Blood Hunt (50 page)

“Hello, children of Eresh and Ay’Araf. Hello, daughter. It is good to see the three of you here tonight, together as companions.”

Naomi was weeping openly now, though whether the tears reflected terror, or awe, or grief, Two could not say. Without words, Naomi went to her knees and bowed her head, her back still shaking with sobs. Stephen glanced over at Naomi, perplexed by her reaction, and then back at the tattooed vampire. A moment later, he was visibly shaken as a bolt of recognition ran through him. He dropped to one knee and bowed his head as well.

Two did not yet know who this vampire was, but it seemed obvious that the woman was to be treated with reverence, and so she went to do what her friends had done. The vampire’s voice, still roaring inside of her head, stopped her before she could move.

“There is no need for all of that, children. I am a simple woman, glad to be once again in the company of my own kind. I would spend this time here with you as an equal.”

Stephen glanced up, head still bowed, and spoke in a hoarse voice. “I don’t believe that is possible, my Queen, but we will do our best to accommodate your wishes.”

Naomi still could not raise her head, could not, in fact, seem to stop the sobs that were wracking her body. She covered her face with her hands, making whimpering noises, gasping for breath. The tattooed vampire smiled gently, stepped forward, put her hand on Naomi’s head.

“Why do you weep, my daughter?” she asked, and after a few unsuccessful attempts, Naomi was able to answer the woman, voice muffled by her hands.

“I believed you dead. I truly did. Oh, forgive me, Mother.”

“I have forgiven many for far worse, my child. You have done me no harm.”

Naomi fought with her tears, slowly winning the battle. At last she looked up at the other vampire, her cheeks still wet, with something between awe and love.

“I know I should know who you are, uh … ma’am,” Two said. “But I’m afraid I haven’t had much time to learn yet.”

The vampire turned to her and smiled. When she spoke this time, her voice came to Two’s ears, and no longer to her mind. It was the voice of a woman, nothing more, but as Two heard the name, she understood why her companions had reacted as they did.

“My name is Ashayt, Two Ashley Majors,” the vampire told her. “I am the Girl from the Desert, last of the
Ovras
, author of the Second Doctrine, and I am
very
glad to meet you.”

* * *

“This is … most unexpected,” Stephen said.

He was sitting on a collapsed pillar, still trying to regain his composure, seemingly unable to stop staring at Ashayt. Two couldn’t blame him; the vampire elder was magnetic, seeming to draw all attention to her while doing nothing more than sitting, serene and unspeaking, gazing out at the moonlit village below them.

“Yes,” Ashayt said. “Eadwyn felt it best to keep my identity a secret. He worried that you would be afraid of me or simply refuse to believe him.”

Stephen nodded. “I would have thought him a liar.”

“And you, daughter?” Ashayt asked.

Naomi jerked and looked up at Ashayt. She had been staring at the ground.

“I … I would have been offended,” she said, her brow creasing. “I would have been angry with him for teasing us with the name of a dead god.”

“I am neither dead nor a god.”

“I’m sorry,” Naomi said, looking down again.

“You do not need my forgiveness. You must forgive yourself, my dear.”

“For thinking you dead?”

Ashayt favored Naomi with a gentle smile. “For many things.”

“I will try, Mother.”

Ashayt nodded, sighed, looked again down at the buildings below. “On nights like this, I am reminded of Egypt, the home I left behind so long ago.”

“Couldn’t you go back?” Two asked, and Ashayt slowly shook her head.

“Not there,” she said, an aching sadness in her voice. “Never there.”

Two was going to ask for elaboration, but Stephen shot her a look that made her think better of it, and she closed her mouth. She wondered if she should feel patronized, like a child dismissed to the side while the adults talked, but Ashayt soon assuaged her of any such fear.

“I would like to hear your story, Two,” the elder said. “I know some of it from Eadwyn but few of the details.”

Two looked up, startled. She had not been prepared to tell her tale yet again.

“Everything?” she asked.

“If you would, yes. I know it is hard, and I know you are tired of telling it, but I must admit to harboring a great deal of curiosity.”

Two took a deep breath. “OK,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“It’s … parts of it are ugly.”

“I have seen many ugly things in my life,” Ashayt assured her. Two nodded, then spoke.

“I was addicted to heroin and selling my body for it when Theroen found me,” Two began, moving into the story with the smooth flow of an experienced teller. It still hurt, but she found it easier somehow to tell it to Ashayt than to any previous audience.

The elder vampire let Two tell the story without interruption for question or comment. In places, Stephen and Naomi made small additions, once the tale had reached the point at which they had become players. Finally, Two finished it and sat back.

“And, well … here we are,” she said. “We’re delivering a vial of blood to an
Ovras
vampire that everyone thinks is dead, and I gotta say, ma’am, that every time I think that my life just
can’t
get any weirder … it does.”

Ashayt smiled and nodded. “Thank you for telling me your story, Two. You have been through much pain and difficulty, and I am sorry. Thank you also for making this delivery. Do you have the box that Eadwyn asked you to bring?”

“I have it, Mother,” Naomi said. She alone among them was still having a hard time looking at Ashayt, but she did so now, glancing up at the elder vampire and extending the wooden box toward her.

Ashayt took the box and opened it, taking the small silver cylinder and holding it in the palm of her hand. She smiled.

“When I left this in Pakistan, I thought that I was doing so forever,” she said. “Now I am very glad indeed to see it again.”

She took from some internal pocket a tiny silver key, and inserted it into the end of the cylinder. There was a clicking noise, nearly inaudible to Two, and with delicate movements Ashayt unscrewed one end of the container and slid its contents out into her hand. She held it up for them, a small crystal tube filled with deep red liquid.

“May I ask what it is, lady?” Stephen asked.

Ashayt looked up at him, smiling, and her eyes sparkled. “It is the very blood that runs in your veins, my brave warrior. This is the blood of Ay’Araf.”

Stephen tilted his head. “Blood from Ay’Araf himself? Not from one of his line?”

Ashayt nodded. “Ay’Araf himself.”

“Which you left in Pakistan …”

“Yes.”

“My lady, forgive me, but … why would you have a vial of Ay’Araf’s blood in the first place?”

Ashayt held the vial up to the moon and looked at the liquid within for a long moment before turning her gaze back to Stephen.

“He gave it to me,” she said. “Long ago, on a night not unlike this, warm and pleasant, we sat with Eresh on a beach, hundreds of miles from any man, and she asked us to drink from her until she was dead and to burn her body to ash.”

“You killed her?!” Two cried, before clapping her hands over her mouth. Ashayt looked over at her not with disapproval or anger, but with understanding.

“We killed her, yes. It brings me sorrow, even now, to think of it, but she was in pain. Torment. Her children were spreading. More and more of them were being uncovered and destroyed. She felt it, every time it happened, no matter the distance, and it brought her unspeakable agony … physical pain and mental anguish. It finally became too much to stand. She begged us, the only other vampires old enough and strong enough to do it. She begged us to end her, to take her blood into ourselves and be strengthened by it.”

Ashayt’s eyes were far away now, remembering that night. “We sat on the beach in front of a great fire and we wept, and said our goodbyes. She was the mother of us all, and in the end we could do no more than give her what she asked. Ay’Araf and I took turns drinking from her until she was dead, and we put her on the fire. We made love while she burned, lost in the ecstasy of her blood. When it was over and we lay naked on the sand, Ay’Araf bit his wrist and filled this crystal with his blood, and told me to take it. It was to be a memory, a reminder of him, and of this night we had shared together, and of the thing that we had done.”

Ashayt sighed, and she looked at them again. “I would never see him again, and I kept his gift with me until I traveled to Pakistan more than a thousand years later to see his tomb. I left it there with him, the only part of him that remained beyond ash and dust. Now Eadwyn has retrieved it, and you have returned it to me at last.”

“Why did you have Eadwyn go get it?” Two asked.

Ashayt smiled at her, paused a moment as if considering her next words carefully. Finally, she said, “It is for you.”

Naomi glanced up. “We are to keep it?”

“For now, yes.”

“I don’t understand, Mother,” Naomi said. “Is it … are we to use it as proof that you approve of Two’s desire to be a vampire?”

Ashayt considered this but shook her head. “No, child, not precisely. It could be used as such, but Eadwyn sent you to me for another reason. There is a choice that Two must make, a choice that will change the rest of her days and shape the future of our people.”

There was a momentary pause in the conversation, and then Stephen gave a small laugh.

“I’m rather curious to hear this one,” he said.

“You and me both,” Two told him. “Ma’am, could you … elaborate on that a little?”

Ashayt smiled, but her eyes were set intently on the small vial of blood. She reached again into another hidden pocket of her gown and brought forth a second crystal vial, holding it up together with the first. From Two’s vantage point, they looked identical.

Ashayt turned and held them both out to Two. “These are for you.”

Two looked at them in surprise for a moment, and then took them from the elder vampire. She held one cupped in each hand, looking down at them, trying to determine what she was supposed to do with them.

“I’m confused,” Two said at last, and Ashayt gave a small laugh.

“I would expect so.”

Two looked up at the other vampires. Stephen was looking at Naomi, who was still staring at the ground. Ashayt was gazing out into the night again, her features still serene.

“This other one is yours, right? Your blood?” Two asked, and Ashayt nodded.

“What is she to do with them, Mother?” Naomi asked, looking up. “What choice is she to make?”

Ashayt gave Naomi an odd look of pity and then she turned back to Two.

“Before her death, Eresh revealed to us that she was not the first vampire. She was the source of all living vampires, but she was not the first. There was at least one who had come before her … and she was not like him.”

Now it seemed Naomi could look at Ashayt, her reticence to do so lost in her astonishment. “We were always taught that Eresh was the first.”

“The origins of our species are gone now,” Ashayt said. “The one who turned Eresh told her nothing of his past, only that he was the last of his kind until her. You must understand: Eresh was thousands of years old by the time I became a vampire. To the Mesopotamian people, she was a goddess. The one who made her … who knows how old he might have been? Our origins may stretch back to the time of the Neanderthals or earlier. We don’t know. We will never know.

“What I do know is that Eresh was not like her sire. Whatever it is that split our bloodlines, it began with her. Yet, some part of it seems to have lain dormant, because some of the traits of her sire reawakened in me, and others in Ay’Araf. Eresh had his strength and mental abilities, I have his aura and resistance to the sunlight, Ay’Araf had his near-immunity to poisons and his ability to go for days without blood.”

“What about the Burilgi?” Stephen asked.

“I have never heard definitive word of their sire. Whether they represent a mutation like myself, or are simply a polluted version of one of the other clans is uncertain, but in either case I can think of no area in which they are the most blessed of the vampire races.”

Stephen nodded, glanced at the blood vials in Two’s hands, and looked back up, this time at Two.

“I can’t …” Two began, and then looked at Ashayt. “I mean … I wasn’t an Eresh long enough, was I?”

“No,” Ashayt said. “The bloodlines cannot reunite within you.”

“Even if I drank these, it wouldn’t work. I’d have to be drained first, and this wouldn’t be enough to bring me back. I’d have to take Naomi’s blood, or Stephen’s, and then I’d just end up like them.”

“Yes.”

“But you said I have a choice.”

Ashayt nodded. Smiled. “Yes.”

Naomi had been looking at the vials in Two’s hands, but now made a sudden, startled gasping noise. She said only one word, and it came out as something near a whisper: “Oh.”

“What, Naomi?” Two asked. “What is it?”

Naomi looked suddenly miserable. “You have a choice,” she said. “You definitely have a choice … although it’s not really much of a choice, is it? And Eadwyn knew that when he sent us here.”

Two pursed her lips in confusion. “I am totally lost.”

“Aye, seconded,” Stephen said.

“The blood can’t combine in you because you’re not a vampire, and I don’t think it could combine in any other Eresh, because their own blood would simply overpower it.”

“Correct,” Ashayt said.

“Could the effect be reproduced with … no, no, it’s … it’d be too weak.” Naomi was mumbling to herself, staring at the ground. Ashayt was nodding.

“It has to be yours,” Naomi said to Ashayt. “And his.”

“Yes,” Ashayt said again.

“But what the hell do we do with it?!” Two cried. She felt her hands clenching and forced them to loosen. She had been feeling left out for so long, and she was tired of it. “We don’t have Eresh’s blood. Even if we did, how do we make the combination?”