Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony

by Brian McKinley

  I was about to die.

  Flea shouted and the big Yeti growled and dragged me back to where she and Valmont stood. So now I was wired with adrenaline, drained of emotion, wounded, surrounded by monsters and my fate was in the hands of a playful sadist who hated my guts. You see what I meant about this third night?

  “Now, how in the world did you get in here?” Valmont asked, kneeling down to bring us to eye level.

  I took a second to catch my breath and Flea said, “He come before to deal for Jade Tiger help. Think he gone.”

  Valmont’s expression would have been comical under other circumstances. “Cherie, in the future, that is precisely the kind of information you’ll want to give to me as soon as possible.” When she was properly chastised, he returned his attention to me. “I think even you would have to agree that you’ve seen more than is good for you, oui?”

  “No, please, listen to me.” I laid out the basics of Sebastian’s plan for that evening and the agreement I’d reached with Jade Tiger for her help.

  “So, you see,” I finished, “you have to wake Jade Tiger up and let her do what she promised. You can go and do whatever you need to prepare. None of this matters in the least to me. I won’t say anything about it.”

  I forced myself to stop and wait for his response. He’d listened to me while I explained the situation and now sat as he considered my request.

  He smiled, bemused. “You’re telling the truth, hard as that tale is to swallow. Even harder to believe is that, given our history, you would make common cause with me to stop it. But you would, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “You are the most inexplicably decent fellow I’ve come across in years,” he said, rising. “Be a pity to destroy you before I can experiment a little more with that but you’re likely to prove more baggage than I can afford.”

  I just looked at him and blinked. “But … what…?”

  He slid back into his pants and addressed Flea. “We shall have to bump up some of our plans I think but that should hardly distress you. I’ll take the boy back to my rooms and then hunt down his cohorts. You make sure Jade Tiger remains dead to the world. If Sebastian’s plan is as the boy says, I see no reason not to think you and your Guaiwu will be accompanying me off this island tonight.”

  Flea squealed with joy and embraced him.

  “Wait, don’t you get it?” I asked. “Sebastian’s trying to end the world!”

  He laughed. “Yes and beaten me to it by years, as well! Was I wrong in using subtlety and human nature? Nuclear war just always seemed so … inelegant. Oh, well. Who would have believed Lord Feral had even that much wit left?”

  “You stupid asshole, he’s gonna kill you!”

  “Well, he may be in for a surprise in that regard but I’m sure I shall enjoy the evening in any event.” That smirk again as he dropped the poet shirt over his bare chest.

  I struggled to get up or move, anything but the Guaiwu held me firm. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  He knelt again, studying me. For just a moment, I saw a shadow of regret pass over his sculpted features. “I don’t think you could understand, even if I told you.”

  He placed his palm on my forehead like a revival tent healer and pain exploded inside every nerve ending of my body. At the same moment—absurdly—I heard the sound of someone knocking on a door.

  Then nothing.

  * * * * *

  My first thought upon waking was that Valmont’s room was brighter than I expected. My second was that I was on a mattress or cot and I wasn’t tied up. Should I fake being asleep? I cracked one eye open and saw the florescent light fixtures set into the high ceiling. Florescent lights?

  I opened my eyes and sat up.

  Ash turned and looked at me, his mouth a grim line. Caroline sat on a wall-mounted bunk, dressed as she’d been that morning. Our accommodation was a large prison cell, complete with a wall of red bars, a steel toilet and sink and four of the metal bunks with foam mattresses.

  I managed a “Huh?”

  “Holding cell in the security bunker,” Ash said.

  “Why aren’t I in Valmont’s room?”

  “Why would you be?”

  I related my experiences in Jade Tiger’s suite, omitting the sexual details and downplaying my “romantic” moments with her. Caroline kept interrupting to ask me questions about the new aspects of the Shen I’d observed, so it took a little longer than I expected but I adjusted my narrative to include all the interesting sociological, political and physiological details by the time I got to the part with Valmont.

  “So, as far as we know, Jade Tiger is neutralized? Dammit!” Caroline said.

  “Well, I think I can explain that knock you say you heard,” Ash said, sitting beside her. “One of the men I thought I could trust went to Wilkes this morning and told him about my snooping. Him and his cronies nabbed me as soon as I walked into the bunker. They probably watched the interior monitors and saw you two leave the office.”

  “That’s how they got me in my room,” Caroline said. “Shot me with one of those stunners before I’d finished typing up my note to Iago.”

  Ash glanced at me. “Then they would have searched for you in all the regular areas and when that failed, they started knocking on the Hegemons’ doors.”

  “Valmont wouldn’t want to be seen,” Caroline thought aloud. “So he’d disappear, leaving Flea by herself to deal with Wilkes. Maybe Valmont figured it was better to let Sebastian get us out of the way. He can always come for us if he survives, after all.”

  “Cheerful thought,” I said.

  Caroline shrugged. “Pieces of negotiable value.”

  We heard the sound of another cell door rattle open and went to the bars to look. Wilkes rolled an AV cart with a television down the hall to our cell, keeping well out of reach and hooked the system up. “See y’all are finally awake, that’s good. Hegemon Blackwood said to send his regrets that he couldn’t come down and visit but he’s got so much last-minute crap to see to, big night and all.” He finished, turned the TV on and stepped back to admire his handiwork. “Still, he didn’t want you to miss out on the fun tonight.”

  On screen, we saw the camera’s view of the council chamber.

  “I thought we were watching Macbeth tonight,” I complained.

  Caroline snickered and Wilkes’s grin turned sour. “Lucky you’re getting anything at all. Up to me, I’d have had you and the little slut barbequed this afternoon.”

  I made myself keep smiling.

  “Wilkes, hold on,” Ash said as he made to leave. “You can’t honestly believe any reward you’ve been promised is worth destroying civilization for. There’s still time to help us stop it, Colonel. Please.”

  I wouldn’t have wasted my breath on the worthless son of a bitch but I had to admire Ash’s willingness to try. To my complete lack of surprise, Sebastian’s flunky just chuckled and shook his head. “Never had me much use for ‘civilization,’ really. Once Sebastian’s done with all this shit, I get the bite and then this whole damn island’s mine. King of the castle, baby! Have me a vamp army, too.” He talked like a kid describing the best Christmas present ever.

  “Dammit, Wilkes, that’s a pipe dream!” Ash persisted. “Don’t you realize this is one of the first targets the other Domains will strike? Creation takes a week under the best circumstances, there’s no chance you’ll survive that long.”

  “I been waiting to hear you beg for a long time now, you pompous little faggot,” Wilkes said, stone crazy. “But I can wait a little more for the good stuff. Sebastian gets these two when he goes but you’re all mine, Ash.”

  He turned and swaggered back down the hall. A few seconds later, we heard the other gate clang shut.

  I turned to Ash. “You’re gay?”

  He just stared at me.

  “Is there any way for us to break out of here, Ash?” Caroline asked.

  “Not that I know, since I designed the place.”

&
nbsp; “What about setting fire to one of the mattresses or doing something else to draw the guard down here?”

  It was the kind of thing I would have suggested back when we’d been in the wine cellar. I went back to my cot and lay down.

  “C’mon, Caroline, my men are better trained than that,” he told her. “Besides, the guard’s watching with that camera behind the TV. He’d call down a buddy, then come down with a flamethrower and move us to separate cells.”

  We’d come full circle I thought, except with a defined threat, less time and fewer options. I just couldn’t believe I’d gone through everything I had in Jade Tiger’s suite for nothing.

  Well, okay, not nothing. I’d settled on my feelings for Caroline but in terms of accomplishing our goals and stopping Sebastian, it seemed it’d take a miracle to make anything come of it now.

  Guess I better start praying for a miracle.

  I meant it as a joke but then I thought about it some more and realized that, aside from feeling a little awkward, I had nothing to lose by trying. Hell, if this wasn’t a situation worth calling on a higher power for, then what was?

  I know I’ve been using Goddess this and Goddess that but until that moment, it was mostly an affectation. I’d gone to some Wiccan ceremonies with friends, lent my energy to a few “spells” before but the Goddess had always been a vague idea. More of a rejection of the Christian God than a being I worshipped on Her own terms. Still, I’d always taken comfort in the idea of Her existence, a feeling of warmth that the God of my stepfather had never inspired in me. It’s no surprise that when I did think of the Goddess, She always resembled my mother.

  Another thing that my close encounter with the Shen had given me was an appreciation of how much of the world we didn’t understand. During our first brainstorming session in my apartment, Caroline quoted some law in quantum physics which stated that any time two different energies meet, they become entangled and those particles continue to have a connection forever. There is also a law of magic that two things which share similar qualities can be used to affect each other.

  Jade Tiger fed on me and took my energy into her, thus creating a connection between us. Therefore, by both quantum and magical laws, I decided I should be able to use my energy to influence hers if my will was strong enough.

  I figured it wasn’t any crazier than most of the other stuff we’d tried.

  I closed my eyes and began. Dear Goddess (it wasn’t a letter but I had no idea how else to start), as you know, I don’t do this regularly, so I’m just gonna come out and ask a huge favor. Caroline, Ash and I all need your help. I’m really asking on behalf of the whole world but I’ll stick with us for the sake of ease. Caroline’s whack-job of an ex, Sebastian, is trying to start a nuclear war that’ll destroy the world. So, I’m asking you to please help me make contact with the energy I gave to a Shen named Jade Tiger and use it to wake her up. She’s promised to help us stop Sebastian’s plans and right now I can’t think of anything else that might save us. Of course, if you’ve already set some other things in motion to stop him, that’s cool. If not, then please guide me and add your will to mine in this working.

  As prayers, or invocations, go it wasn’t a classic but it was sincere and I hoped it would work. I cleared my mind of thought and concentrated on my memories of Jade Tiger, visualizing her in detail with clothes on, since I didn’t want to get distracted. I imagined her asleep, moaning and tossing in the violent throes of a nightmare. I imagined moving inside her on some microscopic/magical level where I saw her life energy (orange) and the energy she had taken from me (green). Her system had absorbed most of it, so it was well-intertwined with her own and formed large strands of dark purple. I then pictured the energy from Chinese Fabio in a red blob and used blue to represent the drugs Valmont and Flea used to keep her asleep.

  This was the tricky part. Without projecting an image of myself into her, I used pure force of will to command the purple strands to move.

  They did!

  Squinting my eyes, I directed the strands to push the red energy into the midst of the green, the idea being able to use it like a sponge to absorb the blue. It took a while but I managed to spread the red energy around the blue areas until they began to darken into something like dark violet. Made more confident by my success, I attacked directly with my purple strands, lashing at the larger violet stains while herding blobs of Jade Tiger’s natural orange energy at the smaller veins.

  As I watched, the orange broke up the smaller streaks of violet and digested them until they disappeared into the orange. I doubled my attacks on the remaining blobs, whipping them apart again and again into fainter pieces. This weakened the intensity of my purple veins and I had to pull in new ones to use as old ones disintegrated but I kept at it.

  After another minute or so, I’d used up my last strand but saw the orange energy swirling more vigorously than it had been when I arrived. Weary but strangely exhilarated, I pulled myself back and relaxed. I had no idea whether it worked or not but I felt pretty damn pleased with myself.

  As I opened my eyes, Caroline sat on the edge of my bunk, watching me. “I hope we’re not boring you.”

  “No, I was just…” She tended to dismiss any of my explanations of ritual magic as “silliness.” Sounds funny coming from a vampire, but it’s true. “Well, actually, I was, uh, praying.”

  She raised an eyebrow. I sat up and flexed my hands, which had fallen asleep during my exercise in trying anything once.

  “Not a bad idea at all,” Ash said, surprising me. “I might give it another go before long.”

  “Anyway,” Caroline said, drawing my attention back. “The council session has started and Jade Tiger’s not there. They’re debating whether to proceed without her or not.”

  I just drank in the sight of her from head to toe, happy to be here with her just in case this was the end. “What do you say we go out with a bang?”

  It got a laugh out of her, at least, followed by an ‘Avery, get serious’ look. She gave me a kiss and pushed a bit of hair back behind my ear. “If I believed we were doomed, you know I’d take you up on the offer. But I’m not ready to admit defeat yet, are you?”

  I sighed but shook my head.

  “Good. We’ll consider that a rain check then. Since we can’t count on the DeWinter cavalry coming to our rescue, I wanted to go over some thoughts and questions I came up with based on what you told us about the Shen. See if we might get something there.”

  I nodded and she questioned me about specific details of things I’d seen in Jade Tiger’s suite and I elaborated on what I’d already told her. Then she would start asking me my opinion on a theory she’d developed to explain the disparity between what I’d seen and what we originally thought.

  I remember Caroline went off on a tangent about reconciling how the bioplasmic entity can maintain the static physiology of the organic form while still coordinating or mimicking life processes like breathing, eating and sleeping.

  “What if it’s all sort of an illusion?” I countered. “I mean, all matter is energy, right? So, what if the bioplasmic entity converts the matter of the body into energy like itself over time? But because it’s taken on the shape of the human consciousness for so long, it still thinks of itself as that person. You know, a mind over matter sort of deal. It would explain the rumors of them being able to shape-shift and go insubstantial, wouldn’t it?”

  Caroline’s doubtful look made me abandon the argument.

  “My God, conversations like that are enough to make a man look forward to the end of the world,” Ash muttered.

  “So, what’s the story over in Bureaucracy Land?” I asked.

  Ash sighed. “Jade Tiger’s majordomo told them she was indisposed and unable to attend the session. The Judicis did his best to argue that all Hegemons are required for something like this but Sebastian argued that this was a Vampyr matter and, if she didn’t want to take part, so much the better. Draco just ruled in favor of beginning the
trial.”

  “Of course,” Caroline said. “Sebastian played right to his prejudice.” She got up and joined Ash to watch, so I decided to follow her. Wasn’t like I had anything better to do and if my prayer and accompanying energy manipulation had worked, we might see some evidence of it soon.

  “I can’t tell whether Iago told Julia about his evidence or not, she’s so guarded. But he would have to, wouldn’t he?” Caroline seemed to be attempting to make conversation more than anything else.

  “Does it make a difference either way?” Ash asked, walking back to one of the bunks and lying down.

  On screen, Sebastian poured heart and soul into his speech, ranging from knowing irony to raging indignation and then back to wounded sorrow. Even in Latin and with a static camera angle, I could appreciate how effective it was. “So, he’s going through with the whole trial thing?”

  “I think he needs to have it out against Iago once and for all,” she said. “He wants to win ‘fair and square’ before pulling the rug out from under them all.”

  “He’s buying time for Wilkes and his men to secure the house,” Ash declared from his bunk. “Now that they’re in session, the council chamber is audibly isolated from all the suites. As long as there isn’t automatic weapon fire in the halls, his voice should drown out everything else.”

  Caroline stared hard at the screen. “This is the critical time then. There’s still a chance that if one of them realizes there’s something going on, they could over-power Sebastian and prevent his plan from succeeding.”

  So Sebastian continued his one man show and we waited. I put my arm around Caroline as she grew more anxious. Ten minutes went by like this. Then twenty. There was no sign of Jade Tiger.

  The whole energy thing had probably been my imagination. Or maybe it worked and Flea just pumped her full of more sedative.

  By the time half an hour had elapsed, I was almost eager for the apocalyptic doom portion of the program. Finally, Sebastian returned to his seat and Draco called on Iago to present his defense. From his seat at the foot of the table, the same chair I’d occupied during my interrogation, Iago de Medici flowed to his feet, skin flush with life and health, hair a gleaming mane of oak and steel and eyes like polished silver reflecting the sun. The gray was gone, replaced by a brilliant white suit in a contemporary cut accented with tie and pocket square in navy blue. He looked as stylish as Geoffrey but the addition of his natural majesty brought the effect to a unique level.