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Prologue
When I close my eyes now, I can remember how things ended. How things then began.
We were under the desert. Now I am under some mountains. I am always underground these days.
Everyone had left: the bad guys and the good guys. Although from the outside, quite what the difference was might seem unclear. It was just me and my patar and his patar.
That is, me and my husband and his father. Or me and my father and his husband. Things that are clear in the world of living humans, or “kee,” are not so clear in the am’r world. (“Am’r.” You would call them “vampires”…but not to their faces, unless you relished super-strong, exceptionally hard-to-kill creatures feeling cranky about you.) Or, well, things that are clear in the am’r world to the am’r would not make any sense among the kee.
Not that I could ever go back.
If I ran away, back to the kee world, the irony is that I would seem strong, very strong. Able to bench-press amounts that would shock people. Able to hack through someone’s neck without flinching. I would be so self-fucking-reliant. I’ve survived shit that would make any normal living person melt down permanently.
But I don’t fit in that world anymore. What would I do with my strength? Go back to work at the Helen Abigail Winstringham-Fenstermacher Memorial Library? Even a dream job, say, like being Microsoft’s Digital Archivist, wouldn’t do much for me anymore. Living in a world of grocery shopping, renting an apartment, binge-watching shows on the sofa in the evening—all the mundanities of the kee existence is not something I could go back to. Especially since daylight is a bit of an issue, now.
But being am’r-nafsh (a “living vampire,” who has not yet died the mortal death) is no fucking good. It might seem attractive if you don’t know all the details. Who wouldn’t want to be irresistible to vampires? To be the most mouthwatering thing they could fantasize about and have a world of the sexiest creatures all wishing you were theirs? But it turns out that then you can’t tell if people want your company for you or simply for how delicious you smell—and potentially taste, if you’ll just hold still long enough. Worse than that, you’re neither this nor that, stuck in the middle with the worst of both worlds.
I don’t have the strength of a full am’r, nor do I have the experience of having lived in the am’r world for, you know, centuries and stuff. These problems could be ironically resolved by dying—and then living a good long time.
Is everything in am’r world inverted from what I had known in the world I came from? So far, the answer is, “Well, yeah, kinda.”
By dying, I could achieve full am’r strength and I’d be less sexy to other am’r—which, trust me, I’ve learned the hard way would be a deeply good thing. Then, by living on as am’r, I could slowly, and undoubtedly painfully, accrue the knowledge and skills required to be able to effectively rush to the rescue of others instead of sitting around like a princess in a tower, waiting to be rescued.
Which is fucking exactly what I’m doing now. The bad guys (the new bad guys, the ones running around in these caves, not to be confused with the bad guys we’d gotten rid of back in those caves) have captured me. My patar is missing. The patar of my patar (or “gharpatar,” in the am’r language) is with me, but trapped in a drugged sleep. And when he wakes up, he is terrifyingly violent—not the kind and gentle lover I’ve grown to love as much as my patar.
Sometimes I wish we had stayed forever in that little room under the desert.
Chapter One
It was a reunion for Sandu and me, and we sorely needed it, pun intended. We were sore, and boy, we needed it. But we had things we needed to do first. We needed to make his patar, Bagamil, undead. Or undeader. Something. As Sandu explained it to me, we needed to wake him up from a particularly death-like (even for a vampire) coma.
“The am’r…ei bine, we do not need to breathe the way kee do,” he told me in his new I’ll-share-all-the-info-you-ever-need-or-even-just-think-you-might-possibly-want mode. This was my reward for not leaving him or defecting to the bad guys—or killing him myself—after all the shit that had gone down. He continued, “But we do need some oxygen. I do not understand why, before you ask, draga mea, but if we are deprived of all air, we fall into something like a coma. We call it ‘ahstha.’ The same will happen if we are completely drained. Or if we are terribly injured and cannot get the ‘vhoon-vaa,’ the blood healing. We do not die. We do not change or heal on our own. We just…maintain.”
“And that’s why Bagamil is like…that?” I pointed to Bagamil’s disturbingly dead-looking body.
“Yes. And that’s why he,” Sandu pointed to another corpselike thing, “is like that.”
Oh, right. There was this other undead-person-in-a-coma in there with us. He was a bad guy, but since he currently wasn’t much of a threat, he wasn’t my highest priority. Sandu paid no attention to him, and I was so exhausted that if Sandu didn’t think it was a problem, I so wasn’t going to worry my pretty little head about it.
“Well, there’s air in here now,” I tentatively noted. “It came in when we did, and we left the door open. So why don’t they wake up?”
“Neither will wake without receiving vhoon,” Sandu explained as he grabbed the inert bad guy and pulled him away from Bagamil. It had been quite the tableaux: Bagamil in his sunny golden robes and this villain in his finest tactical gear, both a little singed around the edges but neither burned. Both had collapsed on the floor, but Mr. Baddie looked to have been dropped from Bagamil’s arms as if he had fallen from a very interesting embrace.
As Mr. Baddie was dragged past me, Sandu stopped to further lecture on the stiff. “Look at how emaciated he is, dragă Noosh. He did not get that way from lack of air alone, but also vhoon-lack.”
“So, Bagamil, um…”
“Yes. My patar obviously drained him before the bad air incapacitated him. It was very wise of him, which is unsurprising, of course. He has been am’r for a very long time indeed. I surmise they were fighting, or this one followed Bagamil to kill him.”
“That was one of their goals!” I was hit all too sharply by deeply unpleasant memories. All too recent ones, as well. How strange that I’d been in such a terrible place just a few hours ago. I had not known if Sandu or Bagamil were alive, and I hadn’t known if I was going to be horribly tortured and kept as a trophy by one enemy, or horribly tortured and then killed by another. But there were some serious reversals of the Bad Guys’ evil plans, and now here I was in this cave with all the people with whom I’d desperately wanted to be reunited (except Neplach, and…oh, no, I didn’t dare think of Neplach, or I’d totally lose control) while everyone else who’d survived was rushing in every possible direction away from us.
It was very quiet now, but it still smelled of explosives and burned stuff, and of stale air.
Sandu’s words pulled me from my ruminations. “Yes, of course, it was their goal. They would need Bagamil out of their way if Mehmet were to unite first the am’r and then the kee under him and then attempt to rule both worlds. I do not think he and his followers would have encountered the success of which they dreamt. There are vastly many more kee than am’r, and they have no lack of weapons that work quite satisfactorily on us.”
I shuddered. Yes, I had seen that first-hand.
“But,” he continued, “if they had been very clever and had made into am’r, or killed and replaced, all the world leaders, perhaps they might have had their way.”
“‘Jinnestan,’ Mehmet called it,” I told him. “And Bagamil was only his second goal. After killing you.”
“Ei bine, that was a long time coming. As long as we both walked this earth, one of us was going to have to end the other. That was the only cure for the ages-old infection of our hatred.”
I’d wondered about that. Wondered why things had been left for so long, and noted that while Sandu spoke the right sort of words for being the changed man—well, am’r—he claimed to be, he did not sound unduly regretful that he had finally gotten a chance to take out his worst enemy in an inferno of death and destruction.
Before I could work up a question, however, Sandu continued, now speaking of the desiccated am’r at our feet. “If he followed my patar, he would have been very foolish to think himself unnoticed. But this one was very new, barely changed to am’r. Likely he believed all of Mehmet’s lies about being jinn.” Here he snorted, more with disbelief than derision. “Young and full of vanity, that he believed he could kill the oldest of us all. Asteaptă!”
I didn’t have a chance to ask about that “oldest of us all” thing because Sandu stopped and knelt by the withered figure. He sniffed, then leaned in to sniff again.
It was not because the acrid air made it hard to smell stuff, at least not for a full am’r like Sandu. I’d already noticed, without noticing that I’d noticed, that am’r remains did not smell like much. It was like the blood was the only real thing about them, and while there was a solid form, it was basically a shell. It could be reduced to ash without much smell of burning flesh.
And that’s what I’m in the process of becoming. What am I now? If you burned me, would I smell like a pig roast? Or would I just flame up like an oil-soaked piece of wood?
These are the charming questions you get to ask yourself when you’re am’r-nafsh—half-living, half-vampire—or something like that. Some of the best of both worlds, and some of the worst. Oh, the headaches! And don’t talk to me about buckets!
Sandu straightened up, obviously having sniffed out what he needed. “This is the one. Mehmet made him, and then he made many more. He and the ones who abducted me were also sired by this one. I shall never forget their vhoon-smell. And now I get to finish him. ‘Tokhmarenc’ is the am’r term. It means ‘final death.’”
I shuddered. Not because I disliked finishing bad guys, and not because I hadn’t just gotten some thorough hands-on experience in doing so, but because at that moment, he sounded like Vlad. That is, he sounded like who he was—Vlad Țepeș, Dracula himself.
Or who he’d said he used to be. He’d said he had changed, and he was going to prove it to me. But stomping around finishing one’s enemies seemed pretty Vlad-ish to me.
What else were we going to do, however? I’d learned pretty quickly in the am’r world, you had to be ready and willing to do unto others before they did unto you.
I hadn’t had any time to deal with any of the stuff that had happened to me, nor could I imagine how many decades of therapy that might take. I had no ethical compass anymore. I couldn’t even judge Vlad/Sandu, because I had nothing against which to judge him. I was feeling pretty much like a shell, filled with strange new blood and stranger new feelings.
“Sufleţel, will you stay by Bagamil? He cannot…sense anything. But he is helpless. It would mean a great deal to me if you sat by him for now.”
So I went and sat by Bagamil. I even took his hand. It was room temperature, which felt pretty chilly to the still-partially-living human me. I watched Sandu easily haul away the body of one of our enemies.
I smelled something new burning in a little while. Tokhmarenc. I rested my forehead on Bagamil’s shoulder and didn’t think about anything.
***
When Sandu came back, he sat down beside me and finished his explanation from earlier. This was a new phenomenon in our relationship, and one I deeply appreciated. “So he—”
“Mr. Baddie?”
“Yes, ‘Mr. Baddie.’ He followed Bagamil to this part of the sanctuary, and then there was another explosion. I believe my patar sensed it in time and pulled his enemy into this room, closing the door. And then, knowing that whatever happened next, he would need the sustenance, he drained your Mr. Baddie before the air was used up or made unbreathable by the fire and smoke.”
“Well, that would explain why they were lying like that.”
“Da, it would. And it explains why they were both in ahstha for slightly different reasons. We can find out if we are right simply by waking him and asking.”
“Just with…vhoon-vaa? But how will you get him to drink?”
“That, you shall see, draga mea, will not be a problem. But I must…I now must tell you some things.”
Hmmmm, not sure I liked the sound of that. But if nothing else, I’d learned I needed every possible morsel and scrap of information I could get about my new world. “Yes. Yes, you must.”
“Coming back will be very intense for him. Ei bine. ” Sandu sounded more frustrated than he had during any of the really hard things we’d just lived through. “It is difficult to ask things of you when I do not know how you shall respond!”
I laughed. Sandu wasn’t sure how to take that, but he was used to me laughing at inappropriate times by now. “My patar. You have changed me. Blood—vhoon—has changed me. Just ask me, and I’ll be honest about how I feel. But I won’t get offended like I would have when you first met me. I—I see things differently after all that has happened.”
“Draga mea, your blood would also help Bagamil heal. If you would be an ‘izchha’ for him…ei bine, as you know, vhoon-am’r-nafsh has special properties. I will give him my own, but if you would do vhoon-vaa, it would truly succor him.
“And,” at this point, he rushed nervously ahead with his words, “if Bagamil does vhoon-vaa with you, it would more than benefit you. I want you to be as strong as possible while you are still am’r-nafsh. And after. I thought my enemies would not dare to touch you. I was wrong,” I could hear it hurt him to admit that. “And I must make provision for the future. I do not want to hide you away. Nor do I think you would let me,” he added quickly. By this point, I’d been so thoroughly exhausted for so excruciatingly long that hiding away sounded pretty good, but I knew my feelings would probably change eventually, so I bit my tongue.
“So,” Sandu continued, “if I am not to hide you as most am’r hide their am’r-nafsh, I must make you stronger, safer. Vhoon-vaa with him would do that, and I know he would be more than pleased to give you that gift.” A pause. “We have spoken of it.”
It was time for my own pause as I attempted to sort through what I thought Sandu was saying, what he was possibly half-saying, and how I felt about those things. It also brought up memories I’d been trying very hard to suppress.
“Sandu, I started to tell you before, that I…that I shared blood with Neplach.” Damn, this was just as hard to communicate as what Sandu had just faltered through. “You said you knew. How did you…could you smell it?” I looked at my feet, which tapped nervously on the stone floor beside Bagamil’s motionless legs.
“Yes, I could smell it. I can smell it now, dragă Anushka. But there is no problem, vă rog! Nu, had I been there, I would have encouraged you to do just what you did. It is the same with Neplach as with Bagamil. They are ‘aojyshtaish’—the elder ones, they are vhoon-strong. You could not ask for a better ‘bakheb-vhoonho’—blood-giver. The ties you form with them serve as further protection. Neplach will protect you now as if you were his own frithaputhra.”
“He would have. But…but…” I finally lost it the way I had needed to lose it but had not had the opportunity to for so long. Too long, and yet all too short a time since I’d lost my uncle-in-blood—my strýc, as he had taught me to call him.
Sandu watched me crying for a moment. “I see,” he said, voice utterly flat. “I had wondered when he was not with you and Dragoș. He went to retrieve you before the attack could start, so that you would be with us, protected. So you would not have to battle alone through our enemies to my side. He is ancient, and he has survived more adversity than you can imagine. Had survived. I desired to believe it was merely that he had left you safe with Dragoș and gone to deal with something else.” His voice petered out. I looked up at him through my sobs and saw that he looked awful, almost as wizened as if he had been drained of blood. He just sat there, and I realized that even Vlad the Impaler could be shocked, could feel a deep loss. I threw my arms out to him, needing to comfort him as much as I needed his comfort.
He crawled into my arms, but he did not cry. He held me very, very tightly, so tightly that I started worrying about my ribs being cracked. I wasn’t going to say anything to make him pull away, though, and he could fix any broken ribs with his blood. I assumed. Anyway, I sobbed enough for both of us.
Bloody tears. As I saw the red-tinged drops splash on the floor I was reminded that I now cried blood-tinged tears . And then, of course, I smelt the vhoon—my blood, which supposedly was like some combination of the world’s best booze and most delicious food to all the am’r who smelled me. To me, it didn’t smell like anything special.
However, it was a red flag for the bull that was Sandu. A nice, sexy red flag. I could see that the bull between his legs was suddenly ready to charge.
They say that dealing with death can cause urges to prove that you are still alive: hunger, horniness. A very human thing, a psychologist might say. Since hunger and horniness are basically one and the same for am’r, this was even more a vampire thing.
“We will mourn your bakheb-vhoonho properly when Bagamil wakes, sufleţel. May we…wake him now?” He said it gently, carefully. No pressure, really.
The way he said it, and the raging erection, made me realize what was on the table was not just blood-healing, but a whole lot more.
“Sandu, you keep saying vhoon-vaa, but, um, do you really mean that, or do you mean, uh, ‘vhoon-vayon’?”
Does he mean “just healing”…or does he really mean let’s do some kinky am’r shit right now? Because that’s how am’r do stuff, right? Feeding involves sex. Healing involves feeding, and sex involves blood. Everything always, always comes down to blood.
Well, I did choose this life—in a hot tub half the world away, and. it seemed. like another lifetime. It had been my choice, even if I didn’t know enough at the time to make an informed decision. Also, I had not been, to be painfully honest, capable in that moment of a compos mentis decision, being hopped up on sex-brain-chemicals and vampire blood. But it had been my choice, regardless, and I wouldn’t—I just wouldn’t—try to back out of that, or be half-assed in accepting this choice, this life.
And, if offered a chance to do it all over, I’m not sure I wouldn’t make exactly the same choice. So there went any excuse to be squeamish. Ever.