Chapter Text
In the 465th year of the Sire of Sires—near the close of final year of the nineteenth century as counted since the death of that spawn-botherer Christ—Mercymorn, third of the first progeny, approached the desiccated corpse of John Gaius, and bit down an existential gag.
Her brother, father, king lay half curled on the otherwise immaculate Persian rug, tensed and coiled in the exquisite agony of being bled so dry that his power went with it. The sheer absence of his power pulled her closer to him even as her instinctive revulsion tried to root her to the floor. The husk of a vampire, hungering and luring even in the most brutal of deaths. It would have been kinder to plunge a stake of hawthorn in his heart and be done with it. Her lord’s hands were outstretched slightly as if pushing away. A defensive posture. The collar of his shirt and the lapels of his vest were rumpled, the starched material betraying the ghost of this fatal grip. Above that, the remainder of his throat, yawning bloodlessly on the left side, the scrape of a fang laying bare a bright scar of bone peeking shyly out from amongst the pinks and purples of dried out flesh.
Someone had beat her to the act.
“One of the thralls found him like this.”
She started at the mirthless voice at the door to the study. Augustine was watching her keenly, leaning forward slightly even as he arranged himself with all the grace of his pedigree.
“You didn’t?” she asked. “You seem less surprised than you should if this is your first time seeing him like this.”
“Once I confirmed that the thrall wasn’t losing its faculties, I left to find you.” He closed the door behind him with a soft click. As he approached, languid as can be, his eyebrow quirked up. An accusation. She rankled. She wanted to tear his face off and wear it like a mask on her next hunt. The raw bones of his face might serve more emotions than the muscle ever did. “You weren’t where you usually are.”
“I needed to speak with John,” she said. Then, when his silence was thick and eager and obnoxious: “I had concerns about Cytherea’s House.”
“Of course, of course, your mandated nagging,” Augustine said. “If it was only nagging.”
Mercy could not match him in height. Regardless, she closed the distance between them, jaw tight with the desire to dismember him slowly with the inexorable power of her teeth alone.
“Do you think me a fool?!” she said in a tight whisper that failed to hide the rising hysteria. “Here? Now?! Returning to the scene!!”
“Why not? The immediacy of everyone knowing your supremacy over their grandsire is a heady prospect.”
“With Gideon around!?” She whipped away from him and very nearly stepped on John’s corpse. “No! No.” She breathed out and confessed, for some reason: “I was waiting for his trip to Hong Kong to even think about making a move on John.”
Without a modicum of hesitation, leaping on the vulnerability of her confession with all the glee of a jaguar eating a missionary, Augustine said, “Short-sighted of you, but I guess I shouldn’t have expected anything exciting from you.”
Why did she bother? Hundreds of years of kinhood and still this!
“This is all coming off as particularly smarmy peacocking,” Mercy said. “Something to confess yourself?”
He touched his hand to his chest as if wounded. His pantomime even went so far as to incorporate an especially saccharine widening of the eyes, which only made the lack of true expression there all the more apparent. “Me? Why… Mercymorn, how could you? That man may as well have been a father to me.”
“Oh, spare me.”
“You don’t drink blood, you drink up joy and merriment, leaving all of us in misery, you shriveled up weapon,” he said lightly. He went to John’s side then, head bent as he made himself look, a strange sag to his posture that Mercy couldn’t be sure that she had ever seen before. “No. Not my work.”
“What were you waiting for?” she asked.
“A good boy never tells.”
Of course.
He adjusted his trousers and squatted down. His eyes raked across the throat, the rumpled clothes, then the position of John’s hands. Mercy did not miss his sidelong glance in her direction, as if sizing her up.
“The shrinkage of the flesh won’t give an accurate estimate of the height of his attacker,” she said.
“Ever the anatomist.”
She met him at his level with a kneel.
“There has to be some indication,” Augustine continued. “Any perfume or incense…”
Augustine fell blessedly silent with that musing. He surveyed the wreckage of John’s body with that crease in his forehead that suggested he might be brooding, if he was even capable of such a complex state.
In the ensuing quiet, she finally trusted herself to give in to that horrid pull of the emptiness emanating from the corpse before them. The feel of it repulsed her with such a vivid shock of nausea. All the blood of her recent hunt seemed to curdle like milk within her. The surface desiccation was familiar, nothing one wouldn’t have dealt with over the long years of undeath, the long stretches between meals when on extended, high risk business. Cyrus hunted so infrequently due to his distractions that he was often the subject for teaching fledglings both the consequences of neglecting to hunt and how to feed ailing kin. No, no. The vulnerability of the texture wrapped around that knuckle paled to the lingering emptiness that exuded from John on contact. John at his thirstiest felt brimming with power, spilling over that all of them felt bolstered by his mere presence. This was an emptiness so complete that it might have been a true vacuum.
Mercy filed that away and very gently eased apart his fingers from his palms. The ends of his finger bones grated with each nerve-wracking twitch. She did not need to separate them much to determine that whatever had been caught in his death grip had not been dislodged or torn to be left inside. She tilted her head just so, out of hope that there was skin or blood caught underneath, or maybe there would be a lingering scent, vetiver, ashes, candle wax, incense, anything. But there were no traces of such. His fingernails were only marred by faint crescents underneath and his skin held the scent of gall from all his writing.
“Nothing?” Augustine asked.
“Not a scrap or a whiff,” she confirmed. She snatched her hand away, afraid that she would find ever plentiful reasons to continue to touch the corpse. To bridge the gap of that vacuum and fill it—
“Damn,” said Augustine. “What a damn fine mess to clean up.”
“Who is going to tell Gideon?”
They looked at each other for one long, hard moment. Neither of them relished the idea. John would occasionally recount Gideon’s turning as a wife might recall her beloved husband’s proposal, so in awe still of Gideon’s unwavering loyalty that he had asked John to turn him. Gideon had never hid the mark, John’s draining kiss having the odd ungainly jaggedness of a fledgling still learning the best angle to drink from, despite his experience.
She answered her own question. “Both. While we bring the culprit to bear, he can pay his respects and protect John’s remains.”
“No question as to whether he did it?” asked Augustine. “No one would have seen it coming.”
“The most disloyalty Gideon was capable of was that affair with the hunter in New Zealand, and look how that shook out for her. He’s made of different stuff than you and I.”
Mercy took his ensuing silence as reluctant agreement.
~~~
The genealogy of vampirism—if it could be called such—is a jealous loyalty. The blood of one’s sire drank upon one’s turning, or prior as during a priming period, lives always in the bottom of one’s heart, heavy and immovable as lead settling there as the heart stills. It always calls to its origin. What bonds that form from such a yearning is never set in stone, of course but it is there and it is powerful. It recognizes the sire and the direct children of the sire.
Of course, it also recognizes the sire of one’s sire, and the sire before that. This is where the loyalty traipses in. The conflict of interests. Three generations of sires cast to the differing winds of fate can lead to the fourth being torn asunder of conflicting loyalties, would-be dynasties shattered, warring clans mingled into a horrible senseless slaughter. This has often been the way of history. The fourth generation being the cursed one, the one to be culled superstitiously.
John’s empire, however, spanned six generations.
Augustine was well aware of the methods of maintaining that many generations. After all, he was one of the guiding hands of the whole mess. But Gideon was the center of it all. Who else could teach loyalty as stalwart as his? Loyalty carefully selected for and tended to until every single spawn fell in a beautiful and hungry rank and file from John’s Children down to the newest expansive generation of great great great grandchildren. Culling was rare in the Sire of Sire’s brood, all because of that loyalty.
That John was dead, the very anchor of everything they had made… Of course Gideon would need to see for himself. It was as if someone said the moon was crashing into London.
Mercy had been the one to speak it aloud in the end. Every fiber of Augustine’s being wanted to blame her graceless tongue for how shamelessly the blood ran from the corners of Gideon’s eyes from underneath that sinewy hand. But he knew he couldn’t place blame there, not completely. The words to soften the blow could not have graced his own lips.
Watching this display, it fully struck him then that John was gone. Judging from the particularly stricken tilt of Mercy’s lips, he was not alone in this fresh realization. Despite himself, he offered Gideon a handkerchief the way he might have snuck him a cigarette, between two fingers, body angled studiously away.
Once Gideon dabbed his face clean, he finally approached John’s body.
He said nothing. He just cleared John’s desk and very gently lifted him off the rug as if cradling a sleeping child, and laid him upon it like a bier. He sat in John’s long-worn chair and looked at his sire with the handkerchief crumpled in his hands.
After an eternity’s idea of a minute and a half, Augustine was about to signal to Mercymorn that they should leave when Gideon spoke. He so rarely spoke with inflection that the distinct mechanical stress of his voice held them there.
“It had to have been one of our new siblings,” he said.
“Is it that clear?” said Augustine, caught off-guard.
“John and I saw off Cassiopeia, Cyrus, and Ulysses and their Houses together.” He rubbed his unhappy streak of a mouth. “If any of them circled back to do this, then they have exploited something in the compulsion of the thralls that I am unaware of…”
“Have our new siblings been threaded into instructions yet?” asked Mercy.
“No,” Gideon confessed. “Preparations for the memorial have been what I’ve had my orders to oversee.”
“One of them is already a kinkiller and this wasn’t prioritized!?”
“Harrowhark had the right to kill Cytherea. John has issued his judgment there already and I’m in no hurry to rehash it in his stead. It was just and it is buried.” It was almost blatant favoritism, how many words he spared on the issue.
Augustine didn’t need to share a look with her to know that he and Mercy were of the same mind as to their most likely culprit. He also knew without that look on Gideon’s face that he would brook no shortcuts here, especially not in the case for his sire, his oldest friend. Not for the safety and stability of this entire brood. If Gideon had proven anything with the hunter years ago, it was that Gideon could and would set aside any inklings of favoritism or sentimentality to crush a threat where it stood.
“Yes, let’s do this properly,” said Augustine, before the subject could get too far away from them. “Gideon, Mercy and I will question the fledglings and conduct an investigation immediately. We don’t have much time—”
“No. We don’t.” Gideon hefted the full weight of his mourning gaze on both of them and they both flinched away. “You talk to them. I will look for anything that might point the way. Apex hunters we may be, but there are always signs to catch, tracks to follow.”
“But, of course,” said Augustine. “You’re the best man for the job.”
The attempt at amiability fell marvelously flat.
Mercy relayed everything she could discern from John’s body to Gideon. It must have been an olive branch to assure Gideon that they weren’t invested in keeping anything from him when it came to this, because Mercy could have presented him with a detailed autopsy that only her own expertise could have prepared, and Gideon would have still gone through the trouble himself.
“Thank you, Mercy,” Gideon said nonetheless. His fingers flexed towards John’s sleeve momentarily before abandoning the motion. “I’d like a moment. Please.”
“We were just leaving anyway,” she said in a rush, turning on her heel.
They eagerly left him alone with his grief, embarrassed and mortified by the prospect of witnessing another slip or, even worse, being moved themselves.
Abigail. Ianthe. Harrowhark. Silas.
What a long night this was going to be.