A Band of Blood - Tetsuro

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Tetsuro’s mouth tasted like blood. Bits of skin and muscle stuck between his teeth. He picked out as much as he could with his claws and spat on the ground. He had been vegetarian for about a hundred and eighty years, and he had no intention of breaking that now.

Blood did not count.

Killing humans had always easy to him.

The first time he’d been sent into battle, he had been around thirteen, too young to grow facial hair but not too young to cleave through a body with a katana. It was still the best way to kill.

The other vampires he usually traveled with preferred to catch their prey off guard. Tetsuro did not. His enemy deserved the honour of seeing his eyes when he killed them. He just preferred to do it with a blade than his claws. 

He hadn’t spent his childhood studying poetry and culture to kill like an animal.

The katana, a three-body blade that had once belonged to a father he didn’t remember, cleaved through the limbs and torso like butter. 

It was an easy ritual by now.

Cut the corpse into small pieces. Wrap them in white cloth. Drop them in the Bay.

Warm water ran pink as he washed the blood from himself.

The bone-deep hunger was mostly satisfied for now. As much as he hated drinking blood, Tetsuro had to admit that he felt a little less ready to wring his roommate’s neck. Still, he desperately hoped Jean-Étienne wasn’t home. It was early enough that he might still be out. Tetsuro had been trying to read Crime and Punishment since 1956.

Tonight was not going to be the night for that.

The apartment reeked of decayed, broken down iron. Even without opening the door, Tetsuro could smell it seeping through the slight gap between the door and the floor. The muscles of his jaw and fingers tensed. His teeth and nails sharpened into fangs and claws with familiar pierces of pain in anticipation of what was on the other side.

Even though he knew what to expect, he still froze for a fraction of a second. 

It was almost worse than he expected. 

The small table they kept in the entryway was broken against the other side of the apartment. There were holes in the drywall from the impact. Pieces of the ceramic cat figurine and pot that held a bonsai tree he’d been cultivating for only five years crunched under his sneakers as he darted through the space. The microwave door had been punched in. Wind whistled in through the smashed window. His couch was on its side, with deep claw marks in the cream leather.

For one insane second, Tetsuro thought the cats might have done this.

But no. The real culprit was the insane one.

The mess alone set Tetsuro’s teeth on edge. The only reason he and Jean-Étienne could handle living together was because neither of them was home often, and because they were both obsessive about keeping their shared apartment organized.

Even if they didn’t always agree on what that meant.

Smears of blood across the walls and along the carpet. The brand new bathroom mirror shattered, with more decaying blood on some of the shards.

It wasn’t as bad as last time.

Of course, that may have been because he hadn’t reached the source of the blood yet.

Tetsuro had been smart enough to remove as many reflective surfaces as he could to his bedroom, including the mirror that predated himself. It was hanging as part of his household shrine, one of the only things in this apartment he actually cared about. That, and the bonsai tree he’d been cultivating for about 90 years. If Jean-Étienne had destroyed those—

Tetsuro froze.

Where were the cats?

He couldn’t smell them over the blood. He tilted his head to the side, straining to hear them over the cars honking in the street below. They weren’t the most vocal cats. It made them difficult to locate by sound at the best of times. 

A small mew was barely audible through his blood rushing through his ears. In a single breath, he was back in the kitchen, tearing the cabinet doors open. One broke completely off its hinges. He barely noticed.

If Jean-Étienne had hurt the cats, Tetsuro was going to snap his neck, Brys and Elyes be damned.

Tetsuro wrenched the last cabinet open. A neat stack of plates shattered against the counter. Breaking glass was followed by an indignant yowl. Sashimi leapt from the shelf and landed on all three paws with the kind of grace that even Jean-Étienne might have been impressed by. Sushi, sleeping in a large wooden bowl, didn’t seem to notice the noise.

Tetsuro let out a relieved breath. The metal handle had warped and twisted in his grip. It could be replaced.

With the cats safely located, he was left with finding Jean-Étienne.

He can stay with you, they said. He’s barely even feral most days, they said.

Tetsuro should have stuck him on a boat with Elyes or sent him back to Wales with Brys.

Finding his only half-feral roommate was not difficult. There were only so many places he could be in an apartment of this size.

Tetsuro didn’t have to open the door. It was barely hanging on by one hinge. The doorframe was splintered in several places. Like in the bathroom, the mirror was shattered where Jean-Étienne had thrown it. Part of the frame was still sticking out of the wall. Why in the gods’ names did Jean-Étienne even have a mirror in here? He should have known better.

The old blood smell was strongest in the back corner of the room, between the bed and the wall. Tetsuro took only an eighth of a second to confirm that despite the still-bleeding gashes in his face, upper chest, and arms from his own claws, Jean-Étienne wasn’t seriously hurt before he let his temper get the better of him.

Jean-Étienne’s head snapped up. His eyes were wild. He bared his fangs at Tetsuro and snarled.

“What the Hell, J-E!”

The words were barely out of Tetsuro’s mouth when sharp pain flashed across his face. A claw caught his lower eyelid. The scent of own blood mingled with Jean-Étienne’s. He managed to hold Jean-Étienne back to avoid the teeth snapping at him.

Despite his compact build, Jean-Étienne was incredibly strong and even faster, especially when he was feral like this. Every single one of his muscles was toned from years of rigorous daily practice that rivalled even Tetsuro’s samurai training. Tetsuro’s only real advantage was that Jean-Étienne didn’t really know how to fight. It took several seconds to get Jean-Étienne restrained. A pained shriek scraped against his eardrums.

The whites of his eyes were still white.

That meant he’d fed recently.

That meant something had happened to cause this breakdown. It wasn’t just from blood hunger.

Despite the fact that they’d been born around the same year, Jean-Étienne had been younger when he’d met his first death. He’d barely been twenty when he’d died. Unlike Tetsuro, a samurai of noble birth, Jean-Étienne’s last human years had been spent struggling to survive as a dancer and violinist until he’d fallen from the window of a burning building. Add to that his first vampire years spent in a room full of decaying corpses and feeding on rats, it was a wonder he ever had moments where he wasn’t feral.

“Jean-Étienne. Jean-Étienne, il faut que tu te calmes toi,” Tetsuro said.

It was always easier to communicate with Jean-Étienne in French when he got like this. Of course, Tetsuro had no idea what Jean-Étienne shrieked in return, or if they were even words.

“I am not going to hurt you,” Tetsuro said.

He tried to keep his voice low and even, as if he hadn’t just dislocated one of Jean-Étienne’s shoulders.

Jean-Étienne twisted and sank his teeth into Tetsuro’s arm. Tetsuro stiffened against the pain, his nostrils flaring, though he didn’t release his hold on Jean-Étienne. 

The bitter taste of his blood must have been enough to shock him. He spat out a mouthful of Tetsuro’s flesh and blood onto the floor with a gagging sound that ended in something a bit closer to a sob. He was shaking and breathing hard, but still steady on his long legs.

Slowly, Tetsuro released his hold on Jean-Étienne. As if controlled by strings, Jean-Étienne lowered himself to the floor to lean against the crooked bed. He pulled his thighs up to his chest and pressed his forehead to his knees with a hand in his hair. One of his fingers was bent at an awkward angle. His dislocated arm hung loose at his side.

As tempting as it was to set Jean-Étienne’s arm and finger, Tetsuro didn’t want to risk sending him into another feral episode. Harada-san next door was worried enough about the noises that came from the apartment. While the soundproof paneling in his room muffled his drumming, it wasn’t always enough to fully contain Jean-Étienne’s episodes. Maybe Tetsuro should soundproof the entire apartment. Sometimes, he considered finding a witch to do it for him. If he could help it, though, he would really rather not spend his days surrounded by the smell of witchcraft.

Was sticking him on a boat still an option?

Kicking broken glass out of the way, Tetsuro made his way to the far wall. He knelt down and sat back on his heels. He closed his eyes and listened to his heart slowing down in his chest, counting out the beats. There was a rhythm between Jean-Étienne’s stuttered breaths and his own longer ones that his fingers tapped out without consciousness.

One of the cats took a tentative step into the room. The weight of the tiny footsteps and three-legged gait sounded like Sashimi. Seeming to decide that it was safe, he padded across the room, avoiding the glass, to sit beside Jean-Étienne. Tetsuro heard his head rubbing against Jean-Étienne’s jeans. The soft purring became more audible as Jean-Étienne’s breathing steadied.

Tetsuro watched Jean-Étienne shove his own shoulder and finger back into place. A small twitch of his mouth was the only indication of pain. He lowered his legs just enough to let Sashimi crawl into his lap.

And he didn’t want me to keep them…

Beneath the blood, the wounds in Jean-Étienne’s face were already starting to scab over.

“So what happened?” Tetsuro asked.

It was hard to tell whether he was ‘allowed’ to look at Jean-Étienne when he got into these moods. It was safest to keep his eyes on a hole in the drywall that he was going to have to patch.

Jean-Étienne looked at him. Despite the dampness in his eyes, they were focused. He pursed his lips together and frowned down at Sashimi, who was now rubbing his chest against one of the burn scars that textured the rose tattoo covering it, smearing blood over Jean-Étienne’s chest. His jaw tensed, and he shook his head.

“Something must have happened. We just redid the bathroom,” Tetsuro said.

The statements were mostly unrelated. 

“Elyes will pay to have it done again,” Jean-Étienne said in a hoarse voice that was surprisingly deep for the way he looked.

“It’s not about the money, it’s about— I can pay for it myself!” Tetsuro said.

Just because he didn’t have literal hoards of money hidden around the world like the former pirate captain didn’t mean he didn’t have money of his own. He maintained a minimalist lifestyle by choice. Rent would have been his biggest expense if he hadn’t bought the building some 50 years ago, before the neighbourhood had really been built up. 

And that wasn’t the point!

Jean-Étienne let out a long sigh. He pushed his hair back with the hand not scratching behind Sashimi’s ears. The black curtain fell back over his face. He was no longer the only one of their little band with light hair. There were still several more seconds of silence before he spoke. His voice was quiet, but slightly less hoarse now.

“There is this girl that I teach dance to, she is maybe about the age I was when I come to America. I find out today that her boyfriend is closer maybe to your age.”

Tetsuro clenched his teeth together. The lower fangs scraped against the roof of his mouth.

No wonder Jean-Étienne had gone a little feral. Even Tetsuro had a slight urge to break something. 

Jean-Étienne always claimed wasn’t completely sure how old he had been when he’d left France with a much older patron, but he knew he’d been a teenager. When Tetsuro pictured himself at that age, he imagined somebody who had already spent a lifetime honing his mind and body for art and war. At the same time, Jean-Étienne would have been in a similar position. Both samurai and ballet dancers started young.

Maybe it was because Jean-Étienne already looked younger than him, but Tetsuro couldn’t help feeling a protectiveness for the teenage Jean-Étienne that he didn’t feel for his own teenage self.

“Well, shit. What did you do about it?” Tetsuro asked.

“Nothing yet. I wanted to, but… I would have ripped him apart right in the middle of the street,” Jean-Étienne said.

“I wouldn’t have blamed you for it,” Tetsuro said.

“No. But you would have given me shit if I did something ‘reckless and stupide,’” Jean-Étienne said, making air quotes with his left hand.

“That—“

Actually, that was fair.

The number of times Jean-Étienne had gotten a little too carried away was far higher than it should have been. Drawing the attention of humans and authorities was one thing. It was another matter entirely if he brought hunters with him. The two from Sweden were no-doubt already watching them.

And then there was the Egyptian hunter.

She didn’t have nearly the skills to kill vampires as old as them. In those terms, he was more worried about the Swedes. The difference was that between her and Tetsuro, it was personal. She was the granddaughter of the ghoul hunter who had helped Tetsuro kill his maker. He’d spent years doing what he could to look out for her from afar. She’d looked up to him, and he’d betrayed her by being this. 

A monster.

Tetsuro picked up a piece of glass and turned it over in his hand. His reflection had dark brown eyes. Brys and Jean-Étienne never bothered with them, but he considered coloured contacts to be a blessing.

“We have to keep a low profile. You just fed, right? Wait a few days,” Tetsuro said.

Jean-Étienne frowned.

“A few days… And then what?” Jean-Étienne asked.

“And then, just keep it clean. I’m going back to Japan for a few weeks. In the meantime, you’re redoing the bathroom.”

Read more about Tetsuro in A Beat of Honour

Go into battle expecting to die…

Born and raised as a samurai, Tetsuro Saito expected to die in battle. He didn’t expect to rise again. 

Waking up in the middle of a bloodbath, Tetsuro is horrified to discover he’s been turned into a vampire by a man with a violent agenda. Unless Tetsuro can find a way to stop him, Maxwell Osborne will continue to create an army of immortals. Fighting the bloodthirsty urges now burning through his veins, Tetsuro vows to kill Osborne and spare the world fate he has in store for it.

Everything he once stood for has been ripped away. The life he once had is gone. Will Tetsuro be strong enough to defeat his maker while starving his new impulses? Or will victory demand he lose himself to the darkness rising within him?