“I hear you’re looking for Razeen. You have a lot of nerve walking into this city and spreading his name about.”
“We need to see him. It’s important.” Alex was nervous, I could tell by the set of his jaw, and I squeezed his hand. “Are you Razeen?”
The man laughed. “I am not, but I can take you to him.”
“Is it far?” I inquired, still slightly concerned about Euriel.
The man’s eyes slid from Alex to me, and I swallowed. The hunger in them was unmistakable, and although I knew Alex was pretty damn formidable, if the whole circle of vampires decided to attack me, there was no way we’d be able to hold them all off.
I watched as the vampire’s eyes dropped to my throat. Rallying my nerves, I took a step towards him. “Hey, you, my eyes are up here. Keep them there if you know what’s good for you. Jeez, what is it about guys? When they’re human, they can’t stop staring at your breasts, then as soon as they’re undead, it’s the throat. A girl can’t have a decent conversation with anyone.”
The vampire laughed. “I like you, you are funny. I shall enjoy killing you, I think.”
“Just you bloody try,” I growled, moving into a defensive stance.
Alex stepped in front of me. “There’s no need for this. We’re just wanting to see Razeen, then we’ll be on our way.”
The vampire sneered at him. “Even her? She isn’t one of the undead.”
“Even her,” Alex replied.
“Humans are not permitted. It is the law.”
“Who said I was human? I think you’re making a lot of assumptions here,” I remarked, walking up next to Alex. The vampire stepped forward, and I forced myself not to move. He sniffed the air around my hair, coming close enough to make me uncomfortable.
“Not human then. But… I cannot discern what you are.”
“So you will take us to Razeen?” Alex asked.
It took us a while to reach the location he was leading us to. I was thankful for the movement, still being rather cold after the day spent under the burning sun, so the long walk got the blood flowing. Alex tried to question the vampire guiding us, but he gave away very little, only saying he was taking us to Razeen and it would be up to him to decide what to do with us.
The sandstone houses turned into more modern buildings as we approached the outskirts of the city, and soon we were surrounded by warehouses and factories. He led us to the side door in a factory, unlocking it with a keypad and holding it open for us to enter.
“Great, another warehouse,” I muttered to Alex.
The vampire stared at me. “Not warehouse. Oil field.” He gestured farther down the road, and I stepped back to see lines of huge, odd, dark silhouettes against the starry sky.
“Right. Okay then. Strange place, but okay.” We stepped inside the corridor. It stretched away into shadows, all clean lines and linoleum floors. It did not look like the type of place a thousand-year-old vampire might hang out.
“Now we blindfold you.”
“What?” I exclaimed, looking at Alex in shock. “You didn’t say anything about blindfolding.”
The vampire shrugged. “We have brought you here, but you will not know the entrance. This is sacred knowledge known only to a few. Therefore, blindfolds.”
Alex glanced at me and then looked back at the vampire. He opened his mouth to speak, but then he closed it again and nodded.
I sighed. “Fine.” I allowed one of the silent vampires to approach and tie a black strip of fabric around my eyes. The hair on the back of my neck bristled as he leaned forward, his nose and lips brushing the skin of my neck. As he took a deep breath, I jerked away from him. “Hey, watch it. This isn’t some kind of kinky scene. Behave.” There was a short laugh, and I felt him slide his fingers from my shoulder all the way down to my hands. “I mean it,” I snapped. “Back off.”
He took hold of my wrists firmly, but not roughly, and wrapped some kind of cord around them, binding them tightly in front of me.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, you said nothing about being tied up.” I heard Alex’s voice from my right and knew they must be doing the same to him.
“It’s just for our own protection. We will unbind you once Razeen has declared that you are not a risk or a threat.”
I took a deep, shaky breath and tried to relax. Alex didn’t say another word. A moment later, somebody took me by my bindings and pulled me forward. I followed, trying to trust the person not to let me trip or fall, but it was slow going, and it was several minutes before I was told to stop and wait.
“There are steps here,” I heard the original vampire say. “Take them slowly. Do not fall down the steps.”
I shivered at the idea of going deep into the earth again but did as he said.
We did seem to be going deep. The steps turned around and around. It felt like we were going in circles, and yet it wasn’t the tight, twisting staircase that we’d experienced in Germany, but there was definitely an angle. As we descended, the air seemed to grow warmer on my cold skin, like a gentle heat wafting up from the centre of the Earth.
“We have reached the bottom, two more steps.”
I took the two steps and stopped as I felt someone’s hand on my arm. It was removed almost immediately, and I felt a touch at the back of my head as they untied the blindfold. I blinked in the darkness, trying to see, as he pulled the blindfold away.
We were standing in a wide underground passageway. The stairs above us wound far up into shadows, so I hadn’t been wrong, we had come a long way down. The steps were wide sandstone, and the floor was paved with the same. There were no electric lights down here, instead oil lamps burned behind various coloured glass shells, flickering and casting strange shadows.
The vampire gestured for us to follow, so we did, moving down the corridor with our silent entourage not far behind. Arched doorways led off the hallway here and there, their doors made from carved dark wood or beaten metal that gleamed in the light. I shot a look at Alex, and he shrugged as if the place didn’t bother him, but he reached out and took my hand anyway.
The passageway came to an abrupt end, just opening into a large chamber. From the looks of it, it had once been a natural cave. There were huge stalactite and stalagmite columns that had been carved with elaborate symbols and pillars shaped out of rock all rising to a very high, arched ceiling. It reminded me uncomfortably of the cathedral.
The main area wasn’t dark at least, lit by dozens of torches and fire pits which bathed the pale rock in golden light. In the very centre, a huge ornamental pool dominated the space. It reminded me a little of the bathing pool in Dis with all the columns surrounding it, but I didn’t think this was for bathing. There were no steps down, and the liquid that filled it was dark and glutinous. Definitely not water. I tore my eyes from it, not wanting to know what was in there, though considering we were in a vampire nest, I did have my suspicions.
We walked down the side of the chamber, heading towards the end where the light was the brightest. The shadows and recesses between the columns and the chamber walls held small groups of people, vampires probably, who stared at us as we walked past. No one approached us, but I could hear the whispers as we walked by, and it really didn’t help my sense of dread that was growing by the second.
We were outnumbered. There were over a hundred people here by the looks of it, and if anything went wrong, the odds of Alex and I getting out alive were low, if not zero. Not for the last time, I wished Euriel was with us with his flaming sword. I didn’t even have a knife, as it was in my jacket pocket.
As we rounded the edge of the columns, the vampire guided us towards the platform at the end of the room. Hewn out of the rock, the platform was raised several steps. On the steps was an altar, and behind the altar was a great golden chair, well, throne, really.
The vampire led us in front of it. “Wait here, I will fetch Razeen.”
Trying to avoid meeting the eyes of any of the other vampires, I looked around our immediate surroundings. There wasn’t much on the altar, just a simple white cloth and tall black candles burning in golden candlesticks. A gold cup in the centre held what I was fairly sure was blood. An offering of some kind? Or a drink for Razeen? Behind the throne, a large mural had been painted on a smooth area of the wall. The paint was starting to fade, and I would guess it to be a few hundred years old at least. It depicted a man and a woman in a passionate embrace. Lizpha and his wife, I guessed.
Movement caught my eye, and I looked down to see our vampire guide helping an old man onto the throne. He was certainly not the man in the picture. His skin was not smooth, but ancient and pockmarked and stretched over his skull. His eyes burned red in the sunken hollows. Heavy dark robes embroidered with gold and gemstones were draped over him, but despite his skeletal appearance, he bore the weight as though they were made of fine silk. This guy was strong, and I could feel the power emanating from him.
“So these are our visitors.” His voice was raspy, as though he didn’t use it much, and it sent shivers down my spine.
Our vampire guide stepped forward. “Your greatness, they have been asking about the order, even using your name to request information. I thought it best that they were brought here immediately.”
The old man nodded. “So you have been asking for Razeen.” He spread his arms open in a mock welcoming gesture, his robes rustling. “You have found him. I am Razeen, high lord and priest of the Order of Lizpha. What can I do for you?”
His tone was scornful, but either Alex didn’t notice or he didn’t care. He did, however, bow his head in respect which surprised me. “Your greatness, we apologize if we have caused the order to receive unwanted attention, but you are hard people to find. We need information, and we believe you are the only ones who have it.”
Razeen’s eyes moved slowly to me then drifted back to Alex. “And what price are you prepared to pay for such information?”
“You don’t know what we need yet,” Alex answered calmly.
The ancient vampire stared at him. “You asked for me by name. You know the name of the order. You know I have the information you seek, or else you would not have risked my wrath with your reckless behaviour. I am currently not disposed towards helping you, so I ask again, what will you give me in return?”
Alex’s lips parted, but he didn’t say anything. I moved forward and took his hand. “What do you want? We don’t have a lot of money.”
He smiled, revealing broken yellow teeth. They weren’t like Alex’s, with gleaming white fangs. All of Razeen’s teeth were sharp, and I swear there was more than one row. He looked like a fucking shark. I shuddered at the thought of him biting down on my throat. He’d tear me apart.
“What else? I want blood.”
Alex’s grip tightened on my hand. His face must have shown something because the creature laughed a raspy, grating noise like nails across a chalkboard. I shuddered again but tried to keep it as subtle as possible. I didn’t want him to know he was unnerving me.
“There’s no way she’s giving you blood. She’s with me. I promised she wouldn’t be in any danger.”
Ruby eyes flicked briefly to Alex then back to mine. He stood and slowly walked forward until he was in front of us. A musty, decaying odour reached me, and I tried to breathe through my mouth.
“She won’t be harmed,” he rasped. “I only want a taste.”
“It’s not going to happen,” Alex insisted.
The creature reached into his robes and brought out a small glass vial and held it out to me. “A taste only. I won’t even touch her.”
I took the vial from him, turning it over in my hands. It had a tiny cork stopper in the top. This felt really weird. He wanted my blood, but in a bottle, like wine. I felt a bit disorientated, my thoughts flitting through my mind in a rather disjointed way. I ran my thumb over the stopper. Could blood be corked like wine? If wine corked, it became tainted. I wondered if blood did that. No, I supposed it would congeal first.
“It would most certainly congeal first,” Razeen said as he cackled, and I realised I had been speaking out loud. I blinked, feeling fuzzy, then forced myself to focus.
I closed my fingers around the bottle. “I agree to your terms, but I have three conditions.”
Alex turned to me in shock, but I squeezed his hand to keep him quiet. Thankfully, he kept his mouth shut.
Razeen’s demonic mouth curled up in an amused smile. “I see. And what are they?”
“I’m assuming you want to drink the blood, not keep it squirrelled away in some collection?”
He nodded. “I like to taste as many… varieties as possible.”
“My conditions are that you confirm it is just this one vial and that you drink it now, here, in front of us.”
“And the third?” he rasped.
“You return the empty vial to me afterwards.”
I watched the amusement on his face darken to something deeper, respect maybe, then his face cracked into a creepy and disarming grin. “So I was right. You aren’t human?”
“Not exactly.”
His grin widened. “And you have knowledge of magic.”
I nodded. “I do.” At the sight of the bottle, my mind had jumped back to one of my lessons with Deliah. We had been talking about sympathetic magic. Most people would think about voodoo dolls. You made an image of the person and included a photograph or hair or toenail clippings. Then what you did to the small version was supposed to happen to the real person. Hollywood showed practitioners causing pain and illness, sometimes even death. What most people didn’t know was that puppet or doll magic was generally used for targeted healing practices. But hey, evil things were much more fun to hear about. Deliah warned me about protecting elements of my body, about cutting my own hair if possible so that nobody couldn’t obtain a lock of it, and to never ever let anybody have any of my blood.
I looked up at him. “Do we have a deal?”
Razeen nodded and reached into his robes again. He passed me a small, sharp knife, its hilt bound in gold and rubies. I took it from him and used it to make a small cut on my wrist. I knew by now that my healing abilities would prevent any contamination from entering my bloodstream if the knife wasn’t sterile. I pressed the point into my skin, watching the blood well up, and tipped it into the vial. My healing abilities meant I had to repeat the process twice in order to bleed enough to fill the vial, and afterwards, I passed the knife to Alex. He put the tip of the blade into his mouth, sucking off any residue of my blood before handing the knife back to Razeen.
He held out his hand for the vial as I placed the cork inside, but I pulled my hand back. “Information first.”
He nodded and turned to seat himself slowly back on the throne. “What do you need?”
Alex took a breath. “We need information on Cain.”
“Cain?” Razeen’s eyebrows lifted. “Information on Cain. Interesting. And what do you need to know?”
“Do you know where he is?” Alex queried, jumping straight to the point.
Razeen threw his head back and laughed. The sound reverberated around the chamber. Silence fell for a moment, then the small groups of vampires continued to talk and chatter amongst themselves. A few were paying attention, but most were ignoring us now that it seemed like we weren’t enemies.
“You are referring to mythology. Our blessed father, Lizpha. Cain was his father.”
Alex nodded. “We know Cain was the father of Lizpha. We know they battled in Lizpha’s prison in the city of Eridu, now buried under Tell Abu Sharain, and it was said that Cain was trapped there. We want to know if he’s still there or if he escaped.”
Razeen nodded and held out his hand. With a glance from Alex, I laid the vial on his palm, careful not to touch his leathery skin. Razeen removed the cork and tipped the contents into his mouth. He closed his eyes, as though he was savouring a fine wine, then his eyes flew open, and he stared straight at me, his dark tongue snaking out over his lips. He stared at me for a moment then smiled again, holding out the vial for me to take.
“I’m not sure the information I have to give was worth that.”
Alex started forward. “We made a deal—”
Razeen held up his hand. “You misunderstand me. I meant the information I have is worthless compared to this.” He stretched out his gnarled hand, and I watched in horror and amazement as his skin began to smooth before my eyes. Wrinkles faded away, and dark spots disappeared. Within moments, I was looking at an attractive smooth-skinned, dark-haired young man with a cunning smile and cold red eyes.
Alex stared at him in shock. “How did you…”
Razeen’s eyes never left mine. “It was no trick of mine. Your woman? She is definitely not human. She is nothing I’ve ever seen before.”
I shrugged and looked down, not knowing what to say. It was not every day you were told your blood was this amazing life-giving tonic.
“The information then,” Alex said, getting swiftly back to the subject.
“Indeed, I will tell you what I know. As you will have deduced, or even been told, I am rather old myself, though not as old as Cain. Many here know me to be the oldest vampire in the city. What they don’t know is how old I actually am. When I was first turned, I hunted the city of Eridu, as did our great father Lizpha.”
I stared at him in shock. “But Eridu hasn’t been occupied since…”
He nodded. “I’m nearly six thousand years old.”
This time it was Alex’s turn to look shocked. “I thought the oldest vampire in the world was less than three thousand.”
Razeen shrugged. “The oldest known vampire, maybe. I am not widely known or talked about, and I rarely give up my age. Lizpha had left the city long before my time. Where he went, if he still lives, none of us know. All I know is that the stories about Lizpha and Cain were still about in my time. Rumours, myths, and stories for children ran through the city. Whispers among the undead. Do you not find it interesting that humans believe the tell dates back to about 6500 BCE, and yet we know that it was built by Cain and his sons thousands of years before that?”
“I didn’t think that part made sense,” I agreed. “We just figured they haven’t dug deep enough yet.”
Razeen smiled. “I don’t think they would find much of anything remaining. There were other stories about our city that were told between the generations, stories of a cataclysmic event that wiped out everything that had been there before our city was built.”
“What happened?”
“There was a great flood. The great flood, in fact, which wiped out the city and the surrounding area. It was rebuilt afterwards, of course, but everything that had been there before was destroyed.”
“Hang on a minute,” I interrupted. “Are you talking about the great flood as in Noah, animals, and forty days of rain kind of flood?” Razeen nodded, and I turned to Alex. “As in, the flood that wiped out the nephilim.”
“Do you know much about Sumerian mythology?” Razeen questioned.
“A little,” Alex answered.
“In my time, the city of Eridu was loyal to a Sumerian deity named Enki, the God of the Flowing Waters. There was a temple built to Enki outside of the city. It was believed that Enki had caused the great flood and that the temple was built on the place where the waters rose up to engulf the land. Lesser-known stories speak of Enki himself rising from the ground with the waters.”
I looked at him and then at Alex. “Cain?”
He nodded. “It makes sense. He built the place to contain Lizpha and keep him away from the people of Eridu. It would stand to reason he would build his prison outside of the city walls. And he and the rest of his family were living there too, so he would need to be near a water source.”
“Cain escaped when the flood hit. The huge amount of water must have somehow dislodged something, maybe even caused a cave-in, enabling him to escape the temple… but wait, I thought the flood was caused by rain?”
“The rain would have caused the water table to overflow. The water would have pushed upwards through the earth, bursting out where it could. It’s entirely possible,” Alex mused. Razeen watched us, saying nothing.
“But he’d have drowned, surely?” I argued.
“Drowned, yes, died, no. If he can’t die…”
I stared at him, feeling the blood drain from my face as what Cain must have gone through hit me. Buried alive in the darkness for who knows how long, and then to have to fight his way to the surface, feeling the agony of drowning over and over again until he could finally reach the open air. I couldn’t catch my breath, and memories from the cave-in in Germany slammed into me. I swayed as dizziness engulfed me, and Alex wrapped his arms around me, holding me close.
“Alex, he’s been alive all this time. Thousands of years. What would that do to someone’s mind?”
Razeen put his hand on Alex’s shoulder, and I felt Alex tense under his touch. “Cain is known amongst our people as the Father of Death. A terrifying figure in our mythology, akin to the human Devil, he hunts our kind for sport, tearing us apart with his bare hands, or so it is said. He is our greatest enemy. If he truly exists, then I will aid you in any way I can.”
“Thank you.” Alex nodded stiffly. “In that case, we need to leave and return to our country to begin the search.”
Razeen smiled. “Of course, I will summon Fazir to guide you back to where he found you, and I will give you a contact number to reach us should you need more information.”
“We appreciate that, thank you.” Alex turned to go, his arms still about my shoulders, but at some signal from Razeen, four robed figures stepped between us.
“Forgive me, you misunderstand me. I said I would help you in any way that I could. I must insist, however, that the woman remains here with me.”
“What?” Alex spat. We both whirled back around to face him, my mouth open in shock.
Razeen’s eyes fell to my neck and shoulder, and his dark tongue snaked out to run over his lips again. “I’m afraid I cannot let you leave, my dear.”
“You are not serious,” I insisted.
“You saw what a mere vial of your blood did for me, restoring my youth and my strength. If I were to keep you here, an endless supply to tap whenever I needed it, the world would open up to me once more. I would be able to leave the temple again and go above ground.” Razeen reached out and took my hand, curling his long fingers around mine and twisting it so he could watch his thumb slide over the blue veins that ran just below the surface of the delicate skin. “Don’t you understand, my dear? Have pity on me, I am dead without you. You will be my new life.”
