Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85029 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
I know I have to leave—there is much to be done now. But I allow myself a few more moments of peace.
We did it.
We tricked it.
We controlled it.
And soon, we will be master and it will be slave.
Paul interrupts my thoughts, talking in hushed tones as he has a private moment with Ryet. But his whispers are hard to tune out and the level of anguish in his voice makes me turn my head. Syrsee is still writhing, nearly on top of me now, and Paul is lying on his side, hovering over Ryet’s chest as he pushes sweaty hair away from his eyes.
“You’re OK.” This is what Paul is saying on repeat. “You’re OK, Ryet. It’s going to be OK.”
Syrsee is panting heavily, unable to calm down because the blood lust in the beginning of every transformation is insatiable. Her mouth is still seeking my blood. She’s licking me, and sucking on me, and writhing against me like she wants more sex.
But this isn’t really her.
I could feel the moment when Ryet took her away into some kind of dreamwalk.
It doesn’t matter. She didn’t need to be mentally present in her body when the consummation took place. Ryet wasn’t there, so it makes sense that he would take her with him.
But neither of them are back yet, while Paul and I are both awake.
That’s why Paul is worried. He won’t be able to stay long. He’s here, but not. Because he’s still under whatever spell Syrsee put on him.
I don’t have much time either. I am really here, thanks to the Darkness. It’s more than evil. It’s always been more than that. It’s made up of carbon and code too.
And it’s everywhere under the earth.
Everywhere. Little veins of black, oily Darkness run under the surface of the entire planet like tree roots. That’s how I got here and that’s how I’ll get home too.
It only has one objective: Replicate.
That’s all it does, all day long. That’s all it’s been doing since it came into being long, long, long before I did.
It’s very good at replication. What it is not good at is making more than itself. It’s been here millions of years, it’s been replicating this whole time, and all it can do is make more of itself.
It cannot make a new, independent copy.
In other words, it cannot make babies. It can only grow bigger, and longer, and more spread out.
That’s why it needs the vampires.
It made the vampire to make a baby and it made the Black witch to feed us their blood. The Black blood of Black witches comes from the Darkness because the Black blood is the Darkness. Its mission is to get inside us, and take over our cells, and rewrite what’s in there, and make something new from us.
Something it cannot make itself.
A baby made of cold, coded carbon.
A new breed of vampire.
A vessel filled with nothing but Black blood.
Black blood that will one day, if the Darkness gets its way, leave the vessel behind and be a second.
And it’s kind of ironic. Because we all want the same thing. Babies.
The problem is, each vision of what a baby is—human, vampire, witch, Darkness—is distinct.
A human baby is not a witch baby. A witch baby is not a vampire baby. And a vampire baby will never be the Darkness.
We cannot allow it.
We cannot allow the Darkness to extinguish our species. And that’s what it’s doing. Because in order for the Darkness to have the Dark baby—an exact replica of itself, existing on its own, outside the vessel that contains it—it must kill the vampire.
All these scions we’ve made… for what?
To die. We make them to die. It’s murdering us to save itself.
That is why there are so few. It’s not that we have a completely illogical life cycle—we are not the doomed panda. We are so few because this thing—this alien thing that doesn’t belong here—kills us in its attempt to save itself.
I take a breath. Hold it. Let it out.
I took part in this genocide. I was favored and I took part. Just like everyone else in the Obscurati.
Paul was the one who stood up to it.
Paul was the one who made monsters instead of vampires.
Paul was the only one who ever tried to save us.
The only reason we’re still here is because the protocol for making the third-born was detailed, and difficult, and required thousands of years of trial and error.
But that’s over now.
We’ve done it. With Ryet, we have made a new vampire.
The American Vampire.
Will the Darkness inside Ryet be able to leave the vessel and be itself, alone, without the container?
It must.
It must.
Because we need that Dark baby if we want to win. We need a copy—a perfect copy of the Darkness—before Syrsee, the Blood Mother, gives birth.
It’s the only way to fight it.