Blood Ex Libris Read online

  “The amenities you need are in the cabana. Again, my sincerest apologies for disregarding your comforts and necessities as I did.” Sandu was radiating sincerity and humbleness at me, which was quite nice. I could get used to it.

  “Well, I think I can forgive you this one time,” I joked, “but don’t make a habit of it!”

  “I assure you, dragă Noosh, I will endeavor to care for you with perfect scrupulousness from this moment forward. Any failure will devastate my heart.” Sandu vampired himself away, having gotten in a perfect exit line that left me gaping. Even if he hadn’t smoothly removed himself, I couldn’t have come up with a timely and witty response. No, it was better for my dignity that he’d exited stage left.

  Chapter Eight

  The cabana, which was constructed of fragrant cedar wood like the hot tub and deck, was a perfect guest facility: sink, mirror—cancel that myth about vampires, apparently—and piles of fluffy black towels. I found a toothbrush, a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, a tiny bottle of mouthwash, little soaps for face and body, and mini bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body lotion like you’d find in a hotel. There was a fluffy black robe, and the back of the room had a door to a toilet as modern as the one in the house was antiquated.

  I made use of the mirror to check on two things: First, bite marks, and second, did I look as good as I felt?

  Answers?

  Nope, no bite marks. I was a little disappointed. All those love-bites should have left the classic two-holed vampire mark, at least for the sake of appearances. I’d been longing to sport such a mark since my pre-teens.

  Yep. My skin glowed healthily, even unwashed as I was, and the dark under-eye circles that usually plagued me were gone.

  Oh, the money I’ve wasted on creams when the cure is free!

  Despite the chilly air, I took my time with a hot shower and other ablutions. Once I was satisfied, I discovered that a pair of men’s black silk pajama bottoms and a plain black t-shirt had been left for me. It was comforting Sandu didn’t have clothing stored for his female guests since that would have implied there were a lot of them, or at least enough to warrant laying in supplies. Instead, everything seemed strangely half-planned, as if Sandu had thought out some aspects of hosting visitors but had been too lazy to follow them all the way through. For example, didn’t he guess a guest might want to take a bath in the house? His was a bachelor's existence, what with him living in exactly two rooms of the house, but both those rooms were opulent and full of comforts and niceties.

  I wandered back barefoot, the slightly-too-large menswear making me feel naked-er underneath. There’s something wonderful about wearing a lover’s clothing. I’d never dated anyone long enough to get to the clothes-stealing stage, but I’d a feeling it was one of the perks of a relationship. I found Sandu building up the fire in the den, which was lovely until the sight of the sofa hit me with the recollection of the upsetting bloodstain. Shit! I forgot about it entirely. A sideways glace revealed the absence of blood on the sofa. Oh, gods, he had to clean it up himself! I guess the shock of it had made me too stupid to think of useful ways of dealing with it. Now I felt sick with thoughtlessness and humiliation.

  “Sandu, I’m so sorry! I forgot to tell you… I wanted to ask you… When I woke up, there was all that blood, and I didn’t know what was going on, and then I got distracted. I am so sorry!” And not out-loud: Could I just sink down into the floor now, please?

  He was at my side in an instant. “Taci, micuţo, taci. There is no problem. This is not unusual, and it was yet again my fault for failing to give you information. It is I who should be sorry.”

  “But, Sandu, if this isn’t unusual, what is it?”

  “Noosh. Anushka. It is… It was, ei bine…” He paused here, searching for the words. “Vampires, they, they ejaculate...blood. I do not produce semen. I have died. I cannot produce life. Blood is the fluid, the only fluid in my body. It is what my body runs upon. It is what my body produces. It was not you, not a problem from you. You woke up in—if you will permit me a little joke—in the wet spot.”

  “Ahhhhhh. Hmmm. Well, that makes sense. Sort of. But I have so many other questions! Do you sweat blood? Do you cry bloody tears? Do you, erm, pee?”

  Sandu started laughing hard enough that he had to sit down. I was inclined to sulk about being laughed at, but I realized how ridiculous this whole situation was and joined in the laughter. Sandu pulled me down onto his lap, and we finished with a few of those moments where you catch the other person’s eye and spasm back into laughter again. Then it falls off, you catch the other person’s eye again, and...

  Once we’d managed to get a grip on ourselves, he leaned forward, those glorious green-gold eyes still happily crinkled at the corners, and kissed me. I responded with enthusiasm, but as the kiss started deepening with intent to lead to further actions, I pulled back. “Sandu. Um. I do have some questions. Vampire stuff, and just stuff-stuff. Last night I had, um, unprotected sex with you without a second thought. I’ve never done that before. It’s a bit late now, I know, but well, I should ask anyway if vampires can have STDs or anything? Can vampires get herpes? HIV? Something even more deadly? I’m using, um, birth control, so pregnancy wouldn’t be an issue, even if you didn’t, erm, come blood. That leads to even more questions, which you haven’t answered yet, and…and… Oh, I don’t know where to start!”

  Definitely not at, “Is safer sex even possible when you are drinking each other’s blood?”

  “There is no problem. We have plenty of time for me to answer all your questions, although I wouldn’t mind some breaks to do other things this evening. If you will not mind?”

  “Oh? Oh! Yes! I mean, no, of course not, Sandu. I look forward to some breaks. After some answers.”

  “Yes, yes, my resolute lover. Answers you shall have. What would you like to ask first?”

  Oh. Uh. Now that I had free reign to ask my myriad questions, my mind did this messed-up combination of tripping over itself with suggestions and at the same time, going completely blank. The afternoon’s internet browsing came flooding back to me. “Ummm, Sandu. I have to ask about, you know, your history. All the people you supposedly, um, killed. In horrible ways.”

  He exhaled thoughtfully. “I understand what you are asking. You want to know if you are sitting upon the lap of a serial killer?”

  Gulp. “Well, um, yes, actually. What is the difference between the historical Vlad Ţepeş and the Sandu I’m with right now?”

  Is there a difference? I won’t ask that aloud. Better to just assume there is!

  “There are many differences. Linişteşte-te, te rog. You sit so stiffly. You right now feel so far away from me.

  “Listen to me, please. There is the factor of time. In more than one way, it is not only I who have changed but also the world. This world we live in right here and now is not like the one in which I was a prince and defender of Wallachia. That time, that world—as a modern person, you cannot understand it. The world was an ugly, fearful place. I am sure you know Breughel’s The Triumph of Death?”

  “Yes, Sandu. I discovered Breughel and Bosch back in high school.”

  “It is the best way to describe it to someone who lives now. Not that living skeletons were carrying people off, obviously, but yet it symbolizes with exceeding accuracy how much death was around us and with us. Look around the world at that time. Louis XI, l’universelle araignée, was hanging boys from trees for his amusement. The Malleus Maleficarum, as you undoubtedly know, was written then, and led to centuries of ‘witches’ being tortured and killed in uniquely cruel ways. In the New World, the Incas fattened up child sacrifices for months before drugging them and leaving them to die of exposure to the elements. In England, two young princes were walled up in the Tower of London for political reasons. In Italy, the House of Borgia had not yet begun its reign of poison and violence. The Renaissance might have started, but the age was still dark and cruel.

  “I cannot say I look back o
n my life then without the pain of the clarity that comes with hindsight. You must understand, in my time, most of the violence I did was lauded by the people I protected, by the Church in which I strongly held my faith, and by both my allied peers and ruling superiors. You know I was held hostage by the Turks. They raised me from a tender age, and they taught me many things: to speak the Turkish language, mathematics and logic, court manners, and military history and skills. They taught me those for their elite Janissary corps. The Turks took the male children of their enemies and indoctrinated and trained them to be brilliant soldiers for Islam and the sultan. It was a most ingenious way of using their enemies’ best resources against them.

  “Radu, that handsome brother of mine, led the Janissaries against me, fighting against and killing his own people to serve our enemies. Is that not more evil than my deeds? You see our names through Western eyes; ‘the Impaler’ must be the bad guy and ‘the Handsome’ must be the good guy. But for Romanians, Ţepeş was and is the good, strong hero, and cel Frumos the weak betrayer.

  “It was in the hands of the Turks, or rather in the prison of the Turks, where I first saw impalement. I was to become all too accustomed to it in my time in the prisons of Egrigöz, Tokat, Edirne. Every day, right outside my window, I saw people tortured and killed in a variety of creative ways. I was whipped more than once in the same courtyards where I saw so many suffer, bleed, and die. Yes, the Turks taught me many things.

  “After I died, the printing press invented by Gutenberg—the one that excites you so—was responsible for mass-producing the German anti-Drăculea pamphlets and vilifying my name. They relished and embellished the most horrific details, inflating numbers and inventing many stories toată—you would say ‘out of whole cloth.’ I became ştii, the bogeyman. Dracul came to mean devil, not dragon.”

  Sandu spoke with building urgency, his eyes glowing with a mix of passion, sadness, and anger. Even if I could have thought of something useful to say, I would not have interrupted this torrent of words and emotions.

  “When I tell you it is the factor of time, I mean more than just a passing of the ages and more than putting some kind of applicable context on my actions. I mean that as the world has changed, so have I changed, sometimes ahead of it, and sometimes I have lagged behind. I have been alive for over five centuries. This keeps coming up for you, and I admit it is with good reason. I am not the man I was all those long years ago. I have grown. I have learned from my actions, learned from observing the lives of men as they flashed past me. They take a little longer now since life expectancy has gotten longer.

  “I hope I have evolved in the last five hundred years. Even if I have not moved forward, I have certainly not stayed the same. I died, after all. I am a changed being.”

  I couldn’t help but interrupt. “Sandu, tell me about that. Tell me about being a vampire. All I know is conjecture and myth. Tell me the truth.”

  “The truth! Draga mea, there is a great deal to say, and I hope you allow us a ‘break’ sometime in the not-too-distant future! What do you wish to know?”

  “Well, how can you have died, and yet here you are holding me in your arms and talking to me? After, well, last night, you were, um, full of life. You are warm—hah, you’re hot—and I would not have guessed you were one of the undead.”

  “Ah, Noosh, thank you for your kind compliments. Any life, any heat I may possess is most certainly increased by your aliveness.” He paused to kiss me, nearly distracting me and starting up our “break,” but I caught it just in time and pulled back, trying to look adamant. He sighed.

  “We do not call ourselves ‘undead.’ That is a cinematic term. It’s so theatrical I must assume Stoker made it up.

  “There is more than one kind of what you call vampire. There are the am’r, which is what I am—what you think of as a vampire, what in Romania we call the ‘strigoi mort.’ Am’r is what we call ourselves. And then there are, what in my homeland are called ‘strigoi viu.’ We of the am’r call them ‘am’r-nafsh,’ and they are born when a vampire mixes their blood, which we call ‘vhoon,’ with a human’s vhoon a certain number of times; they are not created by accident. Am’r-nafsh keep their mortality, but when they die, they rise again as am’r, the last fragment of living human gone. This happened to me: I died, killed by a rival, a Romanian traitor, who hired a Turkish assassin to do the job no man would otherwise dare. I am still angry at myself for being killed from behind like a coward!” He took a few breaths. It might have been centuries ago, but it obviously still held a sting.

  “After a period of rest, I rose as am’r. You ask about our temperature. We are almost as warm as living humans, whom we call ‘kee,’ because the vhoon still flows in us. As in Merchant of Venice, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ Yes, we do, as you saw last night. We cannot create our own blood, however, without a, ei bine, an infusion.”

  I had to ask. “And the um, come?”

  “Ah, yes, the ejaculate that bothered you so. We still have a circulatory system, and we still have fluids within the body; it is just that the fluids are all blood, so if you cut us, we bleed.

  “We do not, however, sweat or micturate vhoon. The way our bodies convert our food is more efficient than kee. We use everything. We have no waste matter.”

  “That’s extremely convenient,” I muttered. Imagine a life without having to use the toilet. I assume it also means no flatulence or indigestion, although perhaps blood-indigestion is even worse? Do vampires belch delicately after their tipple of blood? I hadn’t noticed Sandu doing that, but, hell, you try not to burp obviously for at least the first few dates, no matter who you are. Look at me, calling them “dates.” If this was my idea of a date, no wonder I’d had trouble with my social life.

  I yanked my attention back as Sandu continued. “I breathe. You will have noticed this.” Actually, I hadn’t. I think I’d have noticed more if he didn’t, but I kept my mouth shut. “We need oxygen still. Not as much as kee, I have noticed, but I do not know why. Some of us have been scientists, although I do not imagine there have been studies done about am’r respiration.”

  Labs full of white-coated vampire scientists. Or do they wear black coats? It wouldn’t show the blood as much! And publications like the Am’r Journal of Medicine, and Popular Immortal Science, and Journal of the Am’r Dental Association—bet all vampires keep up with that one! That gave me the giggles, which I’d had more of in these past days than in the whole of my previous life. Was that a better response than running away screaming? It made Sandu demand an explanation. He took it quite seriously, however.

  “We have had scientists, and there are still a few, but we are not used to, ei bine, working together for a common goal. There are no joint efforts like shared research or journals or conferences. It is something we need desperately if we are to move forward as a species.”

  “A species? You mean, a different species from Homo sapiens?”

  “Draga mea, that is a long discussion which I promise we shall have in the future. For the moment, I want my promised break.”

  “Oh, yes, the break. I suppose it might be time for a break. Has all this talking made you, um, thirsty?”

  “Yes, but not just for your piquant, ever-so-drinkable vhoon.” I didn’t have time to contemplate that or ask further questions because Sandu stood, lifting me, and put me back down on the chair. I was thus at the level to ascertain that his black silk jammie bottoms were tenting flatteringly at the fly.

  Well, nice to see that after yesterday’s explorations, Vlad’s Impaler was ready for more of me. I mentioned that to Sandu.

  “My ‘Impaler?’” He laughed.

  I decided to take matters into my own hands, however. Literally. I reached up and stroked his cock through the silk. Since his cock already felt like silk, it was silk-on-silk, and I couldn’t get enough of it. His response was immediate and gratifying, and it encouraged me to play more. You read about “straining fabric” in romance novels; I had my hands on a piec
e of silk set to split at the seams. I experimented with different ways of stroking it, swirling my fingers around it, tickling it with my fingertips. Basically, I was a girl with an exciting science experiment: “If I do this, what happens next...?”

  He was making small non-verbal sounds, and had reached out to the back of another chair in an attempt to stay upright. I felt totally in charge, and it was giddying. I was at this moment in full control of the most famous vampire in all of fact or fiction. It was delicious.

  Speaking of delicious, I was getting tired of the teasing (although he showed no desire to rush me along) and so I tugged down his jammies, carefully negotiating around Vlad’s Impaler, and enjoyed the sight of him erect and twitching. He made a strangled noise when I slid my mouth onto him. At first I focused on just enjoying the sensations for myself: the feel of the silky firmness of him, the satisfying sensation of fullness in my mouth, the pleasure of feeling him sliding in and out. After a while I thought to actually focus on his pleasure, and started teasing my tongue on the underside of his head. After that got a good response, I worked into a nice regular rhythm, trying to make sure not to scratch him with my teeth.

  Although he is a vampire: must ask if he likes that sort of thing. Later.

  After a while, he gasped, “If you don’t stop…” I understood, but I kept going. I was pleased to bring him to that happy moment, and the sense of control I was enjoying was too good to stop without a proper conclusion. Besides, if last night was anything to go on, there were plenty more erections where that came from.

  With a sound somewhere between a groan and growl, he erupted into my mouth. I had a moment of shock as I tasted blood. I had somehow forgotten I wouldn’t be getting the usual fluid. But after the initial surprise, I swallowed with good grace. His blood tasted like it had last night: viscous, salty, and a bit too metallic for comfort. Yet there was a depth to it I hadn’t noticed last night, it was like a fine wine, with different notes on your palate at start and finish.