Total pages in book: 125
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122030 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
“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.