Chapter Nine~

The vampire guards did not allow my protest to continue; they effortlessly lifted my arms and kicked with heavy boots at the base of my knees, making my legs go out and easier for them to carry me along. As we turned the corner, I got my last sight of Danica. She had still not moved, and they had removed most of her clothing, leaving her in just jeans and her white tank top. Her hair was dripping with perspiration. "Danica!" I yelled, grabbing onto the wall with my arms, my only limbs that were still in my control. I held myself there, if only for a moment, trying to make her wake up, in part to reassure myself that she was still alive. I was hastily pulled away, though, until I too was almost lifeless, and following my capture to what I was sure was my own death...

I was not dead, as I was taken into an old fashioned bedroom. Long dark curtains hung to the floor and were pulled shut, covering what I took only to be a window. A four poster bed sat largely in the center of the room and the guards quickly laid me upon it, tying my hands and feet to each of the four corners. The room had two or three candles lit across table tops and near a book shelf covered with old, musty books, but the light was hardly enough to see by, and Theron quickly began to light more.

After the guards had finished tying me up, they turned to Theron for further instruction. For a moment Theron didn't notice them; their dog like faces waiting for their masters call. Theron was still lighting candles, and it took him a moment to realize this. He said nothing as he placed a candle on a small tabletop in the middle of the room, almost adjacent to me, but he waved his hand in a small circle and the guards departed with further blank faces.

"What is this?" I demanded, wondering about why I was here and what was planned to be done to me. I also took in my surroundings carefully. The room itself was a carbon copy of any room that you would have found in any mansion in the seventeenth century, right down to the wicks that burned blue flames onto the candles. Theron took his time to answer me. He went about the room methodically lighting each and every candle; there must have been hundreds, and he seemed to enjoy lighting all of them. His face lit up slightly more with each flame that he created.

"This," he said huskily, lifting his eyes from the blue flame underneath his eyes, his gaze trying to hold me in a hypnotic stare. I wouldn't let him. "This is the black room." He said looking back toward the flame, unfazed by my resistance.

"Take me to Danica!" I protested. What else could I do?

"You can no longer help Danica," he said, his voice almost as hypnotic as his eyes. "Danica has made her choices, and now she must suffer for her crimes."

"What crimes? What as she done?"

He fell silent again, as he moved around the room creating more flames. His rust colored curls fell into his face slightly around his forehead and eyes as he bent down to light the lower candles. "The problem with Danica is that she wants to be an angel to all, and she forgets that there is evil in this world that doesn't share the same views."

Strangely, that sounded like Danica, and the story that she told me back in the Acevedo house came back to me. She helped some of the human slaves here escape.

"It's really is an honor, your highness," he told me again. He had finished lighting the candles and the room and it holds an eerie glow over me. He walked from one side of the four poster bed to the other as he said: "Under better circumstances you and I could have gotten along famously."

My eyes furrowed, "What do you mean?"

He slid his boots over to a book shelf that was against the wall on the right side of me. It was dark, and made from old wood and cracking slightly from old and worn out paint. His chain mail shirt dangled and jingled in his movements. He skid his finger along the bindings of the rows and rows of old books that line it. I could hear the slick of his finger as it slid over the leather coverings. "Here," he said, pulling out an old book from the stack and holding it up to his face, tilting it beneath one of the candles that he lit. He read for a moment, his lips silently mimicking the words that he heard in his head. He turned back to me some time later. "When I was a boy living in Brussels, I found a book in my grandfather's library," he explained to me, and I tried to picture this gothic youth in the earlier century that he was describing. "It was autumn, in late 1654. My grandfather loved books, every room was filled with books, but his library was quiet a feat, and people came from miles around to see its rows lined with thousands of books. One day I went in and in his hands was this book." He held the book up for me to see the cover, but I was too far away to read a title. "It was his favorite, and he always had it with him. "Our family legacy" he called it. He said that his great-grandfather wrote it on parchment in old Gaelic before there was a printing press. The manuscript was transferred to son after son until my Grandfather had it professionally printed. Only one copy was made and this is it."

I couldn't tell if Theron was stalling or if he just enjoyed telling the story, but I was longing for him to get to the point. "Well what is it?" I asked.

"My ancestor Adhamh Sero traveled to the old lands to the east with his king and fellow countrymen. He came to a land, filled with strange creatures, which as he said could change from man to beast at their own will. He called them Shapshifters, and as far as I know he was the first person to originate that name for your people. Adhamh grew to love your people; he traveled amongst the Avians, the Mistari, and then to the Serpeinte. He wrote an entry every day that he stayed amongst them, and came to learn their language, though he could never learn their magics." Theron took a breath, a long breath, and I watched as he clutched the old worn pages between his fingers. "Adhamh's king and the other soldiers did not share his love for these strange people from the east and desired their land more then the stability of its people. The king attacked, and Adhamh did everything in his power to stop his king and fellow countrymen, but it was to late, and the people that he loved came to perish, or fear or hate him for what he was. A human man."

"What does any of this have to do with me?" I asked, understanding the meaning behind his story, but by this time I was already gone and far away from those lands; I was living amongst the human men and had no idea at the time as to what was going on back in my homeland.

"Don't you see Zane?" he begged, coming closer to me from the bookshelf until he was almost standing over me. "Adhamh came to the Serpiente land where he met a young Queen named Irene who tolled him the great stories of her lost older brother, the true king of her people. Zane Cobriana." My mouth was open; Irene had said that about me, and her pride for me lifted my spirits slightly. "I grew up with my Grandfather telling me stories about you, Zane, about the wars that you fought in, the battles you won, the obstacles that you had to face to help your people." He was like a young child meeting his hero for the first time and begging him remember him always. I was not like that, though.

"I've never been a hero," I stated plainly and a frown slowly formed across his face. "I did what I did because I had no other choice. Had I the choice, my brothers would have all lived to see the throne, and I made not to sit upon it. Had I the choice, my father would have lived a long and happy life after ruling instead of being murdered in the dead of the night as he sat on his throne, worrying about how he could save his people. My mother, my sisters, they all would have lived to old age to watch their children, and their children's children all grow up happy and safe. Had I the choice, I would have chosen to be a simpleton rather then a prince, if not for the sake of my sanity then for the sake of Danica who never would have come to meet me." I stopped, I could think of so many more things that I would change but I knew that I had said too much already.

He opened his mouth to speak but it was not English that came out, or any other language that I would have expected. It was the old Serpiente tongue, the speech that had been taught to me by scholars when I was a child. "We are born, to be who were are born to be," he said to me. His ease with the language was remarkable, and up to that moment I had no idea that humans could learn it, let alone speak it with fluency. Its range and its motion was the complete opposite of English and most other languages with sounds that no human ear had heard before. "How... ?" I wondered.

"Adhamh also learned the language and wrote it down for my grandfather and myself to later learn."

"What is it that you want out of all of this, Theron?"

"To learn what you know. To know the secrets of your people, your ways."

"But you are vampire, not Shapshifter."

"Does it matter? I can learn well when you teach me."

"I will never teach you our ways, Theron, you do not deserve to know them." His face hardened suddenly, as though I had ripped out his soul and was tearing it to shreds in front of him. I knew that he had not expected that answer.

"Fine!" he yelled, his lips tightly curled together underneath a clenched jaw line. "You can stay here and rot for all I care then." He turned and walked straight for the door, his grandfather's old book still in his hands. When he got to the door he turned back to me, his face still twisted with anger. "Just remember, while you lie here helpless, your precious Danica is being tortured to death!"

I immediately moved up to lunge at him, but my restraints held me back, and he left the room cackling wildly.