23 - Josep
The miraculous first breath.
Traveling through the dirtis like being in the only place you’ve ever known.
It’s like going home. And once you’re inside it again, it’s like you never left.
It’s an overwhelming feeling of belonging.
So it makes perfect sense that coming out of the dirt is the exact opposite. It feels like death and hopelessness. The Darkness wants us to remember where we come from and where we belong.
This time, when I appear inside my bunker cave, naked and covered in dirt, and as the hopelessness washes over me, wrapping around me like a cloak, I temper it with a secret that brings me a bit of compensation.
It’s just enough to keep me focused on what comes next.
Which is a whole list of things—the scions, the ritual, the burial—but before all that happens, I have one more thing to do down here.
I don’t bother washing myself before I set back down the tunnel that leads to the hole that will take me to the darkness. I just get to the hole in the ground as quick as I can and jump, unfurling my wings to slow down my descent. Still, my feet land hard, causing a rumble through the earth.
I pause here, taking in every detail with my vampire eyes.
Little Baby is a tattered mess. Bloody and almost nothing left of her. But notquitenothing.
I walk forward until I am standing over her body. She is unrecognizable and in pieces. But I bend down, slide my hands under what’s left of her spine, and pick her up.
A foot is left behind. A few ribs. And a hand.
But it won’t matter. What I have is enough.
I turn and go back, standing under the hole in the earth I just came down, and with one strong wingbeat, I am ascending again.
A minute later I’m walking back down the tunnel to my cavern and seconds after that I am walking into the pool of black water, Little Baby still in my arms.
I settle on a ledge of rock and breathe a sigh of relief.
It’s lonely being me and I’m tired of it.
Transforming the girl called Echo into the sacrifice named Little Baby is the only opportunity I will ever get to have a partner who is not Paul.
To have something that is all mine. Made by me, sacrificed by me, resurrected by me.
The scions are not loyal to me because I wasn’t the one who fed them as they grew. I wasn’t the one who had conversations with them, or took them to bed, or gave them the blood kiss. They don’t even know I exist.
Paul has them. And he can tell me all day long that they don’t mean anything to him, but he’s lying. Especially about Ryet.
I am not stupid. I know he’s going to try to save Ryet. He won’t betray me—not completely. He will sacrifice Ryet to complete our mission, but some way, somehow, he will find a way to work around his obligations to me in order to save Ryet.
He’s in the process of putting it all in motion right now. That’s why he wanted to be alone at the end.
But I don’t care.
Because I’m going to work the same magic with Little Baby.
And like Paul, I too have been planning.
I bite the palm of my hand, letting my fangs seep deep into the flesh. Then I drip my blood all over Little Baby’s remnants.
What happens next is just… a bit of science. As is most of what’s happening down here in the earth. Coulomb’s Law, which is unnecessarily wordy, can be broken into this: opposites attract. I gave her blood when I left her last. Just a little bit to get her through the pain. But it’s also a marker. One that will attract new blood. My new blood, specifically. Which is so charged with magic—from Paul, from Ryet, from Syrsee, and, of course, from the Darkness itself—that it can do wondrous things.
