The Second Book in
The Blood of Kings Series
To Be Published
Halloween 2020
Death followed by triumph. Chopin understood that; it is there in the music, in the sonata my fingers brought to life. Danilo understood, too, and he tried to show me. No—show me he did.
I loved Danilo, and Danilo loved me, and his blood was in me, and mine was in him, and in his blood, I knew. I saw.
Alexander embraced the world in one arm and his lover Hephaestion in the other. And I was there.
Hadrian made his beloved boy Antinous a god, and the whole world mourned his death and worshipped. And I was there.
Richard Lionheart, lover of men, reigned and rode into legend. I was there.
In one marvelous year James I ruled England, Louis XIII was on the throne of France, and Boris II held the Holy Roman Empire. All of Western Europe was under the direct sway of men who loved men. And I was there.
Then Danilo was gone. Vanished. And I knew the other things he had known.
Edward II saw his lover Gaveston impaled and beheaded. Edward died himself with a red-hot poker forced into his rectum. I saw.
The Knights Templar were tortured, dismembered, burned alive for loving one another. I was there. I witnessed.
In the heart of Rome, the popes burned men and boys alive for loving other men. Boys as young as ten, charred their lives ended. And I was there. I heard their screams and smelled the stench from their pyres.
Danilo was gone, and even though I could not die, I knew what death was. I searched everywhere and often, anxiously hoping for the least hint of him. In my idle time I studied Egyptology, learned hieroglyphics, so I could read his papers and his memoir. I wanted to find a clue why he had left me so abruptly and, it seemed, so finally. He had given me life; and he had given me the first and deepest love I’d ever known, or ever will. But he was nowhere.
I had to find him. I knew I’d never be happy again until I did. But how? There were no clues, there was nothing to go on.
Without Danilo, even though I could not die, death was all I wanted.
I was twenty-one.
* * *
I was always careful; Danilo had taught me well. The young men, old men, men in the middle, whose sacrificed blood I thrived on were from other places. Weekends, when I was not searching for Danilo, I traveled to other cities and found men whose blood kept me alive and vibrant. Not too far, Johnstown, Altoona, Youngstown, Akron, East Liverpool… Close enough to be accessible, distant enough for there to be no obvious links, small enough for the local authorities to be out of touch.
Not boys; I never took boys. Not that the temptation wasn’t there. Young, firm bodies, sweet blood… But they had not had time to discover themselves yet. Some of them would embrace their divine blood and what it meant; some of them would be my brothers. Others… well, they would be men soon enough, and then I could…
When I came home from my little excursions, my cat Bubastis always made it clear how happy she was to see me. And I felt the same way, not only because she was such a sweet companion. Danilo had worked his magic on her. She was the one living link I still had to him, and I loved her.
Sometimes I went to New York, to see Danilo’s face in the ancient stones in the museums there. Sometimes I fed there, too…
One young man, an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum, noticed me from time to time, always looking at the same relief, the one of Danilo and his father. He smiled, a bit timidly I thought; making conversation with the visitors was not quite the proper thing. Déclassé, I imagine. I smiled back.
“You really like that one, don’t you?”
“Yes. It means a lot to me.”
“There’s something even better in the storeroom back here. It’s not in the best shape, so it’s not on display, but… ”
Again, I smiled. Was there another image of my lover, one I hadn’t seen? “I’d like to see it, please.”
He led me behind a large canvas drop cloth and into a side room. Fragments of statues and reliefs were scattered on a large worktable, a foot, a muscular arm, a head; more were propped against the walls. He moved a few and found the one he wanted, a slab of basalt. “Here.”
On the smooth black stone was still another image of the Kissing Kings, one I hadn’t seen before. Danilo, the young pharaoh, and his father Akhenaten, embracing, their lips touching, their passion showing more clearly and more intensely than in anything I had seen before. They were naked. This piece had been carved for them privately; it was nothing like their public images.
I looked at my companion, and I knew he understood what I was feeling, or part of it. “It’s not the kind of thing we can put on public display.”
Then without even thinking, I pressed my fingers against it, as if touching Danilo’s face in stone might be a substitute for touching him.
The assistant curator laughed at me. “With me it’s one of the guys in a Rembrandt upstairs. Dead ringer for my ex-boyfriend. I can never look at it without feeling all kinds of things.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Choreographing an off-Broadway musical. Can you believe it?”
“Why not?”
“Nobody does off-Broadway musicals anymore. Nobody with any sense. They all close in the red.”
“Oh.”
“I’m Rick, by the way.”
He noticed Danilo’s wedding ring, which I always wore. “That’s good. It’s a reproduction, from our museum shop, right?”
“No, it’s real.”
He smirked at me. I was liking him less and less. He would do.
I told him my name, and we shook. He was blond, thin, athletic; his clothes were a bit too trendy to be quite in good taste, but this was New York.
I met him at dinnertime, when the museum closed. We had a quick, light meal. Then he took me to his apartment in Brooklyn. As we were going in, I happened to notice his name on the apartment doorbell. Lawrence Miller. Rick, indeed.
I asked him why he wouldn’t rather live in Manhattan. He shrugged. “I like being across the river. Keeps some distance between me and… well, between me and all that.” He made a vague gesture.
“You like being apart?”
“Yeah, I guess I do. From everything.”
“It must be nice to have the choice.”
He didn’t know what I meant. I wasn’t quite sure I knew, either. But he was one of our bloodline; of that I was certain.
His apartment was larger than most I’d seen in New York. There was room for a king-size bed. Almost before I knew what was happening, he stripped himself naked, locked his arms around me and pushed his tongue into my mouth.
He was good. The sex was fantastic. We came together, first time that had happened since Danilo. When all I want is sex, there’s nothing more exciting than an aggressive bottom. But I wanted more than sex.
When we were finished with our coupling, he lit a cigarette.
I smirked. “Isn’t that a bit of a cliché?”
“What of it?”
“Nothing, I guess.” I smiled and stretched on the bed.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave now.”
“Oh. I thought we might talk for a bit.” I smiled. “Get to know each other. Are you—?”
“Look, we fucked, we got off. I’m going to the gym now.”
“But—”
“I really don’t want to ‘get to know’ a damn dumb tourist faggot, okay?”
“Okay. You won’t, then.”
I jumped on top of him, pinned him to the bed. There was nothing sharp at hand. I used my teeth. Tore his throat open. Drank. It always interests me that men’s blood can taste so different. Some is so sweet. Some is deliciously salty. Some has a pleasantly bitter edge. His tasted like shit.
Then I crossed the room to where I’d left my backpack and got Danilo’s ritual knife. The golden blade gleamed as I did my work. I cut out the organs I needed, eyes, heart. His genitals were still hot from our coupling.
I looked down at his body, drained of blood, wizened and pale. Not for the first time, I found myself thinking that that was what I wanted. To be dead. To feel nothing. Since Danilo vanished, that was all I wanted.
But how? I didn’t know, and I was afraid to find out. If I stopped living on the blood of the sacrificed, would I simply revert to my normal age? Or would I… ? Danilo said I would age and die if I stopped. I had seen too many old horror movies to want to contemplate that possibility. To die old… no.
I didn’t always have sex with them. Sometimes I just… performed the sacrifice and moved on. Over the months, I had come to prefer that, actually. Quick, over with, satisfied. No time for lies, not theirs, not mine.
There were times, looking in the mirror, I thought I could see their faces in my own eyes. There were times when I wondered if they wanted to taste me in the way I tasted them. They denied their blood; but can anyone ever deny himself so completely? Did they feel the same thirst, ever? At all?
Death is the beginning, in the same way that fatherhood is the beginning. I am only beginning to understand, even now. Poor creatures like assistant curator Rick, or Lawrence, would never know.
No one had ever looked for Danilo but me, myself. When he disappeared, everyone—the university and the police—assumed he was simply one more victim in Gregory Wilton’s killing spree, one more of the dead and vanished. With no family to make trouble—with no one in the world except me, or so I thought—the police and the university could safely forget him. But, of course, I could not forget. Every time I took another victim, Danilo was there with me.
And yet I had hardly begun to understand all the things he tried to teach me, or the enormous gift he gave me. I had to find him; I had to be with him again.
There is another world, and it is in this one. I know. I live there.