Cheating Death (Wraith's Rebellion Book 2) Read online

  “Involving my Maker, oh, and me. I will deal with it. All they will do is gripe and whine and moan. Come, food is probably done.”

  “Freezer food?”

  “Frozen food, yes, but I don’t have a lot of fresh food around. Not unless I know I’ll be having mortal guests. Or if I had a guy. I could send him out during the day.”

  “An IT guy shopping?”

  “Say it like a word.”

  “An... it guy?” I asked.

  Then it dawned on me. Not an IT as in an information technology guy. The position was for a young man who did running and errands as well as the technology.

  “Does that mean something in your language?” I asked.

  Quin grinned. “Maybe.”

  “And it makes you grin like an imp. Hopefully they never figure it out, or there will be so much trouble for you and the others. Mass confusion as your genders are switched on IDs and there are flags put on your name.”

  Quin shrugged. “It’s not a written language so your linguists wouldn’t speak it.”

  “What?” I squawked.

  “We don’t consider a language ‘dead’ until modern humans can no longer translate it,” Quin murmured with a shrug. “Take the languages of the Upper Paleolithic area, if you will. We still carry on words from the language and know their original meaning. Humans on the other hand, have the words in their evolved forms, which we also use. Those languages are considered dead. If you heard it, you wouldn’t recognize it. Nor would any modern speaker of the evolved languages because the symbolism of the words themselves have changed.”

  “A tree is still a tree.”

  And despite what Quin though, Jerry had been able to translate something Quin said in that language. It might have taken him some time, and he might also have been a little annoyed at the enunciation, and he did say he wasn’t certain what that one word even was, but he managed it just fine.

  “When English as a language dies, the word ‘tree’ may be remembered, but pine, birch, palm, will likely be forgotten. Especially if those things no longer exist. With the evolution of creatures, there are things that once existed whose words have now been swapped over to the nearest to creature.”

  “Such as vampire?”

  “Actually, yes. We’ve not always been called vampire, and the Elders—those of Lucrecia and Lu’s Makers—were an entirely different creature. There’s a marked evolution between those generations.”

  I tried to recall what he had said the night before.

  “That’s the period that Lu says the Elders attacked and tried to kill the Great Maker, isn’t it?”

  “It is, yes.”

  “And the Great Maker survived?”

  “According to Lu, yes, she did. No other vampire is aware of myths of the Great Maker, aside from calling the first vampire by that name.”

  “The Great Maker is a woman?”

  “According to myth, again. You must understand, when male gods began coming around as the first or even the only god, the vampires of old were pissed. Children came from women. Therefore everything that existed came from the female.”

  “Yeah, but doesn’t archaeology show—”

  “Fuck archaeology. It’s a view of the past created by a patriarchal society, blinded by their way of doing things. There are statuettes all over of pregnant women. And then there are statues of dicks. Not of men. Of dicks, Helen.”

  “Everything you’re saying suggests that Bau is the Great Maker.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what Lu believes. But get the oldest vampires talking. Before Lu, there’s just no males. Sure, Lucrecia’s Maker, but he was still a baby compared to the others who had been culled. She thinks that until Lu, or around that period, it was believed that only women could be turned.”

  “Why then?”

  “According to Lu, a man was turned to punish the vampires for their treachery.”

  “And if he believes that his Maker is the Great Maker, he’d then see himself as the devil.”

  “In the modern terminology, yes,” Quin said.

  “Your Maker is crazy.”

  “I know,” he said.

  He led the way to the kitchen, pulling a pan from the oven. On the pan was a small quiche with steam rising from it. The pan and the quiche were set on the stove to cool as he turned back to me.

  “Anyhow, the earliest full language I can speak is from what modern humans would call a nomadic ice age people. As I’ve taught that language to others, I can only assume it was Bau’s original language. Makers press the languages of their mortality and that of their own Makers onto their Progeny.”

  “What’s Lu’s language?”

  “Sumer, didn’t I tell you that?”

  “Can you say something in Sumer for me?”

  “You’ve been saying it. Lu.”

  “Means?”

  “Man, or male.”

  “Wait, he kept calling you boy.”

  “Yes,” Quin said, then frowned at me as he opened a cupboard. “Obviously, this is one of those things I thought was too common sense to point out.”

  “Yes, I think so. So, no one knows the myth of the Great Maker.”

  “No, the—” Quin stopped and seemed to think for a moment. “The myth of the Great Maker permeates through the cultures of human civilizations.”

  “You mean God?” I asked.

  “No, I mean parts of our myths have helped, uh, word, what’s the word. Helped, shape the culture and understanding of the human race. Parts of the myth are floating around the vampire circles. Lu’s the only one who’s told me near to a full story and even that has been in bits that I’ve reconstructed after centuries.”

  “Bits?” I asked. “Quin. He’s been calling himself Man all along and says that the Great Maker turned Man to punish Woman.”

  “Punish her children, not women.”

  “Oh, my God, and he won’t drink from women.”

  “Nope.”

  “Because we aren’t prey, man is.”

  Quin seemed to consider that. “He does tend not to feed on his playthings. I didn’t know he consumed blood until after I was turned because that was the first time he drank from me.”

  “Because the playthings haven’t sinned yet?” I asked.

  The frown deepened. “Haven’t sinned yet? No, you don’t understand, Lu has always been a paedophile.”

  “Bad people always rationalize what they do,” I said. “I think he believes that boys have no sin.”

  His eye twitched. I watched him twitch again. He quietly pulled down a plate and set it on the counter. There was a moment of silence before he turned to me.

  “Just to be clear, you think he believes I am an innocent and therefore he torments me?”

  “Would you put your dick in something dirty?” I asked.

  Quin twitched yet again.

  “Wonder what would count as dirty,” he muttered. “Because obviously, it’s not rape or baby killing or torture.”

  “From where I’m standing, in vampires it’s the ability to create more of themselves, and in humans, it’s the lack of the ability to give birth.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “I’ll go over who he’s killed and see how many of them were Makers.”

  “Why is that excellent?” I asked.

  “I told you last night. I’m on a short list to become a Maker.”

  “Was that announced to the general immortal population?” I asked.

  “Only to those who needed to know. Most of the vampire community is ignorant of the list, only knowing there is one and that they aren’t on it. Our Makers were not informed unless we told them, which I did not do.”

  “But by becoming a Maker, you would spoil yourself, commit sin, in his eyes. Once you commit sin, you are no longer protected by, well, whatever it is that makes you an innocent.”

  “Sasha survived,” Quin said. “She was a Maker when he attacked the Council. I’ve also had my encounters with him. I think I could win.”

>   “One: think being the key word there. You know what happened to Thought, right? Two: I swear one of you has said that she survived because she took on Lucrecia’s power through transference and it is that commanding power which keeps Lucrecia alive. Remove the ability to command others and Lucrecia would have been dead long ago.”

  “Says who?” Quin asked.

  “Lu, last night. He’s pretty upset about Lucrecia stealing you, which is a long time for a vampire to hold a grudge,” I said. “I mean, she’s committed the sin of creating another of her kind. She’s a woman. She’s also been chosen on more than one occasion for an important something. They’re almost of the same generation.”

  “Lucrecia is a representation, however watered down, of what vampires once were.”

  “Her Maker was killed during the cull, which implies her Maker may have been of the second or third generation. She’s probably been marked for execution since then, and likely knows it.”

  “Her Maker was male. A man. Lu was created by an older vampire, before her. Once it was known men could be turned, it became a fashion. Men got along easier in the world, so they were turned to front for their Makers. Lucrecia, I believe, was created by one of that generation of men.”

  It just didn’t make sense to me. Not in a confused, different perspective I was having trouble seeing type of way, but more like how things hadn’t made sense the day before. There were oddities in how Quin spoke and hesitated. I had to wonder if he was mimicking things to me that Lu had said to him, repeating it back verbatim.

  Take it with a grain of salt.

  There might be some truth to what Quin was saying, and he was telling me all he knew, but it wasn’t the truth. Someone, somewhere, had altered the facts. I swore that someone had told me the day before that Lucrecia was older than Lu.

  Or maybe I was confusing things, I hadn’t really been paying attention to things said about Lucrecia, because she wasn’t the one I had been interviewing.

  Instead, I tried to approach it from a different angle, and see if Quin could make the connection and sort it out for himself.

  “Why create another woman?”

  “She was a whore.”

  I choked on the words I wanted to say. Then I swallowed and considered the images of Lucrecia I had seen. She was beautiful but hadn’t been under the age of twenty-five when she had been turned. Under thirty, surely, but she still held herself as a matron might.

  The last term anyone might apply to her was ‘whore.’

  “Well, for her Maker she was. He had Progeny who he used to kill his Maker, to be free of the woman. Then he turned Lucrecia to serve them all.”

  That was definitely not the story that was out and about. Lucrecia hadn’t been aware of who her Maker had been upon waking up, there were multiple vampires present and even they weren’t certain at first.

  If they were any blinder, they’d need walking sticks and seeing eye dogs.

  “So, the cull worked in her favour,” I said, struggling to come up with something to say.

  It wasn’t Quin’s fault that he was giving me false information.

  “Yes, she was taken on for a time by another vampire, a woman, who was also culled about a century later. We’d have to ask her, but I don’t think she’d be willing to discuss it.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “The last time I brought it up, she tried to strangle me with her own two hands. She wasn’t overly strong at that point. It was in fashion for her to be tiny.”

  “Trade her. Wraith information for stuff on her early life.”

  “That could work. If she doesn’t lock me in a box for being Wraith.”

  “You’re Wraith,” I snapped. “You lock her in a box, not the other way around.”

  “It’s a matter of respect.”

  “The Council whored Wraith out to Death, knowing the sort of vampire he was, the kind of Maker he had become and what he liked to do to others. I think respect is out the window and it’s time to stomp your feet and hold your breath.”

  “That doesn’t work.”

  “Or start killing vampires.”

  “Yes, Dear Council members. If you’d so kindly stay in one place for an entire year so that I can figure out how and when to kill you,” he said as if addressing a crowd. Then he shook his head at me. “That would not go over well.”

  I watched him do so and bit the inside of my mouth.

  “You do know how to kill them. And you know where the head is. I’m betting, given how cliché you lot are, Lucrecia’s got the staff and is bringing it this way. So, you’d have the whole bit.”

  He was quiet a moment. “I would, yes. And yes, killing them would be simple, but killing a vampire is like a human killing another human. It’s not to be taken lightly. Even if I want to stab them in their stupid faces.”

  “So, kill some vampires.”

  “Mortals should want to conserve life, not end it.”

  “Start with those on the list, if you don’t want to end the immortal lives of vampires. There are four slated for execution, right? Kill them, to show you can. Then lay out demands. They gave him someone to torture eternally! You, surely, could gain a pardon. Or a second line of stock. Or your own family. A pat on the head, even?”

  “And Lu? I cannot kill my Maker.”

  “Lock him in a box, make a vampire, transference the ability and then execute him. Simple math. You’re all kind of old men. Blinded by how it’s been done for centuries.”

  “Which is why we’re looking for new blood,” he said weakly.

  “I hope you understand what new blood would actually mean,” I muttered.

  “Oh, I’m starting to see it.”

  I frowned as Quin set a plate of quiche on the small dining table. He motioned to the plate, then moved around the table and sat across from it.

  As he sat, something screamed. An alarm blared to life, and the lights flickered several times before dimming to almost nothing. He shouted something at me over the screaming siren and ran off. It was difficult to understand what he had said, but I thought perhaps he was shouting at me to stay.

  Given the fact that his alarm was clearly going off, I was perfectly content to stay where I was and let him deal with the monster who was possibly trying to break in. For several minutes, I stood there, uncertain what to do with myself. Did I hide? Did I run? Or maybe I should have tried to find a weapon.

  But given my current situation, and the fact that it would be Lu breaking into the place, finding a weapon was kind of besides the point. All I’d do was make him angrier, and if he got angrier, he might decide to keep me alive and torture me a bunch.

  The alarm shut off as suddenly as it had begun.

  I walked out of the kitchen and headed towards the front of the safe area. As I approached the door, it opened and a startled Quin looked at me as I raised my hands.

  Apparently at some point I had grabbed the pan off the stove and meant to whack him with it. Sheepishly, I looked at the pan and turned, setting it on a table before clearing my throat and turning back to him.

  “Troy, my new IT guy arrived,” Quin said.

  “And he decided to introduce himself by setting off the alarms?” I asked.

  “No, he said that he tried to hack my system, in search of weak points. They all try it when they arrive, but I think he’s the first one to be stupid enough to get caught. Claims it’s not his fault though, says there was a trap there that shouldn’t have been there because it was built to catch them trying to check for flaws.”

  “But, isn’t that kind of the point of a security system?” I asked.

  “It is,” Quin said with a nod. “My last guy was absolutely fantastic. Troy will fix what he did and build upon it. If he set it off then others will also set it off. That trap might just save me pain one day.”

  “Good, will I meet Troy?”

  “Of course, he just needs to get settled. In the meantime, however, how about we go over the myth of the Great Maker, an
d you try to eat some food?”

  I will tell you the myth of the Great Maker as best I can. Over the years, I have pieced it together from various sources. The biggest piece to this puzzle seems to be Lu. Most of what I know comes from him. All other vampires who may have believed in her or were religious zealots seem to have been culled. The few fragments that remain are spotty at best and only really made sense once I started piecing together what Lu told me.

  The origin of the vampire creature is not clear in the least. Humanity has only existed as the creature that you might recognize for about a hundred thousand years. Science tells us that the typical lifespan of a species is a few million.

  Yet vampire and its other forms have existed since the dawn of mankind. Some vampires venture that vampire came first, creating man in his image.

  His image?

  Those who believe vampire is God to man, believe the Great Maker is male. Unsurprisingly, those same men are the ones who were turned during particularly religious times. They were raised and taught this idea of male as the ultimate source of good and woman being the ultimate source of sin.

  Suffice to say they don’t have a lot of fun.

  For many of us, the Great Maker is female. Either through a quirk in evolution or by the hand of a god, she came to exist. If you believe in evolution, the answer of how is somewhat simple, and if that is the answer, Margaret will discover it in the next decade or so.

  If the Great Maker was made by a god instead of evolving then Lu’s tale could be correct. She then had a consort, not a husband, who was also her brother because that’s how gods work. There are numerous other god created beings like her. From the number told, each of these were the founders of what mortals would call the supernatural species.

  Should I delete that?

  No, because it appears to be true. If you view the Great Maker as a creature of myth instead of science, then that is how it is.

  According to Lu, her consort is dead but capable of coming back from the dead, except only by her hand. There is obviously a very complex way of bringing a spirit back from the dead, and then giving it a new body. It takes magic, amongst other things. Given her age and capabilities, it’s not beyond her to do such a thing.