That couldn’t be her.

I looked back down, focusing on the dark wood of the countertop. Dishcloth in hand, I continued my 11 PM round of wiping down the counter.

As I moved, I picked up empty glasses from the bar and set them into the sink. My next move would be to load the dishwasher next to one of the sinks.

I felt eyes on me as I went through the motions. The same cold gaze I had noticed earlier.

No. What would Corvine be doing here? It had been two years since I had last seen her, and almost a full year since I had died. How could she have found me? Supposedly my tracks were well hidden.

Though I didn’t have much faith in the man who had supposedly hidden my tracks. He could have botched it up. He botched most things up.

No, but I hid my own tracks well, too. I had always been good at disappearing. It was one of my magic tricks.

I finished up the counter and moved back to load the dishwasher with glasses.

“Sloane.”

I looked up at the sound of my name. It was said in the tone of voice that said this wasn’t the first time I was being called.

Two women sat on the other side of the bar from me.

One had light brown skin and shoulder-length thick brown hair streaked with purple. She wore a forest green dress that set off her hazel eyes. She looked to be in her late twenties, but if I remembered correctly, she was originally from Turkey circa the Ottoman Empire.

The second had skin so pale it was almost a blue-white. Her hair was white, the top half plaited behind her head, the bottom half left to fall down her back. Red eyes watched me from behind white lashes. It was hard to guess how old she looked, but she was from some northern European country circa some revolution. American or French, I couldn’t remember.

I sighed when I saw them, going back to loading the dishwasher. “What?”

“You know, you’d be less grouchy all the time if you just slept at normal times for a vampire instead of trying to keep useless human hours and going out during the day,” the albino woman said.

“Has it ever occurred to you that I’m just grouchy when it’s you, Onyx?” I replied, closing up the dishwasher and setting it to run.

“Well, you also get grouchy with me,” the other woman said.

I looked up at her. She rested her chin on the back of her knuckles, a slight pout on her dark lips. “There seems to be a theme, Carry,” I said.

Her pout turned into a scowl. “We’re only ever nice to you.”

“Because you also want to get into my pants.”

It was Onyx’s turn to scowl. “You already said no, we’re not going to keep trying. You’re just mean because you and Karhi got into a fight again.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, turning to the wall of alcohol behind the bar. I reached for the vodka and set it down before fishing out the Bloody Mary mix from the fridge under the bar. This one was formulated for vampires. Real blood.

“What, did he chew you out again for not drinking enough blood?” Carry asked.

They were right, but I wasn’t going to tell them that. I was already pissed enough that I had collapsed in front of him after not drinking enough blood. I didn’t need his sisters knowing how that fucker had to give me his own blood directly, because bagged blood wasn’t enough at that point.

I gave them irritated looks. “If you stop talking about it, I’ll put two doubles in your Bloody Marys.”

“Ooh, must’ve been bad this time,” Onyx giggled.

“No doubles, then,” I said. “And you get the Skol vodka for that.” I turned back to the bar to grab the bottom shelf vodka.

“Fiiiiine, we’ll stop,” Carry sighed dramatically. “But only if you put Ciroc in.”

I rolled my eyes but set the Skol back and reached for the Ciroc.

As I poured out the vodka, I found my eyes wandering out past the bar top again.

The floors, bar, and booths were a dark wood that gave the room a slick, clean look. The tables were pale wood accented with the same dark wood in the floors. It broke up the monochrome while tying the room together nicely. The walls were painted a muted sage green. Paintings and prints for purchase by local Indigenous artists adorned the walls. I had bought one to hang over my bed.

The coolest thing, though, was the pillars that held up the room. The owner of the bar came from a family that had both O’odham roots as well as Tlingit. She had had artists carve into the pillars and had lacquered over them to preserve them. My favorite was a school of salmon running up one pillar as a bear looked over them hungrily.

My eyes drifted to the woman that had caught my attention before Carry and Onyx arrived.

She was nondescript, maybe in her late twenties or early thirties. Inky black hair fell down her back, covering most of her face. She looked like any other mage or shifter who came into the bar.

She drank a seltzer. I hadn’t served her when she came in. It had been the owner, Niqui Swanskin.

She put a hand around her glass and brought it up to her lips to sip. As she did, for a second, I thought I saw her shimmer, like a bad TV signal. With the shimmer, I saw something black on the edge of the back of her hand, an inch or so below her pinky. It was a tattoo.

It happened so fast, but it was enough.

Why was she here?

“Sloane?” Carry said.

I looked up at Carry, setting their drinks in front of them. “Yeah?”

“Do you have any more of the curly straws?”

“Yeah!” Onyx grinned. “The ones with the bright colors!”

I paused for a moment, glancing at the strange woman. “No,” I said. “We don’t. We won’t, either. Nevermore shall we have those straws.”

As I turned and spoke, I saw what I was expecting. At the word “Nevermore”, the woman shimmered again, this time more noticeably and violently.

I knew it.

“Why not?” Carry asked, pouting.

I shrugged. “We got a messed-up shipment for that Tiki Bar down the street and Niqui kept the straws. She didn’t plan on ordering them again. Ask her.”

I turned from them and headed to the kitchen at the back of the room.

The kitchen was long, one half dedicated to cooking and baking, the other to prepping ingredients. The floors were tiled linoleum in here for easier clean-up, the walls painted a pale cream color, reflecting the overhead lights.

A dark-haired man in his late twenties worked at the grill, while a woman with her hair tied up in a bandana worked at the prep station. We didn’t get a lot of orders for food here since at least a third of our clientele didn’t subsist off of normal food; and the rest normally didn’t order out because their appetites were so large that it was too expensive. One cook and one prep were enough to tide over the customers who did eat.

“Hey, Gracie.”

“Hey, Sloane,” Gracie said, glancing up from where she was cutting bell peppers. She wiped her hands off on her apron.

Gracie was a small woman with short brown hair, a tuft of white at the base of her skull. She shapeshifted into a pony, I was pretty sure.

The chef, Nino, glanced up. When he saw me, he waved.

“Where’s Niqui?” I signed.

“Downstairs,” he replied with one hand, keeping his other on the steak and peppers he was cooking.

“Thanks. Do you need anything while I’m down there?”

“Can you ask Niqui for more oil when she’s counted that off on inventory?”

“Sure.”

I crossed to the stairs descending into the basement.

Niqui had hired Gracie and Nino after I had become a vampire. They had taken some time to warm up to me. Both being shapeshifters left a lot of prejudices.

Gracie had been actively hostile for a while after she started before slowly warming up to me. Nino hadn’t had the chance to be hostile for very long. I was fluent in American Sign Language and had been the one to interview him when he applied for the job. It had thrown him for a loop, not needing to request an interpreter, not needing to rely on his hearing aids, and being interviewed by a vampire. Language barriers made fast friends when you could transcend them.

The basement was one large room divided in two. One half was a freezer, the other half just shelves of food, booze, and consumables.

Niqui was not in the warm half of the basement, meaning her inventory had taken her to the freezer. I found her in there, holding a clipboard with blue fingers. She was shivering.

Niqui was average height, coming up to just under my chin. She kept her dark brown hair short and clipped back, baring razor-sharp cheekbones.

“If I still had them, I’d be freezing my balls off.”

“Then get out. Should’ve had me do the inventory. Air temperature don’t bother me.”

She grumbled a wordless response.

“Hey, Rachel is coming in about ten minutes. Would you hate me if I asked to get off early?”

She eyed me. “Why?”

“I have a visitor,” I said. “I’d rather catch her before she disappears.”

“Who?”

“I think you served her. Seltzer water at one of the tables?”

She looked up at the frozen meat on the shelves before us, considering my request. “Yeah,” she finally agreed. “Alright.”

I grinned. “You’re the best.”

“I know,” she replied. “I need a break anyway, so I’ll work the bar until Rachel gets in.”

“Nino needs oil.”

“Sure.”

I left the freezer, grabbing a ginger ale as I passed by the canned drinks.

I went back upstairs, updating Nino as I went into the bar.

The woman still sat at the same table. I let myself out through the back of the bar and skirted the edge of the room until I came up behind her.

A moment before I reached her, the woman suddenly sat up straight, as if someone had poured ice water down her back.

I thumped the can down on the table.

The woman looked up at me, surprised.

“It took me five years,” I told her. “But you can finally try ginger ale.”

She didn’t say anything.

“You were real good,” I said. “You would’ve kept me guessing. But then you shimmered.” I tapped the area on my hand where I had seen the tattoo on hers. “Your giveaway.”

The look on her face was surprised, eyes wide, eyebrows up, mouth slightly parted—as if she didn’t know who I was and didn’t know why I was talking. But I waited.

Then she smiled. “So, you did do that on purpose.”

“What? The ‘nevermore’?”

Her shoulders went up and she shuddered. “Quit.”

“Quit the act,” I said. “Let’s see you.”

She motioned for me to sit down.

I sat down and little bits of her skin started to turn over, starting from her head and going down. It was like she had scales that flipped and morphed to change the shape of her body. I felt the static discharge of magic in the air around her.

The woman disappeared and, in her place, sat a teenager. Her eyes and hair had darkened almost to black. Her hair was longer and duller, and her skin had darkened to a dull tawny beige. She wore a long-sleeved black shirt and black pants now.

Her fingers grew longer, and the tattoo that I expected appeared. However, there were now identical marks on both of her hands, which I didn’t remember. It looked like a candy cane with the short part curving upwards at the end. The longer ends were facing her thumbs.

I smiled when I saw her. “There you are.”

“And there you are,” she said. She looked me up and down. “You’re a vampire now,” she said. She shook her head. “Of all the stupid things you’ve done . . .”

“I’m the victim,” I argued.

She tilted her head to the side and regarded me with steady eyes. “You have never been the victim.”

I pressed my lips together in a line and felt eyes on the back of my head. Glancing back, I saw Onyx and Carry watching us. They didn’t bother trying to pretend they weren’t.

“But I digress,” Corvine said. I heard the pop and fizz of a can of soda opening. She took a sip of the soda.

Pulling the can away from her mouth, she said, “So, this is what Annie loves so much.”

“Annie loves ginger beer,” I corrected her. “Ginger ale isn’t spicy enough for her. But I figured I’d ease you into it.”

She nodded, drinking more. “This spiciness suffices. The ginger and the carbonation are enough.”

We were quiet for a minute. When I realized she wasn’t going to talk, I broke the silence. “Okay. I’ve waited long enough, Corvine. Why are you here?” I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms.

She set the can next to her seltzer and looked down. She drew the water left from the condensation rings of her glass with one finger.

“It . . . has been rough the past few weeks.”

I uncrossed my arms, relaxing slowly. “Worse than usual?”

She held up her hands, showing me the backs. “I have two now.”

“I noticed. I thought maybe I’d forgotten two marks.”

She shook her head, smiling.

Her smile fell when she glanced at Onyx and Carry. She shook her head. “I don’t like that.”

She waved her hand, and the noise around us muffled. I saw Onyx and Carry’s eyes widen. Corvine had put a spell around us so no one, especially not the vampires with super senses, could hear us. “Vampires are so rude,” she said.

“Seriously. They spy on you and all they do is listen to your business.”

She nodded.

“So how did that happen?” I asked, pointing to her hands.

“Infighting,” she said. “King Rok attacked me.”

I looked up at the ceiling, thinking. Of the animalia, I only knew a few names. “He’s a bird king, right? That’s the only way you got the other tattoo.”

“Crows,” she said. “And he was.”

I had to think about what she meant for a minute before understanding she was correcting my “is” to “was”. “When did you kill him?”

“A few weeks ago,” she said. “And now I have the new mark.” She tapped her left hand.

“So, you get two now. How is it?”

“He had begun to lose their loyalty decades ago. He did not protect them as he should. Pestilence and plague had overcome parts of his kingdom due to his lapses in judgment and there was much death and disease. His attack was the best thing that had happened to his kingdom in a long time. They are better.” She smiled a sad smile. I had never known Corvine to be one to enjoy a fight.

“But I never answered your question,” she said. “You asked why I was here.”

I nodded.

“Things have been difficult. I lost my war general, Catrina, in the fighting and I gained a new kingdom to rule. You can imagine the strain it put,” she said, tapping her temple.

“Yeah.”

“So, I sought you out,” she said. “I knew you left Phoenix four years ago. And I found out where you lived after that. But then, it turned out you left Washington, as well. It was hard finding you, but I did. Few ravens venture south in Minnesota. Crows, on the other hand, are everywhere. I found you almost immediately once I began looking through crows.

“And I came here. Obviously.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

She surprised me by reaching out and grabbing my hands. Hers were warm and soft. I froze, uncertain of what the physical contact meant.

“They’re gone.” A wide smile took over her face. It made me uncomfortable, but I was never truly comfortable around Corvine anyway. “Sloane. They disappeared the minute I walked into the room.”

I blinked, eyes wide. “What?”

“That’s how I knew you were different,” she said. “That something had changed about you. And how I knew you were in here. I am completely free,” she said, a bubble of laughter escaping with the words. “There’s nothing here.”

I grinned back at her. “Corvine, that’s fantastic!”

She nodded so hard I thought she might hurt herself. “It’s euphoric.” Her voice was breathy with excitement. “I can hardly believe it. I mean, before, the din would dull with your presence. But now? They’re gone. Everything is gone.”

“But how?” I asked. “How is that possible?”

“Vampires who had abilities before they were turned—”

“They’re amplified,” I realized. “Right. Telekinetics can knock down buildings, velocikinetics can break the sound barrier running.” I pointed at Carry. “She was a velocikinetic as a human.”

Corvine glanced at Carry. I saw Carry and Onyx didn’t like that I was pointing them out. And I’m sure they liked it even less that they couldn’t hear our conversation.

“Yes,” Corvine agreed. “You have something special.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You’re a cursebreaker,” she said.

“Is what even happens to you a curse?”

She shrugged. “If you can take it away, who knows?”

“But they don’t go away entirely—”

“But I think,” she interrupted, “that one day you could. If you were ever powerful enough.”

I fell silent. I could break curses? What did that even mean?

“I’m glad I sought you out,” she smiled. She drained her ginger ale. “I was surprised, though, when I tried to find out by listening in at the house in Phoenix, that a word was never uttered of you.”

“Good,” I murmured, looking down.

She looked me up and down, her gaze piercing. Then she said, “They don’t know.” It wasn’t a question.

“The only thing they know about me now is that every two weeks, a mysterious deposit of money appears in Mira’s account. I give her three-quarters of my paycheck and that’s the only contact I have. My boss does it anonymously.”

“I don’t think they would have a problem—”

I stood up, cutting her off. “Of course, they would. There is nothing worse that I could have become.”

“You could be dead.”

“They’d prefer it,” I replied. I felt the magic bubble around us pop and everything became louder. It was distracting for a second, but I reoriented myself. “Any of us would prefer the other dead than a bloodsucker.”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” she argued.

“No,” I said. “I know what they would say. It wouldn’t be pretty.”

She sighed. “Sloane. You are too hard on yourself. But I digress.” She liked that word.

I headed for the front door.

“You haven’t asked about—”

“I don’t want to know,” I said before she could finish the sentence. “I don’t want to talk about her.”

“She’s okay,” Corvine said anyway. She followed me through the door. “Still angry. But her kingdom doesn’t suffer.”

I had mixed feelings about that. “That’s good, at least,” I finally said. My failed relationship shouldn’t have bearing on an entire kingdom.

“It is.”

We had emerged onto the street across from the Mississippi river. It was a crisp fall night.

Corvine put a hand on my shoulder. “See you, Sloane. Thank you. And remember—”

“I know,” I said before she could finish what she would say.

“—I owe you a debt,” she said anyway.

She said that every time. I still had never cashed in that debt and I doubted I ever would.

“Later, Corvine.”

She rippled again, pieces of her skin turning over on her. She put her arms up above her head and a raven the size of a beach ball took her place. It pushed its wings down and shot up into the air. The night swallowed her up.

Just as she disappeared, I heard the door to Swanskin’s open. I glanced back and saw Onyx and Carry there.

“Who was that?” Carry asked.

“A friend,” I replied. I turned my back to them and left.

I heard the TV before I opened the door to my apartment.

The lights were off, only the glow of the wall-mounted TV illuminating the room. A silhouette sat on a blue fabric couch, legs stretched out onto a matching ottoman.

Karhi looked up as I entered. I could feel when he considered saying something smart to me before looking back at the screen. It was Kitchen Nightmares, and Gordon Ramsay was yelling at a woman about her cold food.

“Blood’s on the stove,” he said.

I didn’t reply, pulling off my boots and setting them on the shoe rack next to the front door. I hung my car keys up on the hooks under the mail organizer.

The dining room was across from the front door, open to the living room. A round dining table took up most of the room. Karhi hosted a lot of dinner parties with his siblings at that table. Or whatever you called dinner parties where the food was just blood.

I passed into the kitchen through the dining room and headed for where a stainless saucepan sat on a burner set to low. Normally we used a glorified formula dispenser called a blood warmer. I had broken it the last time I tried to use it.

The blood was warm but not hot. I drank directly from the pan, tipping it into my mouth. The thirst, normally quiet, flared suddenly as the coppery liquid hit my tongue. I had to stop myself from guzzling it and making a mess as the tremors from the thirst shook my hands.

“You work at a bar that serves blood. If you just drank on the job, you wouldn’t need so much blood when you came home.”

I almost jumped out of my skin at the sound of Karhi’s voice. I hadn’t heard him come in. I never fucking heard him move.

I shot him the finger as I turned to face him, but I didn’t stop. I needed to finish.

Karhi stood in the archway of the kitchen, leaning against the wall, long arms crossed over his chest. He wasn’t what I imagined when I thought of a five-century-old vampire. I had always expected someone who only wore suits and carried himself with refined elegance. Maybe longish hair and tall, with a lot of muscles—a lion filled to the brim with barely-contained sexual energy.

He was tall, sure. He carried himself with feline grace, too. But he reminded me more of a serval than a lion. He had long legs and arms with broad shoulders and a slim waist. His hair was wavy ash brown that reached his ears, parted over far on one side of his forehead. He only wore black, including his T-shirt, jeans, and the half-inch plugs in his ears.

He looked more like what a goth teenager imagined a five-century-old vampire to look like. If Edward Cullen had more of a personality, I guess.

I finished my drink, the tremors finally passing. “It already makes patrons uncomfortable that I’m a vampire. I’m not going to make it even more obvious by drinking blood on my shifts.”

“Get a stainless-steel thermos and suck it up,” he replied. He opened the fridge and handed me a fresh bag of blood. It had the Red Cross emblem on it.

He had a point, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. I just begrudgingly took the bag and cut open the tube at the top with my thumbnail. I stuck the line in my mouth and drank it like a Capri-Sun, squeezing the bag.

“I still don’t understand how you can drink it cold,” he shook his head, sticking out his tongue in distaste. A silver ball sat in the center of his tongue. I heard the bottom of the piercing clack against his teeth as he did.

“Food is food, whether it’s hot or cold,” I shrugged, turning from him to stick the pan in the dishwasher.

The kitchen wasn’t as big as I would have expected for a luxury apartment. The two of us could fit and cook in it at the same time comfortably (not that that would have ever happened). But it didn’t have an island, or two sinks, or copious amounts of counter space. The appliances were high end, all stainless steel, and the counter tops were pink granite, but there was only enough space to work at the stove and maybe have out one cutting board.

Karhi had left out a mess of tomatoes, celery, and salt. He had probably had one of his sisters over earlier and made Bloody Marys. It was the only thing they drank.

I stuck the remnants of the vegetables in the sink and ran the water and disposal, leaving the blood bag to hang from my mouth as I cleaned up.

“You know, you always have to be doing something when you’re eating.”

I shrugged, sticking the cutting board and knife next to the pan in the dishwasher.

“Is it to keep from focusing on the fact that you’re drinking blood?”

I shut the dishwasher harder than I needed to, turning to face Karhi. “Karhi, you’re on a one-way bus to getting punched in the mouth. What do you want?” I drained the rest of the bag and threw it out.

“Carry called me while you were on your way home.”

There it was. Karhi didn’t hover like this unless there was something he wanted to say. “And?”

“And who was your friend?”

“None of your damned business,” I replied, moving past him into the living room.

He followed me. “You’re my fledgling,” he said, extending his hands out in an over-exaggerated gesture of concern. It made me itch to punch him. “I’m here to teach you about the world of magic and how to be a vampire. It’s my job to take care of you until your year mark! I’m just making sure you’re not involved in anything dangerous.”

I spun around and hauled off, punching him square in the jaw. I had been aiming at his nose, but he moved too quickly. And his jaw was so fucking hard, I pulled away, shaking my hand out.

He glared at me, rubbing where I hit his jaw. Blood trickled down his lip where a tooth had cut it from my punch. “Did you just try to fucking sucker punch me?”

I could feel that he was irritated with my punch. But I could also feel the thing he wouldn’t say—he was impressed that I’d even succeeded in hitting him. Normally when I threatened violence, he saw it coming long before I ever acted on it. He could feel my emotions just as much as I could feel his.

I rubbed my hand. “I would think a vampire with supposed centuries of experience with hand-to-hand combat and war and strife at the direction of his own sire would be able to dodge a punch from me.”

That quenched any pride he felt towards me for landing a hit on him. He licked the blood off his lip (not as sexy as so many movies and books make it out to be, by the way) and gave me the finger.

“She was an old friend I grew up with,” I said, turning from him. This time he didn’t follow me.

“You don’t have any friends!” he called after me.

“Neither do you, asshole,” I shouted back.

“More than you!”

“Siblings are built-in friends, and therefore, they don’t fucking count!” I slammed the door to my bedroom shut.

I fell face down on my bed and growled into the comforter.

My irritation at Karhi had superseded my surprise at seeing Corvine. But as Karhi stomped back to the living room, and his own frustration faded from my consciousness, I found my mind back on her.

She had said she sought me out because she needed help. She had always had issues with hearing voices. There was something about ravens that made their monarchs hear voices. It was why ravens could talk—it was an outlet for those voices. I knew crows could talk, too. The crow monarchs probably had the same issue. And now Corvine dealt with both.

I didn’t envy her.

Now that she knew I could cancel them out completely, this probably wouldn’t be the last time I saw her. I used to be able to dull them at least a little when I was human. She would use me as a reverse form of talk therapy.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that when a little bit of your past comes back to haunt you, oftentimes a lot more of that past comes to join the haunting.