna’s eyes changed color: one eye remained the same dark forest green, but the other became an amber color, the eye of a lioness ...
Istara had been given three months to spend with her baby before her destiny would be determined. She never once held Arianna or even touched her. Meanwhile, Istara prepared her Last Spell, just in case. If the Goddess decided she had to die and denied her the seven voices in favor of her innocence, Istara would release her spell to the air. She might fail to save her own life, but she would make sure that Tor would live. The spell could not be reversed except by its maker; she would cast it on the verge of her death, so no power in the world could stop it from manifesting.
“Do you have a last wish, Queen Istara?” Marcus’s voice jerked her back into the present. She was at the beach. She was probably about to die.
“No.” She forced herself to meet his hateful eyes.
“By the power given me by the Eye of Ra, I, Marcus, the Keeper of Mystery of Death, declare the Amiti Queen, Istara, a traitor, who must be put to death.”
The two other Keepers, Oberon and Deimos, joined Marcus and repeated the declaration sealing Istara’s fate. But it was not final yet; they had to ask for the Goddess’s approval. Please, dear Goddess, Istara passionately prayed, forgive me if I’m guilty, take my crown, but leave me my life. Please allow me to go back to Tor and Simone.
“Now we ask any members of the Order who reject this sentence to speak out on behalf of the condemned. If seven object, the Queen’s life will be spared. If our Divine Mother wants the former Queen Istara alive, she will intervene through seven members.”
Despairing, Istara searched the crowd for signs of compassion but found no mercy in their stony eyes. She was completely alone, rejected and despised by her people and her Goddess. The tears she had been forcing back finally spilled from her eyes. She savored their taste on her lips.
The Keepers of the Key raised their fists to the heavens, gathering the power they needed to eliminate her.
Istara threw her gaze to the sky, casting her Last Spell into the darkness just as the Keepers opened their hands to direct rays of blazing white energy at her heart. For an instant, she became that energy, her body illuminating the beach like a lightning flash, and then she was simply gone. All that remained of Istara was a shimmering mist of tiny sparkling stars, her powers, lingering brilliantly in the air in anticipation of being welcomed by a new Queen.
Arianna was brought to Marcus. He took the tiny baby in his arms and tenderly kissed her rosy cheeks, smiling down at her, his eyes filled with love and joy. Then he placed Arianna in the center of the shimmering mist. The mist came alive and curled like smoke around the little girl, who giggled as she tried to capture the little stars swirling around her.
The gathered members of the Eye of Ra began chanting as the mist attached and melted itself into Arianna’s skin like snowflakes. When the last star disappeared into the child’s body, they rose their voices in unison.
“Long Live the Queen! Long Live the Queen!”
The coronation was complete.
Arianna became the new Queen of the Amiti. Hope filled the eyes of those surrounding her. This girl was destined to change the fate of their dying race. She would have powers to help her achieve this, but powers were not enough. One question filled everybody’s mind: would the young Queen have both the desire and the willpower to fight for her people?
* * *
Nice, France
Ten days later
Sitting on the terrace of Tor’s villa in Nice felt like being suspended on the edge of the world; it jutted out past the cliff’s edge, nothingness below and around it. At sunset, with gold, scarlet, and pink glazing the dark waters of the Mediterranean Sea below, the effect was even more dramatic. Only the late yachts returning home, their forms slipping through the fiery liquid, disturbed the reflection of sky on sea.
Tor watched all of this splendor without really seeing it; he was perched on an entirely different kind of precipice. In his hand he held the letter he had received a week earlier, but like the vista before him, it had become so familiar that he knew what it contained without looking at it.
My love,
By the time you get this letter I will be dead, executed by my own people for loving you too much and making Simone the Keeper of the Key. I am so very sorry to leave you without my blood-bond. I only hope that my powers remain strong in you for a long time before they begin to decline.
Reflecting on the world I will leave behind, it breaks my heart to imagine you without the protection of my powers. You must have the Gift of Ra, my love, and the only way for you to access it again is to blood-bond with the new Amiti Queen, my daughter Arianna. This will not be an easy task, of course; the Keepers and the rest of the Order will do anything to ensure her security.
My final gift to you is my Last Spell, which will help you find and blood-bond with Queen Arianna. On Arianna’s twentieth birthday, her father and protector Marcus, the Keeper of the Mystery of Death, will die, leaving her without family, and vulnerable. This will create an opportunity for you to gain access to her and accomplish the blood-bond—and with it, Gift of Ra.
The new Queen of the Amiti is my gift to you, so that you will always be the King. MY King. My Love. My Life.
Your Istara.
When he’d first read the letter, Tor had been overwhelmed by grief. Part of him had always known that this would happen, and when Istara had disappeared a year earlier, he had suspected the worst, so his shock and sadness had surprised him. Had he loved Istara? As much as he could love anyone, he supposed: he was, after all, a warrior and a Sekhmi. His heart didn’t clench at the sight of her the way it did for his adopted children and his daughter Simone, but she had been his blood-bond and treasured companion. He’d withdrawn from the world and most of his duties in order to devote the past week to mourning her loss.
Now, the grief that had consumed him had been replaced by rage. His need to avenge Istara’s death and inflict agony and terror on her murderers was so powerful he could feel it pulsing in his fangs. But, as the humans said, revenge was a dish best served cold, and he had centuries to prepare for that.
He needed to think of the more immediate future. Although he could still feel Istara’s Gift of Ra glowing within him, it would diminish over time without her blood to replenish it. And Istara had been right: that would be a problem. Vampire kings did not resign or retire. They were challenged to physical combat by competitors—and eventually, they lost. The younger generation of Sekhmi were powerful and extremely ambitious, and those who challenged Tor would find ways to enhance their powers, so while Tor could best any living vampire in a fair fight, he would need to supplement his native strength in order to keep the crown. And Istara had been right: the Gift of Ra was the best weapon he could possibly have.
Thanks to Istara, locating Arianna, when the time came, would be easy. The challenge would be the blood-bond. Although vampires initiated the blood-bond and benefitted from it—or at least Sekhmi did, now that they’d made it illegal for the lower-caste, mixed-blood Nightwalker vampires to do so—it was Amiti who controlled it. Most importantly, it gave Amiti the power to kill the Sekhmi with whom they blood-bonded by consuming them with fire. To blood-bond with the
young Queen meant surrendering his life to a girl who would consider Tor, the vampire King, her eternal enemy. She might even welcome the chance to blood-bond with him, viewing it as the easiest way to destroy the most powerful oppressor of her people.
Chapter 2
Hunter headquarters, Venezuela
Twenty years later
Simone usually loved traveling by helicopter, but this time the ground rising to meet them wasn’t giving her the usual thrill, but more a sense of ... vertigo. In fact, though she’d never have admitted it to anyone else—and was barely willing to acknowledge it to herself—she felt a little sick.
At twenty-two, she was en route to her first Amiti bloodstock auction. It was a rite of passage for young vampires, marking the transition to adulthood—and with it the transition from being, for all intents and purposes, a human child, to being vampire. Simone had only recently begun to require blood, and today she would see firsthand how the stock that provided that blood was acquired.
Like art auctions or other events involving the exchange of massive amounts of money and the most high-end of luxuries, bloodstock auctions were glamorous affairs, opportunities to see and be seen. Today’s auction was exclusive even by those standards, with only the top families from among the Vampire Elite invited to participate, and only the most exquisite of Amiti product being offered for purchase.
And therein lies the problem, Simone thought.
Although she’d been raised among vampires, as a vampire, Simone was half Sekhmi and half Amiti. And because humanlike immortal children were indistinguishable from their human counterparts, she’d spent her first twenty-one years, before her teeth started to ache and her fangs to grow, utterly clueless as to whether she’d end up taking after her vampire father or her Amiti mother. Utterly clueless, and utterly terrified that she’d turn out wrong. She knew that she’d be loved and protected either way, but the idea that she could become what her loved ones most despised—what they ate, for fuck’s sake!—was so dreadful as to be beyond comprehension. And yeah, although they’d have denied it, she’d glimpsed the worry in their eyes when, at nineteen and then twenty, she didn’t have fangs, even though they weren’t to be expected that early. It was still possible that she’d develop some Amiti characteristics, but fangs and blood requirements were so central to vampires’ physical and social traits that they’d been her main concern, and her main relief.
But now she was about to face a new test. Although she indirectly experienced Amiti every time her family enjoyed their cocktails of Amiti blood, she’d never actually seen Amiti bloodstock in the flesh, so to speak, and so their existence had remained an abstraction. Would she suffer from some kind of humiliating connection to them? Or worse, identification with them?
Sekhmi reveled in their superiority over Amiti, their sense of triumph at having confined significant numbers of them and relegated them to bloodstock, and auctions were an opportunity to collectively bask in that accomplishment. Simone wanted to share their sense of celebration so badly, it seemed as though she’d never wanted anything more in her life.
As the helicopter touched down on the Hunters’ private estate in northern Venezuela, Simone shoved away her ambivalence and committed to enjoying the party.
Disembarking, she joined Theores and Leon outside the circle of the helicopter’s draft, to wait while the pilot, Odji, one of Tor’s adopted sons and Simone’s personal bodyguard, powered down the helicopter. She took the opportunity to collect herself, arrange the folds of her exquisite sapphire-blue gown, and review her strengths. She knew she was beautiful—it wasn’t vanity, just a fact—and she looked especially fantastic tonight, bedecked in full formalwear, makeup enhancing her full lips, deep blue eyes, and porcelain skin. And she was smart, well educated, wealthy, sophisticated; she was literally a princess, but even without that status she’d have made a damned fine impression.
And she was with some of her favorite family members. The Elite defined family differently than most human societies. Prides, as they called them, usually consisted of five to twelve members connected to each other by ties of blood, but also friendship. Pride members lived together and owned common wealth and property: real estate, bank accounts, businesses, helicopters—and bloodstock. Pride loyalty was among the Elite’s highest values, and because pride members always had each other’s backs, prides made Sekhmi feel invincible. Simone, Theores, Leon, and Odji were all members of the Royal pride, the First Family among the Vampire Elite on the basis of power and wealth.
The Hunters probably ran a close second, Simone thought as she surveyed the estate. It was magnificent. Grecian sculptures lined the driveway and entrance to the main house—currently unused, since all of today’s guests seemed to be arriving by helicopter. In addition to the main residence, she could see guesthouses and other outbuildings, tennis courts, and horse stables. Closer to the main house, an Olympic sized swimming pool glowed with four fountains shooting colored streams of water twenty feet into the air. The house and pool were ringed with gorgeous Italian tile and perfectly maintained landscaping
The group made their way to the swimming pool area, where thirty or forty guests mingled, men sleek in tuxedos, women glowing like jewels in designer gowns. Simone recognized most of them from other social events. Scanning the group, she realized with a sudden flare of self-consciousness that as far as she knew, she was the only one who’d never been to an auction before.
As they approached the main party, they were intercepted by servers carrying trays of Pink Sunset, a cocktail of champagne and Amiti blood, arranged in hues ranging from pink to red, the colors reflecting the drinks’ blood concentration. Simone selected a flute in a dark pink shade and joined a group of younger males she knew could distract her with their casual chatting and flirting. Gradually her confidence blossomed again at their easy, attentive repartee.
After about an hour, the guests were escorted into the main house and into a spacious room lit by an enormous multi-tiered crystal chandelier. A stage rose at the far end of the room, tables and chairs surrounding its perimeter. A row of flickering candles lined the stage, lending intimacy and mystery to the atmosphere. Simone, Theores, and Leon took the table at center stage; the Royal pride was always extended the courtesy of prime seating. Odji remained standing at the back of the room next to the door with the other Sekhmi bodyguards. Waiters flitted around serving drinks and hors d’oeuvres.
Leaning back in her chair, Simone scanned the room. Her eyes landed on an especially attractive male dressed in an Italian-cut dove-grey business suit, and she smiled at him seductively. He smiled back at her, winked, and then stepped up to the stage. One of the Hunters, Simone realized as he strode over the podium. The Hunter pride had earned their incredible wealth through their monopoly on the extremely lucrative business of tracking, capturing, and selling bloodstock at auctions like this one.
As the Hunter adjusted his microphone, Simone’s confidence abruptly drained from her, replaced by her pulse pounding in her ears. She heard the man’s attractive baritone filling the room, and she was aware that he was outlining the terms of the auction, but she couldn’t focus on his words. Desperate, she fixed her gaze on the purely aesthetic pleasure of Theores’s dark maroon Pink Sunset and how it glowed slightly around the edges, backlit by the candles. Theores loved it highly concentrated; if Simone hadn’t been able to see the little effervescent bubbles, she would’ve doubted it had any champagne at all. See, she reminded herself, it’s just Amiti blood, to be appreciated like any other beautifully presented delicacy. She raised her own glass to her mouth as if to prove it to herself.
Taking up his gavel, the auctioneer announced, “Lot Number One. The blood will be offered for your examination.”
A thick velvet curtain at the back of the stage parted to reveal a large Sekhmi dressed in black leather and leading a small, cloaked figure. When they reached center stage, the Sekhmi stopped and removed the cloak.
Simone froze, her dr
ink halfway to her mouth.
A frail, nude young girl huddled in the center of the stage, the candlelight casting shimmers of gold over her luxurious chestnut hair and smooth, flawless skin. She could only be described as exquisite: her breasts were small mounds, her waist slim, and her hips beautifully curvaceous despite her youth. She trembled with fear, her eyes lowered and hidden behind thick lashes.
Simone was suddenly aware that the girl was emanating an unmistakable, vibrating energy. Enchanting, magnetic, it washed over Simone like a warm rain. Is this what they mean when they talk about the “natural attraction” between our species? she wondered, and then was struck by another terrible thought: or am I sensing my own kind?
That was a question she would never, ever be able to ask of anyone, even Theores, who was the closest thing she had to a mother. Forcing down her panic, she extended her senses to gauge whether the other gathered Sekhmi felt the energy, too.
Yes, all the guests were excited and thrilled, working hard to disguise their feelings under casual, relaxed postures. Theores and Leon looked to be entirely at ease, but the ostensibly indifferent bodyguards were especially obvious, devouring the girl with their eyes from the back of the room. A new awareness surged through Simone, of herself as Sekhmi and of her predatory Sekhmi instincts, which delighted in the subjection of the Amiti before her. Her people, she realized, kept bloodstock not only for blood but to satisfy their addiction to power, their drive to possess and dominate another immortal. Nothing was wrong with Simone; she felt what everybody else felt.
