Page 31 of Blood Lovers (American Vampires #1)

Say goodbye now.

Echo is waiting for me on the landing two floors down. I pass by her without stopping. “Do not go up there.”

“But Paul—”

“Save it for another time, Echo. Whatever it is you’re going to say, I already know.”

“But… where are you going?”

“To my apartments. Do not bother me unless Ryet is here.”

“Yes, my lord.”

I get down to the second level, then take a long hallway over to my own wing. I wish that little tower was on my side of the lodge, but it isn’t. And in my mind, all these decades, whenever I have stepped in the purple mist of the future, that was the room where it all happened.

So that is the room where it shall happen.

When I step through the door to my apartment, I can’t help but think about the phone call I made to Ryet when I first came up out of the ground. How rebellious he was that night. How certain he was, as well. Strong-willed, defiant, and, as always, confident.

Today though, he was angry. More at the little witch than he was me. Which is understandable. She betrayed him.

Of course, I set it up that way. So… poor Syrsee. She’s just bumbling around like a clueless idiot through no fault of her own. The Guild has told some pretty big lies to that girl. She will never trust them again. Just as Ryet will never trust her again.

But we all go through betrayals from time to time. Even me. Being banished from the fold was the best thing that could’ve happened. That challenge built my character. It also allowed me time to perfect my powers and work on my weaknesses. I’ve grown used to my absolute authority over the centuries. It’s quite nice not having the Obscurati on my back. If—no, when— I am welcomed back into the fold there will be an adjustment period for me.

But I am ready for that. I am ready.

I am ready for all of it.

Especially this one last visit to Josep.

I go over to the far wall of my living area and open a panel in the wall. There are no lights and it is pitch dark, but my vampire eyes don’t need lights. So I simply walk inside the small foyer, close the door, and descend the stairs that will take me underground to my geneticist.

Occasionally, these days, if I’m drunk or in a good mood, I will try to describe my relationship to Josep to my projects. In the early days I would spell this all out to each and every scion. But that got tiring. Explaining over and over. And for what? They all died in the end.

So with Ryet, I did everything different. Up to and including fully explaining my working relationship with Josep. Which was easy because Josep was already underground by the time Ryet was born. And by the time Ryet was old enough to build him the bunker here at the compound, Josep hadn’t seen sunlight for more than a decade.

We do love our darkness. Both darkness of the spirit and the actual blackness. So I suppose I can understand how humans might misinterpret our love for the dark as an aversion to the light.

The stairs end abruptly at a door. I pause. Straighten my shirt. Then inhale.

The scent of earth and dirt fills my nose and this air alone is enough to give me some energy.

I open the door, step into the tunnel, and walk forward towards the bunker. There is no door leading in. Or out, for that matter. It’s really just a shipping container with the ends cut off. When I enter there is one flickering candle on a small wooden table to my right and an old leather couch on my left. Josep is nowhere to be seen.

But that’s because he doesn’t stay here much. He prefers the cavern with the rocks and trickling waterfall that empties into a dark pool.

When one hears the word ‘geneticist’ they immediately picture labs, and chemicals, and potions. But that is not how genetics work in the vampire world.

I have already mentioned how wrong the lore is. This is just one more thing.

Bite your way into offspring? That’s laughable. If it were so easy, we’d have overtaken this world millennia ago.

No. Producing a brand-new baby vampire starts, of course, with a scion. Just like Ryet. But getting past the scion stage has always been the problem. Every vampire—even with the help of the fold and fully sanctioned by the Obscurati and their dark magic—will have trouble reproducing.

The scion has a natural lifespan of about thirty years, give or take. I have been keeping Ryet alive with the blessing of Josep, who has the blessing of the Darkness.

You see, it is really the Darkness that produces new vampires, not us. Just as it is the Darkness that produces new Black witches. However, the two processes are completely different.

Anyway. Josep does not have a lab. There are no DNA samples. There’s no mapping of the genome. We do things the old-fashioned way here.

With blood.

So I suppose I can understand how the humans got that wrong, as well. Someone was told that there is an exchange of blood between a human and a vampire, and poof. Baby vampires are born.

It doesn’t quite go like that, of course.

There will be an exchange of blood for Ryet tonight. Mine and his. Syrsee’s and his. But this birthing process has been going on for sixty-five years . One cannot simply bite a human and make a baby. And Ryet is not, nor has he ever been, human.

He is a scion .

And before I bit him that night in the alley, he was puer surculus. Infant slave of the master.

One might assume that I am the master. It would be a forgivable mistake.

But I am not the master.

There is but one master.

And after I make my first child—after Ryet has fully transformed—I will finally meet that master once again. Because I will, once again, be a fully-fledged geneticist.

Originis nosferatu .

Just thinking those words in my head fills me with joy.

Because once that happens, I will have won, won’t I? And the Obscurati will be powerless to stop me this time.

I am already lord, but once I am father, the empire of the American Vampires will truly begin.

The tunnel begins to mist up and the air becomes lighter. I’ve always loved this dichotomy about Josep’s cave. He’s literally living in the dark under the earth and yet his cave is so refreshing. As I get closer to the cave opening, the air becomes a mist and the scent of earth more alluring as the sound of the trickling waterfall finds my ears.

I can see it. Maybe. One day. Burying myself in a cave such as this. Surrounded by the energy of the black dirt, but able to walk around and live as well.

How I do love to be underground.

Oh, to be Josep. To live in the earth full-time. It is a dream. One I aspire to. But as the lord of North America, it will not happen for centuries, at least. Perhaps even a thousand years, if everything goes well with Ryet.

A price I must pay.

As I enter Josep’s cave, I realize there is a small glow in one corner. Not a candle, or an actual light, but the lavender haze. Josep lives among the haze. Not in it—he doesn’t dreamwalk the way I do. They didn’t have that power when he was born since it came from me. But over the centuries he has taken command of that magic in his own way, drawing energy from it.

And light as well, I guess. It’s one way to brighten up one’s cave.

He’s sitting at a desk, his back to me. I pause to study that back. All cut with muscles. His skin taut across his broad shoulders. My eyes drop down to the curve of his upper arms, then trace that line back up to where his blond hair has been pulled back at the nape of his neck.

He’s writing something in a book.

“Am I disturbing you?”

“Of course not, Paul.” He doesn’t turn to look at me, just continues to write. “I’ve been expecting you.”

His voice is soft and calm, but also very deep. It’s soothing, actually. That’s what drew me to him back when I was young. I have never seen him angry. He is always patient. And after my upbringing, I needed that.

“The girl is here.”

Now he does turn. And he’s smiling. And, oh, how beautiful is that smile? Another reason why I partnered with him in those early days. He’s very, very pretty. “Already?”

I smile back, then shrug with my hands as I chuckle. “Things really went our way, brother.”

He stands up, body filthy with dirt. But that just makes him more captivating. The dirt is the earth, and the earth is power.

Don’t we all love power?

Isn’t a man wearing power always more attractive?

He comes towards me, places his hands on my shoulders and looks me in the eyes. They are lavender these days. Like the mist and the light that surrounds him now. “This is it?”

I nod my head, still lost in those eyes. “Ryet’s not here yet, but he will be shortly. The girl is being bled out right now. You will have your share in a matter of hours.”

He lets out a breath, then releases me and turns, walking across the smooth rock floor to the little pool of cool water that is collecting underneath the trickling waterfall.

He stands there in front of the pool, looking down, perhaps studying his own distorted reflection in the water. Then he turns again and smiles bigger. “We did it.”

“We did.”

“He’s going to be born tonight?”

“Absolutely.”

“And how long—”

“I don’t know. A week, perhaps? You know how slow things move across the ocean.”

“Yeah.” Josep turns again.

I just watch him from behind. The way his back moves with his breathing. The way he’s nearly aglow with the lavender mist.

He’s older than me by a thousand years, at least. He was my mentor in those early days. I had killed my maker with dead Black blood and was in prison for this crime when Josep took notice of me and my plight. He was tired back then. Tired of living, tired of failing, tired of everything. And he only agreed to be my mentor if I shared the dead blood with him so he could kill himself and be done with it.

I agreed, of course. He was beautiful then too. And enticing. But I was on a mission, you see. A mission of power. And I wanted to make changes to my lineage. So I didn’t think about it. I just made him promise to see it through with me and then he could drink that blood any time he wanted.

We stored blood in crude glass jars back then. But dead blood has no shelf life. He still has his jar of dead blood somewhere around here. But he never drank it. Not after we had success.

Or, as it turned out, failure. Depends on whose eyes you’re looking through, doesn’t it?

And then… oh, how angry they all were at what Josep and I accomplished with the genetics.

So naturally, he came with me across the ocean.

If we did it once, we could do it again. That’s what he told me when we were chained together on the long voyage to the New World.

Indeed. We could.

And now, after hundreds of years—and many, many failures—we have.

“Did you have your visit with the Darkness?” I prod him because he’s been silent for almost a minute now.

He turns, nodding. “Weeks ago.” Then he points to his neck. “But it’s still in there, of course. All you have to do is bite.”

This is how education works in our world. This is how genetics works. It takes a very special person to lure the Darkness to them. It isn’t something that just hands over power. I don’t know how other creatures deal with it, but in the vampire world the Darkness ignores you until you do something spectacular without its help. Something like create a new vampire from nothing.

It’s not impossible to do, but it doesn’t happen often. And, of course, these new creatures are not really vampires. They are mistakes.

But mistakes count in our world. It makes the Darkness take notice.

Josep’s relationship with the Darkness started long before I met him. He was something of a prodigy, I hear, making hideous things from Black blood.

My own relationship with the Darkness was severed almost the same moment it began. That’s how awful and terrible the things Josep and I made together were. We used our small allotment of Black blood, but also the dead Black blood from a little witch we sacrificed. We stole the child right out of the hatchery.

Everything about what we did was illegal. But it was so spectacularly hideous that the Obscurati took notice. We had to be punished, of course. But we weren’t killed and that’s all that matters now.

“Well?”

I realize I’ve just been staring at Josep as these memories were flowing. “Yes. Right.” I walk towards him and we move awkwardly for a moment, trying to find the right positioning. I haven’t bitten him in a long time. He’s had nothing to give me since before Ryet was born. The Darkness was ignoring me, bored with my lack of progress. But it started taking more notice in the last decade or so and the moment I came up from the ground a few weeks ago, I already knew that the Darkness had blessed Josep with the final dose of magic to see our project to completion.

I press myself into Josep. Into his naked body, covered in the power of the earth. I breathe him in as he responds, pressing himself into me. His arms slip around my hips and mine go to his head. He bites his lip as I look into those lavender eyes of his, and then there it is.

My reward.

I kiss him. Deeply. Enjoying that just as much as the blood that trickles out. Then I suck on him until the wound closes and I drag my lips down his neck as I tip his head back, exposing his throat, and I bite.

What comes next is a long series of flashing moments. Time ceases to exist when I get gifts of magic from the Darkness via Josep. It’s bliss. Just pure bliss.

I have never had the pleasure of being fed on to receive the gift the way Josep has, but my time is coming soon.

Soon I will meet that Darkness once again and this time… this time it will feed on me and I will get something spectacular in return.

Soon…

I drink Josep until his body goes limp and his eyes close. Then I pick up him up in my arms, carry him over to a long, flat rock, sit down with my feet in the water—getting my shoes and pants wet—and I cradle him in my arms as I bite my lip and kiss him again.

It takes a few moments for the new blood to hit his system and wake him up, but hit him and wake him it does.

He draws harder, sucking on me until I am the weak one. Until I am limp and he has to take me in his arms.

Then we do this again.

And again.

And again.

When I come back up from Josep’s bunker and enter my apartments, I am dizzy from the thrill and the blood, ecstatic with the knowledge that tonight is our night.

And Echo is furiously knocking on my door. “My lord!” she’s shouting. “Are you in there? My lord! Open up. It’s—”

I open the door just as she says, “Ryet!”

“Is he here?”

Echo nods. “He’s here. But he’s crashed his truck on the driveway. About half a mile down the road.”

“Did you get him?”

She shakes her head. “No. We tried, but he was… he was trying to bite us, lord. And we—”

“It’s fine. I’ll take care of it. You did the right thing, Echo. If Ryet bites you, he’ll kill you.”

Echo swallows. “Yes, lord. I thought so. He got a hold of the guy who approached him first—we’re…” She hesitates. “We’re still trying to identify who that was.”

“Excellent.”

“My lord?”

Poor Echo. She is here. She has been bitten by Lucia. She is a halfbreed vampire. And she has absolutely no idea what that really means. So I decide to enlighten her just a little.

“He’s transforming, Echo. In a few hours Ryet will be the most magnificent monster you’ve ever seen.” She’s still confused, but that’s why I like her. The innocence in this one delights me. So I place my hands on her cheeks, lean in, and kiss her mouth. “I would feed you right now if I wasn’t full of the blood Ryet needs.” I whisper these words past her lips. “But after this is over, Echo, you will be rewarded.” Then I draw back. “Get me the Hummer. You’re driving. We’re going to make history tonight.”

Echo is still stunned from my kiss and my words, her eyes wide, her mouth open. She touches her lips with the pad of a fingertip, lost in the feeling of me.

Then she snaps out of it. “Yes, my lord. Right away.”

She leaves and I close the door, then change out of my wet clothes and put on a suit. An expensive, custom suit that I bought in London before I went underground this last time. This is a grand occasion so I feel the need to dress the part.

I go downstairs and find the house is full of halfbreeds. They are silent and looking at me like they expect an explanation. I, of course, ignore them. But for a brief moment, I register Lucia’s absence, then remember I left her with Syrsee.

God Himself only knows what debauchery she is planning up there with my feeder. But whatever it is, it’s not worth my concern. Syrsee is still here—I can feel her heartbeat. It’s an almost imperceptible low-level hum that reverberates through the lodge. In addition, I know she is weak, which means Lucia has followed my direction and bagged up her blood.

The stars have aligned tonight.

Nothing will stop me now.

The last piece of the puzzle is Ryet and he is waiting for me down the driveway.

“Get busy.” I bark this at the gaping halfbreeds. “Surely you all have somewhere to be and something to do.”

The all nod and then, like they are a collective organism, they disperse.

I walk through the foyer and out into the frigid night. Echo is waiting in the Hummer and when I get in, she’s even got the heat on.

“Let’s go.”

“Yes, my lord.”

I really, really like her. And I’m looking forward to giving her some blood. I think she’s cute. I think I might fuck her. I think I might keep her by my side for a little while. Maybe even nurture her. Let her get strong and take some duties away from Lucia.

Lucia would hate that, but since when do I care what Lucia thinks?

Ryet’s truck is half on the road and half in the ditch. There are about a dozen halfbreeds already there —a good distance away from his limp body in the snow. They have even made a fire nearby, no doubt concerned that the freezing cold night might hurt him in some way.

The cold will not bother him. He is probably so hot with fever right now, I’m certain it feels good.

I get out of the Hummer and clap my hands. “Thank you all. Please go back to whatever it is you do. Echo and I will handle things from here.”

They nod, sound off a chorus of, “Yes, my lords,” and start walking back up the driveway in the direction of the lodge.

I turn back to Ryet and walk over to him, kneeling down in the snow, getting my suit pants all wet. But I don’t care. I would do anything for this man.

Anything.

I am leaning into his ear as I whisper his name. “Ryet.”

He turns his head, angling his mouth towards me. Seeking a drink. It’s not something he ever does, so this is a thrill in and of itself.

I cannot feed him. Not yet. Even though I want to. I want to take him in my arms and let him suck all the blood out of me right now.

But Josep and I have failed too many times before. There is a protocol that must be followed exactly. The chance of messing this up now is miniscule, but it is still there. And giving Ryet my blood, tainted with Josep’s, which is tainted with the Darkness, would certainly be a kink in the chain.

He must take Syrsee first. He must drain her dry. Only then can he have the gift inside me.

I pick him up in my arms and feel the heat burning him up from the inside out. Then I carry him to the Hummer and get in, keeping him in my lap. “Let’s go.”

Echo pulls out, does a u-turn, and then drives us back. I close my eyes, enjoying this moment to its fullest. He is mine now. And he will be mine forever.

We will be equals soon. And then… oh, I can’t wait for what happens then.

When we get to the lodge I get out with Ryet in my arms. Limp. Head hanging back, arms draping down. And there are a few gasps from the halfbreeds who are hanging about.

I don’t tell them to leave. It’s a big moment for them as well. They will never be like me. They will never be vampires. But they are good slaves and this is something they will remember for the rest of their short lives.

They do not follow me into the lodge. Even Echo hangs back, probably waiting for permission to join in on what comes next.

But I don’t give her that permission. As much as I like her, this is a moment for three people only.

Ryet stirs in my arms as I climb the stairs towards the room where my little Black witch awaits.

“Shhh,” I tell him, right into his ear. “It’s almost over now, Ryet.”

“I…” He moans this word out. “I… I can see her, Paul. I can see her.”

“Good,” I whisper back. “Good. Say goodbye to your Jane, Ryet. Say goodbye to all of them now. This will be the last time you will ever have this pain.”