The next scene had her standing on the deck of the ship, looking up at the mark of the Qing Dynasty, the slender green dragon baying at the scarlet sun in a field of cadmium. She entered the Empress’s cabin alone, and Cixi greeted her with a forced smile.
“Come my child,” she said. “Sit with me.”
Muriel hesitated, and stayed by the portal through which she had entered.
“The Viking must remain outside for now,” Cixi said.
Muriel looked back at the metal bulkhead and swallowed hard. Her body shuddered where she stood.
“Are you still cold?”
Muriel shook her head.
“Good,” the Empress said with a cigarette cocked between her lips. “How did you know about the letters?”
“I didn’t.” Muriel’s voice squeaked against that of the dragoness.
“Someone must have given them to you, no?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Did you meet him?”
“Who?”
The Empress looked away, keeping the fingers of one hand up in the air, as she toyed with her ornamental claws. “Laszlo Arros.”
“I don’t know who that is,” Muriel said. “Doctor Keng and Doctor Hwang, they took care of me mostly.”
“But he sent you,” she said. “Why would he choose you?”
“I don’t know him,” she said. “Maybe he knew me.”
“Smart tongue. We’ll remedy that.”
Muriel grew weak standing there, her wires crossing, as one moment she was with the Empress, and the next alone in her cabin. The connection lost again, I pulled my hand from the side of her face. She snapped awake as though poked with something hot.
“Ow.” She brought her hand up to her head, the migraine yet to come.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Did you see it?” She smiled through tight lips.
“Not all of it,” I said. “Do you recall anything about your first meeting with Empress Cixi?”
“She frightened me,” she said. “And she wouldn’t let Veor stay with me.”
“Do you remember what she asked you?”
“She wanted to know why I was sent to her.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I escaped,” she said.
“Did she believe you?”
Her look grew tense and her green eyes sparkled again. “I can’t say for sure. She’s not easy to read, but I never saw her much once Xing Fu claimed me as hers.”
“You slipped into your donor life rather easily, no?”
“Nothing is worse than what I went through at the facility,” she said.
“You gave me a different impression when we first spoke about the Core.”
“Believe it or not, I was ashamed,” she said. “I feel more comfortable with you now.”
“You trust me?”
She blushed.
“Tell me about the other donors?”
“I’m the only one who doesn’t work in the den, but some of the girls help me with Lucia, like Nan, and Gia used to also.”
“Was Xing Fu always good to you?”
“Yes.”
“You were not afraid of her?”
She smiled. “Never.”
“What about me?” I asked, turning away. “Do I scare you?”
“I’m not foolish, Vincent,” she said. “I realize how valuable my blood is. I know it’s nothing like the other blood on the ship.”
“How so?”
“You favor it.”
I startled her, as I spun around and flew to her, unable to resist a nip before we continued. The mention of blood—genuine blood—titillated me and I would wait no longer. She dropped her head to the side and let me penetrate the same spot my Evelina had chosen, between her clavicle and shoulder top. The skin was tender, for she flinched, but braved the pain, permitting me to indulge far longer than necessary.
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.”
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 49