Karhi Emelyn

With Sloane disappearing, Karhi stepped off of Mira’s property immediately. Mira had already told him earlier that day that he wasn’t to step on it, and the glares of the werewolves in front of him reinforced that he shouldn’t overstay his welcome. Or lack thereof.

On the sidewalk, he still didn’t know what to do. He was annoyed that Sloane had disappeared (though arguably, it wasn’t her fault), but he also didn’t want to leave before he saw her back.

He was pretty sure Sloane had gotten blood earlier in the day when they were with Lunette, but it probably didn’t hurt to go get her more. It would take him away from here and would give him something to do. He started down the street, passing by a black car as he did.

He should also probably call Lunette.

“Bell, I swear to fucking god, if you try to go after her and demand answers right now, I will cut your fucking dick off.”

But he could stay to listen to this.

He paused just past the tree line that separated Mira’s house from the next.

“Mira, she can’t keep us waiting forever,” Bell spat back at her.

“You fucking broke her, you selfish piece of garbage,” Mira snarled at him. “You two disappeared on her eighteenth birthday, and suddenly reappear without even so much as a call? Have you even been fucking paying attention?”

Bell didn’t have a reply for that.

“She is not the person I used to know.” Mira’s voice almost hitched as she said that.

“Yeah, she’s a fucking vampire.” Bell didn’t catch that Mira was upset beyond being angry at him.

“That’s your fault, too.”

Actually, Karhi was pretty sure that was his fault, but he wasn’t going to say anything.

Bell spluttered.

“She’s barely laughed since she’s been here,” Mira said. “We are in a grim dark place, but Sloane’s humour has always been grim and dark. But she doesn’t even seem capable of that right now. And how long has she been like that?”

Karhi had never really thought of Sloane as someone who laughed a lot.

“And you’ve lived with her for almost a year,” Mira muttered.

Karhi wasn’t surprised Mira was listening to his thoughts, but he wasn’t thrilled about it either.

“What?” Bell said.

“Quit lurking,” Mira said.

Karhi knew that was aimed at him. He turned around and moved back into their sight.

Bell bristled at seeing Karhi. Karhi noted the Mickey barely seemed to react to his presence at all. He tensed, but his body language wasn’t antagonistic towards Karhi. He just looked sad.

“Why are you still here, bloodsucker?” Bell hissed at him.

“Because he’s curious and also has an answer to my question. Karhi, would you describe Sloane as a happy person?”

“I would not,” Karhi replied.

“Is she funny?”

“Not particularly.” He was beginning to see she had more of a personality than anger and apathy, but it was slow to reveal itself.

Mira glared at Bell and Mickey. Bell was doing his hardest to look anywhere but at Mira. Mickey stared at the ground. “You two fucking did that,” she snarled at them. “Sloane is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life. And it used to be so easy to get her to laugh. But now? Her depression? That’s on you and the choices you made.”

Surprisingly, it was Mickey, not Bell who responded. “You don’t know what we had to do,” he murmured. He still didn’t look at her.

“I don’t give a flying fuck what you had to do,” she snapped back at him. “You don’t abandon family, Mickey Blackthorne.”

Mickey didn’t have an answer to that. He was tense, his gaze hard on the ground. Karhi could read the anger in his features, but it didn’t seem to be aimed at Mira. It was aimed inward.

“If you want to be useful and regain her trust, go find her and watch out for her,” Mira told them. “Whatever’s going on, it won’t hurt her to have backup. But don’t fucking demand forgiveness.”

“We don’t know—”

“Supposedly you’re werewolves. Y’all are trackers. Go fucking track her.”

Mickey and Bell exchanged glances before stalking off. Bell glared at Karhi one final time for good measure before disappearing down the street.

Mira huffed out a sigh through her nose. “I have a headache now.”

“I’ve heard Advil helps,” Karhi said, turning from her.

“You’re getting her blood?”

He glanced back at her, nodding.

“Good. She’s always been bad about eating or drinking.”

That made him pause. “Wait, even as a human?”

She nodded. “Food is scarce when you’re poor. And I don’t think it ever really left her.”

That . . . actually explained a lot.

He paused for a moment before saying, “I don’t know a lot about what’s going on—Sloane has never mentioned Mickey and Bell. But I’m not sure if you can reasonably blame everything she’s going through on them.”

She put her hands to her head and massaged her temples. “You’re probably right. They were just the final block that tipped the tower. But it’s easier to blame them than a lifetime of disappointment and bad shit.”

He bit his lip for a moment before turning from her. “I’ll be back.” As he did, for the first time he registered the black car parked in front of their house. It looked very familiar.

He went around to the back of the car. The plates were Arizona plates and there were bumper stickers on the back of the car. On the side, he saw the passenger door dent from when Sloane had been reckless about parking it.

“This is my car,” he said.

“Sloane is very good at hotwiring.”

He glanced at Mira. “Yeah.” He didn’t even have his keys to reclaim it. But it didn’t look in bad shape. Hadn’t Sloane said it was uninsurable?

“She probably had the VIN scrubbed off,” Mira volunteered.

“Stay out of my head,” he growled, turning and leaving.

“Nope!” she called after him.

Where St. Paul had Swanskin’s, Phoenix had Lazarus. Primarily, Lazarus was a place for magics to party and drink and do drugs. But, if you knew who to ask, you could find harder things, like offers of power and wealth—always more of either than was safe, and always at a price that wasn’t actually worth it.

The building itself was little more than an enormous pink warehouse with bubbly neon letters in rainbow colours saying Lazarus.

It was early enough that there was no line to get inside. The front door was propped open with a cinder block, a single male vampire standing outside, hands crossed over his chest. He glanced at Karhi as he walked up. “Welcome back,” he said.

Karhi let out a surprised thank you as he walked by. Welcome back? Karhi hadn’t been to Lazarus in several years. Did that greeting mean anything specific, or was that just something the bouncer said to everyone who came through? This was the only place that any magics in the city would go to be free from human scrutiny.

A concrete hallway that reminded Karhi of something he would see in a baseball stadium led from the front door into the club. He could feel a dull, reverberating sound in his chest and throat as he walked.

The door at the end of the hallway led into a cavernous room. A bar easily the size of half his apartment took up the back. The rest of the room stepped down in tiers, with booths and tables on the top tiers, couches and chairs on the lower tiers, and a chequered dance floor on the final tier. A stage rose up at the end of the dance floor, a single drum set sitting at the back of it. The room was filled with growling, industrial music playing from speakers built into the walls.

There were a handful of patrons, some sitting at tables, some sitting at the bar. Three bartenders worked to fill drinks and take orders at the counter while servers drifted around the room.

“Hey, Karhi,” one of the bartenders said.

Karhi blinked, looking at the bartender and furrowing his eyebrows. He was a tall, muscular man with a handlebar moustache and shoulder-length dreadlocks. Karhi had met him a few years back when he was in Phoenix for Ilona.

“Sid . . .” Karhi said, moving to stand at the bar. “How are you? It’s been, what, eight years?”

Sid eyed him, raising an eyebrow. He was drying out a shaker. “You were here last night, man.”

Karhi blanched. “I was?” He didn’t know how else to finish that. He wasn’t comfortable admitting something like this to someone he barely knew, but he also needed information on where he had been the night he lost his memory.

“Yeah,” he said, setting down the shaker. “You came in around two or three AM? Had a couple drinks and then left with one of the blood workers.” He pointed to a small grouping of plush chairs and couches on one of the tiers closer to them. Men and women sat or lounged on those couches, chatting to each other or texting on phones. Their outfits were flashy and revealing, most of them wearing high heels and crop tops. One of the men wore bondage gear and talked to another man with peacock feathers in his hair.

Karhi’s brow furrowed. “Do you know who?”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t one I was familiar with. She was new, maybe. You can ask Larry.” He pointed to the man with peacock feathers in his hair. “He’s the one who keeps track of them.”

“Thanks,” Karhi said.

“No problem, man. If you don’t remember, you must’ve gotten pretty fucked up.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Karhi made his way to the blood workers. He could differentiate the regular sex workers from the blood sex workers by the bites on the blood workers’ arms and necks. The man with the peacock feathers had three bruises just barely obscured by cover-up on his neck.

As he walked towards them, a hush passed through them. People saw him and they’d trail off into silence. Karhi clacked his tongue piercing against his teeth nervously.

One whispered something Karhi couldn’t catch above the bass to the peacock man. He looked up and when he saw Karhi, his eyes narrowed. He stepped in front of the others to meet Karhi. “Why are you here?” he demanded.

Karhi paused. “What?”

“I know it isn’t an explicit rule, but it is generally understood that when a vampire kills a blood worker, they aren’t welcome back.”

Karhi froze, staring at the man. His mouth went dry. “Killed?” he whispered.

“Don’t play dumb. You left this morning with Rhee, and she’s found in a dumpster six hours later? Completely drained?” He glared at Karhi.

Karhi blinked, staring at the man. It was like he had punched a hole in Karhi’s chest. “No! I haven’t killed a human in four hundred years.”

“Well, maybe you got too fucking high with her, and you killed her. You were asking if any of us did dope. And you were practically hard when Rhee told you she did.” He shook his head bitterly. “She was so new, too. She had only been here a few weeks, but she was doing so well for herself. Fucking disgusting.” He spat at Karhi.

The spit landed on his cheek, but he hardly registered it.

The woman he had picked up the previous morning had been found dead in a dumpster? But . . . Karhi would have never done that. He hadn’t killed a human in centuries. And he certainly wouldn’t have dumped her like garbage even if he had. Someone his age—there would be proper channels to report the death and make reparations to the loved ones of the deceased.

Straight-up killing humans wasn’t as accepted as it used to be. It was sloppy and displayed a lack of finesse and grace. And while using the proper channels wasn’t required, it was expected from any vampire who wanted to maintain their reputation. If Karhi had killed a human, it would be expected that he would follow the rules.

He turned to leave and felt eyes on him from above. He looked up to where there was a balcony around the edge of the room, leading to private rooms. He froze.

A pale vampire stood at the railing, in front of a door. He was tall and wiry, his hair like white ice. He locked glacial blue eyes with Karhi.

When their eyes met, whispers like the rustling of leaves filled his head. He could just make out words behind the rustling, but he couldn’t pick anything out.

Karhi looked away and wiped his face. He had to get out of here.

He had originally come here to get blood for Sloane. But all thoughts of that fled from his head as he fled from Lazarus.

He didn’t want to go back to the hotel and risk running into Ilona again. Not when he knew about Sloane, and Ilona could find out about it. Instead, he moved back closer to Mira’s house. Not exactly on her block, but close enough that he could see if Sloane came back. He could see Mira’s front yard from where he stood beneath a broken light post. It was dark enough on the street that no one would be able to see him from the house.

Here was probably the safest place to be. Ilona wouldn’t dare pull a move so close to the White Psychic’s house. Hazel would be only too happy to return the favour.

He called Luna and she answered on the first ring.

“What the fuck do you want?” she growled.

“Help,” he answered honestly.

The pause on the other end told him that she hadn’t expected that answer. “Help for what?”

“Apparently I was at Lazarus last night before I was . . . taken, or whatever. And the woman I left with turned up dead this morning.”

“Dead? That doesn’t sound like you.”

No, it sounded like Lunette, but he wouldn’t say that. “No,” he agreed. “I need to figure out what happened to me last night.”

“Or this morning. Or this afternoon.”

“Luna, one thing at a time,” he growled. Everything today had been so much of a blur that he hadn’t been able to actually sit down and process anything. His kidnapping (if that’s what it had been?), the men who had tried to take him from the brothel (related to the kidnapping?), or Sloane’s reappearance (probably not related to the kidnapping).

“Where’s that bitch now?”

He refrained from asking if she was talking about herself. “Luna—”

“Fine,” she snapped. “I’ve been looking into that house you escaped from anyways.”

He blinked. “What?”

“After that bitch split my head open, and you were so fucking helpful in telling me what’s going on, I needed something to do to keep from killing you. When we drove to the psychic’s house, you described where you woke up. I took your description and went searching for the general area. I caught your scent and followed it back to the house.”

He wouldn’t comment on it, but this was actually the only way he knew Lunette gave a shit about him. She would tell him to go fuck himself while also actively searching to help him. Carry and Onyx, and even Zeren to an extent, were all very expressive and affectionate. Over the years, it had worn him down and he had begun to reciprocate it. Even expected it.

But Lunette’s entire exterior was made of barbed wire and dry ice. It hurt to touch her. Oftentimes, it hurt to talk to her. She took brutally honest to mean that she would beat him over the head until he bent to her.

She had learned a lot from Ilona over the years.

Silence had fallen between them and Karhi realized she was waiting for him to acknowledge her. “Yeah,” he said.

“It was a small, three-bedroom house. Some furniture in the rooms, but it was pretty obvious that no one had ever lived there. No food in the kitchen, just some plasticware and paper plates and cups. It was a safe house or something.

“There was no one there. I could smell blood and bleach—someone had cleaned up after the shifter you killed. I saw where you broke through the window, since that hadn’t been fixed yet. But otherwise, there was nothing. Not even anything in the trashes.”

He hadn’t expected Lunette to find anything, but he did still find himself disappointed at the lack of new information. “Is that it?”

“It’s owned by a shell corporation, but I haven’t been able to figure out where the money is coming from. The doors were reinforced with heavy steel, and those bars over the windows could withstand a beating from the outside if necessary. But obviously not from the inside. Whoever owns it is definitely used to dealing with magics, but maybe not vampires since we can cut through steel. I’m digging deeper but it’ll be a bit before I figure it out.”

He nodded even though she couldn’t see him. “Thanks, Luna.”

“What is that brat doing?”

“Do you actually want to know, or are you going to just yell at me about her some more?”

“You could answer, or we can talk about how you turned a nineteen-year-old.”

There were no good ways to get out of this conversation. But . . . Lunette had had a lot of slip-ups with turning humans over the years. As far as he knew, they had never been underage, but she had been in trouble a lot with the vampire courts.

“Do you know the consequences?” he finally asked.

Lunette made a noise of disgust in the back of her throat. But she did answer. “It depends,” she said. Her voice sounded tight, like she was just barely holding back another growl of irritation. “Nineteen is a grey area with humans. Because humans’ age of adulthood is generally recognized as eighteen. The vampire courts generally frown on turning below twenty. It’s illegal below eighteen, but eighteen and nineteen are grey. Basically, as long as the fledgling doesn’t pull any shit, you should be fine.”

That was a minor relief. It hadn’t really been a huge concern of his, but because of the questionable legality, it had been niggling at the back of his head. “Thanks,” he said.

“Did you turn her at nineteen or eighteen?” she asked.

“Nineteen,” he said. In fact, it had been her nineteenth birthday the night he had turned her, he later found out.

“Oh good. Because if you had turned her at eighteen, you have to keep track of her until she turns twenty.”

His brow furrowed. “What?”

“A sire staying with their fledgling for a year after they turn is a general rule. But if you turn them at eighteen, you have to stick around until twenty, because you’re kind of their guardian. It’s this weird . . . not law, but kind of unspoken rule.”

He hadn’t known that.

“And incidentally, fledglings under twenty aren’t really subject to the same rules as the rest of us. They’re still underage. They don’t get punished for things the same way overage vampires do.”

He leaned against the lamp he had been standing next to. “Like what?”

“Eh, violating rules in neutral territories like the courts or violating hospitality rules like they have at big festivals or parties or whatever. Most of us would get put to death. They get a stern warning, and their sire gets fined.”

“Fined?”

Lunette chuckled darkly. “Money or service or any other sorts of things. I heard one time that a sire that had pissed off the courts had to serve as Aurelia’s hand maiden for like a decade after her fledgling killed someone at a Yule festival.”

Karhi glanced up at the sky thoughtfully. He couldn’t see any stars, just darkness. A gentle breeze brushed his skin.

“Karhi, why don’t you know any of this shit?”

“Because I haven’t sired hundreds of children,” he replied coolly, clicking his tongue against his teeth.

She replied with something not physically possible.

“I don’t have tentacles,” he replied distractedly, something popping into his mind. “Lunette, how normal is it for fledglings to forget to feed?”

The pause he got in response told him that she hadn’t expected that question. “Uh . . . not at all. Why?”

“Sloane forgets frequently. I’ve had to open a vein more than once to feed her. And then, afterwards, she drinks two or three bags of blood.” He didn’t want to tell her that Azlea and Thirn told him to ask because he was still trying to understand what the hell had happened with them.

Lunette cursed. She sounded . . . impressed? “How is she still alive?”

“I don’t know. I spoke with Mira, and she said, with the way they grew up, Sloane went without food more often than not.”

“Hmm.” He heard her scribbling something down. “Yeah . . . that could be it. Big influences can carry over into vampirism. For example, someone who spent a lot of time trying to be invisible as a human could have an ability to—”

“Turn invisible?” He had never heard of that as a vampire power, only a paramortal power . . .

“No. Vampires don’t develop powers like that. No, they could make themselves easily overlooked as a vampire. They could be in a group of people, and the next day, no one in that group even remembers they were there that night.”

“Or someone who spent most of her life dreaming and imagining a better life would wind up being able to make illusions as a vampire?” Onyx had spent her life locked up by her father because of her albinism. She’d had to find ways to entertain herself.

“Yes. Sloane’s power may not have manifested because the whole time it’s just been incredible thirst control.”

He nodded thoughtfully.

“Anyway, where is she?”

He heard a car door slam just as he caught the scent of burnt meat and sulphur on the wind. He looked up to see a taxi in front of Mira’s house. Sloane was already out of it, by the door next to the curb. She opened it and reached in to help somebody out.

“Gotta go,” he said.

“Karhi!” Lunette protested. “What the—”

“Call you later, bye.”