She tilts her head and looks at me the way someone would if they rescued a stray kitten the night before and have walked into their kitchen and found a fully grown, hungry panther prowling around. “And your family has one of these... settlements?”
“Yes. It is called The Parallel.”
Chapter 55
Rocco
She looks at me intensely, her eyes shining. “Do the inhabitants of these settlements wear a thin leather anklet with a metal plate clasp that has numbers and letters inscribed on it?”
I stare at her, surprised. “Yes. How did you know?”
“I saw a naked girl wearing it in one of the rooms underneath the party you took me to. Were all those masked people vampires?”
“Yes.”
“What do the letters and numbers on the metal clasp mean?”
“Not as much as you think. The anklet’s real role is only one. It signifies compliance. Any human that takes it off is marked as a trouble maker and quickly removed from the settlement before he can infect anyone else.”
“I see.” She bites her bottom lip and looks down. Her face is troubled. “Is that girl dead now?”
“Yes. If they are brought up from the settlements, they are to be used at blood drinking orgies or hunts.”
“Hunts?”
“Usually, reserved for trouble makers. They are brought up to homes, where they are allowed to think they can escape, then they are hunted down in the grounds and killed.”
“Why?” she cries.
“Because some of us are addicted to adrenaline soaked blood.”
I see a shiver go through her and she hugs herself pitifully. “But you yourself don’t keep humans as livestock?”
“No, but I did avail myself to The Parallel until the seventeenth century.”
“Why did you give it up? What do you do for blood now?” she lashes out. I understand her anger. It comes from hurt. This is not what she wants to hear from me. Unfortunately, there is worse to come.
“In the seventeenth century, I was living in Paris, in the court of Louis XV. There, I met a young girl, a maid. A simple country girl who had left her village to work at the King’s grand palace. She was only seventeen and she had the lowly job to light the fire every evening and take out the chamber pots every morning, but compared to pampered, powdered shallow creatures that populated the circle of aristocrats at the Palace she was special beyond compare.
“She had rosy cheeks, clear blue eyes, and a laugh that reminded me of little bells in winter. She was honest and so innocent she went to bed with a little toy rabbit. And I wanted her. Really wanted her, which shocked me, because it was the first time I’d felt an emotion other than the intense lust for blood.
“Suddenly, I saw humans in a different light. My upbringing had made me view them solely as a means of feeding my powerful need. Even though I befriended them, dined with them, played cards with them, and had amorous liaisons with them, they were never more than sustenance to me. I was a lion with a full stomach playing with baby kudus until I was hungry again.
“Polly was the first baby kudu I wanted to keep for myself. To take care of and shower with all the wonderful things she had never known. I moved her into my castle in Bavaria. You will be surprised to know that it looked exactly like the castle on the rock you painted. The more I knew her, the more I began to love her. She was pure, everything I was not. One day she became pregnant.
“We share the same original core DNA as humans so children are possible, however our ancient rules are unambiguous and immutable. We are allowed to mate with humans, but progeny is strictly prohibited. The reason for it was self-preservation. Our ancestors knew we needed to keep our numbers carefully controlled. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Bringing irresponsible additions to our ranks would eventually mean the end of us all. I didn’t care. I was willing to break our most sacred laws and become an outcast. I was determined to marry Polly and have our child.”
I turn away from Autumn because I don’t want her to see how furious I still am. I stare unseeingly out of the window. Time rolls back. I see her still body. Inside her my unborn child. I tore her belly open. I thought I could at least save the child. He was fully formed and beautiful, but his heart had stopped beating. I pulled his tiny wrinkled eyelid up, and his dead blue eye stared back at me. Grotesque. Grotesque. Grotesque.
I clench my fists and continue speaking. “But it was not to be. My parents had her killed. They thought I would forget her and go back to being the way I was, back to my blood thirsty ways, but it was too late. The real reason the Council had forbidden breeding with humans was the fear of how mixed bloods will change the ideology of our kind. How could you drink the blood of a human, how could you kill a human, when your own son is half-human? I couldn’t go back to seeing humans as a great sleeping mass of throbbing hearts inside warm bodies.