by Casey Lane
One look at Mordecai stilled her movements. Long, dark waves of hair covered the pillow and stuck to her face. “Don’t take this one, Mordecai,” she begged between panting breaths. “The Society has taken enough from me.” Her lips curled into a feral snarl.
“Constance, focus on your breathing. Think of the importance of this child, and be grateful you were chosen.” He bent down and whispered into her ear, “From that, take your comfort.”
All around her stood tall men in long, black robes. They waited quietly, staring down without emotion as she struggled in pain. Her abdomen rose and fell as her back arched.
The room’s candles dimmed in their sconces, as a sudden breeze teased the flames. In the corner of the room, behind a column against the north wall, appeared a little boy, barely ten years old.
Luca was tall, almost five feet, and his long arms were crossed over his wide chest. He was a strange boy, one of the few vampires born with white hair. Mordecai studied him as he watched the human, face expressionless.
“Luca?” Constance called out, craning her neck toward the young boy.
Luca remained in place. He neither nodded nor spoke. Mordecai knew he’d never seen anybody give birth before, and the smell of the room—a mixture of blood, pain, and dampness—must have intrigued and repulsed him.
“Bring me my son!” Constance demanded.
“Silence,” hissed Mordecai. “He is merely here to greet his brother before we take possession of the new one. Don’t display such emotional wretchedness in front of your child, human. Is this how you would like him to remember you?”
Pulling a small watch from the pocket of his robe, he tried to will Constance into silence. When that failed, he turned away from her in revulsion. Her sobs annoyed him. She sputtered out a choked scream as he walked toward Luca, a son she had never been allowed to raise.
“You know your brother is being born, don’t you, Luca?” a small, hunched vampire asked. She waited by the window for the child to be born, to take him from his mother. She would be his nursemaid, in accordance to the Society’s laws. No human woman was qualified to handle such a gift.
Luca looked into her clear, light-blue eyes. The vampire nursemaid bent into him, leaning upon a black parasol as brass goggles dangled from a belt loop on her waist, and he reached for the goggles with curiosity.
“Yes, Luca. You are children of the same mother,” she smiled as she handed him her goggles. “Only human women can give birth now. Vampire women are sterile, an inadvertent and unfortunate side effect of the genetic enhancements.”
Luca smiled, though his fingers fidgeted nervously around the eyepiece. He opened his mouth to speak but the loud whistle of the Graves End train cut him off. Luca had never known Constance, his birth mother. It was the accepted way of the Society to use breeders; select genetically superior, human women to carry and birth the children, then raise them under the tutelage of the Society.
With a strained expression and a fierce cry, Constance cursed the Society while her next child was born. “Unnatural bastards. May you be destroyed by this new one!”
The room fell silent except for a slow growl coming from Constance as she pushed a final time. A slippery grinding sound filled the air, and the new vampire emerged—another flawless boy. She strained against her ties to see her newborn, but the nursemaid ran over and quickly covered her eyes with a black blindfold.
“Is he alive?” Mordecai ran behind the curtain and looked at the child, still covered in the sticky wetness of his mother. He recoiled at her post-partum state. The human looked like a wild animal, her naked body covered in dampness and bloody slime.
The tall, silent vampire assisting the delivery pushed down on her abdomen to expel the last of the placenta, and as the mucus-like substance exited her body, he held the bloody mass in his hands and brought it to his nose to smell.
“Discard the placenta immediately,” Mordecai snarled at the weak vampire. “We don’t eat medical waste.”
The nurse wrapped the silent infant. “Alive and alert,” she answered.
The human mother blindly grasped into the air for her newborn. Her fingers moved furiously, but impotently, with her wrists still bound above her. Her frantic screams filled the room, and her legs kicked the wooden bed as the vampires tried to clean her.
“Draegan,” said Luca. “You will call him Draegan. I see it.”
Mordecai spun to face the young vampire, as his mother continued to twist in her restraints, fighting for her freedom. “What did you see?”
The vampire nurse shuffled by him, carrying the newborn in her arms.
Constance softly mumbled as she collapsed with exhaustion. “Ten minutes. Please ten minutes with my sons.” Her words slurred together, in a heap of pain-drunken syllables.
Mordecai sternly turned and emptied powder into a handkerchief from the side latch of his pocket watch. He held it over her mouth as she struggled against him, inadvertently breathing it in. “Quiet. You know the rules.”
She became still on the bed, silenced by his pharmaceutical.
Mordecai looked deeply into Luca’s eyes, but could not penetrate his visions. The boy’s mind was exceptionally strong.
“Only his name,” Luca said. “I see only his name.”
He knew it was a lie. What had the young vampire seen?
Astrid sat at a glass-top table, drinking her first cup of morning tea. Her wavy, chestnut hair was swept into an elegant bun at the nape of her neck, while a few strands carelessly rested on her bare shoulders. A violet sash accented her emerald-green dress, complimenting her green eyes. She wore pale-green lace slippers and supported her feet on the ornate, gold-plated legs of the adjacent chair.
“Darling, which dress should I wear for the party at the Upton’s this evening?” Astrid’s sister, Miranda, interrupted the silence and held out two dresses, a few feet away from her slender frame. She stared at Astrid intently, as if this decision would influence world events.
Astrid blinked back her thoughts, brushing them away like cobwebs. “That depends, dear sister. Do you want to look pretty and sweet, or gorgeous and womanly?”
Miranda’s honey-colored eyes turned to the opened window. “Pretty. I want to enhance my virginal assets.” She giggled. “Considering Jasper will be there, and you know what a penchant he possesses for innocent young ladies.”
Astrid nodded and smiled into her teacup. She realized, yet again, how different she was from her sister. Miranda’s world was filled with social events, eligible young men, and expensive accessories. Astrid’s interests were also social in nature, but only for social betterment and political changes in her beloved London. “Things are quite simple in your world, Miranda,” she sighed.
“My world is your world, too,” she answered. “But you complicate it all with your grand illusions of saving it.”
Astrid set down her teacup and took off her slippers. She pulled on a pair of bronze boots and tied them tightly, accentuating her small ankles. Their father, a member of the House of Lords, provided them with a typical upper class lifestyle. Yet, Astrid found her heart would sing most freely amongst the colorful people of London’s less savory areas.
“Those boots are bloody awful,” said Miranda. “Worse than a man’s. Hideous, like old riding boots.”
Astrid smiled as she opened the small desk drawer and pulled out a handful of brass cogs and levers, along with a small screwdriver. “The thought of it! Imagine, functional attire made for comfort.” Her sarcasm was lost on her sister, so she arranged the small gears according to size upon her desk.
“Making more accessories for those funny goggles of yours?” teased Miranda.
“My objective is to enhance the refraction and magnification,” she answered.
“Oh, excuse me, Miss Inventor. Soon, you’ll be flying in one of those airships, by yourself no less.”
“My goal is complete independence, certainly. And why not? Should women not command an airship? Are my skills not
equal to a man’s?”
“You won’t have your independence for quite a while,” said Miranda. “Not with the murders and desecrations happening in the East End.”
“Indeed,” remarked Astrid in a neutral tone.
Several women, all poor—mostly prostitutes—had been attacked and left for dead. The women all carried puncture marks in their necks. Most Londoners believed this to be the work of a vampire, yet it was inconceivable the Society would allow it.
For decades, the Society laws decreed that peace would prevail between humans and the vampires. In this decree, humans agreed to donate blood in exchange for the superior healthcare the Society provided as guardians of science and genetics. Once in place, there had never been a breach by the vampires, even with their unrepentant desire for human blood.
“Someone else must be trying to shatter the peace,” Astrid said aloud. “It’s too blatantly obvious. It must be a set-up.” She loved London, a city of power, burgeoning with scientific and industrial growth. She imagined the vampires felt the same and thought no one, not even a member of the powerful Society, dared to breach the peace.
The sound of a zeppelin ripping through the air filled her ears.
“It must be Father,” said Miranda. “Perhaps he has more information about the vampire murders.”
“Miranda. Nothing has been proven. There is no evidence suggesting the murderers are vampires.”
“No evidence? The women were bitten and drained of their blood! And who knows what other atrocities they suffered that are unfit for the papers. Don’t be naïve.”
“Those rags exaggerate. I don’t believe a thing they print. Our greatest minds created these vampires using human DNA. I can’t imagine they would want to destroy us. They are an extension of us.”
Astrid recalled her father’s story about the emergence of vampires and the beginning of the Society. He had told of scientists conducting experiments with their own genetic material, resulting in irreversible mutation—vampires. Some possessed both super-human speed and strength, while others possessed telepathy and psychic powers.
“You live in a bubble,” said Miranda as she brushed her golden curls. The ivory handle, etched with a dozen octopuses caught Astrid’s eye. “I am not ignorant of the world. You are.”
Chapter Two
Under A Blood-Red Sky
London 1860
(20 years later)
“This is the seventh woman killed, and we still haven’t found any clues linking the killer to the crime scene.” Mordecai’s icy voice filled the room. “The humans believe it is one of us. And with the evidence provided, I find it hard to refute their claims.”
Castille, Mordecai’s assistant, wrinkled his face as his brow furrowed. “That is an outrage. I can’t believe we have a rogue vampire on our hands. In fifty years, nothing of this sort has happened. It must be contrived. A game!” The younger vampire boiled with anger. He had not yet been born when the Society had emerged, and only had memories of benevolent vampires. “Our Society is perfect. A rogue vampire is an impossibility.”
“Peace, Castille! It does not serve us well to get riled at this juncture.” Mordecai’s robes danced behind him as he rushed to close all the windows in the room. It’d taken him decades to perfect his walking, making it appear as if he glided across the floor in fluid motion instead of ambulating like some common animal. “Rest assured, we will find the killer, be he human or vampire, and he will pay for his atrocities.”
Mordecai was the largest and most skilled of the prophetic vampires. He knew the killings could be the turning point of both his governance and the Society.
The stillness in the room weighed heavy on him, as the Society members quietly contemplated the possibilities. Using the silence, he tuned in telepathically to the site of the last murder. Able to enter thoughts and manipulate memory, he was also able to absorb the energy and aura of a location, in order to review past events.
He closed his eyes and emitted a low hum. His mind’s eye wandered through space and time, to the slums of the East End.
He caught a glimpse of a young woman exiting a carriage of the upperclass, clad in an emerald-green dress. She came upon a young street boy and spoke to him. Her chestnut hair swept neatly from her pale face.
“Don’t be afraid.” Her voice was soft and lilting. Though her dress indicated her membership in London’s gentry, her expression had a sensitivity rarely found in such people.
Mordecai entered her mind, feeling a warmth and yearning, as well as dissatisfaction and desire. Seeing nothing he could use, he quickly abandoned her thoughts.
“Come with me.” Her soft hands clasped the boy’s, though his were calloused and darkened with grime. She was firm yet loving, as she led him down the cobbled street, gently guiding him away from loose stones and horse excrement with a maternal grace.
Mordecai followed them, half-curious and half-enamored by the woman’s beauty. The boy acquiesced, even though his face twisted in confused pain.
She led him into her horsedrawn carriage and sat across from him. As soon as the horses began to trot, Mordecai heard the boy speak.
“It’s one of them, Lady Astrid.” His voice was particularly rough for such a young boy.
Astrid laid her hand over the boy’s. “Are you quite certain?” The softness in her voice was in sharp contrast to her strong gaze.
“Yes. Quite.” The boy nodded his head vigorously and began to cough. He looked behind him with fear. “He wore the robes. He had the ring.”
Mordecai felt how the boy’s voice erased the doubt in Lady Astrid’s mind. Then he felt himself being pulled back to the moment the boy remembered. He breathed in deeply and continued to hum.
The boy held his head down in pain. His face contorted as Mordecai entered the recesses of his memory. His head still bowed, his eyes tightly shut, Mordecai raced through the child’s recent memories.
Mordecai knew he must make his way through the boy’s mind swiftly, for the woman had noticed the boy’s discomfort. Astrid was familiar with the telepathic powers of the Society, and the effects upon a young and undeveloped mind. She also knew no human could stop a telepathic vampire.
“Timothy?” she spoke as she gently cupped his chin in her palm. “Timothy, it will be fine. Do you see anything now?”
Timothy tried to speak, but only managed to shake his head.
Mordecai quickly released the boy, as he’d found what he was looking for. It had been a long-robed, tall creature, jumping from a five-story roof onto a helpless woman below. Within moments, the creature had effortlessly jumped back to the roof in reverse flight. On the ground, the woman’s once round body was all skin and bones; her youthful face, shrunken to merely a flesh-covered skull. She had been drained of all fluids.
Try as he might, Mordecai could not see the face of the assailant. One thing was for certain, the attacker was clever. Knowing the risk of telepathic tracking, the vampire had made himself invisible and faceless in memories. Mordecai and the boy could only see a hazy shape of a creature dressed in black robes with no decipherable face or body.
But the ring . . . there was no erasing the ring.
The attacker was one of them.
Having seen enough, he disconnected mentally from their location.
Mordecai’s humming ended as he slowly opened his eyes; the Society committee members stood before him, staring intently, waiting for what he would say.
“I regret to inform you all that the killer is surely one of us. Of that, there can be no doubt.” Mordecai’s voice was as heavy as the fog outside, blanketing the other members with its abrasive truth.
No one questioned him, instead, the committee stood with their gaze to the black-and-white checkered tile floor.
Mordecai walked to the wall of books and sat at the table. An ornate, brass telephone rested on the gray marble, and a tense anticipation hung in the room as he picked up the receiver. “Hello. This is Mordecai of the Executive Branch of the Societ
y. Give me the Chief of London Police.”
Chapter Three
Factory of Faith
London 1860
Astrid rode home in her carriage, heart racing under her corset. Her dress was crumpled and slightly splattered with mud, but her mind was with Timothy and the disturbing information he’d provided. She sat frozen in disbelief, still absorbing all that he’d witnessed—such a brutal murder by a rogue vampire.
She’d felt the boy cling to her as she led him down the streets, stealthily toward her carriage, his trusting young hand in hers. Astrid now worried she should not have left him alone to protect himself. She suspected that a telepathic vampire had entered Timothy’s mind to probe into the night’s happenings.
Perhaps the prophetics pose a risk to Timothy’s life? Perhaps they want to protect their own kind?
She knew she had no way to protect him. She could not take him home like a lost dog—her father had had enough of her philanthropy. Taking in a boy from the slums would have been the last straw. But, none of that mattered in the moment.
“Stop! Turn back, William.”
William, the driver, had known Astrid since she was a young girl, and knew better than to argue. Quickly, he turned the horses around. “Where to, Miss West?”
“Back to the street, where we found the boy.” Astrid felt a peaceful contentment as she uttered the words, despite her heart pounding with anticipation.
“I hope he hasn’t wandered far,” she muttered, trying to ignore her inner fear for his safety.
Once they reached the area where Timothy was last seen, the streets had become quiet and empty. The boy had vanished also. Astrid alighted from her carriage and desperately looked for him along his usual streets, to no avail.
“He’s gone home. Or he’s gone inside for supper, Lady Astrid,” William’s voice falsely reassured. They both knew the boy had no real home to go to. “I’m sure he’s safe,” he tried again.