11
At midnight, Astarion was in a fine mood. He had delivered two warm bodies this tenday, which might not put him on par with Aurelia but was a perfectly respectable showing. He had sent a very strong message that he was not to be bent to another’s will, present vampire lord excepting.
Also, he now had a gloriously atrocious hat.
He tossed the purple velvet monstrosity into the air and caught it. Could he convince Petras that it was the latest fashion? He studied the fan of feathers. Probably not. Petras was not the sharpest knife in the corpse, but there were limits.
He was just contemplating whether he could attach it to Violet’s head with sovereign glue while she slept when there was a solicitous tap on the door.
Only servants ever tapped like that. Cazador just flung the door open, and the other spawn either knocked, like Aurelia, or didn’t want to see him anyway, like Petras.
(Violet had tried to pick the lock once.
Her shriek when the silver needle had gone into her hand had been worth the hour he’d spent setting the damn thing with tweezers.)
Astarion opened the door. It was, indeed, a servant, one of Cazador’s many thralls.
He never bothered to learn their names. The ones who had simply been unlucky were one thing, but the ones hoping to be made into spawn ought to be embarrassed, and the fact that they weren’t made it worse.
He might detest some of his fellow spawn, but he didn’t hold them in the bone-deep contempt that he held some of the thralls.
“Lord Cazador requests your presence for dinner,” the servant said with downcast eyes.
Also, they were timid. He hated that. When he’d been a magistrate, his servants were never timid.
He’d had a valet who threatened to leap from the window every time they disagreed about what waistcoat he should wear.
The man had been an absolute jewel. Astarion hoped that he’d found work for someone else who appreciated his genius.
The bard’s hat would have sent the valet hurtling from the tallest tower of the city. Astarion tossed it onto the bed, straightened his cuffs, and went to dinner.
He was deeply relieved when the servant led him to the dining hall. Dining alone with Cazador never went well.
The great hall had also been redone in fake sandstone.
His lip curled slightly. The first time he had seen the hall, when he was so newly made that there was still grave dirt lingering under his fingernails, it had been hung with black velvet and lit by towering braziers in the shape of ram’s heads. It had been far more to his taste.
Even more to his taste had been the naked revelers at the table, drunk and laughing, most of them three-quarters of the way to an orgy, some already there.
Astarion had halted in the doorway, nostrils flaring, as he realized that he could smell something underneath the scent of wine and sex, something delicious, something alive…
Cazador had given him blood to drink when he emerged from the grave, but he had been half mad with hunger and terror and had not fully appreciated it. But cleaned and cosseted, he could smell the blood, and it smelled like ecstasy.
“Go on,” Cazador said into his ear. “Go on, my beloved child. This is what awaits you now.”
Astarion had never suffered from an excess of modesty. He stripped off his clothes and stalked toward them, half predator, half supplicant, his cock hard and his mouth watering.
The revelers welcomed him. Wine-stained fingers stroked his skin, and a cup was thrust into his hand. He drank, and it was a spectacular vintage, as good as anything he’d ever tasted, but still there was a thirst in him and a longing that had nothing to do with wine.
Bodies pressed against him. He spilled the wine, and a human woman licked it off his neck.
She turned her head to do so, and when he caught a glimpse of her throat, something stranger and darker than lust seized him.
He caught her chin in one hand and her shoulder in the other, felt his new fangs hard and sharp inside his mouth, and bit down.
She didn’t scream. In fact, she moaned in ecstasy, though Astarion could barely hear it over his own moans. Her blood struck through him like a thunderbolt, like an orgasm, and he drank it down, mouthful after mouthful, until she went limp in his arms.
The company roared their approval. He didn’t realize he’d come until he felt a stickiness on his thighs that wasn’t blood. There was another glass of wine in his hand, unasked for. He savored it this time, the taste a counterpoint to the metallic thickness of the blood.
The tiefling woman he would come to know as Aurelia walked across his line of sight, seized one of the revelers, and dragged him away. Her face was cool and remote, her eyes like topaz gemstones. Was she judging him? Let her. Astarion could not be bothered to care.
The man she had chosen writhed against her, arching his back. She held him at arm’s length, then sank her fangs into his bared neck. Astarion heard the crunch of cartilage across the room.
Hells, he thought, are we killing them?
If they were, it seemed that the revelers wanted it desperately.
Before he could pursue that thought any further, there was a man sliding against him, boneless as an eel, kissing him.
The man’s mouth tasted like wine, and his pulse beat wildly under Astarion’s fingertips.
His tongue stroked the points of Astarion’s fangs, then pressed hard enough to draw blood, and the taste exploded, thick and hot, like no kiss Astarion had ever known, like nothing he had ever dreamed of.
He lost himself utterly to pleasure. He chased wine with blood and blood with wine.
The revelers gave up their throats and the secret places of their bodies.
Astarion had never felt so alive, so full, so powerful.
He was a god of sex and darkness. The ram heads on the braziers gazed down silently, and the flames licked gold and orange across his lovers, his worshippers, his victims.
And then Cazador had snapped his fingers and dispelled the illusion.
The squeal of pleasure from his latest partner turned into a real squeal, high and shrill, and Astarion opened his eyes to find that he had his teeth buried in a pig’s throat and was dry humping the tablecloth.
He flung himself backward, aghast. The room was littered with the drained bodies of young pigs, the tablecloth stained with their blood. The ones that were still alive lay in a slowly squirming heap, eyes glazed with magicked docility. Perhaps they even believed that they were humans.
He jerked his head up and met Aurelia’s gaze. There was a dead hog at her feet, and in her cold ruby eyes gleamed the faintest hint of sympathy.
It was then that Cazador had told him the rules. There would be no human blood for him, nor blood from any thinking being. The truth was, Astarion barely heard. All he could think of was finding a bath and scrubbing himself until the uncleanness was washed away.
He was sure…almost sure…he hadn’t actually fucked a pig.
Petras didn’t, when Cazador pulled the same trick on him.
Just a lot of writhing and squirming and rubbing up against a sow bigger than he was, which had sent Cazador into gales of laughter.
But he’d definitely had one’s tongue in his mouth, and that was enough to make him want to rip his own tongue out and wash it with lye.
The elder vampire hadn’t lied. This was what awaited him now—brief pleasures that gave way to humiliation and disgust.
And a little fear in the back of his mind that anything he was experiencing might be an illusion.
He could see that shadow in the back of Petras’s eyes, too.
Is this all truly happening? Can I ever really be sure?
Later, Aurelia explained the grim truth behind the prohibition against drinking intelligent blood.
The spawn were not allowed to drink Cazador’s blood, either, thus becoming true vampires.
They were under his control until he chose to offer his blood and turn them fully.
They couldn’t even band together to kill him and drain his corpse.
On second thought, maybe it was just as well the old man had changed the décor in the dining room. If Astarion was wading through memories like this just from looking at fake sandstone and badly carved vultures, the gods only knew what the sight of all that black velvet would have done to him.
There was still a long table, though it was made of a pale slab of stone. Most of the other spawn were already standing beside it, though none of them had sat down. Identical covered dishes sat in front of each chair, along with two goblets. One of wine, and one…
The smell of blood filled his nostrils. Not rat blood this time. Not pig. Something better. Sheep, perhaps? Cow? Still warm.
He could feel himself starting to salivate.
“We must wait for the rest of the family,” Cazador said from the head of the table.
He lounged on his throne, sipping idly at his own goblet.
Astarion suspected that the contents belonged to a certain bard, but since he had never been allowed to taste the blood of a thinking being, his palate for blood was as unrefined as a kobold’s for wine.
Dalyria drifted over to him and cast a glance in his direction. On another person, it would have been a look of mild concern, but in the doctor’s case, it might as well have been a shout. She was worried.
And rightly so. The old bastard doesn’t usually get the entire family together formally like this unless he has something planned. The last time, he released venomous snakes and told us we could only eat what we could catch, and that was a good day compared to the time before, with the steel wires.
The last straggler—Aurelia—came in. She was still wearing torn leathers stained with someone else’s blood. “Forgive me, Father,” she said in her cool, passionless voice. “The hunt went long.”
“My dutiful daughter,” Cazador said, extending a hand. She kissed it and took her place with the others.
“Choose any place you like,” the vampire lord said, waving to the seats.