Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony (The Order Saga Book 1) by Brian McKinley Read Free Book Online Page A

never touched the girl.
    But I would have, except for Caroline. I know in my heart and in my soul that I would have broken sometime during those hours and torn into the flesh of that beautiful, innocent child to get at the blood I wanted. I’ve lived with that every night since.
    I suppose that was Sebastian’s first lesson.
    His second, I’m sorry to say, came the next night when we woke. The girl lay on the floor just as we’d left her but the blood from her slit throat had soaked into the fabric of my jacket and pooled on the stones around her. Caroline wept with a visible fury. I was pissed off and sickened of course but I was also still hungry and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a secret, cowardly part of me was relieved to have the option taken from me.
    I try to live with that too.
     
    * * * * *
     
    After Sebastian let us up from the “wine cellar,” we learned how to be good little house servants. For Caroline, it was more of a refresher course but I felt like I’d been enrolled in Butler School. Ash instructed us because of some protocol thing about only the Creator or his personal Dhampir being of high enough “standing” to give orders to Vampyrs, though sometimes the housekeeper, Mrs. Kai, helped him. Sebastian also poked his nose in to “check on our progress” and add little demeaning chores to my list of duties. I began to think I was back home with my stepfather.
    I half expected to have to mow the lawn and scoop up the shit from the guard dogs.
    After I’d demonstrated acceptable skill in bowing, groveling and waiting tables, Ash took me out to the maze.
    It was as ugly as advertised. Located behind the house, industrial size concrete blocks formed the walls with barbed wire and large halogen floodlights spaced evenly atop them. At the corner farthest from where we stood, I saw the steel gate that served as the above-ground entrance.
    Ash opened an inset panel of buttons. “Here’s the main controls. This set controls the gate: green for up, red for down.”
    “Would those be the ones marked ‘gate’?”
    “This set’s for the lights,” he continued. “And this last one turns on the electricity for the barbed wire—”
    “Wait, wait, I’m getting confused,” I said. “Which set turns on the lights again?”
    Ash fixed me with those hard storm-blue eyes that always bring Clint Eastwood to mind. His crew cut still has a lot of brown in with the gray and his skin has the rough tautness of a man who’s fought his body’s every attempt to sag in middle age. “Lose the attitude, son.”
    According to Caroline, Colonel Ashford D. Erikson refused to be elevated above the rank he’d earned in the Marines, unlike a certain “Major” Wilkes who’d served time in an Army prison for manslaughter and been dishonorably discharged at the rank of private.
    I’d been trying to get a rise out of Ash for the past few nights and so far, this was as close as I’d come. In a way, a sick asshole like Wilkes was reassuring because he was what I expected an Evil Vampire’s henchman to be like. Ash, in contrast, reminded me of the captain at my old security job: a decent, fair-minded guy who maybe took the rules a trifle too seriously. As Sebastian’s Bailiff and Dhampir, however, Ash ingested that filthy creature’s blood on a regular basis, ran a facility that kidnapped innocent human beings for the consumption of a tyrannical monster and had been doing so for decades. Was he an amiable sociopath, a fanatic who believed Sebastian to be some kind of god, or did he just drink himself into forgetful oblivion every night? I couldn’t figure him out.
    “Oh, gimme a break,” I told him. “This whole thing’s bullshit and you know it.”
    Ash hooked his fingers into the pants of his brown khaki uniform. “What I know is that Hegemon Blackwood specifically ordered you assigned to this duty.”
    “Yeah and of course, you always do what you’re told like a good little Nazi.”
    Stepping