Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony (The Order Saga Book 1) (4 page)

It didn’t knock me out. They did that with the tranquilizer darts as I lay there twitching on the concrete. They rolled me onto my stomach and cuffed me, while I watched Caroline, also in handcuffs, being led to the chopper by a middle aged, leathery soldier who I would later learn was Ash. I remember thinking that Ash looked more like Humphrey Bogart with a crew cut than Hugo Weaving.

Then I blacked out.

* * * * *

I woke up on a cold flagstone floor, less groggy than I would have expected given how I’d been put down. Caroline says that the few toxins and tranquilizers that work on Vampyrs tend to move through our systems faster. The first thing I remember is the stench. The air was thick with the smell of piss, shit, mildew and that old socks odor of unwashed bodies.

“Avery?” It was Caroline, just behind me. I opened my eyes and sat up, regretting my haste as a wave of dizziness crashed over me.

As my sight cleared, I saw that the muffled hums and creaks I’d been hearing came from people lying in stacks and stacks of cages. They were naked, bound, mouths taped shut and sustained by I.V. drips hanging on the doors of their cages. I’m not talking full-size cages, either, there was just enough room for the person inside to lie on their stomach and maybe raise their head a little. There were men, women and children of all ethnicities and ages with colored, laminated tags on the front of each cage. Some of them cried while most just lay there while the bodily waste from the cages above them dropped down onto their backs and legs. There had to be close to a hundred cages, stacked four high and running nearly the length of one wall. The lowest cages were at knee height, raised up above drainage grates in the stone floor.

“Jesus Christ.”

“This is the reality of The Order,” Caroline said. Her voice echoed in the dungeon-like chamber. She was sitting against the wall opposite the cages, arms resting on her knees, eyes on the floor. “All the bureaucracy, all the politics, all the power and wealth and grand history: this is the foundation it rests on. You couldn’t understand before why I didn’t see the humor in those movies and television programs you showed me…”

“What … what is this?”

“This is the wine cellar.”

That’s what I was afraid she was gonna say.

A few of the caged people stared at me, pleading with their eyes.

“C’mon,” I said, getting to my feet. “Help me get them out of these cages before somebody comes.”

“The guards will just put them back and hurt them for causing trouble.” She hadn’t moved, except to glance up at me.

“Don’t think like that! There’s almost a hundred people here. We could overpower the guards and make a break for it!”

Caroline shook her head. “If they’re all free, the guards will just shoot them. It’s happened before. Even if we got through the guards, the stairways are monitored. The cellar will be sealed off, gassed—”

“But—”

“And if we got out before that happened, we’d still have to get through the house and more guards. Then a private island patrolled by a hundred or so experienced soldiers armed with machine guns, flamethrowers and attack dogs.”

I’d fallen back into my old role-player, problem-solving mode. It helped thinking of this as a fictional scenario designed to test my resourcefulness, rather than the bleak reality it was. “Well, every guard we take out gives us weapons and equipment to help even the odds. We use one of the flamethrowers or something to torch the mansion, create a little distraction.”

Caroline said, “Every wall of the mansion is a firewall, all the exposed beams are steel made to resemble wood and all the flammable decorations are treated with flame retardant chemicals every few years. But for the sake of argument, let’s say we managed to make it to one of the boats. There are attack boats patrolling the waters in every direction and they’ll sink anything that’s not authorized. Supposing further that we managed to land on Long Island or Connecticut- do you really think you, me and a hundred naked humans could just disappear? They’d hunt us down just like they did tonight and they’d catch us.”

I paced, trying not to look at the faces of the caged people. “Well, what the hell do you want from me? We can’t just give up!”

“Avery,” she said. “I’m not trying to be a defeatist but you have to realize that Ash has been in charge of Sebastian’s security for over fifty years now. He led successful high risk missions in both World Wars and personally redesigned every aspect of this island’s security plan. I doubt there’s anything you can think of that he hasn’t already planned against.”

“Well, you managed to get away.”

She nodded. “At the time, I was Sebastian’s Adjutor and advisor—though in name only by then. I used my connections to make preparations for two years. Then I waited until Sebastian was away at a Gathering. I left the island on official business and disappeared.”

Okay, granted, that approach wasn’t gonna work for us in this situation…but then I thought,
Kill Sebastian
. If we could grab him as a hostage, we could force safe passage for us and the captives back to civilization. A hundred naked people telling anyone who’d listen about a terrible vampire island should prove a nice distraction.

I’d never killed anyone before but I thought I could make an exception for him. With Sebastian dead, Caroline and I would be a low priority for whoever took his place.

Before I could start outlining my brilliant scheme to Caroline, I paced far enough to catch sight of an archway across from one of the stairways. The archway held a prison-bar door, beyond which lay a dark passageway. “Check this out! There’s a tunnel or something here. Maybe you can MacGuyver it open.”

“The passage only leads out into the maze.”

“Maze? You’re not saying he—”

“Had an actual maze constructed,” she confirmed. They say that’s a sign of a great relationship, when you finish each other’s sentences like that. “Back in Nineteen Seventy-Seven or Seventy-Eight. Stone and barbed wire and even some glass sections for people desperate enough to jump through…”

“Yeah and deadly booby traps, too.” I walked back to where she sat. “C’mon, Caroline, a
maze
? I mean, that’s fucking retarded! What is he, the Man With The Golden Gun?”

“No, he’s a Feral.” She said, hiding behind her clinical tone. “It’s a condition some Vampyrs contract in which their more primitive, predatory instincts overwhelm their human thought processes. It’s often accompanied by structural changes in the eyes, fingers and other aspects of the victim’s physiology. He built the maze to sharpen his tracking skills. He has his people capture the fittest, most dangerous humans they can find—soldiers, athletes, mercenaries, convicts—and put them in the maze. I think he Creates some of them first, even though that’s illegal. There are no traps, just Sebastian, nude and unarmed. All they have to do is get out of the maze and they win their freedom. As far as I know, no one ever has.”

I was getting a little sick of Sebastian’s increasingly mythic status. I stopped myself from replying as my nifty new vamp hearing detected the sound of someone approaching from the passageway. I snuck over to the other side of the archway and squeezed myself into the darkness of the corner as well as I could.

I went completely still as the prison door buzzed and slid open. A second passed … then another … and then a large figure entered.

I leapt—

He had his hands on me even before my feet left the ground. I heard a low animal growl and then I went flying right into the stone wall on the other side of the room!

I managed to brace myself for the impact and landed on my feet.

“No!” Caroline. Behind me.

I turned. She was standing between me and what had to be Sebastian but he pushed her aside as he halved the distance to me. He stopped about ten feet from me and I got my first good look at him. From Caroline’s reluctant descriptions of him, I’d been imagining him as a cross between Christopher Lee’s Dracula and Lon Chaney Jr.’s oafish Alucard.

I wasn’t even close.

Sebastian Blackwood stood six and a half feet tall with black hair shaved close to his skull and worn in a neat beard. He had one of those blocky heads with heavy features that looked a little fleshy even after undergoing the Amazing Vampyr Fat Loss System. His eyes were a striking yellow that reminded me of a panther. They looked like contact lenses but gleamed in the dimness of the room and matched his yellow teeth and sharpened canines. He wore a thin, loose, red robe that showed enough for me to see that he did indeed possess the physique of a Greek god—Hades would have been my guess—covered with black, curly hair. Through the hair, his entire body was splashed with blood. He reeked of animal musk and death.

He grinned at me with a dog-catching-scent-of-prey grin and said, “So thee’d strike first and from cover? A good instinct, if a middling execution.” The voice wasn’t what I expected either. Deep and rich, it had a touch of Middle English pronunciation that sounded vaguely Scottish or Northern English. He crouched a bit, tensing. “Try again, if ye be a man…”

Obviously, he was baiting me and yes, the smart thing to do would be to tell him where to stick his notions of manhood and go rejoin Caroline. In the heat of the moment however, all I could see were sudden, all-too vivid images of that thick, hairy body crushing Caroline beneath it—of him grunting and stabbing himself into her delicate, beautiful body—of his huge hand striking her face for some badly timed remark—of him shouting at her—of this repulsive creature scraping some person’s blood off his body and smearing it onto her face so he could lick it off—and some ugly, primitive part of my brain recognized that Sebastian was challenging my right to be with my chosen mate. I felt the little flex in my gums as my canines slid down and my heartbeat increased, blood surged through my body, pulsed in my ears, washing out all other sound.

I attacked him.

As we moved to meet each other, I retained the presence of mind to throw a distraction punch at his face while putting my real effort into kicking the fucker in the junk.

Sebastian sidestepped my punch, grabbed my ankle and used it to flip me over and plant my face into the flagstones. The impact smashed my nose, broke a few teeth and swept away whatever last shreds of dignity I’d left lying around. I heard distantly, the sound of people coming down the stairs behind Sebastian and remember being reminded of my years in school. I’d taken my share of beatings there and learned that nothing attracts a crowd like a fight. Good times. Oh yeah.

“Strike for vulnerability, very good!” the beast man barked. He turned and addressed Caroline. “Aye, he’s a spirited whelp. With instruction, he may yet make a worthy companion.”

I saw Caroline come over to us about the same time as the guys in combat boots. “Sebastian, if you harm him any further, you’ll regret it.”

“Thou presume to threaten me?” Sebastian asked without anger. Thinking back on it, he sounded hurt.

Without even waiting for him to drop the other shoe, Caroline knelt down and helped me roll onto my back. I expected Sebastian to explode and maybe throw me again or attack Caroline but he didn’t. His thunder skillfully stolen, he just tossed my ankle aside and turned to the new arrivals.

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.