Page 119 of Hoofin’ It

Wobbly was an understatement. I needed to lean on the vampire to walk in a straight line. “I walk better than this when drunk,” I complained.

He laughed and patted my back. “You’ll be all right. We’ll wait for her in the sun room; she’ll be blind until she gets there, anyway. They’ll be careful with her, but I’m worried about how she’ll react. She seems quite feisty. You need to keep her from trying to take them on barehanded.”

“I think they’d win.”

“They would. Now, the Tower of Babel. What do you know of it?”

“I’m not exactly religious,” I warned, shrugging. “It was in the Bible. It fell—destroyed by God—if I remember correctly.”

“Yes and no. The Bible’s really good at taking bits of history and twisting them. The tower existed, it did fall, but God didn’t destroy it. The Babylonians got bored, so they abandoned it, leaving their wealth of knowledge for humanity to find. As do all good intentions, it backfired. They’d been distant from humans to begin with; the humans had enough trouble with infighting. The Babylonians are not human, nor do they understand what it means to be human.”

“I noticed. I also noticed the different representations of the Bible’s history in the restaurant.”

Quinton smiled. “We noticed you noticing. We could lose you for hours if we put you in Noah’s room with a good view of the ceiling. It wasn’t damaged, in case you were worried—none of the frescos were.”

“Good. You were alive before the Tower of Babel fell, weren’t you?”

The vampire sighed, dodged around a sapphire protruding from the floor, and guided me to the gap in the cavern wall. “We’re old, our family.”

“Are you going to bite me if I ask a question?”

“No, but I may choose not to answer.”

“Fair. Were you already a vampire during the flood?”

Quinton glanced at me, looked away the instant he realized how closely I was watching him, and guided me to the next room, one made of emerald green, cubic crystals. He pointed at one nearby, large enough to serve as a seat for both of us. “Catch your breath. You really have studied that fresco, haven’t you?”

“Or I know you and your family well.”

“When people tell me that, I laugh at their arrogance. In your case, the sentiment may be correct. No, we were still alive then but not for much longer.”

Vampires couldn’t remember their old lives; when their souls died, the memories of who they’d once been died with them. I sucked in a breath. Someone had made that fresco for them—someone who remembered, someone older. “Were you still alive when you first met Abil Ili?”

Quinton’s smile carried a sharp, predatory edge and showed me his teeth. “You ask hard but good questions. My father still lived. I did not.”

Sinking onto the stone, I stared at him, a chill running through me. “But your father sired you, didn’t he?”

“I was the reason for Papa’s fall. Papa was, in life, a wiseman—an elder of a tribe. We don’t remember which one. That’s something Abil Ili refuses to tell us. Some secrets are best left in the grave, he says. He’s probably right. The Babylonians can do many things, but they can’t bring back the dead. Knowledge is power, Gibby. Magic is power. Together, they’re a dangerous, terrible, wonderful thing. Abil Ili’s love for Papa is the love he shares with his hive. They shared their grief. No one says so, but we were a mistake—a beloved mistake, a cherished mistake, but a mistake all the same. It was not God who destroyed the Tower of Babel, but the Babylonians themselves. From their libraries, they stole the secrets of magic and left the mundane teachings for humans. Then, it was a concept. Theory. They’d never risen someone from the dead before, but they knew the law; one life for another. Papa laid down his for mine, but instead of my resurrection, it became his, and the man Papa had once been died, gone during the turning, his soul forever lost. But Abil Ili remembered, and he refused to let Papa’s sacrifice be in vain. Thus, we all died, but we rose with the dying sun, made new by Papa’s fangs.” The vampire paused. “I’d been dead for several days by then.”

I thought about the Saven brood’s odd respect for the Bible and the stories it told. “Three days?”

“Three is a funny number. It’s the proclaimed sacred number, the time the Christ spent dead before he rose. Before the Babylonians, magic had been a more common, accepted thing. Then it disappeared with them—and a good thing that was, too. Their time became a time of myth and legend. But three days is the limit for a lot of things, including the rise of a vampire. Had Papa not risen me from my grave before the rising of the sun on the fourth day, I wouldn’t have risen at all.”

“Abil Ili recreated your family after your deaths.”

“We owe him much for that. It’s why we are like we are. Newly risen vampires are driven by instinct and the need to hunt. We must be taught. We were born anew.” Quinton touched his chest. “This soul is not the soul of my birth.”

I wasn’t brave enough to ask whose soul gave the vampire his unlife.

A newborn kitten could’ve outpaced me, but I didn’t whine about my exhaustion or trembling. Quinton knew; he kept licking his fangs, displaying a hint of his hunger in the presence of weakened prey.

“If you bite me again, I’m shoving my Rugers up your ass and firing,” I informed him in my most cheerful voice, picking a slanted yellow crystal to lounge on until Marian arrived. If someone wanted me to move, they’d have to move me. “I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

“You’ll feel better after you have something to eat. It’s been a long time since they’ve made something palatable for humans, so I expect they’re challenged finding you’ll enjoy—and being careful about what they bring up from the gardens. I’ll get them to give you a tour before we leave. I think Abil Ili underestimated how badly you were injured at the restaurant.”

“I think I underestimated how badly I was injured,” I confessed.

Quinton straightened, tilting his head to the side to listen. “Ah, she’s here.”