Lotus Petals - The Books of Blood and Fire 1

Lotus Petals - Chapter Two

Aijyn was afraid of vampires. She always had been.

Until she had been ten years old, Aijyn had lived in a village north of the Blood Lotus Temple. The people there had spoken of the vicious demon lord who ruled the forests on the other side of the pass: they had feared him, whispering of him and his monstrous brood in the hours of darkness. The village, like so many in the Kansai region, belonged to Gohachiro. Every year the villages in his domain gave the daimyo an offering of six living children—three boys and three girls—to keep peace with him. Those villages who offered a suitable child accepted by the daimyo would be protected from his hunters for the duration of the year, until he demanded the next offering and required another sacrifice.

Finally, on the cusp of adolescence, Aijyn herself had become part of the offering.

Of the six children offered to Gohachiro every year, four of them became blood-givers. These children were imprisoned and kept alive, fed upon little by little by the strongest and most vicious of the daimyo's demons until the coming of the next offering. Then, they were killed. The demons did this because to them, the warm blood of the still-living held the essence of life itself, and the blood of children was more satiating to their ravenous natures, purer than the blood of adults. If the villages submitted to the daimyo's demands and offered four suitable juvenile blood-givers each year, Gohachiro's vampires would repay the honor by seeking out their nightly prey in other towns and provinces instead.

The moment Aijyn's terrified mother had given her over to the tithe-collectors, Aijyn had been convinced this would be her fate. A girl of ten, she resolved then and there she would not see eleven. Her mother had drawn back the string of a bow and shot an arrow through her heart, though it would take a year for the bolt to strike home. Aijyn found a strange peace with this; she had had two younger brothers and an infant sister, and if she could spare her mother the agony of ever having to offer another of them to future tithes, Aijyn would go to Gohachiro.

Perhaps this saved her. Two of the six children offered—one boy and one girl—were always kept by the daimyo to serve other purposes. To her silent surprise, in her year he chose Aijyn. It proved her life would be one of a servant of the household instead, where the boys were made eunuchs or soldiers and the women made attendants to the Lord's harem, the oiran and the tayu. Rather than one year's imprisonment, being bled for the vampires' joy until she died, to be replaced by the next sacrifice, Aijyn found herself thrust into the bustle of the temple itself. She began her servitude as a housekeeper for the courtesans, tending to their needs with graceful obedience.

Though she had been spared the short life of a blood-giver, Aijyn had always known it did not make her safe. Gohachiro's thirteen oiran were mostly human, but his favorites, the tayu, were demons like him...and demons were soulless, heartless things, twisted shadows of mankind. Every day the vampires eyed her like hungry men feasting their sights upon a suckling pig. Now and again one of the women would lean in close to her, inhaling the scent of her neck with a little purring pleasure, and Aijyn kept herself steady by reminding herself she had already died; the fated arrow would simply take a little bit longer to reach her still-beating heart.

During her years in the temple, Aijyn had seen many of the other tithing children come and go. The boy who had been spared during her year would have survived longer if he'd been made a blood-giver: he defied the temple soldiers and attempted to fight them for escape, and they'd killed him outright, snapping his neck with cold brutality and then moving on as though nothing of particular notice had passed at all. She had seen three girls—two older than herself and one younger—slaughtered by the concubines, sometimes out of nothing more than spite, or out of an indulgent whim. She had also seen two girls chosen to become oiran, and one of them bitten by the daimyo, made a child of his hellish race. This, of course, would be the highest honor among most of the demon lord's women: to become a vampire tayu.