Page 131 of Blood Lovers

He stands up, body filthy with dirt. But that just makes him more captivating. The dirt is the earth, and the earth is power.

Don’t we all love power?

Isn’t a man wearing power always more attractive?

He comes towards me, places his hands on my shoulders and looks me in the eyes. They are lavender these days. Like the mist and the light that surrounds him now. “This is it?”

I nod my head, still lost in those eyes. “Ryet’s not here yet, but he will be shortly. The girl is being bled out right now. You will have your share in a matter of hours.”

He lets out a breath, then releases me and turns, walking across the smooth rock floor to the little pool of cool water that is collecting underneath the trickling waterfall.

He stands there in front of the pool, looking down, perhaps studying his own distorted reflection in the water. Then he turns again and smiles bigger. “We did it.”

“We did.”

“He’s going to be born tonight?”

“Absolutely.”

“And how long—”

“I don’t know. A week, perhaps? You know how slow things move across the ocean.”

“Yeah.” Josep turns again.

I just watch him from behind. The way his back moves with his breathing. The way he’s nearly aglow with the lavender mist.

He’s older than me by a thousand years, at least. He was my mentor in those early days. I had killed my maker with dead Black blood and was in prison for this crime when Josep took notice of me and my plight. He was tired back then. Tired of living, tired of failing, tired of everything. And he only agreed to be my mentor if I shared the dead blood with him so he could kill himself and be done with it.

I agreed, of course. He was beautiful then too. And enticing. But I was on a mission, you see. A mission of power. And I wanted to make changes to my lineage. So I didn’t think about it. I just made him promise to see it through with me and then he could drink that blood any time he wanted.

We stored blood in crude glass jars back then. But dead blood has no shelf life. He still has his jar of dead blood somewhere around here. But he never drank it. Not after we had success.

Or, as it turned out, failure. Depends on whose eyes you’re looking through, doesn’t it?

And then… oh, how angry they all were at what Josep and I accomplished with the genetics.

So naturally, he came with me across the ocean.

If we did it once, we could do it again. That’s what he told me when we were chained together on the long voyage to the New World.

Indeed. We could.

And now, after hundreds of years—and many, many failures—we have.

“Did you have your visit with the Darkness?” I prod him because he’s been silent for almost a minute now.

He turns, nodding. “Weeks ago.” Then he points to his neck. “But it’s still in there, of course. All you have to do is bite.”

This is how education works in our world. This is how genetics works. It takes a very special person to lure the Darkness to them. It isn’t something that just hands over power. I don’t know how other creatures deal with it, but in the vampire world the Darkness ignores you until you do something spectacular without its help. Something like create a new vampire from nothing.

It’s not impossible to do, but it doesn’t happen often. And, of course, these new creatures are not really vampires. They are mistakes.

But mistakes count in our world. It makes the Darkness take notice.

Josep’s relationship with the Darkness started long before I met him. He was something of a prodigy, I hear, making hideous things from Black blood.

My own relationship with the Darkness was severed almost the same moment it began. That’s how awful and terrible the things Josep and I made together were. We used our small allotment of Black blood, but also the dead Black blood from a little witch we sacrificed. We stole the child right out of the hatchery.