BloodGifted (21 page)

He lifted my hand
, turned it to the light and the serpent’s eyes gleamed dully. ‘The stones, she said, were actually two drops of her blood and imbued with power. They would glow on the finger of an Antonii —a descendant of the family of Marcus Antonius—and burn that of an impostor.’

I recalled the way the rings glowed when Alec and I first met. He was an Antonii, it seemed, by virtue
of his transformation by Luc who was in turn changed by Lucius, son of Marcus Antonius. In a roundabout way it made sense.

Luc
continued. ‘They were to be passed on through the generations till the Destined Ones appear, and only when their child is born in the exact same place where it all began, will the curse be ended. The rings themselves will hum in confirmation.’

I looked at the thing sitting so innocuously on my hand and shook my head. After my initial introduction to the ring on my birthday, I’d have thought nothing more could surprise me. I was wrong. First slithering, then glowing, now humming.
What next
, I thought,
magic beans?

In some way I was r
elieved it hadn’t hummed, yet another part of me was disappointed and I had no explanation as to why.

‘Tell me about the twins,’ I asked, to rid my mind of yet another disturbing thought.

‘The girl, Antonia, lived for a hundred and forty-nine years. She passed on the curse to her firstborn—a boy called Paulus.’

‘And Lucius? What happened to him?’

‘He’s still around.’

‘Wasn’t he at the R
itual?’

‘H
e was there, but he likes to keep a low profile. You’ll get to know him soon, I promise.’

Strange, how I was getting used to the idea of being around people who were centuries, even millennia old. Only four days ago I’d been happily ignorant of this parallel world. How far I had come.

‘Marcus’s men must have taken it very badly, knowing there was no reprieve for them,’ I said.

He nodded and pointed to two of the four faces I hadn’t recognised. ‘Appius and Pudens took their own lives. Walk
ed out into the sun one morning while the rest of them slept. The others… well,’ he shrugged. ‘They adjusted and left Britain for Gaul, as France was then called. Antonius had a villa there and his wife, Gallia, had recently given birth to the twins. They remained there for the next sixteen hundred years, till Claude D’Antonville, the thirtieth
Ingenii
and your great, great grandfather indulged his desire for adventure and gold by going to America and then here—’

‘
—
where he met my great, great grandmother, fell in love and never went back to France,’ I finished for him. ‘I know that story. It’s our family history. Dad told me when I was little; how our name was anglicised and the apostrophe dropped.’

‘Exactly. And we’ve been here ever since.’

‘So how did the Ritual develop?’

‘It was created in direct response to other vampire attacks on Antonia when she turned fifty.’

‘You mean there were others like you?’

‘Only a few
and they homed in on her like radar. Lucius wasn’t there. He was in Britain. He’d run away as soon as the change came over him so as not to fulfil the sorceress’s prediction by feeding from his sister. He was fifteen. Yet thirty-five years later, when they both reached their fiftieth year—’

‘
Oh!’ I didn’t mean to interrupt, yet again. It just came out of me as I understood the significance of that now.

He nodded his head once. ‘Yes, her blood matured and seemed to call to him,
even over that distance. He couldn’t stay away. Meanwhile, her husband had divorced her for not being able to bear children. Marcus and Gallia knew nothing about the delayed conception she and her eventual offspring would experience. The sorceress hadn’t mentioned anything about that. And in those days, for a woman not to be able to have children it was, well… a disgrace.’

He rose
from the step on which he’d sat and leant back against the balustrade, arms folded across his chest. ‘It happened quite accidentally. Lucius fought off two vampires who’d attacked Antonia. Jake and Terens came to help and they succeeded in killing them—beheading. Next to the sun it’s the surest way to despatch a blood drinker, as long as the head is kept well away from the body, otherwise it simply reattaches itself.’

The things I was learni
ng! I was starting to worry my eyes would permanently remain the size of dinner plates. This was the kind of stuff a person read about in fantasy books, taking comfort from the fact it was far from realty. Yet here I was, utterly absorbed in a story that was just as real as the man who was relating it.

‘But Lucius had been badly wounded,’ he continued. ‘Unless he fed, he wouldn’t last till the morning to regenerate in the day sleep. As if acting on instinct, Antonia sliced open her wrist and pressed it to her brother’s mouth. The moment he tasted her blood, strength and power flowed through him. Her blood was unlike anything he’d ever tasted. He found h
e didn’t need to sleep as often and could even walk out into the day without burning. His strength increased, as had all his other faculties. Antonia’s blood was the key.’

‘Did Marcus feed from her too?’ Sheer curiosity prompted me to ask that question, even as the thought of it repulsed me.

‘No. He never did and, apart from Lucius, he forbade anyone else to as the consequences would have been dreadful. Every vampire in Europe would have fought to possess her. Some tried. So Marcus appointed Lucius her guardian and his own men—Justinus, Sempronius, Terentius, Calixtus, Martius and Galen—were placed under his command.’

I guessed those were the Latin names of the men I now knew as Jake, Sam, Terens and Cal. The other two I hadn’t heard before. ‘What happened to those last
two?’ I pointed to their images in the window.

Luc’s gaze
strayed up there and moved from one face to the next. ‘They died. Killed by vampire-hunters as they slept. The other vampires they encountered were wild, uncontrolled, killing indiscriminately, giving humans a reason to hunt us and so had to be stopped.’ The passion in his voice made me suspect he may have experienced such a thing sometime in his long life. I hadn’t yet asked him just how old he was.

‘It was one of the reasons for the establish
ment of the Principate—to rein them in and protect Antonia at the same time. That’s how it started. Lucius became their leader and since he was stronger, no one dared challenge him. Those few who tried were quickly dispatched. Then he and Marcus established the Brethren Laws, by which all blood drinkers must abide.’

‘And that’s worldwide?’

‘Yes. Leaders were appointed from among them and made responsible for other vampires in their regions—they’re the Prefects. Those still living are in the Eldership. Zhao and Kwame. You met them at the Ritual.’

‘
I remember them.’ I thought back to Monday night and the gold cloaks they wore when we were introduced. Apart from the woman, Maris, who looked like she needed reining in, the others appeared solemn, even wise. Somehow I couldn’t picture them as wild and uncontrolled. But then, what did I know!

He let out a deep breath.
‘To finish a long story, Lucius noticed that whatever matured in Antonia’s blood at age fifty, began to wane as she reached her centenary. But her son, Paulus, inherited it. His eyes, like hers—like those of all our kind—were lavender. And like her, he aged slowly and his blood matured at fifty. It gave off the same strong, sweet scent as his mother’s. If there wasn’t a changeover of
Ingenii
Lucius could lose his position as Princeps, as he wouldn’t be strong enough to fend off challengers. It’s for that reason,’ he said, as he sat back down next to me, ‘the Ritual was established—as a sort of… coming-of-age rite and to introduce the new Bloodgifted—as they came to be known—to the vampire community.

‘
On that very first occasion nobody challenged, and everything went seemingly well for the next several centuries, until one arose and challenged Lucius for the right to be Princeps. His name was Jaroslav, one of the Prefects from Eastern Europe. They fought. Jaroslav bit off Lucius’s finger and took the ring for himself.’ He indicated his own finger on which sat a serpent ring identical to mine, except its eyes were green rather than red.

Luc continued. ‘
But as he did so, the eyes of the serpents turned black and the metal began to burn. The ring itself rejected him. Rather than lose his finger, Jaroslav ripped it off. Unfortunately, Marcus didn’t behead him as he should have. He spared him, since there were so few of us at that time, and later he became one of the ringleaders behind the Second Rebellion. Lucius was forced to dispatch him after that.’

It doesn’t pay to play nice!
I thought.

‘Lucius retrieved the rin
g and placed it back on his own—regenerated—finger. The serpent’s eyes on both rings glowed bright red and so became a feature of the ceremony, and it’s been repeated from then on every fifty years.’

‘And that’s ho
w the Legacy began.’ Although I said it aloud, it was more to myself. ‘When exactly was that?’

‘By modern reckoning, in the middle of the tenth century.’

Yep, I was definitely going to need glasses to hide my perpetually wide-eyed look. Luc must have been used to goggle-eyed
Ingenii
, for he just kept on talking.

‘Lucius fed from her descendants for the next nine hundred years. Apart from one daughter, all the Bloodgifted were males.’

‘Who was the daughter?’

‘Judith.’

‘And now me.’

He nodded, then
stood up and took my hands in his. It was strange but I felt comfortable with him doing that. It felt almost normal, unlike Alec whose touch made my body tingle.

‘Laura, now is the time for you to know all
,’ he announced and pulled me to my feet.

What else was there? I
don’t know how long we had sat here, on the stairs, as he revealed my family history to me.

‘My study
.’ He motioned to a closed door on the landing I hadn’t noticed before. ‘I tend to spend more time in this room than anywhere else in the house.’

He opene
d the door to reveal a masculine domain dominated by a massive table carved from malachite with its own throne-like leather chair. Against the wall, near the entrance, stood a dark green, well-used Chesterfield on which my aunt sat. She rose as we entered.

‘Come in, dear,’ she said and beckoned me forward.

I heard the door close behind me as I crossed the rich burgundy carpet that matched the leather inlay on the desk. Bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes lined the walls, interspersed here and there with an assortment of silver-framed photographs. Luc, after following me in, stood beside Aunt Judy and took her hand. They looked anxious.

‘Please, take a look, my Laura,’ Luc said as his hand swept the room.

I strolled over and took a closer look at his personal gallery. Then I heard him softly call Alec.

I did a double-take
. The photos were all of me. There I was as a baby, maybe less than a year old, my little, chubby arms outstretched to a laughing fair-haired man as I took my first steps. I had a similar photo in my album at home, but only Aunt Judy was in it.

Another one showed me, around two years old, being thrown high in the air by the same
man. I had golden Shirley Temple curls and my baby-self laughed down at him. The fair-haired man was Lucien Lebrettan and he looked the same then as now.

Still another
photo showed me on my first birthday with Aunt Judy and Luc on either side of me helping me blow out my candle. My gaze travelled from frame to frame until I was dizzy. There was my first day at school, my high school sporting achievements and—in pride of place—my university graduation.

Luc
appeared less often as I grew older. In photos of my teenage years, he was in the background and I had to peer closely to see him. It was either Mum and Dad or Aunt Judy who appeared next to me.

I looked
around and found more framed photos perched on shelves and on piles of stacked books. Every available space was taken up with various stages of my life.

A strange
, hollow feeling opened up in my stomach as I tried to understand what I was seeing.

Luc
had called me,
ma petite, ma fille
, which I knew from my high school French meant,
my little girl, my daughter
. He’d also called me,
my
Laura. I’d wondered at the familiarity I felt toward him, and why my Aunt Judy appeared at all my birthdays. And finally, it explained the gift I received every birthday. My parents never revealed from whom it came.

My throat went dry.

Alec had entered as well, but seemed reluctant to remain as he stood in the doorway, his hand still on the door handle.

‘Please stay, th
is concerns you as well,’ Luc said to him.

‘This is a private family matter. I
shouldn’t be here,’ he replied and looked directly at me, his face unreadable.