“Obsidian,” she calls again, but her lips don’t move to make the sound.
I reach out a hand towards her. “Cala—”
That vortex of color again as it all morphs once more. This time, we’re back in her room and she’s crawling towards me on her bed, the upper part of her face obscured by a lace mask. She slides one finger into that sweet mouth, silently calling me again. “Obsidian.”
Frantic, I dive to reach for her, but she vanishes in thin wisps of smoke. “Damn it, Calamity. I give in, okay? I give in. Get back here!”
Then, I’m back at the catacombs, deeper than I’ve ever been, where the stone is no longer black but weathered, aged beige. The ancient designs carved upon the columns and arches still retain some of their vibrant color, despite the time that’s passed.
A pedestal feet from me.
Beyond it, doors.
A presence ghosts by me, the female in the red veil. When I turn to her, the air around her bubbles, as if she’s standing underwater. Her gnarled, primitive crown’s missing. Her face remains hidden but the two hands she holds up in supplication are pale as paper.
“Every single answer you seek is in you. In there. All over these walls. In our history . . . in this face.”
The veil’s torn back, exposing her face . . .
Calamity’s face, submerged in that water, eyes glowing fiery red, hair flowing like demonic tendrils around her—
My eyes snap open from the shock. Breaths racing, I’m confronted by this infernal, black hallway once more. The passageway to the catacombs, with it’s dark, carved walls.
I’m about to dematerialize back to my room when Calamity appears in a swirl of gold dozens of yards away. Her dress is nothing but a patchwork of see-through, gold gauze, the crown on her head tiny compared to her usual ones. Extended from it on each side is what looks like a headband made of gold bullets. There’s a sheet of glass-like crystal circling her head like a halo, and tiny gold stars are affixed to the rim.
It’s the oddest, must futuristic crown I’ve ever seen any royal female of this kingdom wear.
Her dark eyes are rimmed in light blue, with two small, black tears drawn beneath her eyes.
She stares at me in quiet longing.
Brewing accusation.
I want her more than anything I’ve ever wanted before, sweating from it, yet I can’t have her. I can’t.
Calamity steps forward, mouth opening to speak.
Jerking my head violently, I stumble away from her, this creature that torments me so.
Her eyes flash with anger and an almost alarming pain.
She dematerializes ahead of me, leaving me here, confused and shaking from the physical ache.
And it’s physical. Almost like an illness.
What the fuck is happening to me? I flash back to my room and swipe my arm across my forehead. It comes away coated in light pink blood.
It takes me three more days for me to realize something that should’ve been obvious to me long before now.
Calamity respects my wishes and keeps her distance from me, only crossing paths during military or social affairs.
It’s the only time she speaks to me, giving her “uncle” the customary greeting.
Just like before.
Can’t tell where the line between honoring my desires and punishing me is, yet there’s no doubt that this is also meant to inflict pain on me.
It’s working.
When I was eighty-two, I became addicted to şirat. Our version of hashish, if you will. It’s one of the most addicting things known to our kind, second only to blood and sex, and it kills us just as frequently when coming off it.
That withdrawal is nothing compared to this. Forget that fact that I’ve actually considered visiting the royal physicians about this; it’s why she’s doing it that’s gnawing at me.
It shouldn’t matter to me what one young female thinks or feels. Not to this extent.
I’m breaking Calamity’s heart with my denial.
Fuck this, I’m pretty sure I’m breaking my own.
Leaving my computers running, I finally push myself towards my bed. Haven’t slept in five days. I’ve avoided it on purpose, frustrated by the ever-lucid, ever-vivid dreams that rob me of any actual rest.
Falling face down onto the black, silk covers, I’m pulled under in an instant, emerging in the catacombs once more. The mosaic of images and scenes are a cyclone of repetition. The same distorted message delivered time and time again.
The black vortex with its hissing, anamorphic voice. “You know what this all is. The answer is always before you.”
Her scent haunting me, even in this dreamscape, with its voiceless, taunting whispers. “Come to me. Forget who we’re supposed to be to each other and take what is yours.”
The red veil. The crown. The figure that’s Calamity yet isn’t truly her. “Eons of reproduction. One line after another. And, finally, she has arrived. My perfect descendant. The one with true power.”
The paper-white male in his ancient, tribal clothing, his own crown sparkling on his head. Black eyes, the same color as mine and Calamity’s. That familiar face that I can’t place . . . “Save her. Guide her. She’s needed.”
A replay of that veiled figure ripping back the fabric covering her face, revealing her shocking resemblance to the female that’s plaguing me. “Every single answer you seek is in you. In there. All over these walls. In our history . . . in this face.”
I awake on a shout, the sunlight streaming through the arched windows confusing me. Was I out for such a short time? It was daylight when I finally gave in to my need to rest.
Head pounding, gums aching, cock perpetually twitching, I reach for my cellphone on the nightstand. One glimpse of it and I see that I’ve been under for an entire day. There’s dozens of messages, all from Dregan, Sandor, and my brother.
My fucking brother.
My tattooed fingers tighten around the phone until I can hear it creaking, the material threatening to bend.
He’s the only one that can give me answers. The one hiding it all.
He’s not hiding it any longer. Refuse to accept this from him for a single second more. It’s time he gives me the answers I seek.
If not for the sake of this bloody kingdom, then for my sake, but either way it’s time.
Wiping another round of blood-sweat off my forehead, I drag myself out of the bed long enough to shower before heading in search of the king himself.
sixteen
I find Malachai in his study. Dematerializing straight inside, I catch him unawares, glaring at his computer screen with a fierce frown.
“Anything to do with Calamity?” I ask calmly, when inside I’m anything but.
For the first time in almost three-thousand-years of being his brother, I watch Malachai jump in his seat, pupils blown, eyes wide.
If I didn’t know any better, I could swear that’s sweat starting to gather along his brow.
“Obsidian, there you are.” Smoothing a hand down his black Sherwani—a traditional Indian-style blazer; a style our culture picked up on a millennium ago while living there—he stands to greet me. “We’ve all been searching for you.”
Hating this near-stranger before me and wondering how the hell we got to this point, I narrow my eyes as I study him. “You mean the same way I’ve been searching for answers you refuse to give me.”
There it is again. That guilty flicker. That panic. “This again? Obsidian, please—”
“No, brother. I think you’ve forgotten the foundations of our relationship. How it was always built on trust.”
He lays his hand upon the surface of his marble desk, but his fingers are shaking. Unsteady. Realizing this, he jerks his hand back and folds both arms behind his back. Then it’s his turn to assess me with a narrowed glance, hazel irises trailing over my body. “Why this obsession, Obsidian? Honestly?”
Because she’s driving me mad.
Because she’s infecting me.
Because the taste of her blood and her pussy won’t leave me be.
Because deep down I know I’m going to end up claiming what I cannot own if I can’t pinpoint why and how she’s doing this to me.
All things I can’t voice aloud. Instead, I go with another truth. “Because you’re breaking every single rule to pave way for her to inherit your throne. You, a male we both know is fertile”—after all, the tests were run on him recently as part of a new tradition to ensure succession of the line—“but has chosen for some reason not to procreate with your queen. Instead you change the working mechanisms of an entire empire so a female that isn’t yours biologically can rule.”
Malachai expels a frustrated breath. “I love her as if she’s my blood, Obsidian.”
I know! Hence another reason why I can’t have her! Not to mention the instability of this kingdom due to the rapidly-shifting times and this new law-changing streak of his. “Yet none of that explains why you’ve sealed her medical files. Why you’re changing so many laws. Why you let her run absolutely wild!”
“That’s what this is about! You’re angry because she’s a modern female that goes against everything your old-fashioned mentality believes in!”
His attempt to gaslight me only enrages me further. I’m not a hypocrite. I have enough self-awareness to understand that I’m struggling to adapt to the changes in the mentality of the females of this kingdom, but this is so much fucking bigger than that. “Don’t you try to deflect and make this about me, when we both know you shared my mentality until very recently.”
Obviously regretting his course of action, Malachai turns to face the window, gracing me with a view of his strained, pensive profile. “There’s things you don’t understand, Obsidian.”
“Because you won’t make me understand them!” I approach his desk, blood thundering in my veins at the sensation of betrayal his secrecy brings about. “I was eighteen when I was initiated into the army. Mere years later, our sire was dead and you were king. And even before then there were never any secrets between us, Malachai. So why fucking now?”
“Obsidian,” my brother says, using that tone he always used when we were younger. Only two-decades separate us, but I recognize that “big brother” tone every time he brings it out. “I promise you, one day I will be able to trust you with these answers, but as monarch this is one of those things that for now I must handle on my own.”
Bullshit.
Sick and utter bullshit.
This kind of ache can cripple a male if he’s not careful. An entire lifetime of trust between us finishes eroding—no, collapsing away in a single instant of time.
What makes it even more heartbreaking is how oblivious he is. How egotistical. Standing there, staring at the window, the king convinced he’s doing the right thing even as he ruins everything around him.
I don’t know what happened the last five years I was gone, but this can’t be the same male I grew up with. It can’t.
Fed-up and on the verge of rage, I leave his study without another word. On instinct, my mind takes me to the same place it usually does while dreaming lately—the massive corridor leading to the fucking catacombs.
Why does it always come back to this place? It’s ridiculous. No answers can be found—
Wait. That’s not exactly true, now is it?
The damnest suspicion pulls at me, like an invisible, unbreakable string. Suddenly I find myself doing what I couldn’t bring myself to do weeks before. Step by step, I travel the passageway into the catacombs. Using my preternatural speed, I descend into the Earth, until I arrive at the first entryway.
On either side of me, candles blaze to life on their own, highlighting the black walls and the inscriptions carved thousands upon thousands of years ago. It’s while I’m standing here, eyeing the stone portal before me with its single, odd keyhole that another memory comes barreling back at me.
The keyhole. From the outside it seems round, but I know within its an intricate spiral.
Just like the horns that baby goat skull had in one of my dreams. The skull the faceless female was holding out to me.
But they weren’t horns, were they? My mind had morphed the image while reminding me of the key’s existence. To my left is the inscription of that skull, and as my father once explained, behind that piece of stone lies the key.
Walking up to the wall, I press my palm to the inscription, barely surprised when the single large brick slides first backwards, then outwards, until it finally slides into a recess in the wall. The opening bared is pitch black, but my father’s voice rings in my head from two-in-a-half-millennia in the past.
“The key to the catacombs lies in there and only one of our line can get the stone to move.”
Reaching inside, I feel around for the key. My fingers finally enclose around it, safe in its velvet pouch, but even through the fabric I can feel the ridges. The spirals.
Again, like the baby goat’s horns in that dream.
Within minutes, I’ve used the key to open the inner chamber. Candles burst to life upon my entry, controlled by a magic I never truly bothered to learn or understand. Why should I have? By the time I was born all the old rites were more than ancient. Nothing but stories taught to me as the spare heir of our family’s throne.
The inner chamber is a smorgasbord of relics. Parchments. Papyrus. Carvings, sculptures, paintings, all organized according to timeline. It’s at the very end of the chamber that I find what I’m looking for.
The area devoted to our faction’s beginnings. My oldest known ancestor’s history.
Two ancient portraits, preserved by the same magic that runs this place, stare at me from the shadows.
In one, it’s the male. The one from my dreams with the recognizable face. My ancestor, the first male to separate himself from the others to create this new faction. The first king.
Marduk.
All the males in my family line have resembled each other in some way or form, but Marduk’s face once again strikes me with a cold fist to the center of my chest.
For that’s my face staring back at me. My face but five times paler and missing the beard covering my jaw.
Next to him is the portrait of his queen—his mad queen, now that the tale’s coming back to me. A queen even paler than he is . . .
With her striking resemblance to Calamity.
And as the rest of the story—their story—continues to come back to me, I have to finally admit what’s brutally obvious.
Eons and generations might separate Calamity and I, to the point where we no longer share the same DNA, but ten-thousand-years-ago we shared the same ancestors.
King Marduk and his half-succubus, half-vampire queen Ninkasi.
seventeen
“T
en-thousand-years and you hide our first reported case of a campion from me?”
Malachai practically falls off his bed. “How in the hells—”
Alessandra is nowhere to be found. Even expanding my senses, I can’t locate a trace of her in the royal chambers.
Frustrating. It would’ve been the perfect opportunity to question her, too.
“Ten. Fucking. Millennia. Malachai.” Stopping before his island of a bed, I cross my arms, doing my best to hide how badly I’m shaking.
Calamity’s DNA isn’t the only thing that’s rare.
Succubi are capable of reeling anyone in. Most of the time they don’t even do it on purpose. They exude a pheromone that attracts most beings around them.
Males, females. They all end up wanting to have sex with her. It’s biologically impossible for one of our kind to resist.
But among all vampires, a small portion of the population house an even bigger weakness to the succubi and incubi.
We end up becoming addicted, bonded. Bodies locked to the experience of having them, owning them, and incapable of letting go.
“I’m talking to you!” Malachai’s by his bed now, shrugging into his robe.
“An
d I’m questioning you!” I shout back. “A cambion among our kind for the first time since our original queen, and you hide this from me!”
“Again! How the fuck did you manage to get into the medical records?” Malachai flashes before me, aggression pumping off him.
Exactly what my body instinctively wants. He’s choosing to take the hypocritical route? Fine. Gives me more of an excuse to stomp his face in.
I meet my brother head-on, fangs bared. “Fuck the medical files. Who needs them when Ninkasi’s portrait still sits in the catacombs?”
Throwing his head back, he hisses at the ceiling.
Hadn’t thought of that one, had he?
“Shit,” he curses under his breath, turning away from me. “You couldn’t leave well-off alone. Of course you couldn’t.”
“Why would you want me to?” I yell at his back. “Instead of trusting me to help with this?” Instead of informing me so I could be better prepared?
Better prepared. What a crock of shit. There was no preparing me for this. Not when I share the same genetic weakness to succubi as my ancestor had.
Their numbers, while never-endingly stable, are pathetically tiny compared to ours. Avoiding them—or at the very least, not getting close enough to pick up on their pheromone—hasn’t been difficult.
Now there’s one directly under our roof and she reached sexual maturity during the five years I was gone, manifesting the full nature of her succubus-half. One I’ve been close to.
One I’ve tasted.
“You don’t understand. You say you’ve been in the catacombs, yet clearly you bypassed the part of our history where—”
“Ninkasi’s contributions to our society during the chaos of the founding years. You’re making all these choices based on that?”
“Yes, Obsidian! Everything is changing. Everything. You believe it’s my re-writing of the laws that caused the ripples in our society—”
I hold up a hand, rubbing the space between my eyebrows with the other. “No. I don’t. It was inevitable. It always is. With these new modern times, it was unavoidable that we’d have to deal with this. But you honestly believe that letting an unpredictable, part-succubus, part-vampire hybrid rule is the answer.” It’s not a question, simply me repeating his asinine belief.
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