by Aja James
Reassured for the time being, Valerius held her close while she slept and felt himself drift into dreamless slumber as her even breathing allayed his fears.
*** *** *** ***
The vampire gazed into the crackling fire and popped a piece of French chocolate truffle between its full red lips, colored by the aged red wine in the glass beside its chessboard.
On one side, the diamond white pieces sparkled brilliantly in the firelight. On the other side, black obsidian pieces reflected a red glow within them, like red flags in the eyes of an enraged bull.
But there was something peculiar about this particular chessboard: the white side had no pawns in the front line. Instead, those eight positions were taken by two more knights, three more bishops and three empty seats. And in the position of the king, there was a pawn in its place. The white side had no king.
The black side, however, was assembled in the traditional array. It seemed like a spectacularly ill-matched display. Surely the white had too much advantage.
But then the vampire smiled a knowing smile. Pawns had their uses. And when they reached the last line of the other side, they could become as powerful as queens.
And besides, a knight and a bishop had already been sidelined, and two more white knights had fallen. The vampire carefully took those pieces off the board and arranged them perfectly on the edge of the table between the white and black sides. It surveyed its handiwork with satisfaction.
It was indeed an ill-matched set. The advantage was entirely with the black.
Echoes of pain reached the vampire from a distance, and it perked its ears to listen. The sounds of torment resonated in undulating waves off the underground walls.
Hmm, it purred with a devious smile, the new addition to its company of pawns must be enjoying his induction. Becoming a vampire assassin was a messy business, and not particularly pleasant for the inductee. The vampire almost rubbed its hands together with glee.
A new toy to play with! And such a large and handsome piece.
There was so much to look forward to, its delighted laughter drowned out the distant shouts of pain.
*** *** *** ***
Valerius’ body erupted in flames as Rain took his vein while he still slept. Unconsciously, he raised his hips and arched his back to offer more of himself, his arms tightening around the Healer.
Not wanting to disturb his much needed rest, Rain kept him in slumber by triggering calming energy throughout his system with selective insertions of strands of zhen into his pores. She lay on his chest and fed languorously from his throat, still half asleep herself.
Although Valerius did not awaken, the intense, painful need within his body ignited by her feeding blossomed darkly into haunting dreams of the past…
Sometime before 200 B.C. City of Rome.
The stately Roman manor that rose in the heart of Rome, amidst a circular border of olive trees with stone paved roads that led to a grand fountain outside its entrance, boasted serenity, charm and elegance.
But the depravities that carried on within put the trials of Tartarus to shame.
Valerius’ days and nights folded into each other with predictable monotony that blurred the passage of time.
Wake up. Eat. Get cleaned.
Get dragged to the “entertainment” chamber. Fight the guards with fist, feet, nails, teeth, and any movable object that could be used as a weapon.
Get beaten and subdued. Get restrained to whatever instrument of torture that was the special of the day.
Get raped for the next few hours by the patrician and his wife, their friends, random strangers who paid to be entertained, even the guards if their masters felt particularly generous.
Get dragged back to his isolated cell. Wait for the pain to become somewhat manageable.
Eat. Sleep.
And start all over again.
One month crawled into a year. One year stretched into several.
Valerius became intimately familiar with every kind of debasement, every sort of pain. As his body grew into manhood, so did his masters’ fascination with it. They were endlessly inventive with their games. And if Valerius became more difficult to subdue with his increasing size, muscle and life-and-death fighting techniques, his masters happily accommodated these changes with cruel creativity.
Body parts, poles, sword hits, even broken shards of pottery—Valerius had been brutalized with more objects than he could count.
He learned to disengage his mind from his body early on. Learned to distance the pain and the unholy acts of violence. He only focused on getting stronger, fighting tougher and plotting his escape.
One day when Valerius was in his twenty-fifth year, there was some commotion in the slaves’ compound towards the back of the manor. Two female bodies were dragged across the canopied garden walkways linking the slaves’ quarters to the main residence. They were obviously dead, for the grayness to their skin and the fact that they made no sound as the guards dragged them over rocks, steps and debris.
Valerius watched the guards’ progression through the masters’ bedroom window with stoic eyes. He was too concerned with his own upcoming struggle to have any curiosity about the female victims.
Today the masters decided to change their routine. Instead of shackling their favorite toy in the entertainment center below stairs, they had him brought to their own chambers for a group orgy. They were having guests after all, and Valerius was the main attraction. But to make sure they had nothing to fear from their feral, troublesome slave, they doubled the guards and kept the stud in tight chains that wound from his neck to his wrists to his ankles.
Valerius kept his gaze on the back gardens and stared sightlessly while two of the guests came forth to admire and grope his body. In his head he calculated the probability of success if he tried to fight off the six guards, four guests and his patrician masters. He also weighed the consequences in the event of failure, which was by far the most likely outcome.
Not that he cared.
A surreptitious sweep of his surroundings told Valerius that two of the guards were new and young, bulky but bumbling. Their weapons weren’t even strapped properly, and by some miracle, they were the two that held Valerius’ chains. The guests would offer no resistance, for they appeared to be inbred patricians from the noblest Roman families; none of them had an ounce of muscle or nerve. His masters had been imbibing heavily before his arrival, for their breaths reeked and their movements were clumsy. And because it was the master’s bedroom, he had easy access to the grounds outside.
Valerius almost smiled. His chances of success had increased considerably.
As he planned his maneuvers, a knock came on the chamber door.
“I ordered not to be disturbed!” the master thundered from the bed.
“My lord, what do you want us to do with the females?” came a muffled reply from the hall.
“Just get rid of them over the cliff by the river out back,” the mistress responded, then groused to herself, “such tiresome creatures.”
There was an obedient response from outside and the sounds of departing feet with dragging bodies.
“I hope they were worth your pleasure,” the mistress shot a venomous look toward her husband, as if she were jealous. “It’s not fair you had fun without me.”
“Didn’t you enjoy watching, my love?” the master responded with a sly leer, “and didn’t I let you keep the trophies?”
The mistress fingered a simple gold chain around her neck with a small pendant in the shape of a bird, carved out of some sort of stone. Around her wrist sparkled a bracelet made out of beads, circling around a bird that matched the one on the necklace.
Valerius’ gaze suddenly sharpened, and when he realized what he was looking at, the ground beneath him seemed to shift.
The trophies the master alluded to were as familiar to Valerius as the back of his hands. For he’d made the simple jewelry for his mother and sister with those very hands when he’d been a boy. They
were parting gifts to the two women in his life before he and his father left for the arenas after a brief visit home. It was the last time he’d seen them.
Unbridled rage and grief flooded Valerius in tidal waves, infusing him with a superhuman strength and clarity.
Before anyone knew what had happened, he leaned forward on one knee, yanked on the chains that held him with such force, the ends escaped the two guards’ grasps. Winding the sections near him around his wrists, he swung the free ends like whips across the guards and guests who were closest, striking them unerringly on soft, exposed flesh and vulnerable eyes, nose and groins.
By the time two guards and two guests had been beaten down, Valerius was already ramming his shoulder into one of the new guards, pushing him hard into the wall and knocking his head back against it. He then deftly unsheathed the dagger and short sword and wielded them with deadly accuracy with the chains wound loosely across his shoulder, chest and around one arm, out of his way.
The shouts from his masters, grunts of pain from the guards and squeals of distress from the guests faded like background noise as Valerius honed in on his next targets with lethal precision and skill.
Four more bodies crumpled to the ground as he cut a path to the bedroom window. But he was in no hurry to make his escape.
No, he was going to kill each and every one of them, and he’d leave the masters for dessert.
The rest of the guards on retainer in the manor had gotten wind of the massacre and arrived just outside the chamber door. At the first pound, Valerius squeezed the life out of guard whose neck was in a chokehold between his bicep and forearm while taking the guard’s long staff and inserting it into the hollow handles of the door, keeping the reinforcements at bay.
Within minutes, all six guards and four guests littered the floor in pools of blood and tangles of limbs. Valerius wiped his bloodied lip on his forearm and regarded the quarries left for last.
The master and mistress clung to one another on their bed, looking almost mad with fright. By now their screams and crying had faded into whimpers, like two cornered animals awaiting slaughter.
Valerius advanced slowly and purposely upon them, a spatha at the ready. Wordlessly, he dragged his tormenters to the floor and urged them to their knees.
As he poised to strike with sword raised, he was oblivious to their groveling and blubbering. The accumulated pain and grief for his family rose within him, blotting out all else. Death was too good for these two demons from hell. And their death would not give him any comfort, any absolution.
But death would have to do.
As Valerius’ blade met its targets, dealing the killing blow, the chamber door burst open and guards and Roman soldiers flooded the room. Valerius neither struggled nor spoke when they dragged him away. He would be executed for his deeds, he knew. A slave doing mortal harm to his masters was a capital crime. It mattered not all the cruelties they’d inflicted upon him.
A slave had no rights, after all. Not even to his own humanity…
Three days later, Valerius considered his short and violent existence as he breathed shallowly upon the crucifix he’d been hammered to the night of his revenge.
Three days and nights he’d rotted up here beneath the blistering sun and the chilling night winds. Strangers had pelted him with stones for amusement. Vultures had picked at his wounds and sun-burnt skin. He felt his strength ebb out of his body, felt the last breaths of life deserting him.
Any moment now, he would finally be able to rest. But he would have no peace, for his deepest regret was failing to protect his family.
With a soft breath, his eyes eased shut and his world went black even as he felt the first drops of soothing rain.
Sometime later, when he stopped before the River Styxx that carried the dead across the underworld, a glowing mass of energy floated towards him and blocked out the darkness.
“Before you go, warrior, consider this choice: what would you do if you had a second life? What one regret would you abolish?” a haunting female voice penetrated his consciousness.
Valerius automatically replied, “I would protect the ones I love. I would protect the weak who cannot protect themselves.”
“Then rise again, my Pure One,” the voice grew stronger and the light grew brighter until Valerius was blinded by the glare.
“Rise again, Protector.”
Chapter Eight
When Valerius awoke the next day, he found Rain already gone, not only from their bed, but also from the Shield. She and Ayelet had started off early to the clinic as a peculiarly high incidence of patients complaining of symptoms that sounded like anemia had called to book appointments the day before.
Ayelet wanted to have a look for herself and assess the situation for signs of vampire tampering. Usually, when vampires took blood, they also took souls, for blood alone was not enough to sustain them. But the Dozen feared that something sinister was in the air, something that changed vampire biology, and by extension, the fragile Balance that had been maintained since the last Great War forever.
Glancing at the oriental clock against the opposite wall, Valerius grimaced in self-disgust. He’d slept most of the day away, and yet he still felt exhausted.
And haunted.
The dreams had been so vivid in the night that he felt as if he’d relived the worst part of his past all over again. It happened frequently, as often as every other night, being overwhelmed by demons from his human life, and he’d spend his waking hours struggling to distinguish reality from memories. It was an involuntary reflex to want to cut off any body part of any person who touched him. For the last ten years of his human life, touch equaled humiliation and pain.
His body tingling with sensitivity from the remnants and Rain’s feeding, Valerius moved cautiously to get dressed. Just when he shrugged into a light black jersey, a soft knock sounded at the Enclosure’s door.
It was Wan’er, and she seemed hesitant, almost nervous, as she gained entrance to the chamber.
She stood just a few feet inside the threshold and clasped her hands in front of her. “Protector, I need to speak with you about a private matter,” she began without preamble, some of her no-nonsense straightforwardness coming to the fore despite her nerves.
Valerius gestured for her to come further inside and take a seat on any of the comfortable silk chaises, but she shook her head no. In order to not tower over her, he took a seat instead on a bench nearby and gave her a nod to continue.
Wan’er took a deep breath as if to bolster her courage, and blurted, “My lady Rain is not recovering fast enough.”
Valerius sat up straighter and gave the handmaiden his fullest attention.
Wan’er plunged on in a rush of words, “You do not realize what it cost her to heal you and now the General too so soon after. And she would never complain of it. She always over-stretches herself to ensure the health and well-being of others. You see, by the time of this Phoenix Cycle she was weaker than she’d ever been in the one thousand years that I have been her handmaiden. The last ten years had taken too much of a toll, and the last Consort had not been the strongest.”
At this, Wan’er gave Valerius a pointed glare.
A muscle ticked in the Protector’s jaw as he silently berated himself for his cowardice ten years ago. He’d give anything to do it over, but he also knew that back then, nothing could have made him apply for the Service of a woman he’d only just met, no matter how moved by her he’d felt upon first sight.
“What must I do to revive her strength?” Valerius tried to focus on what he could control, for the past could never be changed.
“Intercourse,” Wan’er stated matter-of-factly.
Valerius felt the blood drain from his face. It was not something he wanted to think about, much less talk to the Healer’s handmaiden about.
“You must release within her as often as possible as vigorously as possible,” Wan’er continued without batting an eyelash. “Didn’t she explain to you the
Consort’s role? You are essentially her Mate for this duration. Blood is not enough. And it is obvious to me by looking at her state of health that you have not yet bedded her.”
Valerius abruptly got to his feet and paced away from the handmaiden to get some air in his lungs. He felt like the walls were closing in, and his pulse was leaping in panic.
“I do not know why you have not done the deed, but it appears my lady is accommodating your timeline and disregarding her own. But if you don’t do your duty to the Healer, she will not survive another week.”
Valerius remained silent and squeezed his eyes shut, as if to shut out Rain’s reality and his own consuming fears. He nodded once in comprehension, sensed the handmaiden bowing to him and heard her parting words.
“I leave my lady Rain in your hands. Please care for her well. I- we cannot bear to lose her.”
And neither could he.
*** *** *** ***
The evening found Seth disappeared with only a briefly scrawled note: “I will be away indefinitely. Do not try to find me.”
As the remaining members of the Dozen gathered around to regroup and strategize, the gloom and sadness in the throne room was thick enough to cut.
Orion and Eveline would share Seth’s duties until his return—no one would even imagine that he wouldn’t. Aella would take over training of the recruits, whose numbers included the three Pure-males that had applied, and failed, to Serve the Healer. Part of the time, she would benefit from Valerius’ assistance, but his primary duty was to strengthen the Healer and ensure her safety. Tristan and Dalair would rotate between guarding Sophia and hunting rogues, as well as tracking down the whereabouts of Leonidas. Aella would partner whichever one was on duty during the night.