Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony (The Order Saga Book 1) (8 page)

I still remember them all.

I went down by degrees, feeling light-headed, then dizzy, then to that transcendent threshold of numbness where nothing exists but a single moment stretched out to infinity in all directions. Before I got to the critical threshold, Caroline inserted another needle and began transfusing me from herself.

My next memory is waking up to find Caroline cradling me in her arms. She smiled down at me and brushed a bit of sweat-plastered hair off my forehead. I felt wonderful aside from a little fogginess but that wouldn’t last.

Nothing in Caroline’s clinical descriptions or any of the magical, beautiful scenes of my books and movies had really prepared me for what I was in for. For two days I alternated between hugging the toilet and sitting on it. My body was being emptied.

I had a fever, chills, muscle spasms and aches in places I hadn’t even known I had. When I slept, I had horrible, vivid nightmares which made me extremely cranky when I was awake. Through it all, Caroline only left my side to get water for me or some blood for herself (and even these she tended to do when I was sleeping). She never lost patience with me, no matter how much I complained or needed.

As the virus invaded and reprogrammed every cell of my body, burning all my fat for energy, I was glad to be overweight for once. Caroline explained that Creation is even slower and more painful for people without excess fat to burn. I can’t imagine that, since my pain was enough to reduce me to tears on several occasions and that was with Caroline feeding me from her veins to further ease the process. I even spent a day in a bath of ice-water when my fever threatened to boil my brain.

It’s literally like being reborn, only this time with an awareness of every forming limb and squeeze down the birth canal. I couldn’t have survived without Caroline: my lover, my mother and my nurse…

My Creator.

After the bathtub, the worst was over. There were still many days of aches while my loose flaps of skin tightened up around my new frame and my muscles cramped with the conversion to a higher concentration of fast-twitch fibers but Caroline’s company made it bearable.

Her blood was the flavor of life to me, her words gospel, her love the very air I breathed. “My baby,” she would say, kissing me and holding me close, “my sweet, beautiful boy.”

I was a Vampyr.

I was utterly hers.

But was she really mine?

* * * * *

The entrance hall is one of the house’s most impressive areas, with its gold-veined marble floors, medieval tapestries and stained glass windows. Caroline and I and the house staff were lined up on one side of the entrance hall’s emerald runner opposite the guards. The maids wore peasant dresses that looked like something you’d see on tavern wenches at a Renaissance Fair: Hunter Green with brown aprons and corsets designed to enhance their cleavage.

Ash, at least, still got to look like a soldier. He and Wilkes and the other house guards were at attention, outfitted in something that resembled a Marine dress uniform: olive drab jacket with gold buttons and rank insignias, dirt brown trousers with a gold stripe and a Marine dress cap in the same colors.

Sebastian paced incessantly across the huge area. He’d gone all out for the occasion: his nails were sculpted to fine points and buffed, the hair on his neck had been shaved to make his beard look neater … he’d even had a bath. He wore a belted, knee-length tunic with gold embroidery around the collar and cuffs over loose brown leggings that were also embroidered with gold piping. On his feet were moccasin-like boots, which made sense for someone used to going barefoot. On top of all this was a knee-length wolf’s-fur coat.

The outfit should have looked ridiculous but it didn’t. Sebastian wore it with such natural confidence that it magnified his already imposing size while granting the bestial quality of his movements a rugged majesty. A normal suit would have made him look sloppy and awkward, while this outfit transformed him into something like a warrior-king.

Still, as Vampyrs went, Sebastian was something of a disappointment but Caroline’s bios of the Hegemons had piqued my interest.

How many chances do you get to meet a real live evil despot?

We stood in the entrance hall and waited for over half an hour before the first one arrived. Even then, it turned out to be a serious bore-a-palooza. We’re talking four hours of Senate coverage on C-Span here.

The only interesting arrival was the Shen representative of Asia. There have been and are other species of vampire in the world besides Vampyrs. Most were simply wiped out when encountered by The Order. Now, Shen is an interesting term for them to choose, since it can mean everything from spirit to ghost to god when translated to English. The Shen are the only vampire race to defend their territory against the encroachment of The Order and, in 1901, were permitted to join as equals and take a seat on the ruling council. Part of their ability to stave off invasion had to be their perfect comfort with sunlight. They can also eat food and, in most cases, are impossible to tell apart from humans.

Remember my first date science-fest with Caroline? Our best theory was that some kind of non-corporeal entity (the “demon” of folklore) existed and was able to enter bodies on the verge of death. This entity then absorbed the host’s personality as its own and was able to hold the body in a fixed state as long as it received supplemental energy through feeding. Caroline wasn’t satisfied with this theory, because it left more questions unanswered than answered, but it was the only thing we had that fit the handful of facts she’d been able to collect on these mysterious vampires.

The
Guaiwu
, on the other hand, are the basis of many of those Chinese vampire legends and stories I’ve read. In mythology, they’re called Ch’iang-shich, Gongshi, Jiangshi, and Kuangshi depending on the translation used, but the term means “stiff-corpse” and generally refers to those hopping vampires you see in Hong Kong vampire movies. The real
guaiwu
are savage creatures with white hair covering their bodies, solid red eyes, talons at the ends of their fingers and a mouth full of fangs. The Shen use them as a slave race. We have no good explanation for them except that they are distantly related to Draco’s revenants.

The Hegemon of Asia, a Shen, calls herself Jade Tiger. That’s not a real Chinese name, for those of you unfamiliar with Chinese naming customs, it’s a total pseudonym. I think it’s a precaution against being able to use their name to cast spells against them.

She brought a dozen servants! The others brought one or two, four at the most. They all came marching into the entrance hall in this grand procession with incense, gongs and cymbals, separated into columns that matched the ones we stood in and then in came her four Abominable Snowmen bodyguards carrying her on a fucking litter! The litter, of course, could have been a prop from
Curse of the Golden Flower
: gold and jewels and silk pillows covered with ornately sculpted Chinese dragons and tigers. Lying on it, she wore a modern red silk dress.

According to Caroline, it was one of her more restrained entrances.

Jade Tiger looks like a Chinese woman in her early twenties with a flawless complexion, delicate facial bones, full lips and a pearl-white smile full of even teeth. Her eyes are deep, sparkling black opals that seek yours out with a ravenous sexual hunger no matter what she’s saying. Her hair is a shimmering waterfall of black silk that flows all the way down to the small of her back and, I swear, it looks so soft and inviting that you almost have to fight to keep from burying your face in it. As for the rest of her attributes, well, suffice it to say that everything she has is in perfect proportion (maybe a little larger in the chest than most Asian women) and she knows how to show all of it to her best advantage.

I hate admitting this but when Jade Tiger strolled up to Sebastian, I felt a desire that was almost painful. That primitive part of my brain urged me to tear her clothes off and fuck the life out of her right there and to hell with the consequences.

That’s what it’s like to be in her presence and she’s one of the less impressive Hegemons.

* * * * *

While Caroline and Ash stayed in the hall to organize the procession of servants for later, I was with the footmen and maids setting the feast tables in the great hall before the Hegemons came down.

The large plank hardwood floor gleamed beneath the two-story tray ceiling and the room’s stone block walls. Rich tapestries, depicting some of Sebastian’s great personal and political accomplishments, hung inside arched alcoves while stained glass windows added to the cathedral feel. The fireplaces on either side of the room blazed high with logs, combining with the candles on the three wrought iron chandeliers to bathe the room in an unearthly glow. Banners sporting Vampyr mottos in Latin streamed down from the second floor balcony overlooking the room where a quintet of musicians (borrowed from one of his Governors) played a variety of period music.

I remember I couldn’t get that Tears for Fears song “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” out of my head.

Naturally, the problems started even before the dinner did.

The Hegemon of the Eastern European Domain came downstairs first, just as he’d been the first to arrive. He’s known only as Draco. You trill the ‘r’ like in Spanish and the ‘a’ is an ‘ah’ sound.

He is, quite simply, the scariest motherfucker I have ever laid eyes on.

He has what I can only describe as a cruel face. Bony, narrow and swarthy for a Vampyr. It bears the scars of both smallpox and a perpetually sour expression. He slicks his widow’s-peaked, wiry black hair back straight, Dracula style and wears sunglasses even in low lighting.

When he first walked into Sebastian’s house, you could feel him like an arctic wind. Ivan the Terrible, Vlad Tepes, Peter the Great, Nicolai Ceausescu, Catherine the Great, Joseph Stalin: his is the will they all obeyed.

Draco had done nothing obvious to “freshen up” in the hours since his arrival and strode into the great hall the same way he’d entered the house earlier, Revenant bodyguards in tow.

Revenants are the cannibalistic vampires who gave rise to the legendary Transylvanian folklore. They seem to be a phenomenon similar to the
Guaiwu
and rather than wipe them out, Draco unknowingly took a page from the Shen’s book and conducted a campaign throughout the later Middle Ages to subjugate them into eternal slavery. They followed their master like attack dogs as he stepped up onto the platform that held the high table.

“Your arrangements are unacceptable,” he stated in a flat, slightly Russian-accented bass that cut through the air like a thrown dagger.

Sebastian, standing at the door that leads into the butler’s pantry and making some final arrangements with Helmut, turned. “What dost thou mean? And were we not agreed that thee’d be leaving those filthy beasts in yer rooms?”

Draco didn’t move, except perhaps to lift his chin a bit but his stillness was a waiting crocodile’s. “The Oriental witch continues to bring her creatures, therefore I shall bring mine.” His right arm moved—independent of the rest of his body—to indicate his ornately carved armchair. “My chair has been placed at the far right of the Judicis’s, yourself and Great Britain between, accounting my standing only marginally higher than Africa. This insult will be amended before the feast commences.”

Sebastian sighed. “I consulted Hegemons Julia and Plantagenet on the seating. If thou have a complaint, thou should—”

“Ah, we’re arguing about Draco’s status again,
oui
?” said a cheerful voice with a light French accent.

We all glanced to the far doors where Jean-Paul Valmont, Hegemon of Africa and the Hegemon of Western Europe, Julia Agrippina, entered arm in arm. They glided across the floor with such grace that they hardly seemed to be moving at all and wore polite, appropriate smiles without a trace of warmth in them.

Valmont is a few inches shorter than me with a very slender build and the kind of face you see in Renaissance paintings of angels. He showed up for dinner in one of the many variations of his usual Lestat costume: white with a crimson vest that matched the ribbons he tied his long caramel hair into twin ponytails with. Caroline’s bio mentioned that he stole his name from a character in some French novel.

Sebastian tried to get his lips to smile at the newly arrived couple but only managed a grimace of clenched teeth. “We are not arguing, Valmont. There is no argument. I am merely explaining to Hegemon Draco—”

“As you must plainly see, noble lady,” Draco interrupted, addressing himself directly to Hegemon Julia. “My standing has been incorrectly represented in this arrangement.”

She and Valmont paused at the edge of the platform and she studied the line of chairs while her gilded boy-toy hung smugly from her elbow. “Yet plainly I see that it has not.”

Draco’s spine stiffened and his Revenants hissed softly. “Though true that my Domain has, for a time, lost some small prestige, still my personal standing within this body is more distinguished. My age and years on the council both exceed the Oriental, yet she is positioned ahead of me.”

Julia nodded, her polite smile still fixed and almost as chilling as Draco’s glower. “Yes but the gap between your age and hers is not so much. A trifle of perhaps a century, is it not? And while your years of service to this august body do exceed hers, the distance between the achievements of your two Domains can no longer be counted insignificant.”