Dark Desires_A Novel of the Dark Ones

by Aja James

  More human.

  Was he?

  Most vampires came from one of two sources—Pure Ones who lost their way and, the majority, humans who’d been turned. There were very few True Bloods, or vampires born, after the Great War and the Purge of the aftermath.

  Ryu had had a human mother; he assumed his father had been one of her clients. She never told him exactly who, and he supposed it really didn’t matter. All he knew was that she was obsessed with his father and always prepared for his imminent visit, except he never did.

  His Master, the one who had taught him the Ninja arts, was a vampire and had turned him when he was in his twentieth year.

  Turnings usually meant that the original soul within the human body would have to make room for part of the vampire maker’s soul. The process left both creator and creation less than whole, which was why there was a limit to vampire multiplication. At some point, the creator wouldn’t have enough soul left to go around. And the smaller fragments inserted into his creations would no longer be able to sustain themselves. They either became lifeless, empty shells, or lifeless, period.

  Those who desperately sought survival indulged their bloodlust in human killing sprees, devouring as many souls as they could in last-ditch efforts to fill the dark voids within them. But those were very short-term solutions that could not prevent the inevitable disintegration of their human shells. In the process of prolonging their existence, they took countless lives and souls with them into the darkness.

  Ryu had always attributed his distance from the world at large, from the people in his life, to being less than whole himself. He was not like the Dark Queen Jade Cicada who had been a Pure One once, nor like his ex-comrade Inanna who was a True Blood and who’d recently found her Blooded Mate in Gabriel.

  Vampires made didn’t mate. Or perhaps more to the point, couldn’t mate. Two halves, in this case, did not make a whole.

  At least, that’s what Ryu understood.

  He thought of Ava Monroe.

  Whatever he felt for her couldn’t be real. And if it was, it wouldn’t last. He simply wasn’t made that way. Not only because of what he had been born, but also what he had been turned into.

  Ryu lay back on the tatami mat and threw one forearm over his eyes. Something in the vicinity of his chest cavity ached so badly his jaw clenched with the pain.

  This time, he didn’t have to force the memories to surface. They surged like demons from the pit of hell to remind him of what he was, what he would always be…

  Sengoku period, 15th century Edo.

  Ryu turned ten just as a warm breeze from the nearby sea ushered in spring. Cherry blossoms came early this year and painted the landscape in effervescent pink.

  He was big enough to do more chores around the establishment in which he and his mother lived. He’d gotten good at fixing things with his hands, whether it was musical instruments for the ladies’ performances or replacing missing tiles on the roofs, or louvering doors and repairing slitted windows. He was never allowed to venture beyond the enclosed courtyard and the gated compound of houses, but he didn’t know what he was missing, so he didn’t mind.

  Up to now, he always thought Misaki and the other residents of the establishment, all female except for Ryu, were entertainers who were skilled and talented in a variety of performing arts from song and dance to calligraphy and playacting. Each one was like a delicate cherry blossom in full bloom, dressed in colorful silk kimonos, sparkling jewels, precisely painted faces and elaborate coiffures.

  There was always an underlying tension amongst the girls, a rivalry for who had the most requests for performances, who brought in the most high-class clients, who looked more dazzling in their new silk robe or behind their painted fan. But for the most part, they worked together and lived together in harmony, everyone knowing perfectly the roles they each had in the larger household.

  Ryu could often hear the tinkling of feminine laughter, see twinkling eyes full of mischief and gaiety, and was surrounded by music, poetry and art. Despite the distant politeness between him and Misaki (and really he didn’t have any other mother-son relationship to compare to), he felt lucky to call the establishment his home.

  Until today.

  Ryu was trimming flowers in the courtyard and having a one-sided conversation with bumble bees when Misaki sought him out.

  “Come to my chamber, Ryu-chan,” his mother beckoned with soft words and inviting smile.

  Ryu shaded his eyes from the glare of the setting sun and looked in her direction.

  She was particularly gorgeous today in what must have been a new kimono, her obi tied in the back as usual. He could not see her eyes for the kyōwagasa, oiled paper parasol, she held tilted to the side. He suspected it was simply another decoration that completed her look rather than useful as a shield against rain or sun.

  “Yes, Misaki-sama,” he answered promptly and made his way to her.

  He did not ask what she wanted, for that would be presumptuous. He always obeyed her as his mother and master.

  Once in her room, she showed him the well-made linen robe and silk vest she had laid out for him on the dais.

  “Is it not splendid?” she said with a pleased smile. “You will look so handsome in it, Ryu-chan.”

  Was it his? Ryu could hardly believe it. She had never given him a gift before. He was so speechless he couldn’t even find the words to thank her.

  “Let’s try it on, shall we?”

  She helped him out of his working clothes and into the colorful new outfit that fit him perfectly.

  “You have such a nice figure,” she complimented as she tied his belt. “You will grow up to be even more magnificent than your father.”

  Ryu considered asking her about his sire, but he didn’t want to ruin her good mood.

  “There. Now let’s see to your hair.”

  She bade him to sit cross-legged in front of her, his back to her front, on the mat while she undid his topknot and brushed his long, thick hair down his back in leisurely strokes.

  “Look at how thick your hair is, how dark and shiny,” she commented as she brushed. “More beautiful than a girl’s.”

  At this, she turned him around to look at him at length, her eyes roving over his face and neck and shoulders, taking in every detail.

  “I think…” she tapped one manicured fingernail against her chin. “No makeup is needed for you. Your honeyed skin gives you the glow of vitality. We do not need to make it white like the others. You will stand out more this way. Your eyebrows are full and black and shapely. We do not need to shave it and redraw it to mimic the same effect. Your eyelashes and eyelids need no squid ink to enhance them. Your lips are already red and moist.”

  She smiled brightly at him.

  “It’s a good thing you are a boy or I would be mortally jealous of you, Ryu-chan!”

  Ryu ducked his head and lowered his eyes. He didn’t know whether to be pleased or worried.

  She turned him back around and brushed his hair some more.

  “I was like you once,” she said wistfully. “I was lovely and fresh and dewy and young. Everyone said I was to be a great beauty, perhaps the greatest of my generation.”

  She put the brush aside and stroked her fingers through his hair, gently massaging his scalp. It felt so good, Ryu closed his eyes. She had never touched him for this long before. He tried not to lean back further into her touch like he wanted to.

  “But then I grew up,” Misaki said, no longer wistful. “And I am growing older. The quality and quantity of my clients are declining. They are already talking of replacing me. They say they have found someone more beautiful.”

  She laughed a shrill little laugh. “They are mistaken. No one is more beautiful than you, Ryu-chan, for you are my son. And his. You are special.”

  The more she spoke, the more worried Ryu became. He did not want to be “special.”

  Then she pulled a long ivory kanzashi hair stick from her own coiffure, combed the
hair back from the top of his head, and wound it around the ornamental pin, which magically held up the sleek black knot that now adorned the back of his head. She left the rest of his hair unbound down his back and shoulders.

  “All done,” she said, sounding cheerful once more. “Now come along, we don’t want to be late and miss the show.”

  She reached out a hand to him and pulled him to his feet, still holding his hand as she led him down a narrow path within the compound to a different part of the connected series of houses. An area he’d heretofore been forbidden to go.

  “Quiet, now,” she told him in a hush, “We don’t want to interrupt. We just want to see.”

  Soundlessly, they entered a house through the back door and she guided them to a fusuma wall, where she pulled him down to kneel beside her. There was a small rectangular panel in the wall that Ryu would not have known was there had she not slid it open to reveal the chamber beyond.

  “Come closer, Ryu-chan,” she whispered in his ear. “Come see for yourself.”

  Ryu did as she requested and put his face almost against the wall so that his line of sight fit directly in the panel opening.

  A woman was on her stomach on the tatami mat, a thin silk blanket beneath her. She was naked and panting. A man, half dressed, most of his chest and bulging stomach revealed by his loose robes, was kneeling behind her, pushing against her and grunting rhythmically.

  Ryu jerked away from the panel opening and would have stood if not for the strong hands on his shoulders holding him in place.

  “Look,” Misaki ordered him, her tone no longer sweet.

  “Watch and learn.”

  Ryu swallowed the panic that was rising like acid in his throat. He obeyed her and put his face against the wall again.

  He recognized the woman as Yuriko-san. She of the round, shimmering eyes and heart-shaped face. She didn’t look much older than he and she always seemed so child-like, though she must have been closer to his mother’s age.

  She was making noises now, half mewling, half cries of distress, as if the man were hurting her, but she didn’t want him to stop.

  “Look at what is between his thighs,” Misaki whispered in Ryu’s ear.

  He almost jumped out of his skin when he felt her hand grab his private parts in an ungentle squeeze before letting go.

  “You have the same equipment here. When you are a man, you will use it as he is using it. It will increase in size when it is hard and ready to penetrate. Look.”

  Ryu didn’t want to look any more. He was revolted by what he saw. Why would any man want to do that to a woman? Why would any woman want that done to her? He didn’t want to grow up if that was expected of him too.

  As if hearing Misaki’s instructions, the man pulled his “equipment” out and roughly flipped Yuriko to her back, giving Ryu a clear view of his engorged staff, shiny in the candlelight as if wet, ruddy and ugly. Ryu also saw the reddened slit between Yuriko’s splayed thighs before the man shoved his rod into it.

  More pumping ensued, rougher this time, violent enough to bounce Yuriko’s head on the mat like a flopping fish, hard enough to make her breasts shake and jiggle on her chest. Her cries grew louder and more screech-like, her face contorted and red.

  The man pulled back and rammed into her harder, his thick hands holding her hips down as he hammered, his crotch making fleshy slapping noises against her thighs.

  Suddenly, the man shouted and shuddered and Yuriko let out a little scream. He collapsed on top of her and held still. There was heavy breathing and no other sound.

  Ryu wanted to turn away but was afraid to. He didn’t want to elicit more of Misaki’s disapproval and he didn’t want to risk being discovered behind the wall. Why had she brought him here? Why was he made to witness this grotesque act?

  After a few moments, Yuriko stretched languorously and wrapped her arms around the man’s hairy shoulders. He raised his head and put his tongue in her mouth. She made that mewling sound again and chuckled.

  “Stupid girl,” Misaki whispered beside Ryu’s ear. “That is why she will never hold on to them. She will delude herself that they truly care for her and pine after them. That is why she will die alone and miserable. And poor.”

  Her hands tightened on his shoulders.

  “Heed me well, Ryu-chan: you must never kiss. Kisses are too personal for the likes of us. You might think you can separate your emotions from your body when you kiss, but you can never do it completely. The risk is too high. It will be too easy to lose control. You will lose yourself if you lose control.”

  Ryu nodded jerkily, though he didn’t understand any of what she said to him, any of what he saw. He just wanted to appease her and go back to his room, away from here.

  “Come,” she said, pulling him up again. “It is time.”

  She tugged him down another corridor, and this time, she had to half drag him because his feet were heavy and his legs, sluggish.

  She opened a chamber door and indicated with a tilt of her head that he look inside.

  There was a man there, kneeling on the mat, facing to the side. When he heard the door slide open, he looked in their direction and smiled.

  Ryu cringed when he saw that smile. It was evil, and so were the man’s eyes.

  “This is your first client, Ryu-chan,” Misaki explained in her sweet voice again. “Your rite of passage. Enjoy it.”

  Ryu understood enough to shake his head violently, his whole body starting to quiver in fear.

  She snatched out and grabbed his chin, her nails cutting into his skin as she had done once before.

  “You will obey me, you little bastard,” she hissed for his ears only, through a smile that he now found hideous. “I was your age when I had my first client. You should be grateful to be in high demand. I reserved you for the highest bidder and painstakingly built the anticipation these past years. No one took so much care in arranging my first performance. They just threw me to whatever rabid dogs wanted a bone.”

  Ryu couldn’t shake his head with her gripping his chin so tightly, but he pleaded with his eyes for her to not make him do this, not make him go in there.

  She lowered her face close to his and froze him with her cobra-like black gaze.

  “A bit of advice. For your first time, you can lie there and let him do everything he wants to you. Next time, you can practice some wiles and prolong the game.”

  She smiled that grotesque smile again. “I can teach you many tricks. We will be in such high demand that we can one day own this place for ourselves. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  Tears leaked out of Ryu’s eyes and he was shaking so badly he could barely get the words out, but still he tried to plead with her, “Please, Misaki-sama, don’t send me in there. Please… Mother…”

  Her palm connected so sharply with his cheek his head snapped to the side and he almost fell. It was the first and only time she’d ever struck him.

  “Enough!” she hissed, and looked beyond him to regard the awaiting client.

  “I apologize for the wait, Sanjo-sama,” she said sweetly to the man, bowing low. “Ryu-chan is shy. But he is ready for you now.”

  That said, she gave Ryu one more push until he staggered into the room with the man, walked backwards with her body bowed in respect and slid the fusuma closed…

  Hours later, when she returned to retrieve him, Ryu was sitting beside the man, who was sprawled in a heap on the tatami mat, his small face and naked body marred by bruises and scratches, his eyes soulless and black.

  In his hand he held the kanzashi hair stick Misaki had inserted into his hair. It was coated with blood, just like the dark pool that steadily oozed across the floor around them.

  Chapter Eight

  “How’s the transplant approach coming along?” Ava asked Sōsuke a few days later while they were waiting on the Southern Blot electrophoresis to complete.

  She had been so focused on her own work she hadn’t really participated in the other sub team’s deve
lopments. Not that she was invited to inject herself into their process in any case.

  Just this morning, they received another anonymous sample from GTI.

  Unlike Evergreen, which was a sample extracted from red blood cells with the full genetic blueprint, this one contained only half of the equation in the form of sperm.

  Suddenly, her long shot of using embryonic stem cells hovered within reach. They just needed to map the genes first to ascertain their similarity to Evergreen, which was the ingoing assumption. The next step would be to combine them with healthy human eggs and hope that fertilization might occur and an embryo might form.

  Given that the genetic material they were working with was not entirely compatible with that of humans, the chances of success were pretty low. According to her partner, these human eggs were preselected from previous research to increase the match ratio. Even so, it could still be one-in-a-million odds, or worse. And it wasn’t as if they could buy more human eggs from the corner market. There were strict laws and regulations around these things, and rightly so.

  They did, however, have a substantial, high quality supply, and their contact at GTI assured them they would get more if they needed it.

  It was a long process, though, from fertilization to viable embryo, with many potential failure points. More than one of her three weeks on the project was already up; she might not be here to see the research to a more certain conclusion. But at least the team had her notes and ideas. They would be able to continue without her intimate involvement. She could also help problem solve from afar.

  “We have run into some walls,” Sōsuke answered. “I am not as close to that work stream, but of course we share important findings. We keep running into the compatibility issue.”

  Ava nodded.

  For the transplant approach, the idea was to take healthy tissue or blood cells from Evergreen and graft or inject them into a host, let the host tissue draw from the healthy injection without changing its fundamental makeup. Like grafting healthy skin to treat a burn victim, or an organ transplant for people whose own were failing. The more complex and critical the organ, like the heart, the brain, the lower the likelihood of success.