12 - Ryet
This is the Kingdom of Darkness
I never knewthat scions had a stench to them.
They reek like…rot. Like something two days dead that’s been left out in the hot sun. The scent of one was bad enough, but there are at least a dozen staring at me from the opposite end of the pool, looking like backlit shadows.
The silence lingers because the scion who appeared first, the one who was talking to me, didn’t finish his introduction when his buddies came up behind him.
“Get out of my house.” My voice is nearly unrecognizable. It’s the demon voice. Which matches my new demon body.
The leader, if that’s what he is, bows, falling to his knees and prostrating himself. “My lord?—”
“I’m not your lord.”
He looks up at me, but doesn’t lift his head, only his eyes. “OK. Ryet. That’s who you are, right?” I don’t nod or agree, so he just assumes his guess is correct and keeps going. “There are scions underground. They got to feed off you and they’re transforming as we speak.”
“Get to the point.”
“The point is,” he says, getting to his feet and staring me in the eyes. It comes off as a challenge and even though I’m not his lord, I feel slighted at his overt gesture of disrespect. “The point is that we haven’t fed,Ryet.”
“Am I supposed to care?”
The man sighs and there is some murmuring from the others standing behind him. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I just know I’m starving.”
I think back on my own experience as a scion, trying to remember a time when I was starving, but can’t. I mean, the lust was always there. If Paul bled, I wanted it. But I don’t recall a single time when I ever had to go begging for it. Especially from someone I didn’t even know. “Where is Paul?” I ask him.
“He left. He took Kael and left.”
“To go where?” I notice that my voice is starting to normalize. It’s no longer demonic-sounding, but not quite back to my regular voice, either. My skin is changing too. Instead of the bruised blue and purple color, it’s going pale. And the bite marks that were all over me just minutes ago are starting to heal and disappear.
“No one knows,” the scion says.
“What is your name?”
“Jeff.”
“Jeff?” I snicker. “Jeff the vampire? I don’t see it.”
Jeff sighs like he’s tired and then his eyes flicker a weird shade of gold. “Me either.” And these might be the truest words I’ve ever heard from anyone.
“All right, Jeff. I need things. If you help me, I’ll help you.”
“What do you need, my lord?”
“And don’t call me that. I’m not your fucking lord. I’m no one to you and you’re no one to me. Don’t get attached to me or my blood, because I’m not Paul. I’m nothing like Paul. Do you understand me?”
Jeff nods. “Yes. Now how can I help?”
I stand up and get out of the pool, cradling Syrsee in my arms as I walk towards the group of scions. “Where is Josep?”
“No one knows,” Jeff admits. “He was in the ground, but there’s a lot of disturbed dirt over there. Even before you came back to life. I know Paul left, we all saw that. But there’s a lot of turned-over dirt now. Like…” He pauses to take a breath. “Like some of the scions came up too.”
I blow out a breath, silently cursing Paul for causing this mess. “How many? In all, I mean? How many of you are there?”
“Fifty-four in total, but there’s only twenty-two of us left who didn’t get to drink and go into the earth.”
“Twenty-one,” another man says. “Kael left with Paul, remember?”
