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“I expect nothing less,” I say with a laugh, before adding, “And how do you know how I feel about weird things? I have an appreciation for weird.”
Darcy motions toward the portal. “Then, by all means, after you.”
I tip an imaginary hat. “My pleasure.” I reach down, pulling a slim dagger from the sheath hidden beneath my pant leg. Joking aside, as a vampire with not much more than mortal strength, I know better than to enter the secret lair of an enemy to the clan unarmed. “See you on the other side,” I say to Darcy before stepping into the mist.
It’s cool, but not unpleasantly so, and after three steps, it abruptly vanishes, leaving me in a small room with a matching clock on its fireplace mantel, but that’s where the similarities end. Instead of a gaudy sofa, this room has a giant porcelain tub, a shower with four golden nozzles lined up about eighteen inches apart, and the infamous golden toilet.
But it isn’t like any toilet I’ve ever seen before. For one thing, it’s enormous, rising nearly to my chest with a seat big enough for an ogre. And when I cross to peer inside, I find no water in the bowl. There’s not even a bowl, really, just a tunnel that drops straight down into pitch blackness.
Darcy appears a beat later, observing, “Another bathroom. But why?” He takes a tour of the small room, his voice echoing off the tiles. “He has a perfectly serviceable one in his apartment with room to add more showers if group cleansing is his kink.”
“I don’t know,” I say, chilled by the way my voice echoes down the seemingly bottomless hole. “But I don’t think this is a toilet. I think it’s…something else.”
Darcy joins me by the golden loo, gazing down in the dark beside me as he scents the air. “Sulfur.”
I nod. “Yes. Annabelle said something about there being monsters in here. Sometimes she would hear them growling. And as far as I can see—”
“There’s only one place to keep a monster in this room,” Darcy says grimly. “That would have been good intelligence to possess before I entered without a weapon of my own, brother.”
“I knew you could handle yourself,” I say. “And she said she’d only heard them, never seen them. I thought she might have been confused. Maybe it was demons she was hearing? They tend to have low, guttural voices.”
“Perhaps,” Darcy says, leaning back. “But that wouldn’t explain the blood stains.”
I turn. “Blood stains?”
He nods toward the bathtub. “There’s a ring in the tub. And a smell. It was recently filled to the brim with human blood. From the stubbornness of the stain, I doubt it came from a single occurrence.”
I cross, my stomach clenching at the sight of the stained porcelain. “Not even a gluttonous vampire could take down this much at once and demons don’t drink human blood.”
“Maybe it was used to feed the monsters, whatever breed of nightmare they are. Or maybe it wasn’t for drinking, at all. Maybe Sultan was bathing in it,” Darcy says. “I’ll have to speak with Blaire, but I know there are black magic spells that involve soaking in blood. They aren’t spells she would work, of course, but she might know what a Chaotic Witch would do with a bath full of blood.”
“Or a Chaotic Warlock,” I say. “Sultan seems to enjoy both men and women, but Annabelle specified that it was a man with red lips who stole her papa’s attention away from her. Though it doesn’t sound like he was very kind to the creature, even before he was distracted by traitorous intrigue.”
“He’s a piece of absolute garbage,” Darcy says, his lip curling.
I sigh. “Agreed. What was Priscilla thinking when she turned him?”
“She was thinking she likes a big boy now and then and might want to fuck him later.” Darcy steps away from the tub, scanning the space again. “That’s about as far as she thought with any of us, I’m afraid. There’s a reason most of the women in our clan were turned by Paul before he walked into the light.”
I lift my hand to my forehead then touch it to my heart, reflexively making the sign of honor for an elder vampire’s passing, though Paul wasn’t a favorite of mine. He was violently, dangerously mentally ill for centuries before he finally woke up from a dream believing he’d been transformed into an avenging angel and ran out into a sun-drenched spring afternoon.
We found him in the rose garden, his mostly disintegrated jaw locked around a white rose he’d been trying to eat before he was fully incinerated.
“Do you think you’ll ever be an elder yourself?” I ask as Darcy glances into the toilet again. “Perhaps a less power and sex mad one who chooses his children more carefully?”
“No,” Darcy says, his deep voice echoing down into the darkness. “I told you, I have no desire to be a parent. Not of a human child and not of an adult struggling to survive the transition into our way of life. It would be too heartbreaking.”
I know he’s referring to the high mortality rate among vampires in our first hundred or so years of undeath. Our bodies change, but our minds remain the same. In that way, we’re still very human, and a human brain isn’t built for eternity. Eventually, most of us struggle with the weight of forever. Only the strongest survive, and even they tend to get a bit eccentric as the centuries pass.
“But perhaps new vampires would fare better if they received more support from their makers and communities from the beginning,” I suggest, unwilling to let it go for some reason. “You could do things differently. Give them the tools they need to head trouble off at the pass. Things like mental health care, support groups, and employment that proves how useful they can still be to the world.”
Darcy turns my way. “Whatever was down there, I’m fairly sure it’s empty now, but we should get some shifters here to sniff around. Their sensitive noses might be able to parse out what species of beast was in residence. As for the other, it sounds like a job for you, brother. You’re the one who’s good with people and politics and dragging the powers that be into the nineteenth century.”
I smile. “I’ll have them in the twentieth century soon. A few of the European council members have agreed to fly to Japan for the world summit next year. Once they realize how much easier it is to get where they need to go by air, I’ll have them embracing digital bookkeeping and preventative mental health care in no time.”
Darcy snorts. “Not even the humans are evolving that quickly, and they have motivation to make change during their relatively short lifetimes. But if anyone can do it…”
He lets the subject drop, and I’m grateful. For a moment there, I was tempted to tell him the truth—that I won’t live long enough to become an elder—but that’s no longer a possibility, not with Priscilla due to arrive at any moment. He’d confront her on my behalf, I know he would, but all it would accomplish is putting a target on his back, and maybe Blaire’s as well.
