Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 89023 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89023 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 445(@200wpm)___ 356(@250wpm)___ 297(@300wpm)
A word that perfectly describes my third-born life.
I have become what I once despised.
And that’s depressing.
Also not true. It’s easy to put myself in the category of those who were Fallen and named in the Book because I have committed many a sin and I have accepted the Darkness inside me and done its bidding. But there is a plan at work here. And I’m playing the starring role.
Good or evil, it is me.
Here I pause to chuckle and this chuckle disturbs the scion currently feeding on my wrist. He pauses his drink, eyes heavy with blood lust, but also suspicious. If a vampire is laughing at you as you feed, might this be a concern?
I pet his head and smile. “It’s OK. Drink. Drink all you want.”
The scion lets out a relieved breath, then dips his mouth back down to my wrist and continues his suckling.
He is not the cause for my chuckle. I am the joke here.
Me.
It’s always been me.
But I haven’t gotten this far without merit.
And it wasn’t the Hand of God that did that.
In the beginning it was Syrsee. That one visit gave me hope.
The Obscurati knew I was something special. I did, after all, kill the Emperor. Then, in the following year, I killed three more. They were all vile. Nero turned Rome into a complete shit show. Everything was up for grabs back then. I was a bit out of control so the Obscurati made it a priority to reign me in.
It was during this period that Josep and I first met. He didn’t mean anything to me back then. He was just a wretched creature in a prison. Something to be forgotten and it would take another eighteen hundred years before I saw him again and started figuring things out. By this time, we were both insane.
He wanted the Long Drink. To end it and start over again, I guess. The Darkness hadn’t understood the depth of human greed and depravity when it first manifested inside the body of beautiful Josep.
But it learned.
Still, Josep was done. I tempted him with the dead Black blood, promising him that little vial in exchange for his help in getting away. Starting over in the New World.
And by the time we got here, he was ready to try again.
But all of that was but a step.
The leaps didn’t come until I created my little coven of witches. It took a while to hunt down the distant descendants of the Coyrah in the New World, but I knew they were here.
Over the many thousands of years that the Coyrah was recycling, many had escaped. Nero wasn’t the only monster who ruled Rome, after all. As vile as he was, he had nothing on Caligula. It was Caligula who diluted the Black blood so badly, it was nearly worthless. He made so many little Black witches. Hundreds in the span of just a few years. So many, they lost track of them. Black blood babies were being born everywhere.
That’s how the Darkness spread around the world. Of course, looking at it objectively a couple thousand years on, even I have to admit that it feels more like a plan than a mistake.
And now these distant descendants of the old Coyrah line make Dark magic for me through the blood of my sacrificial scions.
Because that’s all a scion is.
Nothing but a sacrifice.
And Ryet is no different. Because by now, he will have consumed that blood and fed it to our dear Syrsee.
Who lives.
Who must live.
Who will live.
I know this because Syrsee came to me.
And that time in the bath was but the first.
She is my plan.
She was always the plan.
Without her, we lose.
15 - Josep
What’s one more day?
Little Baby is life. She is my new purpose.
We are lying together on the floor of my cave, panting and sweating from the sex, and this, I think, is my first experience of bliss that is not about blood.
She’s on top of me, her soft breath fluttering against my chest like butterfly wings, and she is sleeping.
I love.
I am able to love.
It’s a surprise because loving her was not my intention. I had imagined a slave. Sex, blood, whatever I desired her to do—to me, for me—I saw her doing it.
But a slave isn’t real. And ever since the Darkness tricked me into thinking it was Little Baby while I was underground, I can’t seem to get it out of my mind.
What is real?
I admit, I haven’t thought about it much. And it helps that the Darkness explained that it and I are the same, I just forgot we were the same.
But it’s the Darkness.
And the Darkness doesn’t have regrets, or attachments, or ponder the meaning of life. It’s unable to do any of those things because it exists outside of time. Without time, there is no progression. Without progression, there is just… well. Darkness.