Page 21 of His Realm

“If everyone is drinking from you, how do you have enough blood to sustain your number?” Zev asked him, sounding confused.

“We eat as well.”

“I’m sorry?”

“We eat,” he repeated.

“How?”

“I am certain, just as you do,” he said, giving me a smile.

“What do you eat?”

“Fish mostly,” he told me. “Fruit and vegetables, and we have chickens, goats, and sheep.”

“And you eat all that?”

He nodded.

“Vampyrs eat?” I asked Zev.

“It would make sense. The original mutation, possibly due to lack of available resources, allowed the first vampyrs to drink blood and survive. In Ophir, without enough blood to go around, since all the iceni blood isn’t going to each other, but to the nobles, a change had to happen to allow them to live in addition to blood.”

“I get the reason for it. I simply don’t understand the how.”

“Just because all the vampyrs you’ve met don’t eat or drink anything but blood doesn’t mean their bodies have forgotten how. Evolution doesn’t work like that.” He sounded like Varic. “How could I not be able to digest a piece of meat? Meat is still blood, right?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Take fruit, for example. What’s the difference between drinking juice and eating the fruit? It’s the same source, and you can digest both. Apparently, the iceni in Ophir can also do both.”

“So the ability to digest other things isn’t absent in vampyrs.”

He shook his head.

“From how it’s been explained to me, I thought you lost the capacity to digest food because maintaining the digestive pathways—I mean, why would there be a need for that?”

“There’s no need, but it’s also not an impediment, evolution-wise. Vampyrs learned how to subsist on only blood—that’s a mutation that allowed many to live through whatever event killed off those who couldn’t,” he reminded me. “It makes sense that it could work, over generations, in reverse.”

I exhaled deeply. “Sorry, I—I had no idea.”

“I didn’t either.”

“So technically, you could have a steak if you wanted.”

He was quiet a moment. “There would be no point, as I couldn’t get anything I needed from that. That steak won’t sustain me in any way, just as iceni blood would not.”

“But you’re not a noble.”

“True,” he said with a grin, “but I am old.”

“Okay, so nobles need noble blood, richer blood, never mixed with human, and so do you because you’re ancient.”

“You make it sound so terrible.”

“Don’t be funny. I’m trying to understand.”

“Sorry. So yes, correct. Iceni blood, or a steak, would be useless to me. Iceni, back in ancient times, had been vampyrs who bred with humans. They have mixed blood, and even if they have only one human ancestor, that slight dilution of blood can be tasted. Older vampyrs can smell that ‘un-pure’ blood through the skin. I’m curious to find out how drinking only iceni blood is working for Decimus’s court,” Zev admitted. “I can’t imagine how blood from people who eat food is sustaining a noble.”