Blood Ties (8 page)

“Yeah—” Oliver stammered. “But he's my friend, too.”

“Ha! Of course it is! A vampire's best friend.” Myrandah turned to Bane. “And ah, yes, how fine and lethal this one becomes.…” Her eyes glowed as she rubbed Bane's arm, but Oliver noticed her cast a lightning-fast glance at Sebastian that didn't seem as pleasant. “I bet he excites at the notion of a real blood hunt with the cousins for once.”

“Definitely,” Bane agreed.

“Mother,” Phlox groaned, “Charles doesn't need to spend his whole time—”

“
Tsss!
” Myrandah interrupted. “What else are the young adults like
Bane
supposed to do?” she countered, making sure to use Bane's chosen name. Oliver could imagine how much Bane had just enjoyed that. Myrandah turned, still smiling, and immediately reached up and grasped one of Phlox's earrings: the tiny silver lizard head with ruby eyes. “Why, how Phloxiana favors the
modern
things,” she commented.

Oliver watched Phlox's mouth tighten as she fought a reply.

And as if to finish her act with a flair, Myrandah glanced casually over Phlox's shoulder to Sebastian, and her eyes narrowed slightly. “Oh … and she brings the husband along. Aren't we lucky?” Then she spun and started inside. “Enter!” she commanded.

Phlox and Sebastian trudged silently after her.

Bane chuckled. “Grandma's awesome.”

The cluttered apartment was lit by long rows of candles mounted on the walls. A short hall led them into a main room, where a long dining table took up almost the entire space. There was no kitchen to speak of, only a brick oven on the far wall, and no appliances like refrigerators or stoves. The walls displayed helmets, weapons, and other more gruesome trophies from human victims, or the wars and revolutions that vampires had a hand in causing.

“They've arrived at last, have they?” a raspy voice hissed. It was Phlox's father, Dominus, looking up from his hunched position at the table.

“Dad, the train was barely late,” Phlox huffed.

Three other chairs at the table were already filled, by Phlox's brother, Ember, and Oliver and Bane's cousins, Misère and Gustav. Their mother, Sylvana, had been slain a decade ago. Ember was older than Phlox, with thinning hair and a weathered face. He wore a rumpled blue coat, an officer's jacket from the Napoleonic Wars, its condition noticeably threadbare compared to anything Phlox and Sebastian would wear.

As everyone took their seats, there was a knock at the door. Myrandah hurried over. A young man stood outside, holding a long, thin, black glass bottle with a bulbed base in one hand and a tiny iron pitcher in the other. Each was stopped with a cork. Myrandah exchanged
myna
for the bottles and brought them straight to the table. She placed the small pitcher in front of Oliver. “Grandma remembers how he favors the tiger's blood,” she cooed.

“Thanks,” Oliver replied.

“And this,” she said, “for the rest, fresh from the local oubliette.” She held up the bottle. “A few
myna
more for the torture-draining, but how worth it!”

“The very best.” Dominus nodded.

Everyone had only a goblet in front of them. As the bottle of human blood was passed around, Myrandah delivered a plate to Oliver that held a dish called vesselage. It was a spongy white cake with a latticework of thin red candy tubes spiderwebbing through the cake. Lying on the plate, spiced blood seeped from it in a pleasing way.

“It's great, Grandma,” Oliver commented after a bite.

“Suck up,” Bane sneered, and Misère and Gustav nodded in agreement. Misère was a short girl with a round face, her mouth down-turned in a perpetual pout. Her black hair had shocks of gold, and was pulled back and spun around two ivory sticks. She had powdered her face a pure white and painted her lips with shimmering gold as well. She wore a red silk cheongsam, embroidered with gold and fixed by a line of buttons down her right side. Gustav had long brown sideburns and wore a black pinstripe suit with a frilled collar and a tie.

Sitting there beside them, Bane should have looked like the dangerous one, slouching carelessly, with his wild hair and black T-shirt from the band the Petrified Hearts, which displayed an image of open ribs and a stone heart within. And yet he seemed somehow very tame compared to his cousins. They sat perfectly straight, faces blank, with a presence that was at once calm and lethal.

“It's the taste of charcoaled sugar,” Myrandah explained to Oliver, as she did every visit. “Aged in deep caverns as only the Underworld can provide. What a treat it must be for Oliver.”

“Yes, we've heard,” Phlox said tightly.

Everyone tended to their goblets. The grandparents asked about Oliver's schooling. The cousins joked with Bane about how little killing he'd done.

“Just take me out there,” Bane said eagerly, “and I'll make up for my sheltered upbringing.”

“
Neelesthth,
” Dominus agreed in Skrit.

“So, Sebastian…” It was Uncle Ember. Oliver looked up, realizing that this was the first time anyone had really talked to Sebastian. “Why don't you tell us about your all-important work at…” He paused and his voice went slightly sour, as if his next words were distasteful: “Half-Light?”

Silence fell over the table.

Sebastian glanced briefly at Ember, then took a slow sip from his goblet. “Things are fine,” he replied. “We've had a good few years.…”

Myrandah sniffed with disdain.

Oliver watched as his father paused and looked around, calmly taking in Ember's glare and the others' disapproving gazes. Oliver was surprised that things were getting so tense, so fast. It was almost as if the family had been waiting to pounce on Sebastian. Oliver knew that the Old World vampires disapproved of all the modern ways in the New World—of the medical sciences and philosophy that the New World vampires embraced. Even the idea that you could feed on humans without killing them was offensive in the Old World. But this reaction seemed more intense than during their last visit.

“Now I know,” Sebastian continued, sounding almost defensive, which Oliver couldn't remember hearing before, “that the Consortium doesn't have the best reputation in these parts, but it's important work that we do.”

Oliver tried to take a quiet bite of cake, but his fork clanged on the plate. Dominus slurped his blood.

“Not everyone shares that opinion.” Ember's eyes had started to smolder jade green.

Sebastian nodded slowly. Phlox reached over and rubbed his arm as he continued: “Look, Ember, I'm well aware that some of you—”

“Well that's the problem right there, isn't it?” Ember snapped, looking up and down the table for support. “He refers to us as
you.
We're all vampires, Sebastian, but you New Worlders seem to consider yourselves superior.”

“Hold on, Ember…” Phlox countered.

“No, it's fine,” Sebastian said calmly, yet his eyes were glowing as well. “Your brother obviously feels that this needs to be said in front of everyone, and before we've even had a chance to settle in. Let him finish his thought.”

“Listen to that high and mighty tone,” Ember scoffed. “Vampires have lived a certain way for centuries. Then you come along with your theories and your abominations—”

“You might want to be careful, brother-in-law,” Sebastian warned.

“But you're the ones who should be more careful, don't you think?” Ember was almost shouting now. “You question things that ought not be questioned.” Ember glanced at Oliver. “Prophecies are meant to be fulfilled in their own time. It is not the way to
create
an answer.”

Dominus hissed in approval. It was clear what Ember meant: Oliver had been created to fulfill the Nexia prophecy. Was he the
abomination
that Ember was referring to? It certainly sounded like it…

Ember continued, “And how do you even know you're reading the prophecy correctly? Our scholars find no such simple answer in its meaning. And yet Half-Light foolishly rushes ahead, ignorant of the dangers—”

“That's enough!” Phlox slammed her goblet onto the table. “It's always the same with all of you. How can you deny the yearning of the true
vampyr
? How can you not want freedom from this world, this prison?”

“PRISON!?” Myrandah suddenly roared. Her eyes burned, and her voice thinned to a sinister hiss. “You are fools to seek freedom from this world. Earth is death's paradise! A bounty made of flesh and chaos! Could the twisted world of humanity be any more perfect for vampires?”

“Perfect?” Phlox countered. “You call being trapped in a human body, having to feed on lowly mortal creatures while living in fear of being turned to dust, a paradise? Why can't you see that the
vampyr
within us yearn for true freedom! To return to the higher dimensions we were banished from, to live as spirit energy, immortal, fearless! How can you not feel it crying out inside you?”

“Bah!” Myrandah snapped, waving her hand at Phlox and Sebastian. “The tongues on these young to speak of the
vampyr
like it is a dirty human. To say that it yearns and cries … It only craves! And earth provides!” She thrust herself out of her chair and stormed from the room.

“See Grandma's claws,” Misère said, her mouth registering the slightest smile. Beside her, Bane wasn't laughing.

Oliver sat frozen.

“This would be a good time for me to leave,” said Sebastian tersely. “Thank your wife for dinner,” he said to Dominus, then pushed back from the table and swept out the door.

Phlox turned viciously to her brother. “Happy?”

“Are you, Phloxiana?” Ember countered.

Dinner passed in silence, though there was no silence in Oliver's head. His relatives thought he was an abomination.… That was a new low. And they not only thought that Half-Light was wrong to try to fulfill the prophecy by making Oliver, it sounded like they also thought Half-Light might be reading the prophecy wrong.
I've got to hear that prophecy for myself someday,
Oliver thought.

He wondered if this new, urgent anger in his relatives was because he was getting older and also, if having his first demon dream of Illisius was any indication, because the time to fulfill the prophecy was getting closer.
So maybe they'll be glad to know that my parents are going to sacrifice me and start again.
His parents definitely sounded defiant during the argument. They believed in the prophecy, in opening the Gate. It seemed like just more evidence that they would do whatever it took to fulfill it …
like not letting their failure of a son get in the way,
Oliver thought darkly.

Either way, dinner left Oliver with a sinking feeling. Not only was he a failure to the prophecy in the New World, he was apparently also a failure for being the child of the prophecy in the first place. Were there any more ways, he wondered defeatedly, that he could fail?

Chapter 6

Seventh Moon

“
THESE ARE THE LEAST
modern
earrings I have!” Oliver heard Phlox shouting as he passed his parents' room early the next evening. Sebastian, who hadn't returned home until sometime after Oliver had gone to bed, grunted in agreement.

Oliver was sharing the other guest room with Bane, who had already left for the night with the cousins. They were headed to the surface to raid a human village with some of the other teens and likely bring their victims back to the oubliettes, which were special torture dungeons.

Dean was in their room, rubbing a salt balm on his face to keep his mold under control. He was sitting on the edge of the guest coffin, which was a simple open pit of soil that Oliver and Bane had to share. Dean was hunching over a tiny hand mirror that he held between his knees, as there were no mirrors in a vampire home.

“So, how was it up there?” Oliver asked. As a zombie, Dean had to sleep on the pueblo roof.

“Not too bad, actually,” said Dean cheerily. “There's, like, fifty other zombies up there. They had a big dinner of all these different animal heads and stuff. They're not so fun to talk to, but the brains were good, and after eating, they all slept like, well, like the dead.”

“Sounds kinda fun,” Oliver said, partly imagining the idea of actually sleeping well.

The door popped open and Phlox stuck her head in. “Oliver, your grandmother wants to take you down to Tartarus now. So let's go.”

After discovering that in his haste to pack he hadn't brought any other pairs of socks, Oliver and Dean found Myrandah in the kitchen. Phlox was trying to help her get her coat on.

“
Tsss,
” Myrandah hissed.

“Mother, if you'd just let me hold the other sleeve—”

“How Phloxiana tries to help
now,
” Myrandah huffed, “when Myrandah is left with only her own help in the five years between visits.”

Phlox bit her lip and dropped the sleeve. “All right, then.”

Oliver looked around. “Where's Dad?”

“He had more business to attend to,” Phlox muttered, sounding envious.

“Quickly!” Myrandah barked from the door. “The fates pay best before midnight.”

“What's she talking about?” asked Dean.

“You'll see,” Oliver replied.

Below the pueblos, they weaved through the narrow cobblestone streets. Many of the shops were vacant, their entryways boarded up. There were few vampires moving about this early in the evening, and none were as well-dressed as the vampires Oliver usually saw in Seattle.

“Look around you, Oliver,” Myrandah grumbled. “A once grand city, its splendor fallen.
Tsss
.… This was the model of ancient civilizations! From Morosia and Naraka, the vampires ruled every shadow of the earth. Living in splendor, starting wars, causing chaos, and feeding on the flesh as we pleased!” As Myrandah walked, her hunch took on a bounce with her step, as if she was a large lizard. “And what now? To the surface they go, choosing an existence like the vermin, like the humans! To dodge the sunlight in order to pursue their twisted
‘modern'
life.”