by Lily Luchesi
He took a breath and at that moment her fangs pierced his skin, an all-encompassing pain with the telltale spark of pleasure. It was always an amazing feeling when his lifeblood was taken into another…into her. No high could come close.
Regret bit his heart as she pulled away, her lips stained and shining dark red. She licked the blood away without seeming to think about it before she said goodbye for the night. He shook his head as he watched her walk down the still brightly-lit Chicago street. In a flash, she was gone, taking a bit more of his heart with her.
Sean stayed awake despite it going on three in the morning; Angelica’s presence combined with the old rock star lifestyle made it impossible for him to sleep. He found another family tree, this one a bit more detailed, for Augustus. It ended with a daughter, Julia. Sean was certain that the bloodline did not just die out there. He had a hunch, and his hunches almost always panned out, so he went online and did some digging. Julia had moved south, to a different part of Italy. And then her family briefly resided in Spain before coming to America. Hacking into a family tree database website, he pieced together the rest of the bloodline, which stopped in nineteen-sixty-seven, because the child born that year had never reproduced.
By the time he reached that last name on the list, he was pretty sure he was going to faint.
“Holy mother of fuck.” He got out of his chair and grabbed his keys and motorcycle helmet. Someone was long overdue a visit and a very big reality check.
***
Danny was having a nightmare visitation, his first in over a month. He was back where Helena had died, but this time it was not just her ghost, but her corpse as well that he saw. He had seen her body burn in the incinerator at the PID. There was no reason for this rotted, nearly bloodless corpse to be staring at him with its glassy, bulging eyes. The sickly sweet stench of human waste and decay was an assault on his nostrils.
Helena stood in a pool of her own blood, looking down at her broken corpse. “This is what she did to me,” she said in that distorted voice. “Tore at me like an animal and left me broken.”
“Helena, I know,” Danny said, trying to somehow get through the remnant to the soul she used to be. “I know what she did and why. I’m taking care of it, slowly. If I die in the process, no one else will get revenge for you.”
In a flash she was across the garage, her bloody, contorted face pressed against Danny’s. He couldn’t feel her because she wasn’t corporeal, but he felt her energy and it was disgusting. It was dirty, filled with malice. He was glad he couldn’t vomit in a dream. “Do it soon, or I’m taking you down with me.” Blood splattered his face from her spittle and he woke up.
He was dry heaving, trying to control his breathing. The clock on his nightstand said it was three-forty-five in the morning. Finally gaining control over his body he gripped at his throat for the necklace that was supposed to keep Helena away and felt only an empty chain. Turning on the lamp at his bedside, he moved the sheets back and saw the shattered malachite crystal all over his stomach and sweat-soaked sheets. Helena’s negative energy was so strong she had shattered it in order to get to his mind.
Danny’s body broke out in gooseflesh as he realized just how strong and determined the remnant was. Fear made his throat constrict and he worried he might lose his mind before he could put her to rest.
He was debating on whether or not he should even attempt to go back to sleep when there was a loud banging on the front door. He was so startled he got tangled up in the bedsheets trying to stand up. Tossing on his robe and grabbing his gun from the bedside table, he made his way downstairs to the front door.
He sent out his mind to see who was on the other side, but the vibe he was getting back was clouded. He could sense anger mingled with just a bit of shock, but that was it. It was strong, so it definitely wasn’t a vampire or witch.
He clicked on his laptop to see who was out there. Angelica had set up the security system, telling him he was a piss-poor cop for not having one in place already. On his porch was someone he hadn’t even known was back in the country, and certainly not someone he wanted to see anywhere near his house.
Cocking his gun, he opened the front door, aiming directly at Sean Wireman’s heart. He wasn’t even sure if a silver bullet could kill a siren, but all he needed was the smallest provocation and he’d test his luck.
“What are you doing here?”
The siren smiled, but there was no warmth in it; it was as cold as his dark eyes were. “Hello to you, too, motherfucker.”
“I’m serious.” Danny tightened his grip on the gun. “Why are you here and how did you even get this address?”
Sean held up a good-sized plastic baggie. Inside were two old pieces of parchment and some new printer paper. “Because I found something that will be of interest to you. About Augustus.”
That piqued his interest. “And why are you looking into the Emperor?”
Sean rolled his eyes. “Because he killed my friends. But that’s not the point now. The point is that what I found is of the most vital interest to you.”
“Me? Unless it’s an easier way of killing him than decapitation, I don’t care,” Danny said. “Now get lost.” He went to swing the door shut, but Sean stopped it with a steel-toed leather boot.
“I’m not joking. I’d leave these here for you, but you’ll need a translator so it doesn’t take you an hour to get through the entire document. Believe me, I like you even less than you like me, but right now you need me.”
Danny smirked. “You know your powers don’t work on me, right? I can’t be glamoured by a vampire or ensnared by a siren. So you can take your freaky crap elsewhere.”
The shock he sensed from Sean was very satisfying and he started to close the door. Again, Sean stopped it. However, he wasn’t trying to advance inside, so technically Danny had no viable reason to shoot him.
“So I can’t fuck with your head. Too bad for me, but I’m willing to do this the hard way. I’d simply tell you what these say, but you’d never believe me. Do me a favor and quit being the stereotypical stubborn Italian man and let me in!”
Was this little bastard for real?
When Danny took a moment to try and figure out how to shoot him and not be considered a criminal, he said, “I’m not doing this on the front porch like a door to door salesman, Mancini. I’m not going to kill you the siren way—you’re not my type. So if you let me in it’ll be like facing a normal person for you.”
Despite his rationale being extremely truthful, Danny now had to admit that he was curious. What could those scrolls contain? With a sigh, he opened the door and stepped away from the threshold.
Sean stepped inside, smiling. “That was easier than I thought. …Stand down, Detective. You can’t kill me with that thing anyway.”
Danny figured that Sean didn’t have any weapons on him as the man removed his jacket and put it on a chair in the kitchen, which was where Danny led him. There was nowhere for him to hide one, unless he had a knife in his boot. Though the silver spikes on his wristband certainly looked like they’d be painful if he got hit in the throat…or the eyes.
“All right, let’s get down to business,” Sean said, wiping the table.
“Why are you doing that?” Danny asked. “Germophobic?”
“No. I’m making sure the surface is as clear as possible so that these don’t wind up damaged,” Sean replied. He gingerly took out the two parchment pieces. He also took out the few pieces of white printer paper that were in there, keeping some of them facedown, one face-up. Finally, he took out his smartphone and began typing.
He then placed one scroll, the face-up piece of paper, and the phone in front of Danny. “The scroll is Angelica Cross’s family tree, dating back to Livia. The paper is my translation. What’s on my phone is the Hebrew alphabet, so you can do the translating yourself in case you don’t believe me.”
Danny couldn’t help but be a little amused. “Covering all your bases?”
�
��I passed my BAR exam first try at the University of Chicago Law School. Trust me, I know how to cover my ass,” Sean replied.
“Why the Hell did you do music if you’re that brilliant?” Danny asked.
As Sean pursed his lips, Danny got a clear flash of white-hot anger. “Why do people think that a career in any sort of art form is shitty? I decided to try music because I liked music. Besides, before Angelica helped me out, it was an easy way to feed.”
Danny shuddered and then turned his attention to the already translated family tree Sean had given him. There were no surprises there, her timeline was pretty much as he thought it would be. “Why are you showing me this? I know her bloodline already.”
“For your mind to see how this looks, how I translated it. This is the scroll and research you need to concern yourself with.” Sean tapped the worn scroll and pushed it in front of Danny while turning over his translations and what looked like printed articles. “This is the branch you need to concern yourself with. Julia Caesaris. Do you see where the line ends there, with her?”
Danny nodded.
“She was the last of Augustus’ descendants to have any vampire blood in her veins, see, because she was Augustus’ granddaughter. Her mother, Julia, married Tiberius, Livia’s grandson, sometime before this one was born. …Wow. I just really realized how creepy and incestuous it was then. Anyway, I didn’t think that her line ended there. There was no evidence to prove it.
“She left the family, moving to southern Italy, and she began courting with a mortal man. They had children, their children had children, and so on.” Sean flipped over another paper he had printed from the internet. “I found where her ancestors briefly relocated to Spain, and then they came to America not long after Columbus brought his people here.”
Danny looked at the paper. Yep, this was all fairly factual. “So the Romans didn’t follow her family tree because she abandoned the empire before it fell?”
Sean nodded. “Right. I took the liberty of finishing her family tree—Augustus’s family tree. There’s one thing you should know about vampire blood: if you have a vampiric ancestor, you can fuck as many humans as you want, but that vampire blood never goes away. There will always be a trace of it, even if you personally don’t have any vampiric characteristics. That’s immortal blood. It might be diluted, but it’s there. Forever.”
Danny took the other papers, which dated back to the seventeenth century. By the time he got to the nineteenth century, names began to look familiar. Very familiar.
1809: Daria Caesaris married Christopher Mancini. Had seven children.
1828: Their oldest son, Anthony, married a woman named Florence. Had four children.
1850: One of their children, Joseph, married a woman named Eve and relocated from New York to Chicago, Illinois.
1890: One of their sons, Markus, married and had six children.
1930: One of their children, Michael Mancini, married and had three children.
1967: One of those three children Michael Mancini the second, married Josefina Rodrigo of Spanish descent, and had one child: Daniel Michael Mancini.
“Your soul is that of a hunter. Your blood is that of a vampire.”
Chapter Eleven
Danny had been struck dumb many times in his life, especially since he had met Angelica. But never had he imagined or expected to ever feel like this.
“You’re lying. You fabricated this somehow.” Even to himself, his argument was weak and his own voice did not convey an ounce of confidence. If he was in front of a judge, his argument would be thrown out of court and the criminal he was testifying against would go free.
Sean grinned. What he found funny Danny didn’t know. “Mancini, I really, really dislike you. You have it in for a woman I’ve loved for twenty years. You had a great thing together and instead of understanding her, or at least trying to, you want to kill her instead for your own worthless prejudice. I knew men like you. I killed men like you, way back when. Believe me, you’re not worth the scum on my boots, let alone the time it would take to fabricate all these.” Sean stood up and put his jacket on, placing the scrolls back in the baggie. “Keep the copies.”
He started to walk away and Danny was going to let him when he stopped at the front door. “You know why I brought these here? Because maybe if you realized that your blood is tainted, just like Angelica’s, you wouldn’t be so hasty in wanting to kill her. Maybe you could open that abnormally closed mind of yours and realize that there’s a much deeper connection between you both. Maybe you could see that you’re a judgmental bastard who doesn’t deserve any of the love Angelica so freely gave and still harbors for you.”
With those parting words, Sean slammed the door behind him. Danny heard a motorcycle engine being gunned, but he barely registered it.
He realized he was shaking. Not from cold, or fear. He supposed he was in a mild state of shock. He’d never been in real shock except for when he first faced Vincent Cross five years ago and he had no idea how to administer self-care.
Water. They give shock victims water and blankets, he recalled. Unsteadily, he went to the sink and grabbed the nearest glass, not caring if it was clean or not. He braced his trembling body against the counter as he filled the glass. Water sloshed over the rim as his hand jerked and that made him lose his grip on the glass. It shattered, slicing his hand. He didn’t feel the pain: the icy cold water was numbing him, he supposed, as he watched his lifeblood pour into the chrome sink, diluting in the running water.
Eventually his mind woke up a little and he grabbed a clean dishtowel—what his grandmother had called a ‘mopeen’—and wrapped it tightly around his bloody hand. Danny felt the pain now, which was good. It brought him back to the here and now and cleared his mind a little bit.
After disinfecting his hand and putting a bandage around it, he went to the table again to look at the documents. He was part vampire. There was now no denying this, even though a part of his mind was still protesting.
His bloodline went back to the Emperor of vampires, the adopted son of one of the most famous war leaders of all time, Julius Caesar. Funny. Before Danny had gotten the song lyrics tattooed with Angelica, he had only one tattoo, on his ribs. “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.” He got it after graduating from the police academy, and it was a quote from Shakespeare’s play about the dictator. Irony at its finest.
“I’m a human being,” he mumbled. “A human. I bleed, I don’t drink blood. I can go out in daylight without sunscreen. I have touched holy water all my life and never once been harmed. I eat garlic. This changes nothing.”
But it did. It changed everything.
Danny remembered something Angelica said when she had first met Augustus. He had told her that only his blood could fully satisfy her, but she confided in Danny that Augustus’ blood made her feel no different than Danny’s did. Now he knew why, because their blood was the same. Danny’s blood was nearly as strong as the Emperor’s, despite his blood being more than ninety-nine percent human.
It was why he looked younger than fifty, why he healed well from the injuries he had contracted when he was a cop, and why Angelica was able to drain two pints of blood from him in a single day without him feeling any negative effects.
He wasn’t human.
***
“I never realized how useful it was having a person under blood thrall,” Augustus said the next evening as he sipped some of the bagged blood that Angelica had brought over and warmed. He fought the urge to grimace: did his Empress really think that this was equal to fresh?
Angelica, who was still looking at the massive library he had collected in the centuries, looked up at him. “Blood thrall? What is blood thrall and how does it differ from regular old glamour?”
He cocked an eyebrow, perplexed. Angelica was the strongest vampire alive after him, renowned worldwide amongst a myriad of species as a savior of the paranormal community. She was a stunning personage, yet there were times like tonight when
he realized just how young and inexperienced she really was.
It was a pity Veronica’s parents had been hunted and killed when the vampire was so young. She had not learned one single useful thing to pass on to the Empress. However, he admitted to himself that he enjoyed having her remain ignorant. As long as he could teach her, as long as she needed him, she would be even more compliant.
“I assume you have drank from this siren, yes?” he said.
“From Sean? Yes, I have,” she replied.
“And has he ever ingested any of your blood while you had him in a sexual thrall?”
“Wow, nosy much?” Angelica said. “Yes, he bit my lip once. He must have taken some of my blood into himself then.”
“That is blood thrall. It does not affect everyone who takes some blood into their system: like your so-called Consort. However, it does effect a certain number who have exchanged blood with you while…intimate. He will be loyal to you and you alone for eternity. It is always good to have someone like that in your life,” Augustus explained.
“I would never use Sean’s feelings for me,” Angelica said. “He’s my friend, and I would never take advantage of him.”
Augustus chuckled. “Ah, Angelica, I admire how staunchly you adhere to human morals. More so than most humans do, I would say.”
“Well, I can’t help it if humans prefer acting like bloodthirsty mongrels than the intelligent beings they were designed to be,” she said.
If they desire to act like animals then we should treat them as such, Augustus thought. He did not say it aloud, knowing that soon enough Angelica would come to that same conclusion, and think she had done it all on her own. Her believing that would make implementing the new law much easier than if he were to try to convince her.
