Chapter 3

Aldric's POV

I hover outside the girl’s bedroom window, delighting in the confused expression on her face. She can’t see me because I don’t want her to see me, but I won’t be able to hang out here all night watching her. Sooner or later, Baron will come looking for me.

I float back to solid ground and head to the catacombs that are carved into the mountains behind Baron’s mansion. I push the heavy wrought iron gate open, and without bothering to light one of the torches, I step inside the gallery.

The walls are nothing but mountain rock and the floor is compacted earth. The tomb in the middle of the catacomb belongs to our oldest ancestor, Asmodeus. No one has ever looked inside, we dare not open his tomb, but we’ve all heard him. On the last night of the Festival of Creation, we can hear him wailing from inside his sepulchre.

Along the walls, each vampire in his own sarcophagus, are the rest of the originals. Twenty-one in all. I walk past them, down the first corridor to the right. Deeper and deeper into the catacombs until I can’t even hear the world outside anymore.

Here it’s pitch black, yet I have no trouble finding my way. The ground is rotten and stinks like death. Not that anyone in here is truly dead. They’re suspended in a place somewhere in-between. The ultimate punishment for a vampire. Starving, trapped in the darkness, and slowly turning to stone. They can be revived, but it would take so much blood that we’ll probably run out of humans before we can get them restored.

I stop at the stone sarcophagus at the far end of the corridor. I hadn’t been here in eleven years, the last time I visited Baron. I put my hand on the cold sarcophagus. “Darrick,” I whisper my father’s name.

He’s one of the few vampires that willingly walked into the catacombs. He wouldn’t take part in Baron’s uprising against the humans. At the time, I thought my father was a fool. I wholeheartedly shared Baron’s vision for a new world order. A Utopia where all species lived in harmony, ruled over by the species at the top of the food chain.

I was a fool!

I remove the top of the sarcophagus and stare at my father’s marbled face. I touch his icy, rock-hard skin. It took him such a long time to petrify. For decades, I heard his cries of anguish. It haunted my sleep. Then, one day, it stopped. “Let me bring you back,” I whisper. “I need you. We all need you.”

Of course, he doesn’t answer. Hopefully, he’s in a deep sleep and trapped in a pleasant dream with his bride. Swallowing past a lump in my throat, I close the sarcophagus and run back the way I came. I stop next to Asmodeus’s tomb, wondering, as I always do when I come here, how much longer it will take for him to petrify.

Not that I’m grieving for Asmodeus. He would have been our overlord now if we didn’t overthrow him. His plans for the humans were a hundred times worse than Baron’s, and he deserved what he got.

“Do you still weep for your father?” Baron asks behind me.

I don’t flinch or react in any way. I heard him coming, but he likes to think he can sneak up on me. “Of course I do. Don’t you grief for yours?”

“No, not really.”

He’s lying through his ass, but I don’t call him out on it. I have to at least try to stay in Baron’s good graces. He won’t remove me from my position, I have too many allies, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try to accidentally on purpose forget I exist. “What’s with that girl?” I ask instead. “Simone. Why have I never met her before?”

“She’s mine.”

“Oh, calm your fucking tits. I know. Is it because of her blood?”

“No,” Baron says flatly. “I love her.”

I’m sure he thinks he does, but he’s incapable of truly loving anyone. Baron thought he loved someone before, and things didn’t turn out so well for her. I never met his ill-fated bride but we all know why she walked into the ocean. “Will you turn her?”

“Yes,” he says. “At the end of this year’s Festival of Creation.”

I don’t know why I care. She’s a human. Just another human that will become a bride and another problem I’ll need to deal with. Over time, she’ll lose her humanity and Baron will grow tired of her. He’ll discard her and find himself a new little toy.

But there is the matter of her blood. If he turns her, he’ll have an endless supply and there is no way Baron will let someone like her go. She’ll be his own, private little fountain of pleasure.

Golden blood makes us high. I’ve only had it once in my life, and I swore never again. The euphoria was intense, bordering on painful, and it lasted for hours. I woke up naked, covered in blood, surrounded by naked vampires and human corpses.

It isn’t the high that scares me, it is the crash from that high that I never want to experience again. I was depressed for weeks and nothing gave me even the slightest bit of pleasure. “Does she know?” I ask.

Why do I care?

It’s her blood. It has to be. I had one little whiff of it and I lost my appetite.

“Not yet. It’s a surprise.”

Judging by how the poor girl reacted when she walked into the dining room, I sincerely doubt she’ll be surprised, more likely horrified. Asmodeus’s tomb rattles unexpectedly. Baron and I both jump back in reflex. Our presence woke the ancient one. “Let’s go outside,” I say.

Baron doesn’t argue with me. He rarely does. I’m younger than he is, but my bloodline’s powers are truly fearsome and my brothers are loyal. He’ll need an army of vampires to take us out and he knows it.

The wind blows in from the direction of Ward one’s camps. These are Baron’s private camps where he keeps his own breeders and livestock for his household’s purposes. It stinks to absolute high heaven, but after the stale air of the catacombs, I welcome it. “You have to clean your camps, man,” I say.

“Why?”

“What good is diseased livestock?” I ask.

God, I wish I could kill him, but like me, Baron has powerful allies. If I start a war with him, I’ll just cause more suffering, more death, more destruction, and I’ve done quite enough of that to last me several lifetimes. “I don’t understand your…sympathy for the humans,” Baron says.

"It's not sympathy, it's just common sense."

Baron shrugs and stares in the direction of the camps. I haven’t noticed, mostly because he’s usually a sullen fucker and I’ve forgotten just how bad he can be, but he’s very distracted. “What’s wrong with you?” I ask.

“Tomorrow it’s been ten years.”

Oh. Imogen. His lost bride. “You need to let her go. She’s dead.”

“I know. She’s not the one I’m thinking about. Tomorrow is Simone’s twenty-first birthday.”

“So?”

“She’s the same age her mother was when I met her.”

Oh, God. No. “Tell me Simone isn’t Imogen’s daughter.

“She is.”

“Baron…you can’t.”

Baron spins around to look at me, his eyes piercing into my skull. “Why not? Why can’t I?”

“You raised her.” I remember all the human children I raised in my camps over the years, and how I still thought of them as children even when they were old and grey. “You don’t think of her as a little girl?”

An ugly smile I really don’t care for spreads across his face. “She hasn’t been a little girl for quite some time now.”

Bile pushes up in my throat, and I quickly swallow it back down. I don’t show anything on the outside. I’m very good at masking and over the years learned how to control all my reactions, including my heartbeat, so I can even fool a vampire.

“Why do you care anyway?” he asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t care about her,” I lie. “I worry about you. You are not the same…you’re distracted. What if this is just another Imogen? What then, Baron?”

"Your concern is noted." He saheks his head. “But she won’t be. She’ll be fine.”

“Blood madness is genetic. If you couldn’t turn her mother, you won’t be able to turn her.”

“She has golden blood. It will work.”

I sigh and decide to let it go. He won’t listen to reason anyway. “I’ll take care of the camps,” I offer.

“Why bother?”

“Because this weekend is our holiest festival, I refuse to celebrate it with the stink of human in my nostrils. Remember what we celebrate.”

“Fine-” Baron sweeps his arm in the direction of the camps far below -“you always were a religious fucker. Go clean the camps if it makes you happy.”

“Can I use your servants to help me?”

“Yes, whatever, take as many as you need.”

“Thank you.”

I bend my knees and kick off, soaring into the sky and landing right outside the kitchen less than a minute later. I round up every neophyte, vampires in training, I can find and bring them with me to the camps.

I spend the rest of the night overseeing the neophytes. At least they’re fast, and by the time I can feel the approaching sunrise the camps are in some kind of order and don’t smell quite so bad. The humans try their best to keep it clean themselves, but without ready access to water and cleaning supplies, their efforts are futile. 

“Go home,” I order the neophytes an hour before sunrise. “Feed and get enough rest. The festival starts at sundown.”

I take one last look at the camps, then take off, leaving the neophytes to find their own way home.

I go straight to my room for the weekend, take a shower, and close the heavy shutters to keep the daylight out. The sun doesn’t affect my bloodline negatively, but it’s good to keep up appearances. Someone, probably Baron, left a blood bag on my pillow.

I usually don’t drink unknown blood, but I’m starving and the painful thirst reminding me that I haven’t fed yet is driving me insane. I tear the bag open and bring it to my nose. Grimacing and shaking my head, I get up and empty the bag in the bathroom sink. I can smell the human disease in the blood – Typhoid. It won’t harm me, but it makes the blood bitter.

I pull on a pair of joggers and a sweater and lie on the soft, comfortable bed, listening to the house settle down and gradually go quiet. The only sound is the footsteps of Baron’s patrolling wolves. No doubt, he has a few wolf guards on Simone’s door.

The girl’s image pops unbidden in my head. She’s beautiful with long, naturally blonde hair and a soft pixie face. The dress she wore tonight fit her perfectly, accentuating every curve and showing off her slender frame.

But what really caught my attention were her eyes. She has the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.

And more than anything, I want to take that sadness away.