Darkling (36 page)

A big wooden door opened as the chauffeur parked the car. Two female servants and one male servant came to greet us and take our things. They weren’t exactly thrilled to see us, but they were smiling politely. Somehow with palaces of this size, I’d always imagined them being overwhelmed with servants.

Only when we got inside did I see a man walking down the long and large stairs.  And when he said, “My dear Doris,” I was expecting more emotions in his voice. He appeared to be in his late forties, but his pompous air implied that he was older. He wore a silk cape over his suit. A cape! Who wears a friggin’ cape? His movements were slow and measured.

“And you brought a guest,” he said, glancing at me.

“This is my friend, Nika,” Doris said. After he had graced me with a highly unconvincing polite smile, he looked away. It must have been three seconds that he spared for me. On the other hand, Doris’s mood had changed. She was really happy to see this guy; but cousin or no cousin, I couldn’t understand why.

The palace was all white: the walls, corridors, and tapestry. My bag awaited me in my new room, which was right next to Doris’s.  I lay down on the queen-size baldachin bed, and looked at the old wooden desk, closet, and sofa. The room wasn’t exactly big, but it lacked furniture so it seemed spacious enough. If there had been a stretched, headed bearskin on the floor, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

The odd thing was that the palace had no odor. Every old house has one, and I wasn’t sure if its lack of smell was a good or bad thing. I also realized that his highness, the cousin, hadn’t blessed me with the knowledge of his precious name. What a snob. And thinking back on his looks, a thought hit me: could some noble families be older than some Elders? The Lazars, for example, had Udama as their ancestor—the second oldest vamp in the world. Were his offspring older than Baldur, or even Kyrill? It was possible, considering the cousin’s age. I hadn’t thought of it before; I had always taken the name “Elders” to literally mean “older than the others.” But Baldur was much younger than the other Elders, as was Kyrill. And it’s not like the vampire community developed in the Middle Ages.

Before I knew it, I had fallen asleep.

This time, my dream was much more creative than usual. I was in a big cage, sitting on a red sofa. Through the cage bars I could see Baldur and some other people I knew, including Doris’s cousin. And there was a double ring of Warriors, among whom I hopelessly searched for Belun.

I felt a light breeze and Baldur’s strong eyes on me. At first I thought that he was smirking, but when I looked more closely, I realized that wasn’t the case at all. His lips were tilted, but not in a smile—and that change in him told me one strange fact: I
was
in a cage, but it was him who they had surrounded.

Then why the cage?

I woke up two hours later, feeling not a bit better than before.  After I took a shower, Doris came in.

“You took all your pills?” she asked while I was checking the prescription bottle.

“I have a few more. It should be enough,” I said, hopefully.

“What’s wrong, then?”

“Umm, Tertius once mentioned that I shouldn’t take them at all. And it kind of stuck with me.”

“He did? I always find it scary to hear that the Vocati knew many things upfront. Many of our things.” She shivered dramatically.

“What do you mean?”

“Some of the things throughout our history,” she said, and just when I thought she wasn’t going to go on, she elaborated.

“Somehow they knew Sango’s visions.”

“Visions?” That was a first.

“Yeah, he has that ability.” Visions. Cool!

“His visions were about epic things, like the births of the other Elders. And it was his recipe that gave birth to the Vocati.”

“Really? Did he know about its misuse as well?”

“Maybe he was aware of the possibility, but his visions were rare and about general major events. He’s not psychic, though.”

So it was Sango who gave the instructions to breed Vocati in case the vamp community was ever attacked by humans. But things had played out differently. A weapon that was supposed to defend them was now the weapon of their destruction.

“The Vocati somehow knew about all of his visions. Once they even tried to take an Elder before we came for him,” she added.

“Why?”

“Nobody knows. We don’t even know how they got the information in the first place!”

“A mole?” I asked.

“Elders played with that theory for a while, but in the end they rejected it.”

I tried to imagine a person who could know all those secrets and betray his own race. That Priest Doroteo, for one.

“Who was the Elder they tried to take?”

“Baldur. But Sango’s vision was clear enough for the Warriors to come for him first.”

“What happened with new Elders?” I had never found this information in the books I’d read.

“They would take him to Sango’s court and introduce him to our history,” she looked at me mysteriously.

“What?”

“Well, the introduction wasn’t exactly a bedtime story. A newly made Elder would bite all of the previous Elders, gaining the experience and history through their blood.”

Wow, that sounded nasty; yet awkwardly practical.

“And who knows what else happened that we ‘normals’ have no idea about.”

I rolled my eyes and shoved her lightly. If she was normal, then what was I—an imaginary worm?

Maybe Sango’s visions were the reason why she put so much stock into decoding her dreams. He received visions. My mind twirled around the thought for some time.

His only two lineages destroyed. No offspring.

“Doris, how were his families destroyed?” I asked, unpacking my bag.

“Seven of his offspring were killed in a battle, and the rest were sacrificed.”

“Sacrificed?” I couldn’t remember anything that I’d read that would imply . . . Unless—!

“Doroteo?” I asked, and she nodded, looking through the window.

“How many of them?”

“Four. One for each of the Original Vocati,” Doris said in a low voice.

“How did the Priest trick them?”

“He did it by calling them in on a false matter and locking them in a room. Then he raised up the Originals and let them into the room to feed off of Sango’s offspring.”

I had always thought that the Vocati needed the blood to raise up in the first place, but I must have been wrong.

“When they had fed, the Priest came and let the Lolo into them. The day-flying moth was the end of the ritual.”

“And nobody knows the ritual itself?”

“No. I guess Sango would know it though.”

“But who all knew about it then, I mean?”

“Besides Doroteo? Two other Priests who died in the first wave of the Vocati attacks.”

“Four Original Vocati for four noble families as retaliation for the killing of the Rogues. What families were those anyway?” I asked.

“Both the families of Sango, and also Belun’s and mine.”

It shocked me; I wasn’t expecting that answer.

“Of Belun’s family, there remained only Andrei and his father. Mine was luckier, more family members survived.”

These were amazingly useful things to know. I was glad that Doris had finally opened up and trusted me with these stories.

“Does your cousin have offspring?”

“Yep, but they’re older and scattered across the world.”

“Doris, is it possible for a noble to be older than an Elder?”

“Sure. All families are older, except Baldur’s and Kyrill’s.”

“Then why are they called Elders?” It seemed a very logical question to me.

“They come from human families, they were
born
human. Later on, Sango, Udama, and Ixtab together decided to work on creating a vampire community. Before that, they were murdering their children.”

“They—what?”

“They didn’t know that vampires were created the same way that human children were. Only after Sango’s vision did they start to work on it.”

“But why murdering?”

“I know how it sounds. But think about their timeframe. They thought of themselves as abominations—it wasn’t exactly cool being so different then. It’s not cool even nowadays, so imagine what ignorant superstitious people thought back then. What
they
thought back then.”

I tried. I failed.

“So the Elders were born that way to human families?”

“Yes, but with the years, the differences became more and more obvious. They would leave their villages or tribes, discovering their own path.”

“It must have been so hard,” I said, thinking of those confused and lonely children who had to wander around for ages.

“Jeez, I can’t even begin to understand how they must have felt. Being born and raised as humans, and then things beginning to change. You begin to change . . .” She shook her head.

When dinnertime came, Doris told me to dress up. So I opted for a knee-length black dress that seemed decent and classy enough.

Dinner was served on a large balcony, and we weren’t the only guests at the table. There were a dozen people or more. All dressed up, and all speaking Spanish. My Spanish wasn’t bad—much better than my French—but the rest just assumed I didn’t know the language. They’d give me polite smiles and continue their conversations, which was perfectly fine with me—because they were terribly boring. All politics and the economy.

And they all rose from their seats when
the cousin
arrived. Oh yeah, he was fashionably late to his own dinner party. He smoothed down his blond hair, and his amber eyes sparkled with arrogant calm.

“Good evening, dear guests,” he said, his mouth tilting just a touch. I guessed it was an attempt at a smile.

He was wearing a different suit that looked even pricier than the one I’d seen him in earlier. Also he had tucked a neck scarf under his jacket, giving him a whiff of Gatsby. How pretentious.

“What’s your cousin’s name?” I asked Doris, getting tired of calling him
the cousin
—it was too much like
The Godfather
.

“David.” So. David Lazar. The snob.

The food that was served was predictably pretentious, along with the table discussions. It was clear that these people were in some kind of contest to see who could stick their nose further up David’s butt. And for dessert—eggplant in chocolate. Awful.

“I heard that Eleanor Roosevelt liked to dip parts of an onion into chocolate,” Doris told me, but I was clearly no Roosevelt, nor Lazar.  There was no way I was going to appreciate awful vegetables with chocolate dressing.

“Have you heard of Oswald Gray?” I asked her, after a piano player started his tune. Oh, right, there was a baby grand piano on the balcony, too.

“Sure. Why?”

“He was the one who brought me to Tromsø.”

“Yeah, his team captured the Original.”

“Tertius,” I corrected her.

“How many teams are there anyway?” I added.

“Oh, I don’t know. Several, I guess.”

Most of the guests stood, whether to dance or to admire the view—which, by the way, was breathtaking. Doris and I leaned on the stone fence, looking out at the streets and the sea.

“Do they work only for Baldur?”

“The teams? No, they work for Gazini, Inc., which is primarily Sango’s, but the rest of the Elders are also shareholders. In the last several decades, however, Baldur took most of the work upon himself, I guess. By the way,
gazini
means blood in Zulu.”

“How convenient,” I muttered, and she nodded, grinning.

“And what about Kyrill. What does he do?”

“Nothing as attractive as Baldur, that’s for sure. He plays judge in important situations, and he gives advice. And . . . some other things.” Okay, that made him sound like an ancient Santa Claus who was too lazy to get up from his TV barcalounger. But then again, Matthews had told me how slow the Elders could be—and that Baldur was an exception. However, it sounded like there was more to Doris’s story than she was willing to tell now. Which was fine by me; she had already told me way more than I had expected today.

When she started talking to some guests, it seemed like the “party” was just going to drag on. There was no way I was gonna stay there any longer. So I winked at her, mouthing that I was going to go running.

Leaving the palace was a huge relief, and I headed for the beach.

The sound of the waves was calming, along with the sound of the palm trees moving in the breeze. Everything I learned today, plus my previous questions, raced along with my shoes on the sand. There was no way to escape them, even if I had wanted to.

Sango’s visions were a huge mystery. And the fact that the Vocati had known them and had raced against the vamps to steal their newly developed Elder? That was big. I recalled Tertius answering my question of what the Vocati wanted, with: “Their place in the order of things.” What had he meant? In the order of the race, maybe? Maybe the Vocati thought that they were above the vamps based on the food chain, so they wanted the ruling stick. If anything, that was Kyrill’s philosophy as far as I’d understood it. He didn’t respect humans since vamps were “so far superior” to us. And even if he had already thought that, it’s not so strange to assume that the Vocati could share the thought. Although, to their own advantage.

Maybe the Vocati wanted to kill Baldur before he completed his transformation into being an Elder. Maybe that’s why they had tried to reach him first. That was probably it. I mean, as many Elders as there were, Vocati would have had more immortal enemies. It was 5:4, and now it was 2:4 in favor of the Vocati. Could a freshly-not-yet-turned Elder die? Since they had not been born as immortals, but had turned immortal at some point in their young lives, I guessed they could die.

My relationship with Tertius was blinding me. I had created a connection with him, and I had humanized him completely. But those four Vocati that had attacked us—they weren’t that friendly. Which kind of begged the question: why was Tertius?

Then I felt it.

A strong pain in my chest that knocked me to my knees.

All of my muscles froze while the pain spread throughout my whole body. I fell face down, wet sand on my skin. I couldn’t even breathe; the pain was so strong that it overtook all my other senses. But I didn’t faint. Instead I was fully aware of a zillion sharp nails drilling into my head, my face, my chests, my arms, my legs.