Free Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony (The Order Saga Book 1) by Brian McKinley

directions. Before I got to the critical threshold, Caroline inserted another needle and began transfusing me from herself.
    My next memory is waking up to find Caroline cradling me in her arms. She smiled down at me and brushed a bit of sweat-plastered hair off my forehead. I felt wonderful aside from a little fogginess but that wouldn’t last.
    Nothing in Caroline’s clinical descriptions or any of the magical, beautiful scenes of my books and movies had really prepared me for what I was in for. For two days I alternated between hugging the toilet and sitting on it. My body was being emptied.
    I had a fever, chills, muscle spasms and aches in places I hadn’t even known I had. When I slept, I had horrible, vivid nightmares which made me extremely cranky when I was awake. Through it all, Caroline only left my side to get water for me or some blood for herself (and even these she tended to do when I was sleeping). She never lost patience with me, no matter how much I complained or needed.
    As the virus invaded and reprogrammed every cell of my body, burning all my fat for energy, I was glad to be overweight for once. Caroline explained that Creation is even slower and more painful for people without excess fat to burn. I can’t imagine that, since my pain was enough to reduce me to tears on several occasions and that was with Caroline feeding me from her veins to further ease the process. I even spent a day in a bath of ice-water when my fever threatened to boil my brain.
    It’s literally like being reborn, only this time with an awareness of every forming limb and squeeze down the birth canal. I couldn’t have survived without Caroline: my lover, my mother and my nurse…
    My Creator.
    After the bathtub, the worst was over. There were still many days of aches while my loose flaps of skin tightened up around my new frame and my muscles cramped with the conversion to a higher concentration of fast-twitch fibers but Caroline’s company made it bearable.
    Her blood was the flavor of life to me, her words gospel, her love the very air I breathed. “My baby,” she would say, kissing me and holding me close, “my sweet, beautiful boy.”
    I was a Vampyr.
    I was utterly hers.
    But was she really mine?
     
    * * * * *
     
    The entrance hall is one of the house’s most impressive areas, with its gold-veined marble floors, medieval tapestries and stained glass windows. Caroline and I and the house staff were lined up on one side of the entrance hall’s emerald runner opposite the guards. The maids wore peasant dresses that looked like something you’d see on tavern wenches at a Renaissance Fair: Hunter Green with brown aprons and corsets designed to enhance their cleavage.
    Ash, at least, still got to look like a soldier. He and Wilkes and the other house guards were at attention, outfitted in something that resembled a Marine dress uniform: olive drab jacket with gold buttons and rank insignias, dirt brown trousers with a gold stripe and a Marine dress cap in the same colors.
    Sebastian paced incessantly across the huge area. He’d gone all out for the occasion: his nails were sculpted to fine points and buffed, the hair on his neck had been shaved to make his beard look neater … he’d even had a bath. He wore a belted, knee-length tunic with gold embroidery around the collar and cuffs over loose brown leggings that were also embroidered with gold piping. On his feet were moccasin-like boots, which made sense for someone used to going barefoot. On top of all this was a knee-length wolf’s-fur coat.
    The outfit should have looked ridiculous but it didn’t. Sebastian wore it with such natural confidence that it magnified his already imposing size while granting the bestial quality of his movements a rugged majesty. A normal suit would have made him look sloppy and awkward, while this outfit transformed him into something like a warrior-king.
    Still, as Vampyrs went, Sebastian was something of a disappointment but