“You are now the head of my blood army,” the Queen had explained. “You will be called the ‘Guard of the Queens Blood,’ and you will hunt down the rebels of the First Brood as they dare to call themselves and all the misbegotten blood drinkers made by them who have dared to rebel against me and my King and my laws.”

Blood drinkers were gods, the Queen had told Nebamun. Now he too was a god. And at that point, he’d actually started to believe it. How else to explain what he saw now with the new vision of the Blood? His heightened senses bedeviled and tantalized him. He fell in love with the song of the wind, with the rich colors that pulsed all around him in the flowers and drowsy palm trees of the palace gardens, with the chanting pulse of those succulent humans upon whom he fed.

For a thousand years he’d been the dupe of superstition. The world had seemed a grim and unchangeable place to him, full of folly and misery and injustice, and blood drinker fighting blood drinker as incessantly as human fought human, when he’d finally sought the refuge of Mother Earth as so many others had done.

He knew with an aching heart what young Antoine had suffered. Only one blood drinker in existence claimed to have never known such burial and rebirth, and that was the great indominable Maharet.

Well, maybe the time had come for him to make himself known to Maharet, and to talk of those olden times. You’ve always known that it was I, Captain of the Queen’s soldiers, who separated you aeons ago from your sister—who put the two of you in coffins, and sent you off on rafts in different seas.

Was not the world of the Undead poised for destruction if old secrets and old horrors were not confronted and examined by those who knew the stories from the earliest nights?

In truth, Gregory was no longer the Captain of the hated “Queens Blood” who had done those things. He remembered those times, yes, but not the force of personality or attitude behind the memories, or the means by which he’d survived those endless nights of war and bloodshed. Who was Maharet? He did not really know.

When he rose in the third century of the Common Era, a new life for him had begun. Gregory was the name he’d chosen for himself in those nights, and he had been Gregory ever since, acquiring names and wealth over the millennia as he needed them, never again resorting to madness, or the earth, but slowly building a realm for himself with wealth and love. The wealth was easy to acquire, so easy in fact that he marveled at beggar mavericks like Antoine and Killer—and his beloved Davis—who tramped through eternity, and the love of other blood drinkers had been easy to acquire as well.