Blood of Gold Read Online Free PDF Page B

and raging. If he could have killed himself in those early days, he would have.
    Peterson found it useful to keep him alive. He would hold a phone up to his former boss’s mouth, placing a piece of paper with the lines he wanted Fitzsimmons read in front of him. Fitz was forced to try to sound normal, like his genial old self. The other Council members thought he was traveling and had left Peterson in charge in his stead.
    After the disaster in Crescent City, they’d flown into London during the daytime, when no vampires were around to observe them. Peterson had stuffed Fitzsimmons’s truncated body into a suitcase and wheeled it past the tight security that surrounded the headquarters of the Council of Vampires. No one but Peterson and a couple of his closest progeny knew Fitz was here.
    If Fitzsimmons didn’t do as Peterson asked, he’d be tortured again and again, to the point of death. And the next day––the next night, to be exact––he’d awaken and start screaming again.
    At first he wondered if his arms and legs would come back. He was vampire, after all, and all injuries eventually healed. But Peterson kept him starved, with just enough animal blood in his system to keep him alive.
    Once they brought him a child, bound in ropes, as helpless as he was. He drank the young girl’s blood and spent the next hours, and then days, waiting for transformation. His wounds ceased to leak blue blood, but other than that, nothing changed.
    He didn’t take up that much space anymore, so he didn’t need to be in a big room. The one he was in was a closet, really, with a bare bulb hanging overhead so that he could see to read what Peterson put before him. Sometimes when his captors left, they forgot to turn the light off, and Fitzsimmons wasn’t sure which was worse: the darkness, or the light that showed the barrenness of what was left of his life. He memorized the cracks in the ceiling, made creatures out of them to keep him company.
    In the end, he was left alone with his hate. It festered and oozed inside him until he was nothing but a raw and open sore. The vampire, the Wildering, who had done this to him was dead, but those who sought to take advantage of his weakness were very much alive. He planned his revenge, certain that the night would come when he’d arise.
    Once a week, a servant came into the tiny room and scooped out the waste. At first, Fitzsimmons endured the humiliation without a word. One day, uncharacteristically, he mentioned how hard it must be for the vampire to have to clean up his mess.
    The vampire, who looked like a young woman, smiled.
    Fitzsimmons’s mind started churning. He knew that his anger and resentment was off-putting, but his moment of empathy had resulted in a moment of relaxed vigilance. On the servant’s next visit, he smiled at her and asked her name.
    “Chloe,” she said.
    “I’m sorry you have to do such a dirty task, Chloe.”
    She shrugged and bent down to wipe something from his face.
    From that day on, he talked to Chloe as if she were a friend or a family member, a niece, perhaps; perhaps even one of his progeny. Their little talks grew longer, more familiar, with each visit. It seemed to Fitz that she started coming to him every few days instead of once a week. He was winning her over, he was sure of it.
    “If only I could get out of here,” he ventured one night. “I bet if I had enough blood, my limbs would regrow. You wouldn’t have to do this anymore.”
    She frowned slightly, as if she was considering it.
    I’ve planted the seed, he thought. Now I must nurture it.
    The next visit, they talked about where they had grown up as humans. He told her the story of his Making and then waited for her to reciprocate. She mentioned she was French and had been Made in the mid-twentieth century, which made her old enough to know the ways of vampires, but still relatively young. She would say nothing more about her Making. They talked about their human childhoods,