Crimson Born - Amy Patrick Page 0,27

made me wonder...”

“Yes? Go ahead and ask, child.”

“Are you... you’re not a...”

My voice trailed off as I lost my nerve. When people here at the Bastion spoke of Imogen, it was always in hushed tones tinged with equal parts respect and fear.

She’d treated me well, spoken to me gently, and literally saved my life, but still... I got the sense that offending her would be a mistake. And she might not appreciate being called a word like “common.”

“A common vampire?” She finished the question for me. “No. I am not. I wondered when you’d ask. I’m an Arch Vampire. I’ve got ancestry that would make a historian’s head spin.”

Never mind the historians—my head was spinning. I thought I’d turned Josiah with that single bite in the hospital.

Was it possible he’d been bitten by fourteen other vampires before me? Perhaps I wasn’t as guilty as I felt.

But then Imogen dropped the other shoe. Plucking a rose from its stem, she captured its petals in her hand then opened it, releasing them to the night wind.

“You must be careful, my child, when your training is complete and you do go out into the world... because you are my child.”

“What do you mean?”

“When someone is turned in the usual way, by a swarm, they become members of the hive, but they have no real ‘maker.’ You’re not like the other vampires you’ve met here. I turned you. Which means you must be discriminating with your feeding.”

“Discriminating?”

“Very. You must make wise choices. Either drain the human completely... or be very sure you want them alive. Forever. We won’t know until we’ve tested your abilities, but as my direct descendant, you may very well have the same gift I do. You may be capable of turning someone with a single bite.”

Josiah. I gasped. I was guilty. I swallowed a surge of bile that must have been imaginary since I hadn’t eaten anything in weeks.

“You don’t need to test me. I’ve already done it.”

Imogen held up a finger. “I know about the boy—unfortunate situation. But it’s not a certainty that you turned him. It’s possible he had been bitten before and was either unaware of it or hiding it. Not everyone freely admits what they’ve been doing in their personal time. Not even Amish teenagers,” she added with a twinkle in her eye. “We’ll arrange a test for you soon.”

“A test? You mean... you want me to bite someone and try to turn them?”

“Exactly. We’ll make sure the human is a virgin this time—I’m not talking about sex. I mean the unbitten sort of virgin,” she added.

I shook my head vigorously. “I can’t do that.”

“Actually, it’s very likely you can. As I said, you’re my daughter.”

“No, I mean I don’t want to do that. I’m not sure it’s good for humans to be turned.”

If there was even the slightest possibility of me turning someone, I was never going to bite another human. I’d learned my lesson with Josiah.

Intending to save his life, I’d only succeeded in multiplying one tragedy into three.

Imogen rolled her eyes and snorted. “You sound like my sister.”

Strolling to another rose bush, she leaned down and inhaled the fragrance of a large bloom before looking up and speaking almost casually.

“What do you know about the origins of our species?”

“I haven’t gotten to vampire biology yet. All I know is it has something to do with bees and elephants because they assigned us some books about them to read.”

“The cradle of life was also the cradle of death,” she said. “That’s where it started. Africa.”

Snapping several stems with her fingers, she began gathering a bouquet of long-stemmed roses.

“Our scientists believe the East African lowland honeybee began migrating to Asia in the thirteenth century,” she explained. “There, some of the East African lowland queens mated with local honeybee drones, resulting in what is now called the Africanized honeybee—also known as killer bees.”

She punctuated this last with a sly smile before going on.

“In countries such as Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, and Thailand, Asian elephants are ten times more endangered than their African cousins. Can you guess why?”

I shrugged, unsure of the answer and really confused about where she was going with all this.

“People kill them for their ivory tusks?” I guessed.

“You’re partially correct. Poachers also sell the skin, the trunk, the feet, and other parts on the black market. It’s highly in demand for use in traditional medicine. Many of the practitioners, and their customers, believe that eating an animal gives one some of the properties