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A little baby taste.

L ittle Baby screams the whole fall down as I hold her against my chest. Then the landing is so hard, I lose my grip and she goes flying forward, falling face-first into the ragged rock floor.

She makes noises of pain, then she starts sobbing.

I let out a breath. Then take in another one, filling my lungs with the pungent, humid air that one only finds at the entrance to Hell. The mist is thin, but it’s very purple down here. Purple that is almost black. Purple the color of a feeder’s blood.

It’s the past, it’s the future—the mist down here is all possibilities at once.

It’s only been about six weeks since I last visited the gates, but it feels like forever since I was deep in the earth like this.

This is where vampires come from. Not the physical location at the bottom of a cave drop found off a hallway. ‘Here’ isn’t a definitive term. You can find Hell just about anywhere underground if you’re a vampire blessed by the Darkness, as I am.

We not only like it here, we want to be here. That’s why we love the Darkness. That’s why we try to please it so badly. This is where we belong.

Little Baby—the creature formerly known as Echo—does not belong here.

She gets to her feet, sobbing through her screams. “What’s going on? Where the hell are we ?”

I chuckle at her little accidental pun. “Well, you got it in one, dear girl. We are at Hell’s Gates.”

Her eyes go wide, then they wildly dart around, looking past me. Like she might be able to go back. To escape. To evade her future.

“Oh, good luck with that.” I chuckle these words out. “There is nothing behind me but rock. To leave now, Little Baby, you must go up.” I watch, fascinated by this girl, as her eyes track above my head, squinting because she can’t see in the dark.

But I can. And there is fear all over her face. This fear manifests as a screech. “Take me back! I want to go back! Right now!”

“I’m sorry, Little Baby. That’s just not possible.”

“Stop calling me that! And you’re gonna be in so much trouble! Paul will come back. He’ll come back and he’ll be looking for me! I’m the loyal one! I’m the one he loves now! And he will look for me! And when he finds out that you kidnapped me?—”

I put up a hand and her mouth goes silent. She’s still moving her lips, but the mute button has been pressed. Once she realizes this, she starts grabbing at her throat, freaking out.

I reach out, snatch both her hands in mine, and then look her in the eyes. “Well, you’re right about one thing. You are Paul’s favorite. But let me be clear. Paul is the one who chose you, Little Baby. You endeared yourself to him. To get noticed. To get fed. To be the special one in the house. Isn’t that right?”

She can’t answer me and doesn’t even try to mouth words of agreement. She just stares at me in shock.

“Well, you did such an excellent job—you were such a good little slave, such a good little halfbreed slave—that he decided to give you to the Darkness. You’re a present, you see. A gift. An offering. Oh, let’s be real, shall we? You’re a sacrifice, Little Baby.”

She opens her mouth in a silent scream.

“And now it’s time for your reward, dear girl. You’re about to witness something rare, and powerful, and life-changing.”

She has given up on the screaming. Now she’s motionless. Eyes open, mouth open, still shocked, but under a spell.

I lean into her neck, nipping the skin right over her jugular. Teasing it open, little by little. Exposing the vein without tearing it. Little Baby squirms, trying to unbalance me as I continue to pin her to the ground. “Shhhhhhhh.” I say this right into her ear. “You’ll be OK again, eventually. It won’t last long. And no matter what happens next, you won’t remember it.”

She chokes on air, trying to inhale. And when I pull back so I can see her face, her eyes are going wide in a panic. This is what it looks like. This is what the end looks like. This girl right here. So young, and sweet, and filled with plans for the future that will never be realized.

I stroke her cheek and gaze lovingly into her eyes, willing her to calm down.

Little Baby has no power here. She was never given a choice. Lucia presented her with an opportunity, as she did all her halfbreeds. ‘Live bigger, better, unconventionally.’ That was her favorite phrase back when I was still paying attention to what she was doing. That’s how she convinced the humans to shorten their natural lifespans by decades and join her.

Lucia was never a loner. It was always the main thing that set her apart from Paul and I. And while I am a much lesser vampire than Paul because I was made so long ago—long before the definition of vampire started to change—compared to Lucia, I’m a textbook example.

She has always needed humans. But witches come in family groups. Covens, or clans, or whatever they call themselves these days. Black witches included. They all come from somewhere. Though the Black witches are cast out at birth, of course. In one way or another. Killed for their magic or given as a blood gift to the vampire who made them.

Lucia was not a Black witch, but she was not an ordinary witch, either. She was something in between. A pet to one of the Obscurati masters in Rome back in the ancient days. She was older than Paul by a couple hundred years, even though she looked like a child when she joined our small group and took the trip across the ocean with us.

A pet to be experimented on. Much magic was done to her in the name of progress back in the Old World. She was not a witch but she was not a vampire, either. She was a mongrel? Or, if one is poetic and sees the glass as half full, a hybrid. The first and last of her kind.

A mistake, actually.

But I prefer to call her a fortunate turn of events.

And she served her purpose with us. We used her blood, after all, to make Syrsee. Well, we did that experiment hundreds of times before Syrsee came along. All of them failures until that glorious day when she was born and her grandmother killed her mother, took her power, and gave it to the little girl.

That was the part we were missing in the other attempts to make the perfect symbiotic feeder for our perfect new line of American Vampires.

You need evil to make new evil. And what that grandmother did—sacrificed her own daughter, more than once, just so she could do it all over again with her granddaughter—that is one of the ultimate evils. Of course, all black magic acts done against children are evil. But what the Black witches do to their offspring is a whole other level of evil.

Little Baby moans in my arms, but she is calm now. My gaze has overpowered her instincts to be afraid.

It is time.

I stand up, holding Little Baby in my arms, and walk forward into the blackness. I can see a good way down the tunnel with my night vision, but even I have limits. And this is why it’s called the Darkness, isn’t it?

Because at the limit of my vision is a hole. Blank and empty, but full at the same time. This hole leads everywhere and nowhere all at once. I have gone in there on more than one occasion. It is a container for all that was and all that will be.

It is the Darkness.

I take my time as I approach, waiting for signs of recognition. It won’t kill me. Can’t kill me—at least I don’t think. It’s not that kind of entity. The Darkness sucks things up. It takes. That’s all it wants, just to take. But it’s not looking for souls, or thoughts, or bodies. That’s not what it eats. It feeds on blood, just like us.

But we are part of it. It doesn’t want our blood. Paul and I. It will take our blood, then give it back. That’s how we make new vampires, after all. And new Black witches, in a roundabout way.

No, what the Darkness really wants is a nice sample of what it lacks. A mixture of the outside world.

And this is where Little Baby comes in. A little baby sample of what the Darkness lacks. Something… other. That was bitten, and torn to shreds, and fouled up with the saliva of the other halfbreeds as they fed.

Little Baby’s blood is a gift to the Darkness. She is a toy. Something to keep it occupied. A puzzle to put back together. Busy hands are happy hands, isn’t that what they say?

In giving the Darkness a little baby taste of the outside world, I give it something unique. Something it has not seen before. Something intriguing.

And in return, it gives me power.

I came up with this idea hundreds of years ago. Of course, I told Paul about it. We could’ve used a sullied, shredded halfbreed at any time in the past two hundred years to distract the Darkness, but only just the once.

Every time you ask the Darkness for a favor, you must give it something unique. It never works twice. So we saved this opportunity for just the right time.

Right now, as it is.

The Darkness hovers before me, an opaque circular disc that undulates like ink flowing through water, one moment oily and wet, the next like powder or smoke. It is everything, but it is nothing like anything anyone has ever seen before. It is an ending, not a beginning.

The end of everything, actually.

It hovers and waits. It needs an invitation, you see. It is what needs permission to enter, not the vampire. And while Little Baby cannot give this permission—she is not the one in control here—as her representative, I can.

So I do.