The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (61 page)

When I finished, I lay her on the berth to recover.
She did not need long, having grown used to our exchange. “The other donors are
different,” she said from her reclined position.

“In what way?”

“Veor says they’re false ones.”

I gestured for her to continue.

“Most of them come from the facility too,” she said.
“I’ve overheard some of them say they were supposed to be sent to a settlement
somewhere in the Nortrak, but were brought to the ship instead.”

“Do they seem happy here?”

She looked up at me with a blank stare, and then closed
her eyes. “I can’t say for sure, but I think so.”

“Tell me what you recall from the facility,” I said,
planting a hand overtop hers.

She mumbled at first, and then her voice grew
anxious. “I held that first baby in my arms—living, breathing,” she said.
“But it was broken.” She pulled herself up to sitting and touched my shoulder,
taking my eyes in with hers. I read her thoughts and knew what she would say
next. “We were surrogates.”

She meant for a race that was human in every way
except two, its steel immune system and blood type. The generation of
hematopes, though I knew nothing about them at the time, could scorn the
plague, outlive it, but also end the vampire’s reign. The bloodless was merely
the tip of the iceberg, the genetically engineered race the glacier floating
beneath.

“Eventually I was bedridden,” she said. “I miscarried
my last two.” Her color reddened, as shame spread across her face. “The pain
with my last was unbearable. I lost feeling from the waist down. I couldn’t
even sit up. I don’t know how—but I couldn’t feel my legs and they burned,
and itched so badly I’d scream until I fainted from the pain.”

She pulled herself closer, putting one hand on my
shoulder, the stench of her congealed blood insulting my senses.

“I was sure I’d die in that place,” she said. “I
wanted to die, ruined as I was, but then Veor found me and the pain dulled, and
the memories left.”

Veor’s attachment to his kinblood was strong, for he
stepped into the cabin, uninvited. Her sadness called to him, and whenever he
could ease her suffering, he simply stood by her. “Aer du okey syster?” He looked
at me before stepping forward. Veor and I had come to an understanding since
our escape from Rangu. I will forever be grateful to him for his help saving my
counterpart, and me.

“Ja mo bra,” she said, smiling up at him. “Alt aer
bra broor.”

He flew forward and kissed the top of her head
before retreating.

I gestured for her to continue when she was ready.

“Every doctor I saw, even Doctor Keng, who was there
most times, had a cold look in his eye, like he wasn’t really seeing me.”

“Did you know any of the other surrogates?”

She shook her head. “You have to understand, I
didn’t know much. I was too young to know the world when I was brought there,
and most of me died in that place. This ship and my responsibility to Lucia, and
you and Evelina, have brought me back.”

“Did you know Laszlo Arros?”

She looked at me, concentrated and focused. “I’ve
heard that name before.”

“The Empress asked you about him when you came
onboard.”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s it. She asked me about him,
but I’ve never heard of him.”

“Are you sure?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “I’d never lie to you,
Vincent. Believe me.”

Muriel had met Laszlo Arros, though she did not know
it was him at the time. When I got my hands on the booklet, I could see her
entire fresco. Until then, I had only ever gazed on a single tile.

“They were good to me, mostly,” she said. “But
giving birth was always painful.”

Her talk of pain aroused me, and I indulged my
brutish side, as I pressed her to tell me of her torture.

She turned her head to the side, color creeping into
her cheeks again. “My insides are still stretched,” she whispered. “So much
blood each time.”

I restrained myself form licking my lips.

“Oh,” Muriel said, “but the babies were always
perfect.” Her eyes welled with tears and she turned away. “I am so ashamed.”

“Your experience has made you fit for motherhood,” I
said, without a thought to my insensitivity. “Lucia’s mother is incapable as a
caregiver, but you are what she needs now.”

“I love her so.” She smiled with her mouth closed.
“She’s the one who’s saved my soul, your Lucia.”

Her affection for the child was plain, and as far as
I was concerned, she was the perfect parent for Evelina’s offspring. She was
even fit to nurse the newborn, as she did most readily.

“Do not underestimate the sacrifice of your blood
too,” I said. “We are indebted to you.”

“Keep me and Lucia safe,” she said. “Take us with
you when you go. And Veor, too.”

Her request made me think of a lamb, mewling for
protection from the wolf who has come to eat it. I turned away to examine the
watercolors on the bulkhead across from her, tempted anew by the pulse
thrumming in her neck. Her blood spoke to me, captivated my every sense, and I
did not resist taking her a second time before I left her cabin.

Time Waits for
No Man

“I will spare you the details of my gratification,
Dagur. To spend energy talking of blood after the loss of Evelina’s is simply a
waste of breath, though yours may compete for my favor. Blood rules me. Can you
understand this?”

I stretched my imagination to the corners but still
couldn’t comprehend his need. He was a man once.

“Long ago,” he said. “I lusted for blood, then, too,
only satisfied on the battlefield. My mother planted the desire in me as she buoyed
me up in her womb. A shifter with a petulant spirit, no child of hers would
suffer mortality. She wanted an invincible heir, more than immortal, an
unsinkable tyrant, a king to outlive all kings. But she could not make me
invincible without one weakness—one vulnerability that has me relying on
man for eternity.”

He pulled in a breath of air that seemed to change the
atmosphere in the room. I grew dizzy and before sinking into blackness, I heard
him say, “His blood.”

I don’t know how long I was out, slumped over my
drafting table, but when I woke the light in the tower had changed. The shadows
were gone and darkness lived in the cracks of the walls. The shuffling of wasps
in their nests on the outer stones settled when he spoke again, the tenor of
his voice commanding everything for miles.

“Shall we continue,” he said, offering me the pen
anew from its magical position in midair. “Time waits for no one.”

I snapped up my inky dagger, and drew my right hand
to my neck. Certain he’d fed on me, I caressed my skin with the tips of my
fingers to feel for the wound. It throbbed, but there were no holes to touch,
no congealed blood to savor.

“It is in your heart,” he said. “Shall we continue?”

Silenced again, he didn’t allow me to question him.
As I’d done from the start, I obeyed my orator and began transcribing. He started
with the Empress, claiming she’d underestimated his skill, as expected. He
didn’t tell me when or how he killed her, but I assumed the details were
forthcoming.

“She had grown blind in her seat of power, and thus
weak,” he said. “Before Shenmé perished, she assured me her progeny would act
as my ally and take me to the facility, but I did not believe that. You see,
Dagur, some vampires forget they are made. They delude themselves with ideas of
nativity and genesis. Do you see the difference? I emerged—I am the
origin. Everything after is made. The Empress mistook her heritage as a ticket
to power, but her venom was barely laced with mine, diluted through
transmission from another.”

I had turned my back on Vincent, as I concentrated
on the sheet gracing my table, but I imagined the grin I could hear in his
voice. I flinched when he crossed the room as though on wheels, and pulled my gaze
up to meet his. The tip of his claw dug into the soft flesh at the base of my
chin and I shuddered. He studied my aspect, forcing my gaze to behold his rage.
My eyeballs grew dry and stung at the corners, as I heeded the cry that rose up
in my throat, biting it down before it was transmitted as sound. My lips
trembled and my jaw shook, as he seemed to suck the life from me. I no longer inhaled
but was held in stasis, listening to the lone sound of my heartbeat as it pounded
slowly in my head.

“The Empress,” he began, “had no idea I had marked her
days.”

He raised his lip and scowled, showing me his subtle
fangs for the first time. They drew my hand upward like a magnet to metal and I
touched the tip of his horridness before he snapped his head back and returned
to his spot in the corner.

“Back to it,” he said, and I raised my pen to begin
again.

Empress Cixi

I interrupted her grieving, as she sat on the throne
in her cabin wearing a black veil that covered her eyes and hung midway down
her nose. Her mouth remained uncovered, and a small drip of blood pooled in its
corner. She had given up the European cigarettes she loved, a Lenten sacrifice
for her maker, and replaced them with the young donor at her side, her pacifier
for when she was swept up in sorrow.

“Return when I am done,” she barked at him, as I
entered. Just before he slipped out, she said, “I will suck you dry up on deck,
as the sun rises.”

I had not taken her for the kind of vampire who would
waste a valuable source, an investment she had groomed so meticulously. But she
answered my curiosity when she said, “Xing Fu never liked Jörvi. I will offer
him up for her.”

“Are you certain a blood sacrifice is what she would
want?”

“Of course,” she said. “I know her better than you.
Qing ways are our own.” She bit her bottom lip, capping the anger that rose
with her voice. “For five days, I shall kill one donor at sunrise.”

“Can you spare them?”

“Humph.” She scowled at me and then shrank from my
gaze. “Her donor shall be the last,” she said.

She tested me, but I would never let her take
Muriel. I hid my disapproval so she would not move her up in line.

The Empress displayed her grief with aplomb. Her
ties with her maker were strong, but mine were adamantine. Shenmé’s loyalty rested
with me, and her progeny would receive no clemency.

“What did Xing Fu confide before she—” She
could not speak the words, and had I been more sentimental, I may have felt sorry
for her. But even broken, she was callous, and I had given up mawkish ways with
the last of my mourning.

“What did she say to you?” She got up from the
throne and floated to my side, clasping the cuff of my coat, clinging to me as
though I could take her pain away. “Did she tell you why she wanted you to
come?”

I read deception in her eyes, and softened my gaze. “We
reminisced about our time together long before you.”

“Sentimental vampire,” she scoffed, dropping my cuff.
“She could be sappy. She loved you more than any other.”

“Of course she did.”

She gave me a hard stare and said, “You’re not a
nostalgic creature, why speak fondly of one as old as she?”

“She is my first.”

“Is Ei wai lina your last?”

“I thought Evelina was yours?”

Cixi clutched her neck with fingers covered in
ornamental claws. She examined me, trying to see between the folds of my
thoughts. She could read a face or two, but not mine. She gave up and turned
away, shuffling off to admire the head in the glass case.

I studied Vlad’s expression too, a blot on the tacky
setting. My visit to the Museum of Oriental Art seemed a lifetime ago, and yet the
sting of my blood loss still bit at me like an angered hornet writhing, forever
robbed of satisfaction.

“Ei wai lina,” she said. “Her transformation has made
you blossom. Like a proud parent.”

She reached in her black ruqun and pulled out a
cigarette case, studying it as she turned it over, and then tossed it across
the cabin the way a child would launch a toy in a tantrum. The slim silver case
broke in two, dropping to the deck empty.

“That’s for Ei wai lina,” she said.

I sneered and said, “She was never going to be yours.”

Cixi looked away and pouted. “My master ordered the
conversion,” she said, fooling me with the honest tremor in her voice.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sure she told you, didn’t she? Ei wai lina was
brought to her first, offered up as consolation for her starving body. The
child was next. But she smelled you on her, on both of them, and refused to
drink from a claim you’d staked. She wanted to give you the gift instead—as
Laszlo Arros suggested.”

Rage blinded me again, and I had difficulty separating
her lies from half-truths, but I held steady and hid my passion. “Why would
Laszlo Arros want to make Evelina my vampire?”

“Do you know him?” She grinned with a closed mouth.
“Because he knows you.”

“Who is he?”

“He has singlehandedly changed the world,” she said.
“He has discovered the cure for this plague and will rid us of these things
soon.”

“And what will become of your den when he does?”

“Donors will always be useful. Have you not seen how
well behaved mine are?”

“I have.”

“And the drink they supply is exceptional.” She
licked her lips with her pointy tongue.

“Yes, it is.”

She played with the edges of her sleeves, as though
her ruqun were the source of her imagination. The more she rubbed the material,
the more fluid her speech. “Laszlo Arros gave me the venom, you know?”

“In exchange for what?”

She giggled like a schoolgirl. “The last of my
unhealthy donors. They were tired and ailing, so he took them off my hands. He
claimed he would renew their vigor in that magic lab he has.”

“You have met him, then?”

She scoffed. “Youlan has been our mediator.”

“A vampire you can trust,” I said. “Is she one of
yours?”

“They all are.” She huffed and raised her pinky
finger to the corner of her mouth, using the ornamental claw to scratch off the
dried blood.

“Why my venom?”

“I didn’t know at first,” she said. “But Xing Fu
insisted it had fallen into the wrong hands.”

“How did she know?”

The Empress shrugged. “I don’t know that she did.”

“What am I missing?”

I had already learned of Byron’s betrayal, but her
crooked teeth and smile suggested something else—someone else.

“Who knew Laszlo Arros had a sample of my venom?” I
asked.

“The letters tell you everything, don’t they? How
your scientist was involved in the whole scheme.”

“How do you know?”

“You said it yourself,” she said. “I can trust
Youlan.”

We faced off for a moment, each of us not knowing
what the other was about to say, but she broke first. “She didn’t take her own
life,” she said. “I stuck this claw in her, right here.” She gestured on her
own neck to the spot where Evelina’s scar evinced her fate. “The blood gushed all
down her pretty little cheongsam, and I let it go to waste. Ick.”

Cixi vied for my wrath, trying to harden me, as the fraudulent
are wont to do. My hate for her ran deep, but the satisfaction of taking her
head would not be mine. I reserved that for another.

“She convulsed, as the blood began to trickle, and
she retched with her mouth open, desperate for air, reaching for sound. I
thought she’d cry your name, but she didn’t even whisper it. Nothing. Silence. Her
hero had abandoned her, and she knew it. She rushed headlong to death, not
knowing I would bring her back.”

She smiled and the wrinkles of her flat, wretched
pale skin disappeared, her face stretching with the tautness of her mouth. “I’m
glad things worked out in the end,” she said.

I put my hand to her chest and lifted her off the
ground, her slippers stroking the deck like a mop. “I will not ask you again,”
I said. “Who knew about my sample?”

“Youlan.”

I released her and she covered her ire with a faux
smile, itching to bounce me off the bulkheads. When the Empress bottled her
rage, as she was forced to do in my presence, her edges frayed. She had three
heads like Cerberus, and one at a time her triplets erupted with a yelp.

“And the priest, too,” she said.

“That lie is beneath you. Why stoop?”

She scoffed, “I never stoop. I own the priest, and
my Youlan. All of them do my bidding.”

“You talk of ownership as if we live in a different
time.

She smiled and her face grew uglier. “Bondage never
goes out of fashion.”

“Why would they be loyal to you?”

“Power,” she said.

“Power?” I took a seat on Cixi’s throne, and the
memory of Evelina’s pulse, as she sat there being upbraided by the Empress, ran
through the armrest. My skin drank up her energy, and I grew feverish.

“Laszlo Arros is power,” she said.

“Is that so?”

“He holds it all in the palm of his hand.”

“All of what?”

“Everything,” she said. “Even you.”

I feigned a chuckle, but on the inside I was as hard
as stone.

“Youlan can take you to him,” she said. “He’s
expecting you.”

“So Shenmé said.”

Her mouth tightened at the mention of her maker. She
never called her by that name. To Cixi, she was and would always be the Great
Xing Fu.

I got up to leave, and she told me I was a mad
vampire. “More mad than Satan over there,” she said. “He wanted you dead, too.”
She glanced at Vlad’s head.

My ear was attuned to the lie and my heart to the
liar, but the deceptive queen had mastered the quake in her voice.

“Death is not mine for the taking,” I said, pressing
my body close to hers, sending my energy into her like a comet through space.
She suffered the heat, the pain of my touch, the coldness of my heart. “The end
is here, Cixi. Settle your accounts before it is too late.”

“I’m sacrificing Muriel in five days,” she said. “She’s
yours until then.”

Her threat set me off, and I put my hand around her neck,
squeezing life from her eyes, causing her pupils to roll up and into the back
of her head. She stuck out her tongue, as both her shoulders and the corners of
her mouth came up at once. “Ei wai lina,” she croaked. “She must be—” My
hand choked her words, and they were lost.

Perhaps it was the haze of anger, the shades of a
lingering past that had arisen in our conversation, or maybe the thrill of
having just choked her that sent me into spins, but I unleashed my claws and grabbed
the top of her head as though picking up a cantaloupe. My pointed tips sank into
her hardened flesh, and she let out a shrill cry that had Youlan busting into
the compartment, flying across the deck, attempting to take me out. She barely
knocked me from my spot in front of her mistress, but she managed to loosen my
grip on the crown. Several strands of Cixi’s hair hung from my claws, and I
shook them to the deck, scattering them as I made my way out.

“You will pay for this,” Youlan shouted, as I left
the two wallowing in the agony of defeat.