It was like having the plague.
The teacher cleared his throat. “Pass in your papers, please.”
I leaned forward. The kid who usually sat in front of me—hair the color of butterscotch and a fondness for really expensive silk button-downs in jewel tones—glanced back, took the plastic report binder I held out, and blushed bright crimson.
I tried not to sigh. Slid a yellow legal pad and a couple of pencils out of my bag, settled down, and waited. A sketch filled the edges of the piece of paper on top: blocks of masonry, grass shaded in at the bottom, and a huge empty space in the middle.
I could never seem to draw the middle. So all my notes were decorated with this odd churchlike ruin, hovering like a bad dream.
As usual, once he didn’t have to look directly at me, Beaufort seemed okay. “Very good, very good. Now, we left off with the first real attempt the nosferat made at domination of the civilized world, in 1200 BC. There are garbled legends of this time, mostly concerning the Sea People, though most of the archaeological evidence is spotty at best. So how do we separate fact from fiction?”
“Oral tradition,” a blond djamphir in the front row said. “Then cross-checking against the archaeological record and extrapolation from what we know of nosferat behavior.”
The teacher nodded. “Our oral tradition is very precise, specific, and unapologetic on one point. Once, the wampyr could move by day. Once, the sun was not a bar to them. They were weakened, certainly, by its presence—but it was not the deterrent it is today. So what happened?”
Silence. I glanced back over my notes. Nothing that might answer the question. Of course, I didn’t ever raise my hand—but I liked knowing before he called on someone else. Beaufort liked to give everyone time to digest and come up with something, too. He wasn’t one of those teachers who delights in catching kids out.
That was one thing I was getting used to here at the Schola. The grading was fierce and the teachers were smart, but they weren’t trying to play petty power games. At least not in the classrooms.
The answer surprised all of us. It came from over my right shoulder, and it was a sibilant hiss threading through the quiet of a thinking classroom.
“Scarabus.” Leon shifted his weight slightly; I almost felt the movement through the couch. “He rose from the sands and walked among them, killing where he chose.”
“I see someone here has done his required reading. However, Leontus, you are not a first-year student.”
Silence again. Leon exhaled, a slight but definite snicker.
I liked him more and more.
“I’ve heard of that,” the blond in the front row finally said. “Scarabus. Thought he was a myth.”
The teacher cocked his head. “Oh, he was definitely not a myth. If we Kouroi are said to survive as a species today, it is due to him. His name is lost, but the wampyr called him Scarabus. He was ephialtes .” Beaufort’s face puckered up like he’d gotten a mouthful of sour candy against rotting teeth.
I wrote that down, spelling it as best I could. The teacher paused. “Anyone?”
“Greek name,” a redheaded djamphir off to my left supplied. “Right?”
“It means traitor. The term did not originate until hundreds of years after Scarabus, but it is accepted usage now. He was a djamphir who specialized in one thing: killing his own kind for his wampyr masters. Some few of our kind were allowed to live and hunt their brethren for sport, and also to keep us from banding together and taking on the fiends whose blood we bore.”
He’s getting really into it. Sometimes this guy got a little too into the history, talking about it as if he was there. I guess you never can tell among a bunch of djamphir. And to be honest, this was fascinating.
Beaufort rested a fingertip against his pursed lips. He turned in a complete circle, his blue eyes passing over us all and threads of darkness sliding through his hair. The aspect passed through him, his fangs sliding out and dimpling his lower lip. The fangs retreated, his hair returned to normal, and I let out a soft breath, notepaper crumpling under my left hand before I eased my fingers out of the fist.
I didn’t think I’d ever get used to the aspect passing through a djamphir. It’s the part we get from the suckers. The part that makes us stronger, faster . . .
. . . and thirsty for the red stuff in the vein.
You don’t get used to that. Not easily, and not soon.
“Many djamphir have been ephialtes in their time,” Beaufort said softly. “Even the best of us. Raised to hunt our own kind, we know nothing else. It is the original question of nature versus nurture.”
Christophe did that. Hunted other djamphir. A chill moved down my back. After all, he was Sergej’s son. They told me Augustine had brought him in, and my mother was the reason he stayed in the Order.
Except Christophe had told me something else.
If I need a reason now, Dru, it will have to be you.
Talk about an uncomfortable thought. The fang marks on my wrist throbbed a little, but I ignored the feeling. I was getting good at ignoring stuff. If there was an Olympics I’d probably qualify. I’d go for the gold.
“After a certain amount of time, every ephialtes will question why he is killing his brothers. And what will eventually happen to him once his masters tire of him, no matter how useful he is. Scarabus questioned, and he turned against them. Normally he would have been hunted down by every ephialtes and wampyr his masters could induce to do such a thing. But Scarabus had an advantage.”
Leon stirred restlessly behind me.
Beaufort finished his last slow turn, and his eyes settled on me. “He had a sister.”
A ripple went through the room. A few of the boys, unable to help themselves, actually glanced at me and away quickly.
Great. I sank back into the couch, wishing for some of Leon’s wallflower juice.
“Scarabus’s first act of disobedience was taking his infant sister and hiding her. Their human mother died in childbirth, and Scarabus must have told his master that the child had died as well. Such things being common in antiquity. Nothing more is known until fifteen years later, when the sister was on the verge of blooming. He could no longer keep her a secret, so he drank her dry.”
My stomach turned over hard. “He what?” It burst out of me.
Beaufort actually winced. “He, ahem, killed her. Drank past the point of bonding, past the point of the blood-dark, past the point of crippling. He absorbed his sister. And used the strength in her blood to become something the wampyr could not stand against. At least, something the taproot of their species could not stand against. Without that taproot—”
“Whoa. He ate his sister?” It was the guy in front of me. I was feeling kind of glad someone else was having the same reaction. Guess chivalry isn’t dead.
Beaufort sighed. It was a Dylan-class sigh, but without the shades of patient aggravation Dylan could have put into it. “Essentially, yes. He absorbed her essence and used the resulting aura-dark to strike at the Vampire King. Who was, incidentally, Scarabus’s master for most of his life.”
“Wait. The aura-dark.” I remembered that term faintly. “What is that?”
Nobody breathed or moved for a long few seconds. I was getting used to that, whenever I asked a really basic question. They took all these things for granted, since most of them had been raised djamphir . It kind of made me wonder what I’d be taking for granted if Mom was still alive.