Last Rites

by Lily Luchesi

  Danny scoffed. “Please. If I could, I’d hand over all of humanity for you to lead. Angelica, you underestimate not just yourself, but your entire species. You’ve been a leader for two hundred years. Augustus has been in hiding for centuries. The other vamps will see him as he is: a power-hungry, cowardly stalker unable to see anyone else get the spotlight. He was hidden away God knows where, stalking you, and he wants to rise back up on your coattails. And why? Because you are the most badass leader any species has ever seen.

  “You saved the vampires from being hunted, gave them a guilt-free way of living. An easy way to feed. They won’t ditch you, Angie. They will follow you into Hell if you asked. And even if they didn’t, I would.” He took her hand, his warmth suffusing her nerve endings.

  “You already did. Twice.” She smiled, raising his hand to her lips and kissing it. She had never quite felt worthy of Danny, having the blood of a murderer—her father Vincent—running through her veins. And now, now that she was a murderer as well, she knew she didn’t deserve it, but her selfish heart wanted and craved it as much as she craved blood.

  Danny gestured to the envelope with his free hand. “Come on. Let’s see what the bastard wants.”

  Letting him go, she opened the envelope, which had been sealed with an old-fashioned wax stamp bearing what Angelica had always thought was the Delarue family crest: a bat and crossed swords. Apparently it was even older than that.

  She took out a soft piece of parchment, onto which was written a style of calligraphy she had not seen since she had been a little girl. If she could, she’d still be using parchment and feather quills.

  Written on the parchment was, of all things, an invitation.

  “Mr. Augustus Caesar requests the company of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Mancini at his home this very evening at ten, to discuss a unification of our sides. I sincerely hope we can come together and present a united front to the species we were born to rule.

  “PS—I would request you bring refreshments, but I gather that what that entails for you and I, Angelica, to ask would be quite déclassé.”

  Angelica tossed the parchment down in disgust. That was not something to joke about!

  “What do we do?” Danny asked.

  “We go.” Angelica stood back up. “We go, we talk, and hopefully we come to a decent conclusion. The fact that he wrote and considered you a part of the discussion because you’re my Consort—mortal or not—is a huge step in the right direction.” She checked the clock. It was half past seven. “In fact, why wait? An Empress keeps her own schedule, no one else’s.”

  “You think if we wait he might have something prepared to harm us?” Danny asked, getting up to get his shoes and coat.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But I will not begin a working relationship on someone else’s terms,” Angelica said. “He might be older, he might be the original vampire, but he is not superior to me, and he will never call the shots over me.”

  Danny jokingly patted her hand. “There’s the little dictator I know and love.”

  “We leave the moment Harriet gets here with your amulet.”

  ***

  I have to be mental, Danny thought. A mortal, going to have a tête-à-tête with the Emperor and Empress of vampires? Never mind the Empress is my wife: this is eight levels of fucked up. He stopped thinking along those lines, knowing Angelica could smell his fear. He certainly didn't want her halfway into her bloodlust. This night was not intended to turn into a bloodbath.

  They stepped out of his car—where Angelica had proceeded to blast loud music and drive as though she was Speed Racer—and approached the manor house. Despite it being in the Chicago suburbs, it looked like it came out of Frankenstein.

  On the ride there, to distract him from the impending death that could be brought on by Angelica’s driving, he had looked up the property history, thanks to a few tricks he had learned from his mother. The house had been part of a private development that had never come to pass. One house had been built, and then the land was bought out by a commercial real estate company, and they had made dozens of cookie-cutter houses only distinguishable by their different front and garage doors. Standing alone in this Midwestern Wisteria Lane was the house that little kids probably told ghost stories about, unknowing that it was inhabited by a monster from their worst nightmares.

  Despite the welcoming, humorous note, Danny was certain that Augustus was not going to be the type of partner Angelica wanted or deserved. He had been a monster too long to change his ways. Old dogs could learn new tricks, Danny knew this. He had been an old dog who had learned a whole lot of new things these past few years. But he thought that forty years was nothing compared with forty centuries.

  Angelica stepped up and knocked on the door. Danny noticed a serpent-shaped knocker with one ruby eye and one emerald eye.

  After a few minutes, the door slowly opened, revealing Augustus to Danny for the first time. Tall, pale, a bit gaunt, but Danny was certain that that didn’t deter female victims. He was clothed in a black velvet suit beneath a black cloak. The only color on him was the lily he had in his lapel. An odd choice, but it fit in a way. Danny’s psychic mind recognized him, but he couldn’t see how: he’d never met this man before. Still, something was nagging in his brain.

  “Angelica, how did I know you would come on your own time?” he said, his voice deep and reverberating. He turned his nearly black eyes to Danny, drinking in his sight and Danny could have sworn the vampire was seeing into his soul, although that was a ridiculous notion. “And you must be the Royal Consort. A pleasure.”

  Danny was unsure how to respond. “Fuck off” was at the forefront of his mind, but of course he couldn’t say that if he wanted to remain breathing. He settled for, “I hope it will be.”

  The vampire smirked and opened the door wider. “Now, what did that mortal make our dear Vladimir say? Ah, yes, ‘come freely, go safely, and leave some of the happiness you bring’. I created him personally, you know.”

  “Count Tepes?” Angelica asked as she stepped inside. “I ought to kill you just for that: you’re the reason vampires became so popular, and mortals widely know about our existence.”

  Danny could not believe how casual she was behaving. Even he had never been so good of an actor when he did undercover missions for the CPD. That doubt, planted in his brain by Leander Price, that Angelica was much more like the monsters they hunted reared its ugly head and he pushed it away. She had proven time and time again that she was a hero, and he refused to let his dead, demonic ancestor poison his mind.

  “Come,” Augustus said, gesturing for them to follow him. They made their way down the main hall, the same hall Danny and Angelica had walked when they had broken in. Danny looked distrustfully at the door where he had been held captive while worried that Angelica was possibly being tortured once again by whomever had ensnared them.

  This time he was only a fraction less apprehensive about the outcome of the evening as Augustus lead them to a large doorway that led down, deep under the Earth.

  “In what universe do you think I’m just going to walk down there?” Danny asked. “I’ve seen enough horror movies to know how this goes.” And why isn’t Angelica as worried as I am?

  Augustus chuckled at him. “Ah, I can see why you might be concerned. Rest assured, the dungeons are where I made my living quarters most comfortable. The upstairs is simply...set dressings. Your Angelica was down here the last time you visited my home.”

  That explained why she was so calm about going down there, but it only eased Danny’s mind a bit.

  Angelica took his hand and gave him a reassuring smile. “It’s okay. We’re just as safe there as we would be up here.”

  “That doesn’t help,” Danny commented, but he let her lead him down the staircase, approaching another set of intricately carved doors, which looked insanely heavy, but which Augustus opened with barely a brush of his long fingers.

  The room was dimly lit with candles and furnished with things
even Angelica probably couldn’t afford. But Danny stopped caring about furniture the moment he turned his head to regard the portrait on the right-hand wall, the large oil depiction of Angelica. After a few blinks, he realized it was not exactly Angelica: the nose was too hawkish and the cheekbones were too sharp. Otherwise, it was exactly his wife, clad in clothing that hadn’t been worn since Julius Caesar had fucked up Rome.

  “Who is she?” Danny asked, knowing deep down there was only one person that woman could be.

  “Empress Livia,” Augustus replied, taking a seat at the head of the table. “The beginning of Angelica’s line. Uncanny resemblance, wouldn’t you say?”

  Danny noticed now that Angelica looked a little unsettled. Why, when she had seen this portrait before?

  “I was meaning to ask...I’m not her, am I?” Angelica wondered. “I’m not reincarnated like Danny was, right? You had mentioned something before, you said, ‘no matter my form’. If I’m being honest, it got me a little concerned.”

  Augustus did not mock her for her concern. “No, Angelica, you are not her reborn. I merely meant no matter what form my Empress takes, is all. You are entirely, uniquely you.”

  “Now there’s a statement I could get behind,” Danny said.

  Augustus simply stared at him. “I suggest you both sit. We have much to discuss before the sun rises.”

  Danny watched as Angelica immediately took the seat at the other end of the table. He sat at her right, uneasy at sitting in this creepy Goth dungeon. He realized immediately that he had only been included on that invitation to placate Angelica. As he stared between both vampires, he got a chill he imagined citizens of Gotham City and Smallville got when they saw their respective heroes facing off against each other. He was between the two warriors of an entire species: one who made them all, and one who was meant to rule them all.

  The polite air they were both putting on was just that: an air, a thin facade barely masking the fact that if they could, they’d be ripping each other’s throats out instead of conversing pleasantly. The sheer power radiating from them both was electrifying the air.

  This was no place for him.

  “I assume you realize I called you here because, in order to rule together, we must come to an agreement on how we are to rule our people,” Augustus began. “By following you for two centuries, I see that things are different now than they were when I was your age. I can see the longevity benefits of not killing prey, though I do not like it. However, the not keeping human familiars, no turning without your company’s approval...it all seems much more like a dictatorship than a democracy.”

  Angelica scoffed. “I am not a fucking politician, Augustus. Vampirism was never a democracy, even when you and Livia were in charge, pretending that it was. Before I came along, with you in hiding and licking your wounds, vampires were creating more of us like crazy, attracting the attention of humans. They were murdering and leaving corpses around like trash. In the late eighteen hundreds, we were on the verge of being wiped out by mass hunts, just as witches were in the sixteenth century. If not for my laws, we’d be up shit creek and paddles would be nonexistent.

  “You abandoned your post. You left us all alone. Vampires needed a leader, they needed a hero, and so that’s what I became.” Danny watched as her irises flashed red. “I knew nothing of my lineage, I knew nothing of your desertion, yet I picked up the slack anyway. So you want to know why you should follow my laws? That’s why: because I was the leader you never were and never could be.”

  It was Augustus’s turn to scoff. “And then you overstepped your boundaries and tried to control every creature out there.”

  “Someone had to think of the humans. They predate every single one of us except demons and angels. If every creature went about killing willy nilly and managed not to be hunted, they’d have exhausted our food source. Just like a human farmer breeding cows and chickens, it is our job to ensure that our food source does not run dry...no pun intended.”

  Through sheer force of will, Danny kept quiet, unable to believe that Angelica had just compared humans to cattle. He had thought that she loved and respected humanity, not only viewing them as food. Was this how she really felt, or was it just an act for Augustus to go along with her views?

  “I will never allow humans to be killed for food. Perhaps on other things I could be swayed, but not that. Never,” she continued.

  “What other things?” Augustus asked, and Danny saw a bright twinkle in his black eyes.

  “Familiars. They can be allowed to be kept on two conditions: one, they are there of their own free will and not under thrall. Two, they are not killed when they are released, but their memories are washed instead by a PID sanctioned witch or wizard,” Angelica said.

  Augustus sat back, hand on his chin. “Hm. I do believe that sounds fair. But I also feel the need to address your indiscretions.”

  “My indiscretions? What have I done?” Angelica asked.

  “You took a human Consort.”

  This time, Danny could not hold his peace. “Are you insane? I’m with Angelica of my own free will, proposed on my own, let her Claim me...how is she at any sort of fault? She didn’t force me to love her, in this life or my past one. And you’re one to talk about her loving a human—you used to be one!”

  Danny immediately regretted his words when those black irises turned bright red. He was not normally a frightened man, but right then he felt like a rabbit in a trap.

  “Watch your tongue around me, mortal, or you might not have one much longer.”

  Angelica stood up abruptly. “One more threat toward Danny and I will bleed you fucking dry, do we have an understanding?”

  While he was glad she was brave enough to defend him, Danny felt his stomach sinking with the heavy weight of terror. It was like how he’d felt when he had accidentally walked in the middle of a gang fight when he was a bluesuit, only magnified by a million.

  “Noted. Sit back down, my Empress. We have one other indiscretion to discuss before we can move on from this.”

  Danny knew he was not imagining the sadistic glee in Augustus’s eyes at the prospect of bringing up whatever Angie’s other wrongdoing was.

  “Look, I mean no disrespect to your knowledge, but I am with Angie almost every moment. What on Earth has she done against her own laws?” Danny asked.

  Augustus kept smiling. Danny found the expression more unsettling than his scowl. “Vamplets—cute term, by the way, for deadly creatures—are very rare, and lore on them is nearly nonexistent. However, there were some things written by Profeta Firenze pertaining to the vamplet of lore. The main thing is the prophecy pertaining to her rise to power, which you have both seen.

  “Firenze wrote other things as to how that vamplet, once he or she was fully turned, was to come about their full power. And only one thing can bring that latent power forward: blood. Much more blood than your Angie already consumes daily.”

  Danny’s stomach sank lower, but he did not speak as Augustus turned his dark gaze to the other vampire in the room. Angelica’s expression was cloudy, but then again she never did wear her emotions on her sleeve...or on her face.

  “Would you like to tell your beloved Consort who you killed in order to survive and not be a withered husk right now?” He turned back to Danny, who knew he was not hiding his surprise well. “What did you think, Mancini? That Angelica was suddenly well after being lethargic for weeks? In order for her transformation to be complete, she needed the full power from a victim’s lifeblood. She needed to break her own laws in order to survive.”

  Danny watched Angelica, who was staring at a point above Augustus’s head. He wondered what was going through her mind. Normally he’d think that Augustus was just trying to fuck with them both, but Angelica’s pensive reaction made him realize that the Emperor was telling the truth. She would have violently denied the allegations if they were untrue.

  “Well, Angelica? Danny’s waiting,” Augustus taunted.

 
Holding onto false hope that maybe there was a good reason for what happened, Danny reached over and placed his hand on Angelica’s, not knowing he would be given a psychometric vision in doing so. It came in red-tinged flashes, depicting a Hellish scene, unravelling what had been an elaborate lie.

  A dirty garage. Helena with a vampire on her neck. The vampire tossed Helena to the side and advanced on Angelica, bowing before her. Angelica killed the vampire. Walked over to Helena and helped her up. Angelica nearly fell over, weak. Helena was bleeding.

  Danny watched as Angelica tore into Helena’s throat with savage bloodlust, gorging herself on Helena’s blood before twisting her neck...to the right, making it look like a left-handed person had done it. It was the final nail in the coffin. The one thing that made Danny know it had been done deliberately.

  Angelica had killed Helena and had lied to his face about it. She had killed her for power, of all things. His stomach was churning, his head was in a muddle, and he could only think of one thing that he now knew was true:

  Angelica really was a monster.

  Chapter Eight

  Danny and Angelica stared at each other, both of them now oblivious of the ancient vampire who had brought them to this moment. Usually, Danny could not get psychometric visions from Angelica unless she wanted him to. It was the same for any vampire, but somehow he had seen what had happened, and now he understood what Helena’s remnant had meant, what she wanted. She wanted her murderer brought to justice.

  Angelica opened her mouth, closed it, and turned her eyes from him. His hand was still on hers, he seemed powerless to move, even a twitch. He realized that what he was feeling was not his own disgust and dismay, but hers. Somehow they were connected deeper than ever before, yet he had never felt so far from her.

  Her emotions were more a tumult than his were, and the only thought he could detect was that of fleeing before he lost the connection. Angelica wrenched her hand from his as she abruptly stood, the plush chair falling to the floor with a crash. And then she was gone, her vampire speed taking her far away from this manor.