Part I
SPIES
IN THE
SAVAGE GARDEN
1
Derek
THEY HAD BEEN talking up there for hours. If Derek lay very still he could hear them perfectly. At this hour, the Andrassy Ut was noisy above him, with its cafes and bookstores, but this damp hidden mansion of cellar chambers was quiet. And what else did Derek have to do but listen?
Derek was a tall male with dark brown skin and large dark eyes that made him look forever young and vulnerable. His black wavy hair was parted in the middle and it had grown down just below his shoulders. An unmistakable broad blond streak grew from the center part on the left side, more golden than yellow. He wore a thin old shirt, filthy with dust, and the black dress pants he'd had on ten years ago when he'd been captured. He sat on his cot, in the corner of his prison dungeon cell, his back to the wall, his head bowed, and his arms folded as he listened.
Roland, the evil master of the house and its prison dungeons, talked and talked.
Roland's guest was an ancient one named Rhoshamandes. And this Rhoshamandes spoke vehemently of one called "the Prince," whom he wanted to destroy. How many of these blood drinkers were there? Others came through this house from time to time, but they never remained. Others had talked of this Prince too. Derek listened, but without hope.
Rhoshamandes was a powerful one, Derek could hear this in his voice, and in the beating of the blood drinker's heart. Older than Roland most likely, much older, but he and Roland were friends.
This Rhoshamandes excited Roland. It was some sort of privilege for Roland that the fabled Rhoshamandes now sought his counsel.
Roland was the blood drinker who had taken Derek prisoner, luring him away from the opera house years ago, and locking him in this dungeon cell, beneath the city of Budapest. Roland was the one who came down the stairs at least once a week to drink Derek's blood and taunt him and laugh at him.
Roland was rawboned, tall, painfully gaunt, with long straight white hair bound with a bronze clip at the base of his neck to leave a white streak down his back. He had the most cruel eyes Derek had ever beheld, and he smiled when he spoke, which made his most casual unpleasant remarks completely sinister.
Derek had had years to study Roland, Roland who appeared to live in fashionable evening dress of fine-cut dark-tinted velvet dinner jackets with satin lapels, waistcoats of bright patterned silk, and boiled shirts with cuffs and collars as stiff as cardboard. His black patent-leather boots appeared as simple evening shoes beneath the cuffs of his pleated trousers, and a great evening scarf with fringed edges was forever wrapped around his neck. He drained the blood of Derek without ever spilling a drop. He wore kid gloves so sleek they showed the bony knots in his fingers, and his cadaverous face with its large gray eyes was the picture of sarcastic disdain.
Then there was Arion of the shining black skin, the wounded one, burnt and miserable, who had seen his home on the coast of Italy destroyed. He was much younger "in the Blood" than Roland, and for months he'd drunk from Derek nightly, and now he came several times a week. Arion had come to Roland in rags, and Roland had comforted him and restored him, and nursed his soul back to health as they spoke i
n the ancient Greek language of olden times when Rome had ruled the world and everything, it seems, had been better. Of course. Better. You could forgive human beings for such nonsense, but how forgive immortals who had lived then?
There was a gentleness to Arion, and a pity in his heart for Derek. Derek could sense this when Arion was drinking from him. Also Arion brought Derek gifts of fruit now and then and good wine. Derek could see the history and the pain of Arion in flashes--a great seaside villa burned, young blood drinkers immolated, a red-haired female blood drinker burnt to death, her red hair kindling and disappearing in flames. Only Arion had survived this rape of his home and massacre of his oldest companions. Arion sought shelter with Roland, and Roland sought to give Arion courage to "go on."
Arion's skin was quite truly as black as coal, and he had grave thoughtful eyes, eyes of a very pale green that appeared almost yellow. His hair was a cap of close-cropped silky black curls, and his face reminded Derek of a cherub. His skin had been blotched with white and pink scars when he had first come, and his neck and chest so badly burned that he could scarcely speak, but he was rapidly healing. And it seemed to Derek that Arion's skin was darkening though he did not understand why.
Earlier this evening, this powerful Rhoshamandes had given Arion his own ancient and healing blood. That was the way with these creatures, to offer their own blood to the host or his wounded guest, to exchange blood when they lodged under one another's roofs for some time, to offer blood as in the olden days humans had offered other humans food and drink and shelter as hospitality.
When they drank they opened their minds whether they wanted to or not.
But then so did Derek when they drank from him, and so they knew what they knew about him, though he sought desperately to hold back.
What would it do for them to have his innermost secrets? Derek didn't know but he concealed everything from them and always would.
"You won't be here forever," he thought to himself quietly. "Someday when these night monsters are slumbering and helpless, you'll get out of here and you'll find the others. If you are alive, they must be alive." He closed his eyes and he looked at their faces as he remembered them. For most of the twentieth century, Derek had been searching for them. It was his third "life" wandering the earth, looking for the slightest trace of them. But this was a time like no other time and Derek had entered the twenty-first century with even-greater hope of finding the others, only to be snared by this blood-drinking monster.
He was weeping again now. No good. He couldn't hear what they were saying above.
He took a deep easy breath. And once again he listened.
Rhoshamandes was working himself into a rage. "New York, Paris, London, wherever I go, they are there judging me, cursing me. They spit at me, young and old. They don't dare try to harm me, but they taunt me knowing I won't dare to harm them!"
"Why don't you punish them?" asked Roland. "Why don't you teach a few of them a lesson? The word will go round and--."
"And I'll be visited by the great ones again, won't I? The great Gregory Duff Collingsworth and the Great Sevraine! I could easily vanquish any one of them, but not two or three of them. And what, would I be dragged again before the Prince? As long as he has Amel inside of him, he is untouchable. And I don't want war with them anymore. I want to be as I was before. I want to be left alone!"
The creature's voice broke when he said "alone." And now in that soft, slightly slurred broken voice he confessed to Roland that his longtime companion Benedict had left him, blamed him for everything, and disappeared.
"I think he's with them. I think he's with them at this court of theirs in France, or living in Paris--." He broke off. "I know he is at the Court," he confessed. "It is agony to say it. He is living with them."