The Strain: Another Season
Episode 9

Author's note: Apparently the Berber girl and her daughter have names in a comic miniseries - Tasa and Sura respectively, so I've changed her name from Hennu to Tasa for this fic.

Book AU:
Quintus' wife is pregnant when she's given to him rather than having a small daughter.
It is Faustus Sertorius who gives her to Quintus therefore much earlier than in the book.


Creatures of the Twilight
Chapter 3

Meroë, Nubia (modern day Sudan) – 310 BC

Quarta, or Lady Quartz as she eventually styles herself, is the daughter of grateful prostitute and her newly infected rescuer.

Her human mother turns before she realises that she's pregnant and pays no notice to her swelling belly. She disregards the pain of labour and gives birth to Quarta several months early in the darkness of a rock fissure. Abandoned by her disinterested strigoi mother, Quarta "caves" rather than dies.

Too stinky too eat and too still to be a threat, the shrivelled, helpless babe is sniffed and ignored when a troop of baboons colonises Quarta's den. The troop brings occasional kills back to the hole and spilt blood trickling into her corner sustains the wretched creature. She improves drop by drop until eventually she grows strong enough to take a crippled old female baboon left behind to die while the rest of the troop forage, hunt, and play in the sunshine. Simian blood is better fare than an irregular supply of warthog piglet and desert rodent and it invigorates her to take another monkey, then another, growing rapidly until even the forty kilos of tooth and muscle of the alpha male cannot withstand her speed and power. Quarta then seeks the ultimate nourishment - human blood.


Northern Russia – First and second millennia BC

Over the course of many centuries, Primus, Erlik of Siberia's Born, discovers that he is infertile. No matter how many or how nubile his concubines, no matter how hard he uses them, or how often, no womb bears fruit. This, combined with the fact that his lack of bloodworms render him unable to procreate in the usual strigoi way, adds to his burden and stigma, gradually engendering within him a toxic rage against his maker.


Meroë, Nubia (modern day Sudan) – 305 BC

Quarta is beautiful. Indeed, there is something about the strigoi blood that predisposes to an unearthly, almost angelic beauty in all the Born. She is an impressively tall, bald African woman with a nose, black eyes and skin the colour of a latte. She is something new – wormless so technically a Born. Her appearance is halfway between the Quinlan-Born and full strigoi – very much like Vaun but for different reasons. She is harmed by the harsh African sunlight and silver and has the same water-crossing restrictions as the strigoi and Vaun.

The native tribes within the radius of a night's strigoi hunt are so terrorised by her voracious blood appetite that they unite to worship her as a Goddess, bringing her regular tributes of the best of their young manhood as food. Quarta revels in this adulation much as the Ancients Erlik and Yama do and craves more adoration, more power – more celebrity.


Caffa – 1357

'And you, Quintus?' Hostia Sexta looks a little awkward now and absently excavates the grain of the desktop with her thumbnail. 'You've never told me your story…'

He stares at her for long enough to make her squirm in discomfort. Then he sighs and tells her.

He tells her of the Master in the body of Thrax, associate of the depraved emperor Caligula; the weekly tributes of virgin slave girls; the ritual feeding on the pedestal; the early pregnancy detected in one girl after Thrax had begun to feed; Caligula's paranoia requiring Thrax's presence and the guards' incompetence in allowing the infected girl to escape. He recounts his birth in a cave as his turning mother heads south for her Loved Ones; his life as a god amongst men; his career as a warrior and gladiator; even his meeting with Lady Quartz in the Ludus Magnus in Rome and their doomed partnership as a gladiatorial team. Quintus omits nothing. Nothing that is, except for any mention of his wife and adopted daughter.


An Ancient Roman slave market

All the slaves are naked, the better to show prospective buyers exactly what they're getting so the slaver can hardly sell the pregnant Berber girl as a virgin. She isn't particularly beautiful anyway, a bit small with unremarkable features. The consummate salesman, he nevertheless uses the pregnancy as a kind of BOGOF selling point.

'As well as being able to sing and play, cook and sew - not to mention a very willing fuck, if I'm any judge,' says the slave trader, oblivious to Quintus' head snapping round to fix him with a look of complete revulsion. 'And I think I am…' He nudges the big Born where his waist should be and hurts his elbow on a very hard hipbone. 'You wait a few months and you've got yourself your very own family. Eh? Sir? Whaddaya say? That could be very attractive to a…a…' The greasy little homunculus casts about for an appropriate description before plumping for convention, '…a man like yourself?

Quintus uses the prolonged stare that always makes Hostia Sexta writhe in embarrassment before silently dropping the full asking price and more into the sweaty palm.

'Oh, thank you sir, most gracious,' oils the slaver. 'A true Patrician.' He continues babbling obsequiously while he passes the girl's neck chain over. Quintus demands the collar be removed and, just before leaving with his purchase, he grasps the merchant by the elbow and bends down to whisper in his ear.

'The extra coin is for a bath and a wholesome supper. See that you get both tonight.'

Quintus hands the girl his pallium but doesn't presume to drape it around her possessively. To the slaver's shock the big man then crouches down to address the slave.

'What's your name?' he asks gently.

'Tasa, master,' she whispers, eyes wide at her new owner's size as much as his bizarre appearance.

The Born winces at the honorific. 'Mine is Quintus,' he says calmly. 'I desire no other address. You are a free woman now, Tasa.'

The merchant hisses at the extravagance.

'I am heavy with child and I have nowhere else to go, sir…I mean Quintus,' she corrects hurriedly. 'May I come with you?'


The following morning, Faustus Sertorius comes roaring in without knocking. He is furious that the slave dealer was found chained in his own slave pit, clean but exsanguinated, and that all the captives had been freed.

'I gave you the money for a wife not a housecat, Quintus,' he bellows. 'Now marry her and claim her as your own in the natural human way.'

Tasa gazes up in awe and nascent adoration at the gladiator. She goes to stand beside him and slips her tiny hand into his huge fist as if she wishes to defend him in some way or at least stand in solidarity with him.