had been able to do it before, and his supporters thought that, despite the damage, their god might yet return. But not this time.”
There was a certain vicious satisfaction in the consul’s voice that I didn’t understand, and he didn’t give me a chance to ask.
“The bones put out flesh and skin, more than once,” he continued. “But the final push back to health, to life, eluded him. In the end, even his most fervent supporters had to admit that he was gone.”
“He was a snake?” I croaked, finally managing to get my head around the image of a shed snakeskin at least twenty times bigger than I was.
“It was his master power, the ability to transform,” Hassani said. “Or one of them, I should say, as he had several. As Apollo’s son, he grew more powerful in the sun, for instance, instead of being consumed by it—”
“What? Wait.”
Hassani did smile then. “I know how it sounds. But he was the first of us, the very first vampire ever made, and thus a . . . prototype, if you will. He was enormously strong, able to redirect the sun’s rays to consume his enemies, among other things. It was the reason we entombed him down here. To deny him his greatest weapon, should he ever return.”
I wasn’t listening. I’d made the mistake of looking closer, and—shit. It wasn’t just a snakeskin. Cracks in the shed epidermis showed that there were bones in there, including a spine as long as a train and three-foot fangs. I wondered what the hell they’d buried, and then remembered what Hassani had said: this thing regenerated. I shuddered again, and stepped back, really glad not to have met this bastard in person.
Really, really glad.
“The ancient Greeks named this city Heliopolis, after Helios, their original sun god,” Hassani continued. “But they were wrong to do so. They saw the suns portrayed everywhere, and naturally thought of Helios, who was the personification of the sun disk itself. But Apollo was the god who used the sun’s power, and thus aligned more accurately with Ra, while our friend here—”
“Was the cobra,” I whispered, remembering the tiny snake on the statue outside.
“Exactly so. The statue shows the god, the source of his power, and his defender. The ancients understood, even if modern man has forgotten.”
“What happened to him?” I asked, after a pause, because clearly something had.
Hassani glanced at me. “You father never told you the tale?”
“My father?” I frowned. “What would he know about this? Didn’t that thing die . . . well, a long damned time ago?” This whole place reeked of age and long, dusty centuries forgotten by time. The man—the vampire—must have died thousands of years ago.
But Hassani was shaking his head. “He lived until the year 853 in our calendar, which would be . . . 1449 in yours. And even then, it was not so simple. After his bones were brought back here—”
“Wait. Wait.” Hassani obligingly waited. “You’re telling me that that . . . thing . . . died less than six hundred years ago?”
“Yes.” Hassani regarded me mildly. “In Venice.”
“In Venice. He died in Venice in 1449.” I did some mental math, and didn’t like what it was telling me. I scowled. “What didn’t Mircea tell me?”
“Anything, apparently. My apologies; I assumed you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That it took three of them to take him down. Your consul, the European consul Antony, and your father.”
“My father . . . killed that?”
“Helped to kill that. You see, your consul and Antony were Changed by . . . well, we called him Pa-neck, meaning the serpent, although not to his face.”
“Yeah.” I stared up at the huge, fanged skin above me.
“His parents named him Sokkwi, ‘Little Fool’, but he took the reign title of Setep-en-Ra, ‘Chosen by Ra.’ He was quite capable, by all accounts, when young, and a fierce defender of his adoptive father’s interests. Some have even surmised that the serpent above Ra in the early portraits wasn’t Wadjet at all, but Ra’s chosen defender, emblematic of the army he was building for himself.”
“The army.”
This was starting to sound eerily familiar.
“Yes, the gods were constantly at each other’s throats in those days, some five thousand years ago—”
“This thing is—was—five thousand years old?”
Hassani blinked. “Well, I did say he was the first of us.”
I shut up.
“In any case,” he continued. “The old gods were a quarrelsome lot, and a selfish one, with each wanting to rule over all. But they were too well matched