Blood Ex Libris Read online

  A nondescript black car pulled up and popped the trunk for us. Sandu tossed in the luggage, and opened the back door for me. I crawled in across the back seat, and he slid in more gracefully behind me. The driver wore black leather and sunglasses. And he had a pair ready for Sandu, he handed them back—and then frankly stared at me. As he gaped, his nose twitched and twitched some more, making me wonder in embarrassment if I smelled terrible from all the traveling.

  “Noosh, this is Haralamb. Haralamb, aceasta este Noosh.”

  Haralamb turned to look at Sandu, then back at me, and asked, “Noosh?”

  “Poreclă pentru Anushka,” Sandu replied. My stupid nickname was still going to cause a problem with every person we met. I blushed. It seemed am’r-nafsh could still blush, damn it.

  Haralamb moved us out into the start-and-stop traffic. “ A trebuit să soseşti de dimineață, Voivode?”

  “In English, please. Noosh does not yet speak our elegant tongue. You know air travel is a thing of the kee world. Nu, do not again mention a private plane. I have told you before I prefer to travel incognito.”

  “The schedule would be more reasonable, however.”

  “A little sunlight has never killed anyone. Ce nu te omoară, te face mai puternic.” Sandu turned to me. “‘What does not kill you makes you stronger’ is as common a phrase in Romanian as English. While you only feel overwhelmed, Haralamb and I are in some discomfort from the light. Him even more than me, because he is young, a baby am’r, you might say. You will go through this change yourself, in time, but you can learn to deal with sensitivity to light. And indeed, it makes you stronger to undergo such learning.”

  Haralamb asked quite urgently, “De ce ai adus un am’r-nafsh aici?”

  Sandu looked pissed off. It was a scary-blank expression on his face, and his color became an unattractive blanched olive-gray. “It is not your business. Your business is to drive. Do so.” We sat in profoundly uncomfortable silence from Otopeni to București.

  We moved off of the highway to city streets, which soon became twisty, narrow side roads, more like ever-contracting channels between buildings. Haralamb silently pulled the car to a stop in front of one building and popped the trunk. We got out without saying any sort of goodbye. Sandu grabbed the bags and led me to a most unprepossessing door. If this was Vampire Central, many of my favorite vampire fantasies, which had mostly been coming true up to this point, were in for a serious bubble-busting. As we waited for Sandu’s knock to be answered, I tried to squash unpleasant visions of a gaggle of greasy, unkempt vampires hanging out in a dirty basement, plotting improbable world domination. Would it all come down to that, after all?

  The door was answered by another guy in all black, which I was starting to guess was the am’r dress code. Who knew; the goth kids were right all along. He had a broad forehead and wide-set green eyes. Not green like Sandu’s, a pale gray-green that stood out from his much darker olive skin. He had tousled walnut-brown hair. He had very full, beautifully shaped lips, and cheekbones to die for. He looked like he’d just wandered off a runway or out of a fashion shoot, and that did wonders for my fears of finding a basement full of socially ill-adjusted freaks. No matter what Sandu had told me, it would not have surprised me too much to discover that this was just a group of kinky maniacs who all shared the same blood disorder. That was far more likely an explanation if I was honest with myself.

  The male model smiled broadly and welcomed us in expansively. “Intră! Fii binevent! Bine ai venit! Intră, tatăl meu, și tu, și tu, noua mea prietenă!”

  Sandu, laughing, leaned in and kissed him warmly on either side of the face, and stepping back, put his arm around me to herd me forward. “Dragă Noosh, meet Dragomir Pricolici. Dragoș, meet Anushka. ‘Noosh’ to her friends.”

  “And we shall indeed be the greatest of friends, Noosh,” Dragomir said, “for I have long waited for old Țepeș here to fall in love again. It is clear that he has—and seeing you, the reasons are obvious!” He leaned forward with the obvious intent of giving me a Euro-kiss such as he’d exchanged with Sandu but abruptly froze, his nostrils flaring. He turned to Sandu, “But she is am’r-nafsh! And you brought her here? How fascinating!”

  “Yes, as you see, I have, and I need your help in taking care of her in the time to come, da, fiul meu?”

  Dragomir smiled down at me. “I will guard her with my body and soul, of course. You did not have to ask me. Voivode, domnul meu Drăculea, tatăl meu iubit.”

  Sandu snorted. “None of that now, domnule Pricolici—prostuţule! Shall we move on, and I will tell you more as we go?”

  We went from the front hall through an obviously abandoned house: torn wallpaper, the walls had gaping holes, and dangerous floorboards which the men courteously warned me about as we went, wrecked furniture, and broken bottles and other rubbish strewn about the place. To get down one hallway, they had to move some broken furniture out of our way. After that, we went down a set of stairs I was extremely dubious about and into the basement, which managed to be even more disgusting than the main house had been. More piled, smashed furniture was tugged aside: revealing a hidden trapdoor. I would have been even more dubious about going down it, except for the part of me—either a painful romantic or a thirteen-year-old boy—that was cheering. Hidden trapdoors. This was getting good.

  We came out in a long, dark, hot corridor that smelled dank and vile, yet somehow not as overwhelming as an airport full of people. The smells were interesting to me, and I tried to tease them apart: dusty stone, wet stone, dirt, mold, stagnant water, decaying animals, maybe rats, and a soupçon of sewage. I blinked, realizing it was pitch-dark down here, yet I could see. Well, kinda a little. Not as well as the full am’r, of course. Dragomir courteously guided me. “At the fifth step, reach to the right. You will find a handhold. Step far to the right, and walk holding on until it ends.” He went first, I went second, and Sandu brought up the rear.

  My heart pounded probably audibly as I took the five steps. Should I take big steps or small ones? Are there booby-traps involved? At the fifth step, I reached out to the right, and a sort of banister I’d never have noticed if I was not looking for it was carved into the stone of the wall. I clung to it and desperately stepped as far as I could to the right. I did not explode, nor get shot with daggers or poison darts. Or lasers. It seemed watching Indiana Jones had not prepared me for am’r adventures. I would have to ask Sandu later what would have happened to me if I had stepped wrong, but in the meantime, I was exceptionally focused on following the banister precisely forward.

  It was hot in the corridor, and we went along it long enough for it to start to get boring, or at least for my heart to stop pounding. Dragomir stopped and said, “Now we go down again, domnișoara. Just sit down and edge forward, like so....”

  We climbed down metal rungs driven into the living rock. The air that came up to meet us was cooler and cleaner. When we got down, I looked around a world in shades of gray and saw we were in a much larger tunnel. It felt, not decrepit, as the house above had been, but impressively ancient. When I looked behind me, however, I saw something that clashed with that perception: an ugly mini car, squarish and battered and scraped to hell. Sandu laughed when he saw it. “Inimioară still runs? She looks as lovely as ever.”

  Dragomir laughed as well. “You be kind to her, Țepeș! She has a far more beautiful soul than you!” He turned to me. “Her name is ‘Sweetheart.’ She is a 1985 Oltcit Special. She may not be much to look at, but she is my sweet little ride. Will you get in, domnișoara?”

  I didn’t know what “domnișoara” meant, but it felt formal. “She is charming. And please, call me Noosh.” I climbed into the back seat while he courteously held the front seat down for me. Sandu got in the front with Dragomir, but I did not feel unhappy about it. They were clearly old friends who had not seen each other in some time. With am’r life expectancies being what they were, who knew what “some time” meant?

  Meanwhile, the car nam
ed Inimioară had started right up, with a healthy engine sound despite her appearance, and we took off rather too recklessly down the passageway. It was a surreal journey, careening down an ancient tunnel deep under Bucharest in a beat-up micro-car, listening to two vampires chatting about old battles they’d fought together the same way one would chat with an old school friend. Fellini could not have directed anything more bizarre.

  In the front seat, Dragomir turned to Sandu. “I am glad you are back home. There are rumors, and I have a bad feeling in my blood. Can you tell me what has been going on? What do you know about the incidents which have occurred?”

  “I have much to tell you, Dragoș, but it should wait until we meet with Bagamil. It will save time if I only tell my part of the story once. I know of some incidents, although perhaps not all of them, and I have my own tale to tell you. I think we might again be cursed to be living in interesting times.”

  “Da, I think you are right. It will be a pleasure to fight alongside you once more. It has been too long.”

  I might have drifted to sleep after a while since the view was just a monotonous rush of bare stone tunnel. It turned out old war stories were equally monotonous, but I jolted awake when Sweetheart was brought to a lurching stop. Sandu and I exited with some difficulty—the tunnel here was a good deal narrower, and there was just clearance—and Dragomir waved us on. “Go on without me. I must turn Inimioară around.” He took off at the same careless speed and shot around a corner in the passage ahead. Sandu and I were at the bottom of a flight of stairs, going up to a round entrance. No light came down the steps. I wondered if everything in the am’r world was in the dark, which basically meant I’d be seeing only in murky shades of gray the whole time.

  We went up the stairs, turned left, up more stairs, and came up out into a hallway with a simple but pleasing geometric pattern carved along the walls. It was a pretty long corridor and the carving ran all the way down it, with doors opening at intervals on both sides along it. The doorways all looked the same.

  How did anyone find anything around here? Sniff it out like a bloodhound? Bloodhound, hmmm. Or just centuries of memorizing, “the sixth door on the right when you’re coming from X direction leads to Y room.”

  Everything smelled of stone, old stale air, and the faint powderiness of dust, although, of course, I was just a newbie. Perhaps after a few centuries, one could follow scent-trails of people who’d passed along a hallway a decade ago?

  The corridor ended at a pair of large double doors, quite medieval-looking. We stood before them for a moment, not saying anything. I found myself deeply unwilling to go through the doors because I had a feeling there were a lot of vampires on the other side of them. I was just not ready. I was not sure what Sandu was thinking, yet also not sure I wanted to ask.

  He looked at me and smiled wanly. “Draga mea, shall we get up our courage and go in?” I smiled back at him and wondered what could make a five-hundred-plus-year-old nervous. Was bringing a new “girlfriend” home to meet the family always uncomfortable? “There is a side door, there.” Sandu pointed, and I saw a smaller door to the left of the imposing double doors. “We shall usually go through there. But I think now we make an entrance. Stay right where you are.” He walked over to the wall and pressed an area of the carving that looked no different to me than the stone around it and was back at my side before I could blink.

  The double doors groaned as if they were being tortured and swung ponderously forward. “This is why we do not often use them,” Sandu whispered to me, and he straightened up as if by instinct. I imitated him, but he abruptly and deliberately slouched into an “I don’t care what anyone thinks” posture of the sort fifteen-year-olds adopt instinctively.

  The doors finally stopped groaning in torment. I realized I was standing there looking ridiculously nervous and belatedly tried to imitate Sandu’s posture. That probably left me looking like I was having some sort of seizure—and you never get a second chance to make a first impression! Sandu glided unhurriedly forward, and I tried to swagger like I wasn’t about to find out if am’r-nafsh could throw up.

  We walked into perfect silence. Kee can’t be truly quiet. Someone is always whispering, chewing, sneezing at the wrong moment, mouth-breathing, shifting in a noisy sort of fabric, et cetera. But am’r are, well, deathly quiet. It could have been a room full of corpses, except that they were standing up. And all watching us.

  I could smell them. The am’r blood-scent washed over me: a combination of many individual scents, each a unique note. And “note” was right—it was like an orchestra of fragrance. A blood orchestra. I had not yet learned how to separate out the flute and clarinet and different violins, but the differences tantalized me, playing over the underlying scents of age and stone and ancient wood and other things to which I couldn’t put a name.

  They were all wearing black, from leather to suits. Or jeans and slouchy shirts. A few traditional outfits, various types of robes and other garb for which I did not know the correct names. But still, all black. Except for one of them. He was in the center of it all, standing in front of a long table, wearing a cheery golden-yellow caftan-robe-thingie with lots of colorful embroidery on it. He looked as cheery as his clothing, with a warm golden complexion and a mustache just like Freddie Mercury’s. He had long hair, much longer than Freddie had ever worn it, pulled back tightly in a thick ponytail. He was smiling at us warmly enough to make all my nerves fall away. His dark eyes twinkled like he was always laughing.

  With this glowing presence guiding us to the center of the room, the rest of the am’r seemed like ignorable shadows. Maybe it was foolishness on my part, but I felt utterly safe once I had seen the smile sparkling at us from Mister Sunshine.

  It was still completely silent, however. The tone of our footsteps had changed, and I realized we were now walking on marble. Also, I finally paid attention to a rather vital detail: I could see in full color again. Around the walls of the room were great globes gleaming with an even, somewhat greenish light, which provided enough illumination for me to see as well as I could in daylight. I spared a moment to wonder about what was creating that unnatural light. The scale of the globes was on par with the height of the walls. I hoped it had started as a natural cavern, or else it would have taken a colony of Tolkienish dwarves a long, long time to carve it all out. My ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast—or whatever mealtime it was—I had no idea—was getting a bit stretched, and I felt a strong desire to giggle, which I quashed desperately.

  I heard Sandu greeting each am’r in a low but friendly voice and decided to pay attention, but the names rushed past me faster than I could take them in: Neplach, Vulferam, Dubhghall, Atanase, Cătălin, Daciana, Gilles, Astryiah, Eben, Cyrus, Hisao, Răzvan, Maxym, Melesse, Chausiku, Nthanda, Mahtab, Azar, Monserate, Tecla, Serapio, Anoub.

  I tried to note who Sandu nodded at, but it was all too fast and the names too strange. I was happy to finally see women in the all-black uniforms, but I wasn’t sure am’r women were more or less terrifying than am’r men? Men might be kind out of a comfortable chauvinistic assumption of superiority, but women could be cruel to a new female in their midst. Don’t think about that. Focus on Mister Sunshine.

  We finally reached Mister Sunshine, and his smile somehow grew even more welcoming. Sandu dropped to one knee, head bowed. I looked down at him in dismay since he hadn’t cued me what to do. I belatedly dropped down likewise and looked at Mister Sunshine’s feet, which were bare and a bit dirty.

  “Domnul şi Stăpinul meu,” said Sandu, and added, “My patar, here I am.” Shocked, I whipped my head around to look at Sandu’s face, but he was peering at the grubby toes as I had done. “Aojysht, meet Anushka Rossetti, my frithaputhra. I bring her here to be our archivist and information scientist, the keeper of our knowledge. The one who will help us consolidate our history and our potential and move forward as a united culture. Noosh, meet Bagamil. You could call him your ‘grandfather.’”


  My head swam. I wondered if I could still pass out because the black curtain was definitely coming down behind my eyes. I felt far away from everything, sort of swimming in space, weightless.

  I next found myself sitting down with Mister Sunshine—Bagamil—chafing my hands. “Really, Sandu, dragul meu, that was most unfair to Miss Anushka.” He looked kindly into my eyes. “Let me guess, that came as a complete surprise to you, little one?”

  “Um, m-my lord,” I stammered, and remembered a few comments Sandu had previously made. “Um, not a complete surprise, but a pretty thorough one, yes. But please, call me Noosh.”

  “And you call me Bagamil.” He paused, the way everyone did right before saying my nickname for the first time, “Noosh. Despite my frithaputhra’s somewhat dramatic display, I do not stand upon formality.” Bagamil put word into action by pulling up a chair—an awesome high-backed medieval number, not particularly comfortable, per se, but just what you’d hope to find in a vampire lair—and plunking himself down into it. “Our Sandu is very enthusiastic, and he sometimes forgets to tell other people the details he has worked out in his busy and labyrinthine mind. Let me endeavor to bring you up to speed. But first…” He raised his voice and addressed the room. “This is not a formal meeting, not today. Greet each other and reunite. For many of you, it has been a while, no? There are still more of us expected, so the formal assembly will be tomorrow. Aojasc’ am’ratv!”

  The roomful of vampires echoed, “Aojasc’ am’ratv!”

  That seemed to be the end of his announcement, for Bagamil turned back to me. “I look forward to speaking with you more privately in the future, Noosh, but let me respond to some pressing issues now. Sandu might not have asked you if you wish to be our, how did he put it, ‘archivist and information scientist,’ so let me inquire now if you might like the job? We need you most urgently. Our kind tend to be solitary, individual types who don’t often want to work—or even play—together, nor has there been much tendency to work collectively for the benefit of our race.