Book 4: Chapter 7

Book 4: Chapter 7

“This is your office?” Zeia asked, peering around at the richly furnished room, “It’s a little fancy for an office.” She glanced around at the massive table surrounded by chairs, “Kind of big too.”

Kay smiled a small smile and pointed at one of the doors, “Technically, my public office is through there, and this is the attached meeting room. There’s really only enough space for me in the actual office, so we’ll use this.”

“Your ‘public office’? Do you have a private office too?”

“You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

“She does!” Alice chimed in as she sat down, “She never stops.” She raced herself against the table and leaned in, her eyes narrowing as she stared into Kay’s eyes, the gravitas physically palpable in the air as she raised the tension in the room, “She never stops.”

Zeia reached over and smacked Alice’s shoulder, “Stop being dramatic! But yeah,” She admitted, turning back to look at Kay, “Of course, I ask lots of questions; I want to know things. Most people can’t read minds, so they don’t go around volunteering the information I want. If I don’t ask, no one tells me.”

“What do you do if people refuse to answer your questions?” Lauren asked.

“She bothers them until they answer her, or we have to deal with a murder attempt.”

“That was one time!”

“It was five times. And that’s only since you were assigned to my team. I heard reports of three other incidents before that.”

“Six of those were incidental to my questions!” She protested.

Kay quickly counted, “So you’ve actually had two people get so annoyed at you for asking questions they tried to kill you?”

“One of them was an assassin, and it turned out my questions blew their cover, so they were coming after me to shut me up.” Zeia specified, as if that somehow made it better.

“So you’ve actually annoyed a person into trying to kill you by asking questions?”

She pouted and looked away.

“My lord,” Lauren called to him, pulling him away from his new fascination, “We did come here to discuss a particular topic.”

“Right.” He took another stupefied glance at Zeia and sat down. “To start, I don’t want to assume familiarity, but if it’s alright with you, I think we’ve been through enough together that we can forgo formalities, at least in private. Feel free to call me Kay.”

“You don’t have to call me Hunter Ravenhome all the time,” Alice readily agreed, “And I’ll keep an eye on this one so she doesn’t make any lasting mistakes.”

Zeia shot Alice a glare that promised retribution.

“It’s not an issue. I know that’d I’d be in a state just like yours if I was in your situation. To answer your first question, we tested the secretions from my fangs.” Kay opened his mouth and concentrated, letting his fangs snap into place. With a following thought, he had a few drops of translucent liquid drip from the tips into his palm.

Both of the hunters jumped back in their chairs when his fangs appeared, then, after a moment to relax, they both peered at the droplets.

“There are some similarities to vampyr venom, best we can tell without having any to test ourselves, but it seems to be a different substance in most ways. Also,” He hesitated for a moment, “I don’t know if it’s a natural part of being a vampire, it might make sense for a species that seems to reproduce by transformation, but have you noticed that you have instincts you didn’t before? Like you know how to do things with your new body that you haven’t actually learned?”

Alice paused with her mouth open to answer, “I... Yes, now that you mention it.”

“Try and ask those instincts how to make another vampire.”

Her head tilted back, and her brows came down in confusion, “That’s a weird feeling.” After a moment, her eyes dropped to the liquid that Kay was still holding, “It’s both, isn’t it? Vampyr need just their bite, but vampires need our bite and to... mix our blood?”

“I think it’s a two-part transformation process.” Kay let the drops snake down his hand onto a handkerchief Lauren handed him, “Whatever changed when vampyr were created modified that, but yes, as far as I know, we need to bite someone and inject our own venom into them, then add some of our blood into theirs. Together the two substances start the transformation.”

Both of the women’s gazes snapped from the handkerchief to Kay, and their voices overlapped.

“’ When vampyr were created’?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He held up his hands defensively to hold back their ferocity. “I have a, well, not a speech, but I planned this out. Is it alright if I do that? It should answer most of your questions, and we can come back to any leftovers when I’m done.”

“Fine,” Zeia snapped, almost snarling as she stared at him with laser focus, “Start talking.”

“Okay... Uh, well, the reason I know anything about vampires is that there were stories and legends about them back on my original world.”

“Oh, right.” Alice muttered, “You’re an Outworlder.”

“Right, there are lots of tales about powerful creatures that drink blood back on Earth, with different variations from different areas, but many of the traits match up from place to place or story to story. Some have been refined and become topics of actual deliberate storytelling to entertain, but many remain traditional legends that serve as warnings about monsters in the dark. Actually, back home, a lot of beings that exist here, including elves and half-elves,” He nodded at Zeia, “Only existed in stories. So when I arrived here in Torotia and eventually heard about vampyr, I just thought they must have been this world’s version, just on the worst end of the spectrum of possibilities I knew about.” He held out his hand and let a tendril of blood snake out from under his skin, healing the small cut with a small force of will, pushing mana into his healing Skill, “Then I found a cult worshiping an eldritch being in the tunnels inside this cliff.” The blood floating above his palm swirled into the shape of an arrow pointing downward, then back into a swirling flow. “While I was fighting them, and the thing they halfway managed to summon, I gained an ability to sense eldritch taint, at least inside of blood, plus one of my Skills evolved to purge that taint. Originally it was a Skill to remove contaminants from someone’s bloodstream to help with healing and removing diseases and such, but I guess eldritch nastiness counts enough as that to qualify.”

“What does that have to do with vampyr?” Alice asked quietly.

Kay kept staring at the blood as he answered, “They’re full of shit. Every inch of that vampyr we fought was stuffed full of eldritch corruption, and so was the venom that he injected into us. The only reason I was able to save myself, to save us, was to purge all the eldritch bits inside us with my Skill. All that was left when I burned that away was a normal vampire. All three of us were already part way through the change, and I had no way to turn up back, so I did my best to empower the leftover vampire bits and force us through that transformation so we’d live.” He left out the part where it was mostly, almost entirely, the System that’d done that part. They had a connection with Alice, both with them being part of a brand new species with no other members and through the trauma of the events they’d survived together, but she wasn’t part of his inner circle yet if she ever was going to be. Sharing about the System’s meddling was limited to people Kay trusted above everything else.

“So... what are you saying?” Zeia demanded, her eyes still bright with a severity of emotion that was mildly alarming.

“I don’t have proof, but most of the evidence backs me up. If vampires aren’t native to Torotia, and vampyr are just vampires that have been corrupted by eldritch taint, then I think the answer is easy. An Outworlder vampire ended up on Torotia, and either shortly before or after their arrival, they got corrupted by something eldritch. Whether it was accidental or intentional, they became the starting point of what’s basically an eldritch plague that creates vampyr.” He shrugged, “I think that the entirety of the insanity, cruelty, and sheer evil the vampyr get up to comes from the fact that they’ve become the minions of some greater eldritch power that corrupted that first vampire to arrive on this world.”