Now, after all that had happened to her, she felt disgusted by it.
Lucidia looked at the old strongblood, and felt her eyebrows pulling together. “Who are you?” she asked.
He smiled, the creped skin around his face lifting slightly. “My name is Seldon Lexos.”
Her eyes widened. “The Seldon Lexos?”
He nodded.
“I thought… didn’t you die?”
“You thought what they wanted you to think.”
Seldon Lexos had been a close friend of her father’s, in their young, warrior days. He used to be one of the fiercest strongbloods, living through the exploration and movement of vampires to the new world and everything that came after that. But he was most famous for an event that happened only two hundred years ago. The night he’d turned and slayed his own master.
The story Lucidia had been told was that Seldon Lexos had grown greedy and power hungry after a caster had manipulated him. The caster had convinced him to feed his own master poisoned blood, which had weakened the vampire and given Seldon the opportunity to drive a stake through his master and decapitate him.
The other masters had banded together and hunted the two conspires and slain them brutally, setting an example of what would happen to any strongblood that turned. Now, Lexos was the most hated group of strongbloods, considered to be untrustworthy. Seldon had trashed his whole bloodline, it seemed, and they were now loaned out to the lesser masters, and often ended up deserting. The other strongbloods had actually adopted a saying for targets that ran, a joke about how they were headed to their Lexos brethren.
“What happened?” she asked.
Seldon smiled again, lost in memories. “I heard the story, you know. What they told about me. I have to say, it was very creative, but-” he leaned over, wracked by a fit of coughing. Lucidia braced him with an arm around his shoulder and sat next to him as he continued. She didn’t miss the look of loathing that the woman gave her.
“There was no caster,” Seldon said with a deep, gravely breath. “I was of clear mind and soul, and I did what I thought best, given the circumstances. I had served Master Gideon for nearly five centuries, and I had watched him rise to power.”
Lucidia remembered the name: Gideon Myron, founder of House Myron, and considered to be one of the most ruthless vampires in existence. He’d all but solidified the continuation of their slavery practices, operating under fire of the human world, which had outlawed it at that point. The humans were no longer coming willingly to enter into slavery, and when the strongbloods did take them, they fought, like no other before. Gideon was one of the pioneers (if you could call them that) that created the foundation that had grown into the supernatural world they had today, full of strongbloods and servants and blood slaves that were collected and kept in the isolated, guarded castles. Before him, vampires and strongbloods were fairly free, and fairly lawless.
But it was two sides of the same coin, because with that lawlessness, there had been unregulated human consumption and torture that had begun to draw a lot of attention. Now, the system was brutal, but it was contained; at least, to some degree.
“Gideon had built the empire and ruled over it with a sharp sword. But in his final days, he was not the same war-hardened general that he used to be. It was the blood fever that got to him.”
Lucidia nodded. All strongbloods feared the blood fever; nobody was really sure where it came from, or how it happened, but she’d had to kill vampires infected with it many times.
Blood fever was the vampire equivalent of rabies.
It’s fine if a random nobody vampire turns rabid; the masters send a strongblood to deal with it, and the matter is done before too many bodies pile up.
But if one of the masters gets the fever, then you’ve got a very, very dangerous situation. Blood fever makes vampires slowly spiral down, further and further into insanity. It gives them an insatiable greed; they begin hoarding humans and guzzling in gallons, drowning themselves in blood. Depending on how long it is before they’re stopped, the massacres can total hundreds of thousands.
From the outset of the disease, the vampires only have about a year left, and the closer they get to that deadline, the worse they become.
“I’d watched the fever take him,” Seldon hummed, eyes far away. “And the night that I ended him, there were nearly a hundred dead bodies in his quarters. Piled up all around him. He was rolling in them, rolling in blood that was nearly a knuckle’s height on the floor.”
“You had no choice,” Lucidia whispered.
Seldon shook his head and was wracked by another coughing fit.
“Why didn’t they tell anybody?” she asked, her anger rising. “The Lexos family is disgraced now, and you were within your rights to kill him.”
“Nobody is in their rights to kill their own master,” Seldon said bitterly. “We were on the brink of a civil war, with the American fight against slavery. Insubordination could not be tolerated in any form. They invented the caster to conceal the fact that Great Master Gideon had been slain by a mere strongblood; there was no poison, but he was so delirious from the fever that he didn’t even understand what was happening when I rammed the spear through his heart. He was still laughing, covered in blood, when I severed his head.”
Lucidia let out a breath, shaking her head in confusion. “The whole world thinks you’re a traitor.”
“Let them think it. My days are not long for this world.”
“No,” she insisted, her eyes flaring in anger. “This is wrong. What happened to you was wrong.”
This elicited a gravelly laugh from the old strongblood. “Kenzo’s daughter, yes.” His expression dropped, and he tightened his ancient arm around her soldier. “I heard what happened to him. It brought me great sadness.”
Lucidia nodded.
“Did he
