by Maria Arnt
“Not while I was conscious,” she hissed.
To her horror, he shrugged. “Well, there was the one time,” he pointed out.
“Ugh, don’t remind me,” she screwed her eyes shut.
After a long pause, he said quietly, “Was it really that bad?”
Something in his voice, some ghost of insecurity, made her open her eyes. He only looked irritated, but she sensed somehow that was a facade. It would be easy to hurt him and say yes, so why couldn’t she lie? “No,” she grumbled, and then sighed.
“Am I really such a terrible alternative to all that?” he gestured towards the bathroom door with another washcloth he had grabbed off the shelf.
She frowned. “I still don’t understand how sleeping with you is supposed to make me less of a monster,” she snapped.
“It slakes your instincts, your primal urges. It would have let you keep your wits about you, instead of getting completely wrapped up in the blood scent, in the hunt. It would still have been a terrible temptation. I’m not certain you could have resisted feeding, and the chance that you could have left him alive is very slim. But it wouldn’t have been quite so... messy,” he explained.
She chewed her lip, thinking. “In other words, it would help keep me more human?”
He nodded. “In a manner of speaking. Now turn around, and I’ll scrub your back.”
She eyed him suspiciously. “Why were you giving me a bath while I was passed out?”
Sighing again, he made an impatient hand motion for her to turn. She did so, hoping it would make him answer her question.
“I thought you were down for the day,” he explained, dipping the washcloth in the warm water and then drawing it along her back in long strokes. She hated to admit it, but it felt wonderful. “Dawn is only a little over an hour away, and you’ve strained your body lately. What with the experience of taking your first ka, and then I unveiled my power—which I probably should not have done—I thought you were just overwhelmed and your body shut down.”
Tanya stared down at the water in the tub, mildly horrified at the eddies of red drifting through. Diligently, she tried to force herself to remember what had happened. Although she couldn’t summon any images of killing the man, she could remember the sort of feeding-trance she had experienced. It was a lot like the girl at the bar, only faster, and less overwhelming. She had felt that same... something that she had reached for, and this time she had grasped it, pulled, and swallowed it whole. She could still feel it inside her, spreading through her body, becoming her.
This, she realized, had been a person. She had robbed him of his life-force, his ka, Seth called it. Did that mean she had stolen his soul? She didn’t want to think about it.
Because really, she had never imagined that it would feel like that. Never had she dreamed that sucking the life out of a person could feel like the most fulfilling, rewarding, refreshing, spine-tingling ecstasy she had ever experienced. It was like chocolate and orgasms and hitting a bulls-eye all at once.
Now she understood what all the fuss was about. She had always imagined vampires were selfish creatures, killing because they deemed it a necessary evil to survive. Now she could see killing being more like a drug, one anyone could quickly become addicted to.
“All clean,” Seth said cheerfully, and she realized she had been thinking to herself for some time. “Stand up, and we’ll get you dried off and into your pajamas.”
“Seth, you don’t need to—” she protested as she stood up and he wrapped her in a towel, rubbing it vigorously over her skin.
“Please let me take care of you, Tanya,” he said quietly. “I know you find it awkward, but it’s very hard for me not to. It’s a kind of instinct, to provide for and protect your newly-made dependents.”
She sighed. She was very tired. “All right, but I’m putting my pajamas on myself,” she insisted. She could not handle even one more weird thing tonight.
“Fair enough.” Once he had dried her off, he left her to do just that. “And don’t worry about the mess,” he said, pulling the plug to drain the bathtub. “When you wake in the evening it will be like it never happened.”
As she passed from the bathroom to her bedroom next door, she glanced down the hallway at the furthest door. It was closed. Somehow, she highly doubted Seth was right.
18
Seth was true to his word, though. The first thing Tanya did upon waking was to go out and check the bedroom next to the stairs. In part she was curious, but she also had that surreal feeling that it had all been a bad dream.
The room was pristine. The carpet was a little damp, obviously just steam-cleaned. The bedspread had been changed, and she wondered if he had used the old one to transport the body. It was what she would have done. Just as he had said, it was like it never happened.
Except that every fiber of her body told the difference: she felt fantastic, better than she had felt since she’d first been changed. She had that feeling of energy and physical enthusiasm that she had once associated with waking up after a long night’s sleep, taking a nice hot shower, and eating a big healthy breakfast. It was a little unsettling.
“Good evening,” Seth called cheerfully from downstairs.
She turned around and leaned over the railing. How exactly did you address someone who thought they were a god? “Hey.”
“How are you feeling?” he asked solicitously.
She felt the urge to be irritated at him rise, it was too easy to interpret it as a subtle ‘told you so,’ but she squashed it. At least he was being polite. “Better,” she admitted. “I... I have some questions...”
“I imagine so. Once you’re dressed I’ll be happy to answer them in the study,” he suggested.
“Okay.” She went back to her room, frowning a little. Something had shifted between them, and she couldn’t quite define it. She felt like she should be furious at him for forcing her to kill someone, but part of her recognized she was at least partially to blame. And she was just so tired of being angry all the time. Raging against Seth was like beating with bare fists against a brick wall—the only thing it damaged was her.
Maybe it was because she’d finally figured out that he was totally bonkers. It certainly made the question of why he had done this to her a lot simpler. She’d been searching for a reason, and there just wasn’t one. He was nuts. Now she only had to figure out his crazy and try to use it to her advantage.
When she went into the study, she found that he had pulled his old-fashioned swivel chair out from behind the desk and placed it near the long chair. At the end of the unusual seat he had stacked a few books, and he was currently flipping through another.
“Have a seat,” he gestured to the plush velvet.
She snorted and flopped down. “Are you gonna be my shrink now?”
He chuckled. “In my experience therapists rarely answer your questions. They make you find the answers yourself.”
“True enough.” It had been one of the more frustrating aspects of dealing with Jake’s death; no one had wanted to answer any of her questions. Especially if they had to do with vampires.
“So...” he said encouragingly.
“Where to start?” she sighed. “Um. How did you get rid of the body so quickly?” It wasn’t the most important question, but damn if she wasn’t curious.
Seth grinned. “We’re in Chicago, dear. The business of body disposal has a long and illustrious history here. Fortunately, it has also become far more discrete in the past few decades.”
“Oh good. That should make my job easier,” she nodded.
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure if we’ll be able to find a contractor willing to deal in the high numbers you will be producing,” he warned. “But it shouldn’t be necessary, anyway.”
“Why not?” she frowned. The last thing she needed was another run-in with the law. She’d been lucky with Bradley, she didn’t think the next cop would be so understanding and helpful.
Steepling his fing
ers in front of him like a classic movie villain, Seth thought for a moment. “As a vampire, you can kill much more efficiently and leave far fewer traces than you could as a human.”
“Not if I kill like that,” she gestured up the stairs, shuddering.
“Of course not. But by the time you’re ready to kill a vampire, you’ll be able. This is why you need to learn to feed better,” he explained.
Something clicked into place. “You’re going to have me kill them by feeding off of them.”
He nodded. “In addition to the aforementioned benefits, the ka of a vampire is far more powerful than that of a human. It will accelerate your personal growth.”
“Growth? Towards what?” she leaned forward.
Again he hesitated. “Emancipation,” he said at last.
Freedom. For one moment she had a sense of elation, a vision of the classic light at the end of the tunnel. Then she remembered. “But you said that takes like a century,” she pointed out.
“When feeding off humans,” he agreed. “But there have been a few that have shortened that term. I believe the current record is eighty-three years. In each of these vampire’s lives, they have killed at least one Master vampire by feeding, and in each case, they described an incredible increase of power afterward. No one, however, has ever set out to specifically kill large numbers of our own kind,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, because that would be immoral,” she said sarcastically.
He shrugged. “Until recently Master vampires were not numerous enough for it to even be considered. To kill even a dozen would have decimated us. Now... well, look at your record already.”
She was starting to realize just how sharp this population spike was. No wonder Seth was freaked out. “So then, how long would it take me to reach Master?”
“Honestly I have no idea. But my plan is to get you there as quickly as possible. This is why I push you, Tatiana. We have no time to lose,” he said stridently.
“Okay, okay, I get that,” she said, mostly to stop him from ending the conversation in favor of more training. “We still need to think about this god thing. And sex.”
His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “I—well... Which subject would you like to discuss first?” he stammered.
“Definitely the god thing. So... explain to me how this works,” she said, picking up one of the books in front of her, which was the one on Nephthys he had shown her the night he turned her. “You said you’re... Set, right?” She tried really hard not to sound skeptical.
Judging by his expression she hadn’t been too successful. “Perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that I am an incarnation of Set. At one point, over five thousand years ago, Set and I were one and the same. Then a group of very foolish priests attempted to either make a man a god or trap a god in a man’s body. I’m not sure which, but what they got was me: an aspect of Set, with the form of a man, but retaining some of my divine qualities.”
“Okaaaay...” she drawled. “So... you don’t know what they were trying to do? Why didn’t you ask them?”
“When I found myself in this form, I was enraged. My first act was to kill them for their insolence. Apparently, they were a clandestine sect of a larger temple devoted to Nephthys and me, in the city of the dead. They had not shared their plans with any of the other priests, including the head of the order, who was quite horrified at what they had done.”
She had been flipping through the pictures and stopped on one that seemed to portray the scene Seth had just described. Two vertical rows of bodies wrapped in black cloth stood behind a very angry looking enormous figure. In front of him knelt a man in heavily decorated robes and jewelry. “Is this you?” She turned the book so he could see it and pointed to the person who was bigger than the others.
He smiled. “Yes.”
She frowned at the picture. “You’ve got no hair.”
Laughing, he ran a hand through his curly black locks. “Yes, well, styles have changed over the eons. As was typical of priests and other temple-dwellers for the time, this body had been shaved of all hair.”
She looked at him, trying to imagine him bald. “You don’t look Egyptian,” she realized out loud. She couldn’t quite place his nationality, though. She’d always assumed he was English, because of his accent, or at least of some European descent. His nose was a little prominent, but not in the way she would expect from someone from the Middle East, and his light blue-green eyes were completely out of place.
“That’s because I’m not. The original owner of this body was sold to the temple as a slave, likely the spoils of war with neighboring Anatolia or Macedonia, somewhere around modern-day Turkey, maybe Greece. This is the reason Set came to be associated with foreigners,” he gestured to his face. “At the time, that part of the world was inhabited by the Aryans, a race of fair-skinned, blue-eyed people who had come down from the North after the Great Flood of the Black Sea.” She could see him slipping into his Professor Walker persona, which was fine because she tended to think of him as a pleasant and informative sort of person.
“I’ve heard of the Aryans,” she said, “but I thought they were a Nazi thing.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I imagine you’ve heard of Nazi Germany referred to as the Third Reich?”
She nodded.
“It means the Third Empire. Hitler imagined his rule over Europe and the rest of the world as a natural succession from the two previous great empires, Anatolia and Rome. So naturally, he named his ‘perfect race’ after the original conquerors. But the comparison is laughable. The Hittites, residents of Anatolia, were a generous mix of Aryan blood and more indigenous races. They intermarried eagerly with neighboring countries, which is why little remains of them specifically except for the languages spoken in India.” He was in full-on lecture mode now, which was fine, but they were totally off topic.
She shook her head, trying to regain her train of thought. “So you said that you kept some of your... um, powers?” she asked.
Immediately she saw Professor Walker replaced with Seth the vampire—Set, she realized now. “Naturally. Vampirism, as you know it, descends from my ability to pass some of those powers on to others.” He held out a hand for the book and flipped a few pages forward. When he returned it, it was open to the page she had seen before, where the demigod—Seth—was depicted as passing on his powers to the head priest and eleven others.
“The ability to drain the ka, and derive sustenance from blood sacrifice were the most apparent. Functional immortality, as well,” he listed.
“Functional immortality?” she glanced up.
“Yes. Vampires live until they are killed. In my case, I assume I am truly immortal because no one has yet been able to kill me,” he smirked.
“Has anybody really tried?” she laughed.
“Many. Myself included.” Seth glanced away, up at the picture of Nephthys above the mantle.
“Oh...” she said awkwardly.
“I sought a way to return to my former state and my fellow deities. I even consulted an oracle. She told me I would be reunited, but I would have to wait a very long time.” Looking away from the picture, he gave her a long stare.
“That sucks,” she said, still not sure how to respond.
His face softened into a smile. “Indeed.”
“So, in short,” she said, wanting to sum up this particular conversation before her head became too crammed full of Seth’s crazy, “You’re the ancient Egyptian god Set, in human—I mean vampire form?”
“Yes,” he leaned back in his chair, daring her to challenge the statement.
“And you still have some of your powers, but not all of them?” she asked.
“Yes. I cannot, for instance, call up a sandstorm by force of will anymore,” he offered.
“You’re the original vampire, and you’ve been alive for over five thousand years.” That much, at least, she was willing to go out on a limb and believe. “And you want me to kill vampires for you
because you feel responsible for them and there’s been a crazy population increase.”
“Exactly,” he nodded.
She sat there for a long moment, thinking. “Why didn’t you just tell me all this up front?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Would you have believed me?”
She glanced from him, to the book, and back again. “Nope.” She still didn’t, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.
Shrugging, he sighed. “Then you have your answer.”
Tanya sighed too. At least she had solved part of the mystery. She still wasn’t totally sure why he had specifically chosen her to be his own personal assassin, but for some reason, something about the way he looked at her, she really didn’t want to know at the moment.
Which reminded her.... “So,” she closed the book and set it down. “Next subject.”
Seth licked his lips. This was not a conversation he was looking forward to. Never in a thousand years had he imagined he would need to plead his suit with her. He wasn’t even sure how to go about it. “Go on,” he said quietly.
“Okay. So if we’re doing this, there have to be rules,” Tatiana stated firmly.
He wasn’t sure he understood. “Rules?” he asked vaguely. Did she want to set some boundaries for this conversation before they even began?
“Yeah,” she glared at him. “No matter what you think your rights are as my Master, it’s still my body, and I get to decide what you can and can’t do to it,” she insisted.
It took him a moment to catch on. “Limits?” he murmured aloud.
“Sure,” she agreed.
Gods above and below, she was negotiating limits. That meant... “Then you have already decided to accept this aspect of our relationship?” he said incredulously.
She squirmed in her seat and then sighed. “Well if it’s what it takes to keep me from turning into a mindless monster then I guess it’s worth it,” she grumbled.