Sloane Briallen

“Mickey!” I called out. “Bell!”

I continued to push through the wet grass at the edge of the forest. It was only five, but the sky was dark from heavy rain clouds and the setting sun. A steady patter of rain hit my raincoat. I needed to at least search until the promised torrential downpour started.

It was the day after Christmas, a week since Mickey and Bell had disappeared. Mauve and Leah had begged me to stay home the day before. They were worried I wasn’t eating.

Their sons probably weren’t either.

I couldn’t fucking lose them again.

Another voice called out behind me. “Mickey! Bell!” Our friend, Sharona, had accompanied me this time.

Dark circles threatened my vision again, but I pushed through. I focused on my heavy breathing and the drumming of rain against my coat. I didn’t have time for whatever the circles meant. Not when my brothers were still out there.

It was getting darker and colder by the minute. I’d had to turn on my flashlight, and my hands were blue from the winter air. But even though it was cold, I was sweating in my rain jacket.

Memories of the first time we met ran through my head. Goofy laughter filled my ears. The heavy sound of a body hitting sand. A cry of pain. The smell of blood.

A hand touched my shoulder and I jumped, looking up.

Sharona, a pretty blonde, stood behind me. I towered over her by several inches. Concerned brown eyes looked up, searching my face. “Sloane?”

“We lost so much time, Sharona,” I said, my voice tight. Tears welled up and I tried to bite them back. “I spent so much of my life running away from them.”

She put her hand on my arm, squeezing. “You spent the past two years with them.”

“It’s not enough. I thought I would get decades. Decades to make up for all the shit I did to them.” I bit my lip, tears welling up. “Is this my fault?”

Sharona wrapped me in an embrace. She rested her head on my chest. Her voice hitched with a sob. “Of course not. This is nobody’s fault.”

I buried my face into the top of her head. Even through her raincoat, her hair smelled like apples. A shiver ran through me.

“Sloane?” she said, looking up. But her voice sounded far away.

She put her hand to my forehead, and her eyes went wide. “Sloane, you’re burning up.”

The strength left my legs and I collapsed against her. She buckled beneath my weight.

“Sloane!” Sharona shouted, panic rising in her voice. “Sloane, are you okay?”

Everything faded away until all I could feel was rain on my face.

And soon enough, not even that.

Mikko was missing. The revelation surrounding my necklace was seared into my mind, but I needed to focus on Mikko. No thoughts of Bell or Mickey—just things I needed to do. And I needed to look for Mikko. Mickey and Bell didn’t need me right now.

The first thing to do was find Annie. I knew our reunion would not go over well, but I needed to know what she knew. The move was to go to the local gyms with underground boxing rings.

Frankie and I had been the drug dealers. Genie, Frankie, and Mikko were the pickpockets. Annie’s thing was boxing. If Mikko had disappeared after boxing night, then the gyms would probably be the first places she searched.

The first gym I went to was on the poorer side of town, by Van Buren Street. Tired sex workers stood smoking cigarettes on a corner, and I saw at least two drug deals go down in a parking lot.

The gym was at a dead end, a dishwater grey building with its own parking lot behind it. There were mucked-up windows showcasing a scattered few people on treadmills inside, but for the most part it was empty. The gym closed at 10 PM.

Fights started at 11 PM.

These fights were the type that got busted by the cops every once in a while because of their questionable legality. The fighters were all amateurs and most of them were human. Those that weren’t were halfshifters, like Annie, or mages. They usually didn’t have what it took to fight in a real shapeshifter boxing ring.

So, she did these fights, and if they were against a human, she pretended that the fights weren’t already decided once she entered the ring. Jack Bryant looked the other way as long as he got a cut of some of her earnings. Jack wasn’t a magic, but he was aware of them.

I walked into the gym. The floors were concrete, terracotta walls lined with mirrors for people to watch their form. Punching bags hung across the back of the room, three boxing rings at the front. A few fighters practiced in the rings while others looked on.

Annie wasn’t here, but I hadn’t expected her to be. Mostly because I knew it couldn’t be that easy.

I recognized Jack Bryant leaning against a mirror in front of one of the rings. I glanced up as I walked toward him. One of the fighters wasn’t all that bad and the other was reasonably good. Neither of them was particularly phenomenal.

Bryant was a short middle-aged white man built like a bulldog. He had short, squat legs that looked like he was walking on canons. His chest was having a hard time fitting into his shirt and his arms were as thick as my thighs. He had a mashed-in face from a nose and jaw broken too many times. He used to be a boxer, too, just like the rest of these guys.

He looked up when he saw me coming and did a double take. His brow furrowed. “Is’at Briallen?”

“Sup, Bryant?”

“Ain’t seen you in a while.”

“Been busy,” I said. “I’m looking for Falk.”

“She came by earlier tonight looking for her boyfriend.”

“Her boyfriend?”

“Yeah. That black-haired boy you guys was always with,” he said. “Forget his name. Skinny.”

He was talking about Mikko.

“She asked if he’d been around. She was supposed to fight tonight, but she had to back out. Too bad, too, ‘cause I had a guy I wanted to fight her,” he said, pointing up at the guy who was reasonably good. “See how they do.”

“Think she’d be anywhere else?” I asked. “Glass’s or Evans’?”

“Glass is in prison, now. Evans ain’t so popular since he was caught forcing fighters to go down. You can check the other places, but Falk’s mostly been workin’ here.”

I frowned. “Thanks, man.”

“Yeah.”

The other gyms I visit had similar stories and similar amounts of actionable content. Namely, non. No one knew where Annie was.

Sitting in my car, I put my hand to my forehead, thinking. There was nothing on the boxing front. I was fairly certain I’d have to go back to Mira and demand answers. Searching out Annie, when she knew the city just as well as, if not better than, me, wasn’t going to get me far. She was a halfshifter who knew how to stalk in the night and how to lay low. If she was looking for Mikko, she could be anywhere.

There was a knock on my window. I looked up to see a kid standing there. He was light-skinned with bright blue eyes, a little scruffy but otherwise well kept. He was maybe nine. He had a Band-Aid on one cheek and one over his forehead, partially obscured by messy dark hair.

“Hey,” he said. “You’re lookin’ for Annie, right?”

“Yeah,” I nodded slowly. I’d never seen this kid before. “How’d you know?”

“Heard about you asking around,” he shrugged. “I heard someone saw her a couple blocks from the Seven building.”

“Thanks, kid,” I said, pulling out a twenty and handing it to him.

“Michael,” he said. He grinned at me, and something unsettled me about the grin. My brow furrowed but he was already leaving with the money.

The Seven building was where the old mob boss used to do his business. Jackie Seven had been in charge of the mob before he’d died, and Louis Salinas had taken his place and abandoned the old headquarters for another, much shinier building downtown.

I stopped a couple blocks from the building and parked. It’d be easier on foot.

When the mob had moved out, so had a lot of businesses. Most of the buildings in this neighborhood were abandoned now, home to squatters and runaways. I used to sleep here a lot.

The building I started at had once been a three-story office building. Now it was a husk with boarded windows and caged-in doors with locks. I remember when I was younger it used to house a few seedy doctor’s offices, a couple balding lawyers with rugs, and a bail bondsman. Now it was completely commercially abandoned but I heard people in it.

And I smelled a lot of blood.

There was probably a window that was already open with a loose board somewhere—a more unobtrusive way to get in and out for the homeless. But I didn’t have the time to look for it. The lowest lying window to the ground was next to the front door and boarded up. I kicked the boards in, and they gave way like toothpicks.

I made a space big enough to crawl into. The splintered boards scraped against me as I moved through. They drew blood, rough pain grating on my arm. But they healed almost as soon as the wood stopped touching my body, the blood decaying into dry dust. I brushed it off.

The bottom had once been a lobby for customers to walk into, but now it was just a room for squatters and rats. One hallway went to a broken-down bay of elevators.

Shadows scurried up the stairs and a board on another window slammed back into place. My coming had not been welcome.

The smell inside was almost overpowering. The musty scent of unwashed bodies mixed with human waste and the chemical scent of drugs. And above it all, the heavy stench of blood.

I followed the smell of blood past the wall where the receptionist used to work and down a hallway. As I went, the smell grew stronger. It mixed with ginger and something like incense.

I turned a corner and froze, my heart almost bursting from my chest at the sight.

Fresh blood streaked the walls—arterial spray—rivulets of blood beading down the walls. The attack had just occurred. There wasn’t an ounce of dry blood anywhere.

In the middle of the spatter, in a thin puddle of blood, lay a slender woman with locks. Her hair was caked with congealing blood. She was covered in slowly healing open wounds, slashes of red against her brown skin. The worst one was on her thigh, the source of the arterial spray. It went from the front to the back, almost down to the bone and slicing her thigh in half.

Annie.

Fear bubbled in the back of my throat for only a moment before an iron gate slammed shut. A quiet calm settled over me. I had work to do.

I dropped to my knees beside her and held my fingers to her neck. There was a faint, reedy pulse. She was alive.

“What did you do?” I whispered, pulling her locks free from the blood.

She groaned, turning her head slightly. She wasn’t fully unconscious. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. I’d never seen something this awful.

Fear threatened again, but it hit the gate. Fear wouldn’t help her now. She needed to go home.

She only wore a tank top and short shorts, not enough clothing to make a wrap from. I pulled off my sweater to bind up her thigh. There were similar wounds on her arms that weren’t as deep, but they were still losing too much blood for comfort. I tore the rest of the sweater in half and bound those, too.

It was the best I could do for now. The rest was up to Mira.

I reached under her legs and shoulders and stood up as fast as I could, like ripping off a Band-Aid. She groaned again, shuddering in my arms.

“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry.” I whispered the words over and over under my breath until they became a meaningless mantra. Something to focus on so I didn’t think about how she might die in my arms.

I turned, ready to run, when something scraped across the back of my right arm. I jumped, whirling around.

Nothing. I smelled my own blood where I’d been scraped but I didn’t bother to look at it. Maybe I got closer to the wall than I anticipated. Whatever. Not important.

I ran for the front door of the building. At the door, I kicked where the latch I’d seen outside was. The door snapped from the doorway and swung out. A chain caught it, and I brought my foot down, breaking that, too.

I left the building and took off for Mira’s house. Taking the car would only slow me down. It was a twenty-minute ride, and I couldn’t monitor her in the car.

Running it was.

Even with vampire speed, running an order of magnitude faster than a human, it took me almost fifteen minutes to make it back to Mira’s house. Every minute felt like an hour as I checked Annie over and over again to make sure she was still breathing, her heart still beating. The further we got, the stronger her heartbeat and breath got. She was healing like she should, but she wasn’t out of the woods yet.

I got to the house and banged on the door as hard as I could without breaking it, shouting Mira’s name.

Lights went on immediately in her house and in the houses nearby. I heard dogs barking, but I continued to bang until the door opened beneath my hand.

Mira stood there, eyes wide as she took in the sight of me and Annie, smeared with blood.

I pushed past her, barely noticing as the threshold let me through without any issue. Either the threshold still recognized me, or Lina’s invitation earlier that night had allowed me through.

“She’s healing,” I said, walking the familiar path from Mira’s front door to her living room. “But she needs help.”

Mira was already in action, grabbing a plastic tarp from an organizer rack in her dining room. She spread it out on the carpet in the living room.

I knelt, carefully setting Annie down on the floor. She groaned quietly but the majority of her wounds had already healed on the way to Mira’s. The only ones still bleeding were the ones I had bound.

“Good work on the bandages,” Mira murmured, kneeling at Annie’s side, a small suitcase next to her. She opened it to reveal first aid supplies.

“Learned from the best,” I replied. Mira’s grandmother had been the one to teach me first aid years ago. She had been a nurse before a stroke left her disabled.

“That you did.”

The stairs creaked, and I heard a sharp intake of breath. I looked back to see Frankie standing in the doorway of the living room, staring at Annie with wide eyes. When he caught me looking, he glared at me. “I’m supposed to believe you didn’t do this?”

“Yeah,” I sneered. “Because I decided that I was going to come back to Phoenix to pick off my family members one by one. You’re next.”

“Not now,” Mira said in a tight voice. “Sloane, I need help with the bleeding.”

“Get the fuckhead to help you,” I said, standing up. “I have to go back and see if Mikko was there, too.” In the sudden panic of finding Annie, I hadn’t even thought to look for Mikko. But I also hadn’t smelled any other blood sources, which made me think that he hadn’t been there. Or at least, hadn’t been there and injured.

I left the room. The washing machine and dryer were located between the back door and the living room, under the stairs that led to the second story. A basket of clean clothes sat on top of the dryer, and I grabbed a black T-shirt from it, pulling it on. Then I stalked off out the front door.

I was halfway out of the front yard when something hard hit me in the back of the head.

I spun around, cursing. I was ready to see Frankie trying to pick a fight, but it wasn’t him.

A petite girl, fifteen like Frankie, with brown hair stood on the walkway behind me. She had golden-brown eyes and tawny skin. She was a head shorter than me and wore faded jean shorts and a green tank top.

“Jesus, I’ve been trying to get your attention since you walked into the hallway,” she signed angrily at me, coming towards me to grab the sneaker she’d hit me with.

“What, you want to get pissed at me, too?”

She picked up her sneaker, signing with one hand. “No, you dumbass. I want to come with you.”

I paused.

She reached over and used me to balance herself while she put on her sneaker.

I pressed my lips together to keep my lower lip from wobbling as relief flowed through me. That simple act of using me to steady herself eased the tension in my shoulders ever so slightly.

Genie did not need someone to steady her. She was a kinesiopath. Her whole superpower was literally just flawless balance. She could balance, one legged, on a rope between two trees. She could free solo anything she came across. As long as she was focusing on it—otherwise, she had the balance problems that most deaf people had.

Using me to steady herself had been a willful act of vulnerability to show me that she still trusted me. Genie still thought I was me and that I was okay.

She straightened up, winking at me. “Come on,” she said, taking my hand. “Let’s go.”

I blinked, rubbing tears from my eyes. She just smiled before it turned into a sneer of irritation. “I was asleep when you first came here earlier. But Lina woke me up after it all happened and told me. She said there was nothing wrong with you, but Mira’s so upset about everything that’s happened, she can’t think straight. And Frankie’s being a dick.”

“What happened? Why are you back?”

Her smile was bitter as she looked away for a moment. “I’ll tell you later. We’re going somewhere, right? To look for Mikko?”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll talk after.”

“Okay.”

We went back to the warehouse where I found Annie. Genie had gotten on my back so that I could give her a piggyback ride.

I set her down in the lobby.

“I don’t want you to see where she was attacked,” I told her. “There’s a lot of blood and I don’t really think Mikko’s here because I didn’t smell him.”

The same bitter smile I had seen earlier was back. She wasn’t upset with being sidelined. The bitterness was something else.

We’d talk later.

“Scream if something happens.”

“Will do.” She backed herself up against the walls so that she had a full view of the room. I wasn’t sure how good it was, because it was still too dark for her to really see well, but it was still a good tactic.

The stench of blood was potent, but not as much as it had been when I had first come here. While not as quickly as vampire blood, shifter blood decayed more quickly than human blood.

The hallway had been untouched since I left. I could only smell ginger, blood, and whatever that intense smell had been. Maybe myrrh? It had been a while since I had burned it, but I thought that’s what it smelled like.

It made me think of the cut I had gotten as I tried to leave. I looked to the back of my arm, pulling the skin over my elbow to see.

I hadn’t really expected to see anything. I had assumed I just scraped myself on the wall or something—the walls here weren’t as smooth as they could be—and it would heal.

But there was a small, thin white scar along the back of my arm, like a small knife or a pin had dragged across it. What could have left that? It was rare for vampires to scar once they were turned. It took something monumental to physically scar them. Usually, the last scar they ever got was their turning scar.

I put my hand to my neck, feeling for the bumpy scar from when Karhi had turned me. I didn’t know if turning scars were supposed to look quite as jagged as mine did. I had never checked on Karhi or his siblings.

I wondered how Karhi was reacting to my disappearance.

I shook my head. Now was not the time to think about that. I needed to search for Mikko.

Mikko always smelled like laundry. Even when he hadn’t showered in a couple days and hadn’t had clean clothes in a while, I had always associated him with laundry.

There was no scent of him. Just the blood, ginger, and myrrh. And there were no footsteps or aberrations in the blood spatter—no one had been nearby or come through.

There were rooms further down the hallway. I opened one and only found an abandoned desk. In one corner was a pile of blankets and trash. Someone lived there normally.

My search of the rest of the hallway turned up identical results that all led me to nothing. Annie’s blood had been fresh, and Bryant said that she was looking for Mikko. I had a feeling that Mikko had never been here.

I went back into the former lobby and found Genie waiting in the same spot in which I had left her. She had her arms wrapped around herself, shivering.

When I was close enough for her to see me, I asked, “Are you cold?”

“It’s fucking cold, Sloane.”

I wore a T-shirt, but I couldn’t really tell it was all that cold. “Let’s get in the car then.” I turned towards the door, and she followed me. “You know, I was kind of surprised to find you waiting for me.”

“What, do you think I’m stupid?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at me. “I’m deaf and independent and all, but an abandoned crackhouse in the middle of the night? I’m keeping my ass in the same spot until the vampire with super everything tells me it’s all clear.”

She had me there. “Super everything except sensitivity to cold,” I shrugged.

“Is that a thing?”

“For vampires. Heat or cold—don’t feel it much.”

“Huh.”

We left the building. “I’m guessing no Mikko?” she asked. She knew the answer. If she hadn’t, it would have been the first thing she asked me.

“I don’t think he was here,” I shook my head. “We’ll have to wait for Annie to wake up.”

I wanted to try a few more places before I gave up for the night. It wasn’t normal for Mikko to not check in for more than a day, but he may have been caught up somewhere. I didn’t want to think too much about where that somewhere was, because there were no good options.

I had left my car behind the building when I parked earlier in the night. I led Genie to it and hit the button to unlock it. The lights flashed and it beeped in response. I started to open the door when Genie thumped the hood of the car to get my attention. I looked up.

“Is this your car?” she asked, eyebrows high on her forehead, looking the car over from the passenger side.

I winced. It was a lavish car. “Kind of. Let me explain.”

Big old TW for sexual violence on this chapter.

Karhi Emelyn

The Staetman Estate, otherwise known as Casa Vampiria to the locals, was in a wealthy neighbourhood filled with criminals and politicians alike. Sometimes they were even different people.

The property dwarfed every other in the neighbourhood and had its own concrete wall and guardhouse. It sat on seven acres through black iron gates.

They drove along a cobblestone road that led from the gatehouse to the front of the mansion where there was a turnabout. Karhi didn’t often come to the desert, and it always shocked him with its beauty, especially in the morning. There was a mesh of green and gold from grasses to rocks to trees to sand. The landscape was almost like a cross section of Arizona itself from the mountains to the green.

The mansion loomed over them like a white ghost as they approached. The front doors were at least two stories high with a portico. Marble steps led up to the doors.

They didn’t pull up in the front. They went where the road wound around the mansion to a four-car garage on the side.

The chauffeur parked inside and opened their door for them. Karhi, Onyx, and Carry slid out, and he closed the door.

He turned to them and bowed. “Mister Carrick has left instructions for you to be in the main drawing room.” He opened the door into the house for them.

There was no threshold as they walked in. They came into a marble kitchen with three cooks working at the six stoves in the room. They continued through the kitchen and a long hallway until they entered the drawing room.

The room was floored in white marble like the rest of the building, with walls painted creamy brown. The furniture was all Baroque, with intricate scrollwork decorating gold-painted wood. The cushions were in rich purples and reds. There were couches and loveseats centring around a black ebony table where there was a silver platter with wine glasses of blood.

Two other vampires, a man and a woman, sat on separate loveseats near each other. Lunette and Zeren.

Zeren stood up when they walked in, and Carry ran to him. He wrapped his arms around her and spun her around.

Karhi always felt a twinge of jealousy when he saw Zeren and Carry interact. There was a small bit of him that wished he and his own brother were that close.

Vampires who shared the same sire referred to each other as siblings. However, Zeren and Carry were actual siblings by blood from before they were turned. Carry had been older by a couple years.

Zeren looked just like his sister, with brown skin and light eyes that practically shone. His brow was heavy, and his nose was broad and straight, much like his sister’s. They could have been twins in everything except body type. Zeren was more broad-shouldered and towered over Carry by almost a head.

They had both died in the Ottoman uprising in Istanbul in the 1800s. They were the youngest of the five of them.

Karhi moved to sit with Lunette.

She was petite with corn silk blonde hair that went down to her waist. Her skin was pale, with a straight nose and a sharp chin. She looked like a doll with huge russet-coloured eyes.

“Nice dress,” he remarked as he sat down. It was purple with lace, adding to her doll look. Especially with the lace-up black leather boots and the purple gloves on her hands.

“Bite me,” she responded, sitting back and folding her arms over her chest.

“Nice to see you, too.”

“Luna, you big grouch,” Onyx said as she picked up a glass of blood. Karhi took a glass of blood, too.

Luna took his glass from his hand and took a sip. He scowled at her and got a new one.

“Where’s your useless fledgling?” she asked.

His scowl deepened and he didn’t answer, opting to drink instead.

“She disappeared,” Onyx volunteered.

Zeren’s head jerked from where he sat next to his sister, talking to her in Turkish. “What?”

Lunette’s eyes widened and a sharp smile unfurled across her face. “She what?” He could hear how much pleasure she was taking in his misfortune, and it made him want to knock the glass out of her hand.

But he wouldn’t. Because her powers were a lot more painful than his were, and he didn’t want to deal with that on top of being in Phoenix at Ilona’s summons.

“She stole his car,” Carry smirked. “And robbed him blind.”

He resisted the urge to throw his blood on Carry. She was wearing a white linen blouse with light-coloured jeans. It would have ruined her outfit at the very least.

Instead, he set down his glass, and folded his hands in his lap to keep from using them for evil. His siblings truly, truly brought out the worst in him.

Carry went on to relay to Zeren and Lunette what had happened with Sloane. Karhi found himself more and more grateful that he had had the foresight to set down his drink.

When she was done, Zeren was the only one to look properly horrified. “She’s just . . . gone?”

Karhi nodded, choosing not to say anything. He didn’t want to give Carry, Onyx, and Lunette more ammunition.

“Ilona is going to have a cow,” Lunette said.

That sentence sobered the room and the smiles disappeared.

Ilona.

Lunette’s words seemed to have summoned her because a sudden, bone-deep chill fell across the room. They heard the click of heels in the hallway outside.

The scent of parchment and roses permeated the air just before the door to the room opened and she entered. She was alone. His heart fell as he realized Carrick wouldn’t be here to soothe her tonight.

Her beauty was ageless and indescribable. She moved with a fluid grace that called attention to the curve of her hips and strain of a red lace bra against the white button-up shirt she wore. High, strappy stilettos crisscrossed up her calves, accentuating endless legs that disappeared under a short black skirt. Pale orange-red hair, like carnelian, flowed down her back in waves. Her skin was flawless, like polished peach moonstone.

Karhi immediately stood to attention as she entered, partly out of habit, partly out of fear. All five of them being together meant that he had to be very careful about how he acted around her. The others would pay the price if he didn’t. She didn’t normally require that he stand when she entered, but he knew things were different when they were all together.

She stopped in front of them. Her emerald gaze was cold over them, appraising, like they were cattle. He kept his eyes down, but he saw the way she moved to look them each over.

Her gaze stayed on Lunette the longest before she moved to Karhi. “Hello, my children,” she said.

Her words were like ice against his back. He fought the urge to straighten up at the sound of it. He wanted to move forward and embrace her. He could feel her against him, trying to pry inside of his mind. It was intoxicating.

But it was a trap. This was a game she liked to play. Who would be the first to break against her? She would be doing the same thing to the others. She liked to play a game to see who could fight her will. Break and you would be punished.

Minutes passed before the pressure eased and she smiled, ruby lips parting in satisfaction. “Excellent. I’m so glad to see that I truly did pick the best of all my children to be by my side during this year’s festival.”

Karhi wouldn’t point out that they were the strongest out of all her dozens of children. Of course she would want them. Though he was surprised those whack jobs weren’t here—Ava and Angus. The butcher twins. Ilona loved to party with them.

Ilona looked around the room. “But . . . where is the little one?”

Even though Ilona barely reached five feet without heels, she meant Sloane when she said “little one”.

No one spoke, leaving it to Karhi.

“She . . . is missing.”

Ilona paused, her gaze like a ray of heat on him. He wanted to squirm, but he clamped down the urge and stayed still.

After a moment, she looked at the others. “You are dismissed. I will catch up with each of you as the week progresses, and then we will attend the festival together.” She looked at Karhi. “You and I have some things to discuss.”

Karhi saw Lunette look up when Ilona’s back was turned, eyes wide with horror. She started to open her mouth to speak, but Karhi locked eyes with her.

The horror disappeared from her features, confusion replacing it. After a moment, she looked back down, eyes searching the carpet uncertainly.

They shuffled out of the room. Onyx glanced back at him guiltily, but the others didn’t look at him. They left.

Karhi stayed where he was until the last echoes of their footsteps disappeared behind the closing of the front door. Then he took a risk and looked up at Ilona.

“That was smart,” she said, nodding to the door through which the others had left. “Using your powers to force Lunette to forget what she was going to say. It would not have ended well if she had spoken out against me.”

He knew that. It was why he had done it. “I know you hate her. I didn’t want to watch you punish her.”

She turned to him, stepping to the table and picking up a glass of blood. “You’ve always had a soft spot for her. Why did you never take her as a lover?”

“I doubt that would have made you easier on her,” Karhi replied, reaching for his own glass of blood. He was beginning to feel the weight of the fatigue that Ilona always brought him. Blood would ease it. “Plus, I was never interested in her in that way.”

She smiled. It was a smile sharper than a razor’s edge. “Of course not. You were too busy with your other trysts. And you know, you became so boring after that girl’s grandmother.”

“Maybe I just became tired of being your toy,” he said, taking a sip of his drink. Now that it was just the two of them, he could be a bit more flippant than he otherwise would be. “I’ve become tired of being your little playmate to hurt Carrick.” The fact that he wasn’t here spoke volumes about what Ilona was expecting tonight. Karhi resisted the urge to click his piercing against his teeth.

Ilona waved him off, downing the rest of her blood. “You don’t hurt Carrick. He has his lovers.”

“That you kill if you find out about.”

“Only when they’re disrespectful!” she defended herself. “He’s had one for a few years now. Laurie. She’s a human.”

“I thought you set her on fire.”

“No, that was Laura. And that was a decade ago.”

“The point is, Ilona, you can kill his lovers and he can’t kill me. That’s not fair to him.”

She waved him off. “You’re so serious, Karhi.”

“Where is he?” he asked. “He was the one to call us here.”

“He’s on some errands for me,” she shrugged, setting her glass down.

Of course, he was.

“And where is your fledgling?” she asked, stepping forward until her breasts almost touched his stomach. She was looking up at him, but her gaze had him rooted to the floor. He may as well have been shorter than her for all the authority his height gave him here.

“I don’t know,” he answered through gritted teeth, downing the rest of his blood.

“Yes, you said that. But why do you not know?” He could feel a harsh heat kindling behind her words.

He pushed against the feeling of her emotions in his head. “She stole my car, cut the GPS out, and there has been no sign of her. I have everyone I can searching for her, but she is nowhere to be found.”

She clucked her tongue angrily, turning away from him. “That insolent, repulsive little girl. She thinks she can hide from me?”

“I don’t believe it was on her mind. I believe she’s trying to hide from everyone.”

Ilona turned to look at him. Her perfect mouth had contorted into a vicious image of fury. It was a black cold fire against him that made his muscles tense, ready to run. But, of course, he couldn’t run. She wouldn’t let him.

“I will find her,” she growled. “I will find her, and she will be punished for this insolence. I will make sure that every one of my other children is on the lookout for her. I—”

“Ilona,” he said quietly.

She looked at him.

“Why do you want her here so badly?” He had an awful feeling in the pit of his stomach that he already knew the answer. But he almost felt compelled to ask. She wanted him to ask.

She turned back to him, motioning for him to lean over. He did so almost without thinking.

“Sloane has some lessons to learn,” she whispered in his ear.

His blood ran cold. Memories of Lunette’s screams filled his head. Echoes of his own screams joined her, a chorus of agony, bloodlust, and fear.

His mouth was dry, and he swallowed, straightening.

Ilona tilted her head at him curiously. It wasn’t a human gesture. It wasn’t even a vampire gesture. It reminded him of a praying mantis, tilting her head in search of her next victim.

Finally, she said, “You don’t want me to find her. You want to protect her. To keep your fledgling from me.”

He didn’t say anything

“She’s mine, Karhi,” she snarled.

“Why are you so fascinated with her?” Karhi asked. He had to redirect her.

“She is your child. She takes you from me. How could I not be?”

“She is gone,” Karhi said. “If she’s gone forever, you can ignore her. You will have me back.”

She paused, looking up at the ceiling. She was contemplating this.

“Without Sloane in the picture, I will be here, and we can be alone.” Every word he spoke tasted like bile. He had never even been interested in Sloane beyond keeping her alive. Nor did he want Ilona in any way. But he hoped that she would only be searching for the truth in his words that she wanted to hear: he didn’t want Sloane.

Finally, she smiled, and he felt a fire ignite in his chest and race down. Nausea rose into the back of his throat, but desire quickly swallowed it.

He had successfully avoided her wrath.

She reached up and shoved him. He grabbed her as he fell back, pulling her on top of him. She giggled, wrapping her arms around his neck and straddling him.

She was cold to the touch, like a corpse. There was no real life behind her touch. Only the cold embrace of painful, inevitable death.

His claws grew out before he knew it and he ran one down the centre of her blouse, cutting through the thread that held the buttons. He tore the fabric off of her, pressing his mouth to the area between her shoulder and her neck, biting down until he tasted blood.

She hissed, twisting one hand into his hair and yanking back. He growled, sliding his other hand up her skirt.

“You’re going to ruin my nice new clothes,” she hissed into his ear.

He turned his hand and shredded her skirt. “They only get in the way,” he growled back hungrily, putting his free hand around her waist and turning her, pushing her onto the couch.

In the back of his mind, he felt a repulsion to what he was doing. But his desire for Ilona all but drowned it out. She wanted him, which meant that he, of course, wanted her.

He didn’t get a choice.

Sloane Briallen

I had been sitting in the car for ten minutes, staring down the block at a front yard littered with plastic children’s toys. A lone, dry kiddie pool had been set up close to the house, a hose curled up next to it. A beat-up red Tahoe sat in the driveway next to the yard. The light mounted next to the front door was on.

Dusk was settling over the street. Most of the streetlamps were broken, but a few had turned on.

A little girl sat on the front step of the house. She was blowing bubbles and had made a game of trying to catch and stack as many bubbles on her wand as she could before the bubbles popped or the stack fell over. A glass of water sat next to her, an untouched afterthought.

Her face was round, her cheeks just beginning to lose their chubbiness. She wore a light blue T-shirt with a panda on it and jean shorts. The clothes were baggy on her, probably from a thrift store, and made her look smaller than she was. Her eyes were the green of fresh cut grass, and far more alert than I would have expected from a child barely out of toddling.

I felt like a creep, watching this little kid play in her front yard. But I couldn’t bring myself to either pull up or get out of the car. Lina playing on the front steps brought back so many memories. I was there when she was born. I bottle fed her. I held her through the night when she was colicky to give her mom some respite. I was there when she first started walking. When she had turned one.

But how much had I missed?

She was so tall. She had turned five in July. Were five-year-olds supposed to be so tall at this age? Her hair was so pale, almost bleach blonde. Would she keep that, or would it disappear with time? Her mom’s hair had darkened over time. She was long and lanky with knobby knees and elbows. Would she look like her mom and gain more muscle and flesh out? Or would she stay slender and long?

Would she develop any powers?

She wouldn’t know who I was on sight, I didn’t think. Maybe from pictures or stories, but she wouldn’t recognize me out of context, right? I could just, maybe, get out? Do a casual stroll? That would be fine, right? She was too young to be able to figure out who I was. And if I stayed across the street, Mira wouldn’t be able to tell I was here. Not if she wasn’t actively listening.

I opened the door to the car and got out, moving to the sidewalk. It would be fine, just a walk-by. Nothing too invasive. As long as I didn’t linger too long.

I found myself wishing that I had one of those new smartphone things Karhi had. That way I could pause by the house and pretend I was doing something on the phone.

For now, I’d have to just walk past the house, looking around as I did. At least I had sunglasses, so it wouldn’t be obvious I was looking the house over as I went.

It was just like I remembered—a narrow house, two stories with small windows. It was painted a rusty color with white trimming that had turned brown over the years of exposure to the Arizona sand and weather. A garage hung off the side with a basketball hoop in the driveway. The lot was the biggest in the neighborhood and was by far the most well-kept. It was also the only one that didn’t have bars on the windows and doors.

I searched for any sign past Lina that there was anyone else inside the house. I could hear heartbeats if I listened really hard, but they were too much of a jumble to identify. I didn’t know how many people were inside. At least one. Someone would have to be home to make sure Lina was safe.

Lina looked up suddenly, and I froze.

She tilted her head at me, as if listening. Her expression was curious, eyebrows slightly furrowed. I gasped as something brushed my thoughts. Gentle hands touched memories, and my mouth dropped.

She’s just like Mira. My eyes prickled as the weight of how much I had missed in four years settled onto my shoulders.

The curious look disappeared from her face, replaced with a wide, dazzling smile. My heart jumped in my chest, and what little breath I had left disappeared. It was as if someone had punched me in the gut.

She stood up so fast that she almost overturned the bottle of bubbles. The bubble wand dropped from her hands, and she ran towards me with the biggest grin I had seen in a long time. My heart ached as I realized no one had been that happy to see me in years.

I bolted across the street almost faster than I could process. As I got closer, I realized she smelled like strawberries and . . . vanilla. Vanilla, just like her mother.

I swept her up in my arms, being so, so careful to make sure I didn’t grab her too hard. I knew how strong I was now. I needed to make sure she never saw that side of me.

“Auntie Sloane,” she whispered in my ear, burying her face into my shoulder.

“Lina,” I whispered back. I pressed my hand to the back of her head, squeezing my eyes shut and smelling her hair.

I couldn’t speak. It hurt too much. Years of refusing to think about my past, of refusing to think about my family—it all came bubbling up. I had spent so much time pushing it all down, only thinking about them when I absolutely needed to.

And I had missed this little girl growing up.

But how had she known who I was? How had she recognized me?

I see you in their memories all the time.

Shock, like cold electricity, went through my body and I jolted. I pulled away to look at her, eyes wide and watery. She was just like her mother. Telepathy and mindreading.

She grinned at me, nodding. “You’re a little older now,” she said, speaking out loud now, “but I still knew. Your head is like Mommy’s memories.”

I chuckled, wiping my tears away. “Of course, you did. I always knew you would be smart.”

The door to the house opened, and we both looked up.

Mira was just like I remembered. Fruit punch red hair sticking out from her head at all angles—permanent bed head. And a strong, curvy body with wide hips and a comfortable belly. Her eyes were the same piercing blue fire that I had always associated with her. A silver piercing glinted at her left eyebrow and another one at her right nostril. She held a dishcloth in one hand.

“Lina, who—” She stopped staring at us. I watched the dishcloth flutter from her hand to the ground.

I knew I was not supposed to be holding her daughter. Not when I was . . . like this. I put Lina down and took a step back, biting my lip.

“Hi Mira,” I murmured. I kept my hands in front of me where she could see them. Everything inside of me screamed to squirm under her scrutiny, but I stayed still.

It was like lightning in my head, the sudden force the knocked into me. Before I knew what was happening, I was backing away from Lina. I had no control over myself, but my feet forced themselves behind me, putting distance between me and Lina. The invasion inside of my head was like a force of nature. I pushed against it. This wasn’t right. This wasn’t how it should be.

“Mom, no,” Lina screamed.

I dropped to the ground, my control returning. I looked up wildly and saw Mira braced against the doorway, a hand to her temple. Lina got in front of me, shielding me, arms straight out from her body.

“What’s going on?” A figure appeared behind Mira and squeezed past her.

Frankie was fifteen years old now, bronze curls pulled back by a black bandana. He was tan, Venezuelan, and a few inches taller than Mira. He’d gained a lot of height and body mass in the past few years. He wasn’t the scrawny little boy I had known. Brown eyes shrouded with concern and alarm as he looked up at me.

His brow furrowed. “Sloane?”

“She’s a vampire, Frankie,” Mira hissed.

Frankie looked between me and Mira, blanching. “What?”

I felt something tear inside of my head and I yelped and doubled over in pain. I pressed my hands to me temples.

Small hands covered mine, and the pain eased. I opened my eyes to see Lina standing over me, green eyes intent on mine.

“Lina, get away from her!” Frankie yelled. I heard running footsteps.

“No,” Lina shrieked. Frankie stumbled and shouted out in pain. “Mom, leave her alone!”

“Lina, she’s a—”

“I know!” Lina grabbed my hand and yanked at my arm. My head throbbed, and I winced. She stopped, looking at me. “Sloane.”

This time I stood up.

Mira stood on the steps, and Frankie was standing up from where he had fallen. Lina had done that to him. She had forced him to stop.

Frankie had a cut above his eye. I could smell the blood. It made my hands tremble. I hid it by crossing my arms. I could ignore it.

Mira stared at me. “Why did you come?” she wanted to know.

“Because you needed me,” I said.

“I needed human you. You should’ve stayed back wherever you were. You shouldn’t have come.”

“You said Mikko was missing,” I shot back. “If you didn’t want my help, you shouldn’t have asked.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she snapped, gesturing angrily. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell from thousands of miles away that you were dead. I’m sorry I missed out on that part of your life.”

Her words were like knives, pushing in deep and twisting. I bit back the angry tears. I had already cried when I touched Lina. I didn’t need to cry any more than that.

“What do you want?” I demanded. “An apology? I knew how you’d react, so I didn’t tell you.”

“You should’ve kept to yourself.” She looked at me with those eyes. There was blue fire in them that turned her face into the picture of a wounded animal. I could see the glassiness, the tears welling up.

I fought back my own traitorous tears. “I’m still an open book to you,” I told her. “Maybe I should’ve warned you and maybe that’s my bad, but if I had, would that have changed anything? Mikko would still be missing; Frankie and Genie would still be back; and I’d still be here.

“And with or without your help, I’m still going to find him.”

She had no reply to that. I saw Frankie looking between me and Mira, unsure of what to do.

“Annie’s looking for him,” Lina told me.

“Lina,” Frankie hissed. But he was torn between whether to step forward and grab Lina or hide behind Mira.

Hide behind Mira.

I ignored the prickle of tears at that thought, pulling my hand from Lina’s. “Go to your mom, Lina,” I said, not breaking eye contact with Mira.

She protested. “But I want you to come in—”

“Lina, no!” Frankie and Mira shouted.

I smiled bitterly. Vampires had to be invited in; Mira and Frankie knew it. “Go to your momma,” I said again. “They don’t want me around.”

She started to cry. “I don’t want you to go away.”

I finally broke away from Mira’s gaze to look at Lina. I kneeled in front of her and brushed her hair from her face. “I’m staying in town, sweetheart, alright? Just go inside. I’ll see you soon.”

She looked between Mira and me. Then she hugged me. “Come back soon.” She ran back to her mom, skillfully dodging when her mom tried to reach for her. She flitted back into the house, shooting a dirty look at Frankie and her mother.

“I’m going to go check in at the Super Eight,” I said, looking back at Mira. “Let you guys get used to the idea. I’m going to look for Mikko.”

“Not a chance in hell we’re going to get used to this,” Frankie muttered.

“Whatever, kid.”

I felt their eyes on me as I went to my stolen car. I even felt them when I got inside and was hidden by tinted windows. I could feel their gazes until I turned off their street.

I was two blocks away before I had to stop because I couldn’t see past the tears. I put the car in park and put my feet up on the seat and my head between my knees, sobbing.

That could have gone better.

I checked in at the Super Eight and was led to a room with an unattractive view of the parking lot. The sheets were the only things about the room that were clean, but that was all that needed to be clean. I’d slept in worse places.

I needed to shower and get into a change of clothes. I’d been wearing the same clothes for almost 48 hours and even though we don’t sweat, vampires can still get a layer of grime on us if we go too long without showering.

I pulled off my clothes, leaving them by the bathroom door before stepping onto the tile. The bathroom wasn’t too dirty, either. There was grime in the corners of the room, but the tile was pretty clean and there was only a spot or two of mildew in the shower. I would take the win for a room that was $38 a night plus tax.

As I passed the half mirror over the sink, something glinted and I stopped, looking in the mirror. I froze.

The necklace. The flower necklace.

It was there.

With all the commotion with Mira and coming back, I had completely forgotten about the dream that Mira had woken me up from.

But now, for the first time, I had taken off the shirt that had hidden it. And it was there, against my skin, cold to the touch. It was settled just below the dip in my collar bones, resting against my sternum.

I reached out in horror to touch it and it zapped me, just like it had in the dream. As it shifted against my neck, I felt a faint buzz of magic brush against my skin.

I don’t know how long I stared at that necklace. My mind alternated between going a million miles a minute and just stopping in utter disbelief.

But what finally stopped me staring at myself in the mirror, trying to force myself to do anything else, was a realization. The dream had been real. The necklace around my neck proved it.

Whatever I had seen of my mother hadn’t been real and corporeal, but it was her. Maybe she was a ghost. I had no idea.

But what I did know was that my mother had been dead for over a decade at this point. I had seen the body myself at the wake.

I had never seen Mickey and Bell’s bodies.

Were they still alive?

Karhi Emelyn

“I think she’s the Queen of Ravens,” Onyx said as she sat down on Karhi’s couch. She flashed a too-bright smile as she took a sip of her bloody martini.

Karhi rolled his eyes, sitting on the loveseat adjacent to the couch. The couch and loveseat were a matching blue suede set.

Carry sat next to Karhi instead of Onyx, and Karhi scowled at her.

“What?” Carry challenged.

“Please sit next to your wife,” Karhi told her.

Carry narrowed her eyes at him before pointedly turning to face him and putting her feet up on his lap. “Can’t I sit next to my brother?”

Karhi sighed, giving the ceiling a long-suffering look. “Why?”

“Because I’ve been listening to Onyx talk about Sloane’s friend being the Queen of Ravens for two days, and you can listen now while I watch.”

Karhi rolled his eyes, but he didn’t push Carry off.

“I’m not crazy!” Onyx protested, setting her martini down on the coffee table. At Karhi’s glare, she moved the martini to a coaster. “Picky,” she muttered.

“That’s an eighteenth-century piece from Switzerland made of a type of wood that doesn’t even exist anymore!” Karhi shot back.

“You could get a replica of it online for like four thousand dollars. It’s not that special.” Karhi glared at her as she continued. “You can’t even . . .” she trailed off, looking confused. “Wait . . . what?”

Carry smacked Karhi hard enough on the arm to hurt down to the bone. He cursed. “Carry!”

“No using powers to win fights!” Carry reprimanded him.

Onyx, realizing what had happened, levelled a nasty scowl at Karhi. She pointedly pushed the martini back onto the bare wood.

Karhi glared at her, but Carry was right. “Sorry,” he said grudgingly.

“Next time I’ll fucking flood the room with ravens,” Onyx snapped back. “See how you like it.”

Carry sighed. “Onyx, he said sorry. Karhi, drop it.”

Karhi closed his mouth before he could retort.

Onyx and Karhi each sat in silence. Karhi could make people forget things by looking them in the eyes; Onyx could craft illusions.

They stewed in annoyance before Karhi finally held out the olive branch. “Okay, why do you think Sloane’s friend from the bar is the Queen of Ravens?”

Onyx eyed him for a moment before taking the offering. “She spoke of kingdoms,” she said. “This woman that Sloane spoke to. I couldn’t hear it, but I can read lips a little. And Sloane engaged with her. Knew what she was talking about.”

Onyx hadn’t told him about that. “Oh?”

“This woman responded negatively to Sloane’s use of the word ‘Nevermore’.”

Karhi had wondered when she would say something about that. Onyx was the lost Lenore. “You were so cruel to Edgar.” He shook his head. “Playing with him because you wanted his wife.”

“Virginia didn’t even last as a vampire,” Carry groaned, stretching her legs further out on his lap, sinking down into the couch. “She died of consumption, and then she died again because she couldn’t handle the blood lust.”

“Yes, and then Onyx drove Edgar to insanity,” Karhi replied, giving Onyx a look.

Onyx waved him off. “The point here is the poem. Corvine means ‘of or like a raven’. Nevermore. Glamours. Strong magic. Kingdoms.”

Karhi raised an eyebrow.

“She’s one of the bestia,” Onyx declared with certainty only she felt. Karhi could see Carry didn’t seem to share Onyx’s enthusiasm.

“You’re saying she’s a queen.”

“Or a minion of the bestia,” Onyx nodded. “I think it’s a valid assumption.”

“Or she could be a shapeshifter, and her animal is a raven.”

Onyx shook her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Too old.”

Karhi didn’t have a reply for that. Shifters lived maybe to four centuries, if they were smaller animals.

Onyx continued to shake her head. “Trust me, guys, she’s going to wind up being one of the bestia.”

Karhi raised an eyebrow at Carry, who responded with a noncommittal shrug. “I don’t think so, but I’m not going to argue about it. It doesn’t hurt anyone for her to believe it.”

Karhi wasn’t even surprised at Carry’s lack of commitment. She would never ague with Onyx. She was eternally supportive.

“You’ll see,” Onyx said, picking up her martini and pointing a finger at each of them. “And when it’s true, I’m going to rub it in your faces.”

Karhi’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he grabbed it, immediately grateful for a distraction.

That gratitude disappeared when he saw the caller ID. He tapped his teeth on the ball on his tongue.

“Oh no,” Carry said when she saw his face. “That’s not good.”

Karhi answered the phone and did everything in his power to speak evenly. “Hello?”

“Samhain is at the end of the week, and we are attending the festival this year. You and your sisters will be here for it. I have booked a plane for you leaving in six hours. Bring your fledgling.”

“Hello to you, too, Carrick,” Karhi said, keeping his voice as casual as possible.

“I will e-mail you the tickets. Please alert your sisters.” He hung up.

Karhi started to squeeze the hand holding the phone but Carry plucked it out of his hand before he could destroy it. She gave him a look. “Taking out your anger on inanimate objects is unhealthy and sad. Get your shit together.” Vampire hearing meant she had heard the whole conversation. So had Onyx.

Karhi clenched his fists for a moment before lacing his fingers together and setting them in his lap. He smiled a thin smile, showing a lot of teeth. “Our lovely blood sibling would like us to please pack up for a flight he has booked for us to come visit him and our sire. He would be oh so appreciative if we could go to the Samhain festival this year.”

Carry handed him his phone back. “Never mind, destroy the phone. This is worse.”

Karhi continued the thin, slightly deranged smile. “Oh no, sister. You asked me to ‘get my shit together’ so I will be as kind as I can about our dear blood sibling.”

“Stop calling him thaaaaat. It’s gross.”

“But it’s true, dear sister.”

Carry stood up, rolling her eyes. “He’s related to us through Ilona only. I’ll never call that creep my brother.”

“I think that’s why he’s saying, ‘blood sibling’,” Onyx said, getting up to stand by her wife. “Even he can’t call that psycho our brother.”

Karhi stood up, too. He finally dropped the smile and teeth. “You would think, considering I’m over a century older than him, he would show the respect that vampire hierarchy dictates, but here we are.”

“He takes the idea of vampire lovers too seriously,” Carry shrugged as she and Onyx made their way to his front door. “Even though Ilona frequently sleeps with other people just to spite him and sets any lovers he takes outside of her on literal fire.”

Karhi sneered. There was a lot of other things Ilona did outside of Carrick that neither Onyx nor Carry knew about, but they didn’t need to. Instead he said, “I’ll email you whatever I get from him, and I’ll have a car pick us all up, and take us to the airport.” He assumed it would be a private jet out of Minneapolis.

“You going to go pick up Sloane from work?” Onyx asked.

“Yeah. It won’t be a pleasant discussion.”

“Nope,” she chirped.

Karhi grabbed his keys and left with Onyx and Carry. Their car would have been parked in the visitors’ spots, not far from where he parked.

“Wait, I thought Sloane had your car?” Onyx said as they entered the garage and headed towards their cars.

Karhi glanced at her. “Why?”

She looked from him and then back out to the parking lot and slowed. “Because, when we pulled in earlier . . .”

He followed her gaze to where his car was supposed to be parked, in the same designated parking spot as always.

The operative phrase was “supposed to”.

“What the fuck?”

His parking spot was empty. His car was gone. But he was holding the key that operated it. The key was always by the front door. The only other—

He hadn’t thought to check the basket on top of the fridge with his spare key before he left. But why would he have?

“Intriguing,” Carry said. “Come on, we’ll give you a ride to Swanskin’s.”

Karhi nodded slowly, following them to their car.

They got in Onyx’s blue Audi. As Onyx started the car, Karhi pulled out his phone. He thought about calling Sloane but instead decided to call the centre that handled his car’s GPS.

“Good evening, Mister Emelyn,” a cool female voice answered the phone. “You are speaking with Regina; how may I help you?”

“I have reason to believe my car may have been stolen. Could you turn on the tracking in it and tell me where it is?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied. “Would you like me to alert the authorities?”

“Tell me where the car is first and then I’ll let you know.”

“Of course, sir. Give me one moment.”

He waited, listening to silence.

After a minute, she came back, her cool tone a little more muted. “I’m sorry, sir, but it appears the GPS in your car was disabled. I can’t connect, and I can’t find it anywhere.”

“How is that even possible?” he asked.

“Well—you said you believe it may be stolen. Certain car thieves know how to cut the wires in a car that enable the GPS. Cutting those wires stops the GPS from being triggered, even remotely by the company in charge, because the hardware has been destroyed. I’m going to call the authorities.”

“Thank you, Regina.”

“My pleasure, sir. I’m sorry about your car.”

“Thank you.” He hung up.

“You think Sloane stole your car?” Carry asked, glancing back from the front seat.

“Someone did.” He hadn’t even known Sloane knew how to steal a car.

But then again . . . what did he really know about Sloane?

They rode in silence to Swanskin’s. It was only six. Not many people were out for the night yet.

Swanskin’s was pretty empty when he walked in. A man sat in one corner nursing a lonely drink while an awkward couple sat in a booth, hiding behind menus to avoid talking to each other.

Niqui sat on a stool behind the bar, checking a stack of receipts against a ledger. She glanced up when they walked in and when she saw Karhi, she glanced at her watch. “Took you longer to get here than I expected,” she said, setting down the red pencil she had in her hand.

Karhi stopped in front of the bar. “What do you mean?” Onyx and Carry stood behind him.

“Are you here looking for Sloane?”

“Yes. Is she here?”

“No.”

“Where is she?”

“Not a clue,” she shrugged. “She quit yesterday.”

Karhi blinked. “What?”

“She called me and told me she had some personal things to take care of, and she quit. Said she wasn’t sure if she would ever be back.”

Karhi stared at her.

Niqui raised an eyebrow. “Karhi. Are you really that dense?”

He bristled. “What the hell does that mean?”

“She didn’t stay with you because it’s some ‘vampire law’. She stayed with you because she had nowhere else to go. I always knew she’d leave one day to go back to wherever she came from. She was just too afraid that she’d be rejected for being a vampire.” She cocked her head to the side. “I hired her before she was a vampire. Didn’t you ever wonder about that? Me hiring a human?”

Karhi had never put any real thought to it before, but he wouldn’t tell her that. He had a lot more on his mind when he first met Sloane than why she’d work at Swanskin’s. And the months since then hadn’t done anything to make him curious. As far as he knew, Sloane was pretty boring.

“You’re here with those two . . . so, did she steal your car?” When he didn’t answer, she waved a dismissive hand at him. “If you’re not here to order, go away. I need to balance these before month end.”

“Niqui,” he said through gritted teeth. “Where. Did. She. Go?”

“Home, I’m assuming. Wherever that is. I never asked, and she never volunteered that information. So, I let it be.”

“Karhi,” Carry said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

He turned from Niqui, stalking away.

“You won’t find her,” Niqui called after him. “She flies under the radar too well.”

That was an understatement.

“That tongue piercing was the worst fucking thing you ever got,” Carry complained. “Quick clicking it against your teeth.”

Over the years, it had become habit to run the ball on his tongue against his teeth, a clacking sound that helped calm him. He stopped but didn’t look at Carry.

He stared out of the airplane window into darkness. Lights twinkled from the towns below as they passed over. Occasionally, a thin cloud would dampen the brightness.

Karhi was doing everything to look for Sloane. There was a countrywide search for his plates, but his car hadn’t turned up anywhere. She had either dumped it or somehow procured new plates.

He had tried to call her and track her cell phone, but her cell phone didn’t have GPS, and she hadn’t used it since she had left. She had either tossed it or modified it. She had stolen all of his cash, but even before that, she hadn’t had a bank account so tracking that would’ve been out anyway.

She was completely off the grid, and she had gotten over a day’s head start on him before he even knew she was gone.

He had never made it much of a priority to get to know Sloane past the arguments they would have. Sometimes, when they were on particularly neutral terms, she would sit with him on the couch to watch reality TV, but outside of that, they had never discussed anything.

But even so, he was completely unprepared when he realized that one of the only things that he knew about her was that she liked cooking shows and that she knew how to soothe someone on a heroin comedown. He had turned her in mid-December the previous year, meaning they had been living together for just over ten months. He had just . . . taken for granted that she had been a vanilla human before he turned her, and she had continued to be uninteresting beyond her death.

But now, he was realizing that there were so many subtle bits he had missed. She had once admitted to knowing he was a vampire before he turned her. She was sensitive to magics and what they were, even being able to differentiate types of shapeshifters into categories of different dogs, cats, and any others she came across. She could sometimes even guess what type of magic a mage specialized in.

Niqui had made a good point, though he was too angry to admit it to anyone but himself, about how Sloane had even been employed before she was turned. Swanskin’s was a bar for anyone entrenched in the Underground and all of the magic it encompassed. People hired to work there had to be able to work with magics and be able to either bounce out unruly customers or call someone who could.

He was angry he hadn’t asked Niqui what made her hire Sloane, but he also doubted she would have given him a straight answer.

And Sloane had stolen his car and disabled the GPS and disappeared without a trace. And what almost pissed him off more than anything else . . .

“She found the false fucking wall and stole all of my cash,” he snarled at the window.

“Like that was even a large chunk of change for you,” Carry said as she held out her wine glass to the flight attendant to top her off.

Karhi looked over to Carry and Onyx. They sat in front of him on a tan vinyl couch against the side of the plane, watching a TV mounted from the ceiling. Karhi sat in a matching vinyl seat against the back of the plane, by the bathroom and flight attendant station.

“How did she even know there was a false wall in there?” he asked, barely keeping the frustration from turning his question into a shout.

“How did she know how to disable the GPS in your car?” Carry replied. “I think it’s pretty apparent at this point that she’s a thief.”

“I wish I’d asked Niqui why she hired her.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Onyx asked.

Carry and Karhi looked over at her in confusion. Her eyes were on the TV—some children’s cartoon.

“Care to elucidate, askım?” Carry asked her.

Onyx furrowed her brow, looking at Carry. “Sloane’s a really good fighter. Don’t you remember?”

Carry shook her head slowly. “What are you talking about?”

Onyx pursed her lips in confusion. “Wait . . . maybe it was only me that was there. Huh, could’ve sworn I told you.”

“Told us what, Onyx?” Karhi just barely kept a growl out of his voice.

“I remember her before you turned her. We didn’t go to Swanskin’s a lot, but we went there often enough before you moved to Minnesota. A shifter got rowdy, and she didn’t hesitate to kick him when he tried to get behind the bar. She followed up on the kick with another kick and knocked him down. She had her foot on his throat before he could figure out what was going on. Granted, he was drunk as hell. But she wasn’t hesitating. I doubt she could have killed him, but she would have done everything up to killing him. She definitely knew what she was doing. It made me assume she had some sort of martial arts training or something.” She shrugged, reaching for her wine on the small bolted-in coffee table in front of her.

Carry tilted her head to the side. “You never told me about that.”

She shrugged again, taking a sip of her wine. “Thought I did. I think it was just before Karhi moved here, so I just lost track of it during the whole moving thing.” She pursed her lips again, pensively swirling her wine in her glass. “I guess I just always assumed you guys kind of knew she wasn’t as clueless as she played. She worked at Swanskin’s before you turned her, and she and Niqui always got along. Niqui even let her hire someone. I just thought it was a game we all played for some reason.”

Karhi remembered the first time he met Sloane. She had broken a bottle over a shifter’s head and stabbed him with it before spraying him with wolfsbane to get him out of the bar. He had assumed she had some level of basic self-defence, but it never occurred to her that she may be much more capable than just that.

“So . . .” Carry said. Her tone of voice was hesitant, and it made Karhi look at her. She looked uncomfortable, looking anywhere but Karhi. “Um . . . how is Ilona going to handle it when she finds out you lost her?”

Karhi’s heart plummeted into his stomach. He had been carefully avoiding thinking about that.

“Didn’t Carrick say that you needed to bring her?”

He nodded, reaching for the whiskey on the table in front of him and downing the rest of it. It scorched his throat, but he needed the feeling of something other than the cold fear that was creeping up his spine. It didn’t help—gave him a strange mix of cold fire.

“Maybe she’ll . . .” Carry was lost for words. There was nothing comforting she could say that would make this any better.

“She’s not going to be pleasant,” Karhi said, holding out his whiskey glass to the attendant that had come to refill it. “Leave the bottle,” he murmured to her.

“Of course, sir,” she replied, setting the bottle down on the table.

“Do you have people searching for her?” Carry asked.

He nodded. “Yes, but so far, nothing. She doesn’t have any living family outside of the woman who adopted her when she was a teenager, and Sloane didn’t go back to them. I had someone check. I have someone looking into her foster care records, but those are spotty at best. From what I’ve gathered, she was a chronic runaway.”

“That would explain where she learned to be a thief.” She grimaced, motioning for Karhi to pass her the whiskey. He leaned over and handed it to her.

“Yeah. But it doesn’t explain anything else.” He looked out the window. The whiskey had helped dampen the fear that Ilona’s name had spurred inside of him, but he could still feel it festering.

What would tomorrow bring?

The drive to New Mexico was almost twenty hours. I spent almost all of it obsessing over how I would make my entrance back into my family’s life.

I had heard stories growing up about how, when people turned into vampires, they turned into different people. The image of the bloodthirsty, soulless vampire wasn’t just something that humans made up. It was something magics believed, too.

My experience had blown all of that out of the water. I wasn’t any different than I had been.

But how would my family know that? Mira read minds so she should know, but I also wasn’t super confident in her ability to be objective right now. Our family was falling apart, and she was the lone person left to face it.

Mikko, Mira, and I had always been the pillars that supported the family. I had left, but Mikko and Mira could handle it together. One less mouth to feed and one less body to keep track of.

But now Mikko was missing. The voice of reason in a group of highly emotional people. The person I could have had a hope of being on my side and making the others see it.

Now I had to go in by myself and try to justify my existence.

I knew off the bat that Annie was going to have A Problem with me being a vampire. Annie was a shapeshifter; they were practically bred to hate vampires.

Frankie would probably also have a problem. He hadn’t grown up with a magical family, but he tended to take Mikko’s lead. And when Mikko wasn’t there, he took Annie’s. Little fucker had never followed my lead.

Genie . . . I had always been closer to her than Frankie, and she never went in a direction that you expected. I had no idea how she would fall.

Entering Albuquerque finally forced me to focus on something else. I hadn’t wanted to stop off during my trip to Phoenix, but Albuquerque had someone I needed who could make my car a little less hot. While I felt I hadn’t stolen it because Karhi let me use the car whenever I wanted, I suspected he wouldn’t feel the same way, and I didn’t really plan on giving the car back. I also didn’t want him to track it.

Maybe I did steal it.

It took me a bit longer to find the chop shop than I would have liked. I got into New Mexico at four AM and finally pulled into the shop at five. I hadn’t been there since I was fourteen and I hadn’t been too good with directions at that age.

The building was behind a decommissioned train depot. It was dishwater grey with a couple windows on the top. The front had three garage doors and there was a scattering of cars parked outside.

There were no lights outside except for some security lights. I saw a couple of homeless people sleeping on the platform at the train depot. It was quiet outside, early dawn where there was just a hint of pink and grey on the horizon. The whole area seemed dead.

But I could hear the buzzing of saws and whirring of drills inside. Davie J’s was busy and alive.

I didn’t really know the best way to get in. I could pull one of the doors leading into the building off the hinges, but that seemed overt and unnecessary.

I chose to pull up in front of the garage doors and purposefully parked skewed, blocking two doors. I clocked two security cameras mounted on the wall. Perfect. I settled in to wait, leaving all my lights on.

I only waited about five minutes before a man came out of a door a few yards from where I sat.

“Lady, you can’t park here,” the man said as I got out of the car. He was a short Latino man in his early thirties. He looked cranky and tired.

“I’m looking for Davie J,” I said.

“That’s nice, but if you want him to do your car, you’re going to have to wait until we open or leave your key with us.”

“I’m not real interested in getting the car fixed so much as . . . fixed.” I raised an eyebrow at him, waiting for the penny to drop.

The man looked from me to the car. It clicked. “That car’s nice,” he said. He reached out to touch the hood.

“Put your hand on it and lose the hand,” I growled.

Humans don’t respond well to threats from a vampire, even if they don’t actually know you’re a vampire. Survival instincts or something, I guess.

He stopped short of touching the car and glared at me. “What do you want, lady?”

“Davie J,” I said.

He scowled at me until finally, “Come in.”

He led me back in the shop. I locked the car before following him.

The garage stank of gas and sweat. Men blackened with oil and grease worked with disassembled car parts. Two cars raised in the air were missing pieces.

No one paid me or the man any attention. He took me to the back and up a set of stairs. At the top was a door with a window that overlooked the shop. Light from behind illuminated the blinds that covered the window, revealing grease and dust caking the plastic.

The man knocked on the door.

“What?” The voice in the room behind the door was gruff from years of smoking.

“Davie, there’s a woman here to see you.”

“Come in.”

The man opened the door, and I walked in. He closed the door behind me and left me in a small office.

It was an office and, dirty blinds aside, it was surprisingly clean for being in a chop shop. There were tan filing cabinets along the back wall. A man in his mid-forties sat behind a desk with a computer, arms behind his head, revealing a truly impressive amount of black armpit hair. He had a mechanic’s hat on his head and wore a white tank top. His face was lopsided, like someone took a frying pan to it. He really embodied the ideal of a seedy car shop owner.

Beady brown eyes focused on me and looked me up and down, trying to get a read on why I was there. He spent an uncomfortable amount of time looking at my chest. I wasn’t even wearing anything that exciting—black jeans and a band T-shirt with combat boots.

“What can I do for you, little lady?” he finally asked, pointing to one of the two seats in front of his desk.

I ignored the offer to sit and leaned against the doorway, crossing my hands over my chest. “I need a VIN scrubbed, new registration papers, Arizona plates, and a GPS thoroughly killed.”

His eyebrows rose. “Very specific requests.”

“I need the car,” I replied. “Don’t need the attention.”

“What type of car?”

“2007 Black Jetta.”

He whistled. “That’ll come pricey. And with time.”

“How much and how long?” I asked.

“7K and two days.”

“Fuck you.”

He stood up straight out of his chair, his ears turning red with anger. “What the hell did you say to me?”

Davie J was maybe five-ten standing up straight. I had been slouching against the door, but I stood up to my full height now, a good three inches taller than him. He took a small step back without even realizing it as I did. “3K and three hours. There’s hardly any hardware, just some forging.”

My counteroffer seemed to give him his courage back and he straightened back up. “Lady, get the fuck out of my office.”

“No,” I snapped. “Tryin’a fuckin’ rip me off. I wonder what Carlos Vasquez would have to say, finding out you were trying to rip off one of his kids again.”

He froze. His brow furrowed, and he squinted his eyes. I saw recognition dawn on his face, and he looked uneasy. “You’re one of those two little girls he brought here a few years back. Someone stole yer friend’s car, and he was gettin’ it back for you two.”

“Someone? If I recall correctly, it was one of the kids that worked here at the time.”

He didn’t have a reply for that.

I remained silent, waiting for him to break the silence.

It didn’t take long. I was much more comfortable with silence than he was. “Alright,” he finally said. “3K and three hours it is. I’ll get my best guys on it. Car in front of the doors?”

I nodded. I pulled the cash out of my back pocket and shelled out two grand there. “I’ll give you the other grand when you’re done,” I said. I handed him my driver’s license. “Spell my name right and make sure it’s all legit as hell.”

“What kind of two-bit place you think I run here?” he sneered, snatching my ID from me.

I leveled a cool gaze at him. “And if I find you used any of my information for anything, I’ll come back and tear you down. Got it?”

“We run a confidential business here,” he snapped. But I could hear his heartbeat from where I stood; it had sped up. I made him nervous, and he didn’t like it. Humans didn’t like angry vampires. They didn’t even like mildly annoyed vampires.

“I’ll be back at eight.”

I was surprised how similar the Swanskin’s in New Mexico was to the one in Minnesota. Dark wood, indigenous art, carved pillars—even the bartender was similar.

I stopped in my tracks when I stepped in. “Niqui?”

The bartender looked up at me. It was Niqui. Except her hair was cut shorter in a pixie cut.

“Naw,” she shook her head, setting down a bar towel on the counter. “Lisa. Her twin.”

“Oh,” I said, sitting down at the bar. “Jesus.” I took off my backpack and hung it up on a hook under the counter.

“What can I get you, stranger?”

“Sloane.”

“Oh!” She clapped her hands in excitement. “The vampire that works for Niqui, right? You were human when she first hired you?”

“Yeah.” She’d never mentioned that her sister was her identical twin, just her twin.

I stopped. Wait, that didn’t make sense. They couldn’t be identical. “Wait . . . Niqui is trans?”

Lisa raised an eyebrow. “And?”

They must have just been those super fraternal twins that looked almost identical, regardless of gender assigned at birth.

I shook my head. “Never mind. I’ll have a blood and tonic.”

“Sure.” She turned to get the gin from the back wall. “What brings you to Albuquerque?” she asked as she worked on the drink.

“I’m headed to Phoenix,” I said. “Just passin’ through. Had to quit my job with Niqui. Family emergency.”

“Ah. Those are my favorite.” The look on her face told me how sincere she was, and I chuckled. She set my drink down in front of me. “How long you gonna be in town for?”

“Until one,” I said. “Then I’m on my way.”

“Hmm,” she said, eyeing me with mock suspicion. “Stuck here for a few hours. Notice you didn’t come in a car.”

I gave her a half smile.

“So, either you ran half the country or you’re having some things changed around for you.”

I shrugged a shoulder. She was a lot nosier than her sister.

She shook a finger at me. “I like you. Stick around ‘till you need to go.” She left to bus a table.

There were only a few people in the room—three mages in a booth together, a catshifter on his own, and a white-haired human in the corner. It was a pretty quiet morning crowd. I smelled eggs and bacon and could hear the clacking of spatulas on a grill top in the kitchen.

I reached into my backpack and pulled out a paperback copy of Catch-22. I’d been trying to find a chunk of time to read it for months, but I could never find the energy to want to read it. I had plenty of time to make a dent in it now.

At seven AM, the bell on the door tinkled. I looked up.

A group of men in their mid-twenties shuffled in. They all either wore or carried yellow hardhats and orange visibility vests. A couple of them wore overalls with reflective tape on the straps.

I looked back down at my book.

I heard footsteps behind me and then the pungent, musty smell of unwashed man and wet dog hit me. One of the construction workers stepped up to the bar. I wrinkled my nose absently and turned a page.

“Do you have a problem?”

It took me a second to realize the question was aimed at me.

I looked up to see the construction worker glaring at me. His brow was heavy over his deep set eyes, and he had several days of stubble on his chin and cheeks. He was some type of dogshifter.

I stuck my finger in my book. “What?”

“You made a face when I walked up. You have a problem with a shifter being around you? Did I offend your delicate vampire sensibilities?”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “No, but your stench did.”

He sneered at me. “Look, you—”

“Can I help you?” Lisa interrupted, back at the bar from serving a table.

I turned back to my book and ignored the dogshifter.

“I thought this was a respectable place,” the dogshifter muttered, casting me a venomous look.

Lisa crossed her hands over her chest, a nonplussed expression on her face. “You came to the wrong place if you expected to be isolated from any magic you didn’t like. Now, you can either play nice with my other patrons, or you can get the hell out.”

I smirked, turning a page.

The dogshifter growled something unintelligible under his breath, but he backed down. “We want to order,” he muttered.

Lisa took his order and left to put it in. The shifter glared at me but shuffled back to his table. It was a weird combination of outright hostility and tired movement.

Lisa came back to the bar as I drained the rest of my drink. “You want some more?”

“Can I just have some straight blood? Don’t need to drive with an alcohol level when my car is finally ready.”

“No problem,” she said, pulling out a packet of blood from beneath the bar. As she did, I heard grumbling from the shifter construction workers.

Lisa rolled her eyes as she pulled out her blood warmer. “Ridiculous.”

“Them?”

She nodded, dumping the blood in the pitcher and turning it on. “It’s never been a secret that all the Swanskins’ bars are friendly to all magics. A chain of bars run by a family of former and current bounty hunters? We’re not going to be that picky.”

“I always thought that since most of your family are shifters, you’d hate vampires.” I closed my book, interest piqued.

She shook her head. “I’ve found that the longer you do bounty hunting, the less you care about the individual magics. The hatred for vampires runs strong for shifters, mages, paramortals, et cetera. But when you actually have to work with them, doing bounties, or getting information on bounties—being prejudiced closes far more doors than it opens.”

I tilted my head at her. “I’ve never heard anyone . . . defend vampires?”

She shrugged. “Sure, there’s a hatred of vampires for the supposed centuries they killed and feasted on humans indiscriminately.” She pulled the pitcher off the warmer. “There’s a similar outdated myth that the savage Indians did the same thing.”

I had also grown up around the notion that vampires killed and ate indiscriminately. But . . . save for a couple, I hadn’t really actually met any who did that. At least, not on purpose.

She handed me my blood. “And I’m sure your sire has taught you, if you ever drink from a human, leaving them dead is much more work than just drinking a bit and leaving them alone with a vague happy memory of hooking up with a hottie.”

She wasn’t wrong. The general rules I had been taught were that the easiest way to get blood from a live human was to seduce them. There was a small amount of venom and coagulant in our spit—making humans heal quickly from bites and making them forget that the feeding ever happened at all. If they even noticed. They usually didn’t.

Killing a human to feed just involved so much more work. It was generally understood that if you killed one, you disposed of the body. And on top of that, you were to make reparations to the families of the deceased. It wasn’t a law, but it was a common courtesy.

Karhi had said that human authorities didn’t take well to cause of death being exsanguination. Nor did the vampire courts. Kill too many humans without cleaning up after yourself, and you found yourself on the chopping block by the courts.

Fledglings weren’t really allowed to feed directly from humans alone. The thirst could sometimes be too overwhelming, and the fledgling could hurt the human. I had never experienced that, but I also hadn’t tried to drink directly from a human.

We moved on to other topics and chatted for a while longer. The construction workers left.

My phone buzzed with a restricted number. I let it go to voicemail, in case it was Karhi, and listened when I got the notification that I had a voicemail.

It was Davie J telling me my car was ready.

I drained the last of my blood before putting my book back in my bag. I hopped off my stool. “Thanks, Lisa. I have to head out.”

“Alright,” she said, taking my glass. “Glad I got to meet my sister’s star employee.”

I waved as I left.

Swanskin’s was in a quieter part of the city. There were a few cars here and there, but no real activity. It was a calm day. The sun was about a third of the way into the sky. It was a weekday I was pretty sure. Maybe Monday?

The bar sat at the end of the block. Cutting through the alley behind the bar would save me a bit of time and give me some shade. I didn’t experience warmth and cold like I used to, but the sun was a lot brighter than it used to be. I had left my sunglasses in the car.

Stepping into the shade, it struck me that the odor of garbage wasn’t what I expected. It was there, but the smell of unwashed skin and wet dog overpowered it.

I stopped, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.

Two of the dogshifters from the bar stepped out from behind a dumpster twenty yards ahead of me.

I heard feet slam into the ground. I looked back to see two more men crouching behind me. They had jumped down from the building. One of them was the dickhead I had spoken to in the bar.

There was a fire escape between me and the two men further inside the alley. I looked up, ready to take it up to the roof.

There were two more up there looking down at me. For fuck’s sake.

Shapeshifters are just as fast and strong as fledglings. Oftentimes, more so. Vampires don’t get their full powers until they hit their year mark. I had more juice than a human, but full-grown shifters may as well have had the whole bottle of juice.

I backed away from them. “Did you wait outside to six-on-one a fledgling?”

“We had some unfinished business,” Dickhead said.

“Unfinished business?”

“I didn’t much like the way you wrinkled your nose at me when I walked up to order.”

“I didn’t much like the way you seem to think bathing is an optional pastime reserved for other people,” I replied, stopping with my back to the wall. “We can’t all be happy all the time.”

His lip curled, a growl rumbling from his throat. “You’re going to regret saying that.”

The dogshifters from behind the dumpsters launched themselves at me.

I had stopped underneath a fire escape. It was a disadvantage because I was against a wall, but also an advantage because I grabbed onto the ladder over my head and lifted myself up. I kicked out and caught the dogs in the chest, knocking them back.

The dog with the one I’d insulted ducked under my kick, but I pulled back and brought my legs down on his shoulders. I let go of the bars and spun around, tightening my legs around his neck. I jerked back, bracing my arms against his back, and he fell.

I rolled on the ground and came up to the two dogs I’d kicked back.

One aimed his fist at my face, but I moved into his reach, grabbing his wrist and wrapping my arm around his just before he hit. I heaved back and up, his elbow popping. He shouted in pain. I twisted away straight into the arms of another dog.

I tried to drop my weight, but he pulled me up off the ground.

Dickhead came forward, baring teeth that were a little too long and sharp now. “You should’ve just kept to yourself,” he growled.

I spat in his face.

He slapped me, the sting of claws cutting through my cheek. Claws tipped the ends of his fingers. The bastard had partially transformed to slap me.

I brought my knees to my chest and kicked out. He dodged the kick and pain tore through my shoulders with a popping sound. Dislocated shoulders. Fuck.

“Stupid fucking bloodsucker,” Dickhead snarled. There were even more teeth in his mouth.

He said something else, but I didn’t catch it. There was a new player standing behind him that was much more interesting.

The dog was six feet. The man behind him was closer to seven feet.

An absolute unit, he was the size of a house with rippling muscles and hands that looked like they could palm dinner plates. His skin was rough and wrinkled and he had a wicked scar going through his eyebrow, stopping below his eye. His hair was snow white, cropped close to his head in a military cut. I recognized him from Swanskin’s. He’d been sitting in a corner by himself.

The dog behind me must have been staring up, too, because Dickhead spun around to attack what was behind him, but the man caught his arm and twisted it. I heard the crack of bones breaking and the dog howled in pain.

“What are you doing here, whelp?” the man growled, barely opening his mouth. “Cornering a vamp because she bruised your ego?”

“Who the hell are you?” the dog roared. It was a whiny roar, more from pain than any sort of intimidation.

I didn’t have time to warn him as the other two dogs lunged at him. But I didn’t need to. He moved so fast, kicking one and throat punching the other. Was he even human? He didn’t smell like a vampire or shifter.

“Go home,” the man growled, his voice low and dangerous as the shifters groaned on the ground. “You’re not going to want to start this fight.” His eyes were an icy, impenetrable blue. Even I felt cold. He would follow through on his words.

The dogs seemed to catch that, too. The dog that had started the fight glanced at me and then said, “It’s not worth it, guys. Come on.” His voice was strained from the pain of the broken wrist, but he managed to retain a little dignity. Not much, but a little.

“Wise choice, cub,” the man rumbled.

The dogs let go of me and stalked away. They reminded me almost of stray dogs in the rain—sad and pathetic.

I stood up, my shoulders throbbing, and looked up at the man. “Do I have to worry about you now?” The enemy of my enemy was rarely my friend.

“Lisa suspected the ambush coming when you left. She sent me out after you as a favor to her.”

I looked him up and down. “I can see why. Someone’s been eating their Wheaties.”

He didn’t reply to that. “Just don’t get in anymore trouble. It’s not my style to help vampires.”

It wasn’t my style to need help, but I didn’t say anything like that. “Thanks,” I said instead.

The statement of gratitude seemed to surprise him. He glanced at me before nodding and grunting. He left.

I backed up against the alley. This was going to suck.

Bracing myself against the wall, I reached up and grabbed my shoulder, resisting the urge to whimper. Then I shoved it back while leaning against the wall. I hissed over the sound of my shoulder popping back into place. I repeated the procedure on the other shoulder. It hurt less that time.

I’d heal up fast enough. For now, the pain would just be a little less than terrible.

Sloane Briallen

I was in the woods. It was always these fucking woods. Redwoods and pine trees stretched into the sky, the tops swallowed by darkness. The ground around me was covered in moss and ferns, all blanketed by a layer of pine needles.

“Why is it always here?” I growled. One of the worst days of my life on fucking repeat. What was the nightmare this time? Would I spend the whole dream searching for Mickey and Bell? Would I find them dead? Worse, would I find them alive?

“What the hell?”

My heart dropped into my stomach at the sound of that voice.

It was an alive dream. I turned slowly, dreading what I would find.

Two dead men. My brothers.

Mickey was so much bigger than I remembered. The last time I had seen him, he had been so scrawny and tall. So hunched into himself, trying to make himself as small as possible. So intimidated by everything around him.

But now, he stood with confidence and strength. He wore sweatpants and a T-shirt, baggy but still very poor cover for the cords of muscle on his biceps and shoulders that stretched out the fabric. The sweatpants lay almost flat against his stomach, a slight curve of muscle beneath it.

He held himself differently, but his face was the same. A little gaunter than it had been, his cheekbones standing out in stark contrast to his sunken eyes. But his hazel green eyes were bright, if tired. His hair, past his ears now, was a bright reddish-brown. It made me want to run my fingers through it; it looked so soft.

Bell had changed, too, but not as much as Mickey. He had always been more confident and bulkier. He played soccer in high school, so he hadn’t been a hulk of a man, but he had been muscular.

Now he was bit more like a barrel, his chest wide across and his thighs the size of tree trunks. He looked like he belonged in a powerlifting competition. He wore looser T-shirt and sweatpants, but on him the sweatpants looked more like yoga pants—leaving nothing to the imagination. He was a brick shithouse of a man.

His chestnut hair curled around his ears and across his forehead. He was shorter than me, maybe by a couple inches. The height difference had never stopped him from knocking me out and he looked even more capable of that now.

They both looked so tired. It was a familiar look. I couldn’t place it at first until I realized their exhaustion was what I saw in my own eyes every time I looked in a mirror.

It was probably why I avoided mirrors so much.

“Sloane?” Bell croaked. He had been the one to speak originally.

I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I knew this was a dream. I knew I would wake up and they wouldn’t be there.

But I missed them so fucking much.

I barreled into them, pulling them as close as I could. Elation swelled in my chest, but my throat tightened. I smelled wood smoke and their unique combination of lemongrass and cedar as I held them.

They returned the embrace. Compared to them, my body was tiny and slender. They enveloped me in their arms, smothering me. The height differences between the three of us were awkward, but we made it work.

“We miss you,” Mickey whispered into my ear.

“So much,” Bell murmured into my shoulder.

A lump formed in my throat, and I pressed my lips together as hard as I could to keep them from trembling. After a moment, when I trusted myself to speak, I pulled away to meet their eyes and asked, “Can you miss people if you’re dead?”

I felt them both freeze against me. Bell met my gaze with warm brown eyes, biting his lip. “I guess that would be what you thought.”

I furrowed my eyebrows. I only ever saw them in my dreams, but this felt so different. They didn’t usually talk to me about After they disappeared.

“You’ve been gone almost two years. They’ll find your bones behind our house one day.”

Something dark flashed across Bell’s face, his forearms straining against skin as he balled his hands into fists against my shoulders.

Mickey put a hand on Bell’s shoulder and looked at me, taking a small step back but leaving a hand on my waist. The look of heartbreak on his face made me feel sick. “Fuck, I hate this.” His voice was tight.

I looked down, biting my lip. “Me, too. But if it meant I could see you . . . I would sleep forever.”

There was no answer to that.

I looked up at the trees. “It’s always this fucking place. Where we found your clothes after you disappeared.” Said clothes weren’t in the dream, for once. Usually they were, and they were bloody.

“Yeah, we hate coming back here, too,” Bell muttered.

“What—”

A new voice spoke. “This is a place where your dreams overlap. It’s the only place I could find all three of you.”

It had been almost eleven years, but I still recognized that voice as if I had just heard it minutes before. I turned wildly, searching for the source.

She was just as beautiful as I remembered.

She was a few inches shorter than me, and she was curvy. I hadn’t gotten my body type from her. Nor had I gotten my dark hair or pale skin from her. Hers was auburn blonde, and she was tanner than me. In fact, we hardly looked anything alike.

Except the eyes. Those were bright green and almond.

I had always had my mother’s eyes.

“Mom?” I breathed.

Mickey and Bell gasped.

“Hi, honey,” she said, smiling at me. She looked at Mickey and Bell. “Boys.”

I rarely had dreams about my mom. Usually if she was there, it was a memory. Though I guess this was still par for the course since those dreams usually also involved Mickey and Bell.

But I had never had a dream like this. I hadn’t dreamt new dreams about my mother in years. Or new dreams about Mickey and Bell. They were always the same recurring horrors—losing my mother, losing Mickey and Bell, finding any one of them dead.

She hugged me. “Honey, I’ve missed you so much.”

I hugged her back. “Mom . . .” Any other words were lost to the ache in my throat and the sting behind my eyes. I couldn’t convey the way my heart felt like it was going to burst from my chest. Or how, even though I didn’t need to breathe, it felt like there wasn’t enough air.

I clung to her, tears falling.

She pulled away gently, putting her hand to my face. It was so warm. “Sloanie,” she smiled, kissing me gently on the forehead. “We don’t have much time. I must do this now or never. I have something to give you.”

“What?”

She glanced behind her, as if she was looking at someone. She looked back at me. “Quick. Honey, I love you so much and am so proud of you. You’ve pulled through so much. And I don’t care that you’re a vampire.”

With two hands, she traced a circle around my neck. What was left when she pulled her hands away was a thin glowing ring made of bright white light that ended just below my collarbones. She traced something else on the glowing ring. When she pulled her hand away, it left five ovals radiating from the same center constructed of thin white light.

She stepped away, pulling my arms off of her as she did. My heart ached at the loss of contact.

“I leave you with this. Soulsilver. It will help protect you.”

The light around my neck solidified into a silver necklace with a flower on it. It was cold against my skin and prickled uncomfortably. I touched it and it zapped my finger like static electricity. I winced.

She turned to Mickey.

“You did the best you could,” my mom said to Mickey. She hugged him. “I love you.” She took his biceps and traced a thick ring of that white light around them. When she pulled away, they solidified into silver cuffs. On each cuff was etched the same flower as the one around my neck.

She turned to Bell. “You, too. You’re a good boy. I love you, too.” She took his wrists and traced bands like Mickey’s around them. They solidified into silver bands that covered his wrist. The flower was carved into these, too.

My thoughts had become muddled and murky. I kept opening my mouth to speak, but the words would disappear just as I tried to say them.

“These will help you in the coming years.” She kissed each of us on the forehead. “You will need them. You’ll face the same danger I faced, and you’ll need all the help you can get. I love the three of you and wish you well.

“What danger?” I asked. The question came out slowly, like cold molasses. My brain couldn’t move any faster to get more out. Everything was getting so hazy.

She backed away, smiling. Suddenly I couldn’t see her clearly anymore, entire limbs behind a foggy miasma. “Honey. I love you. Be good.”

I reached out for her, but she was too far, fading into fog.

“Mom,” I choked. I felt the sting of tears behind my eyes. You weren’t supposed to feel pain in dreams, right? Why did my eyes sting?

“I love you all,” she murmured. Her eyes were soft.

And then she was gone. She faded into smoke. I realized the whole forest was being consumed by the smokey haze. A heavy buzzing sound filled the air. I turned wildly to see the haze was consuming Mickey and Bell, too.

“No!” I croaked, reaching out to them.

They both jolted, as if just realizing what was happening around them.

Ghosts. They were all ghosts.

Mickey disappeared, leaving just Bell.

“No,” I screamed. I grabbed Bell. “Don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me.”

His arms went around me. “Not this time,” he said. “Not—”

And then he was gone.

The buzzing rose to consume the room, smoke filling my eyes. I closed them to clear it.

I opened my eyes to see the ceiling of my bedroom.

The buzzing continued and I turned groggily, tears leaking from my eyes as I did.

I finally saw the source of the buzzing. My cell phone. It was ringing.

Tears still stung at the corner of my eyes, but I fumbled for it anyway. Anything to distract from whatever the fuck I had just seen. Even if it was Karhi or Onyx calling about something stupid.

I flipped open my phone. It was a restricted number. Karhi, then. He was probably at a shareholder’s meeting or something. He rarely called from a number that wasn’t his own.

“Why are you calling?” I answered gruffly, trying to hide the way my voice hitched as I answered.

“Sloane?”

That voice. It was like bells. A flurry of emotions rose in my stomach, and I swallowed, trying to push it down. Everything already ached and this made it so much worse.

“Hello? Sloane?”

“Mira?” I croaked. All the air had left my lungs.

“Sloane,” she said. There was relief in her voice. “Hey.”

“Mira,” I whispered. I couldn’t believe it. “How . . .”

“Tracked the payments you’d been making to my account. You fucking bitch.”

I winced. I deserved that. “I’m sorry.”

“If you were sorry, you’d have fucking come back,” she snarled. “I called Mauve and Leah. You haven’t lived there in two years. You disappeared off the face of the fucking earth. Why the fuck didn’t you call me?”

I clenched the fist not holding the phone. The heat in her voice was like electricity against me—prickly and hair-raising. Goosebumps rippled across my arms, clearing away the agony of the dream.

“I can’t believe—” She cut off.

“Mira?” Had we been disconnected?

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.” She sounded like she was reorienting herself.

“Is something wrong?”

“Mikko is missing. He never came back after a fight night.”

The air around me stilled. I flexed my free hand.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.” I had heard her loud and clear. Mikko was missing?

“And?”

“And where are Amos and—”

“Amos and his whole group left out of town yesterday. They have some big kidnapping case over in California.”

I nodded even though she couldn’t see it.

“I can’t find him, Sloane.” Her voice trembled. “I don’t know where he is. And Frankie and Genie are back with us.”

I breathed in so fast, it was almost like a hiccup. “What?” I whispered.

“They found their parents dead. Shirley and Rolly—dead. Sloane, I don’t know what’s going on.” Her voice rose hysterically as she spoke, going faster and faster. “I can’t—”

“Okay,” I interrupted. “Okay, okay, okay.” It wasn’t a placating “okay”. It was an I’m-thinking “okay.” And it was meant to make her stop freaking out. It worked and she calmed for the moment.

After a moment, I had an idea. It wasn’t fully fleshed out, but it would be soon.

I checked the clock on my phone, for the first time realizing it was light out. It was close to nine AM. I had my next shift at Swanskin’s starting in four hours. “I’ll be there tomorrow, okay? I’m leaving now.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Maybe early morning the next day. Depends.”

“Okay,” she said. “Is this your number?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “It’s my cell. Call it when you need. I’m going to leave right now. God, Mira, I’m so sorry—”

“Save it,” she interrupted. “Just get here.” She hung up.

I had so much more to be sorry for and she didn’t even know it yet.

I had come home and passed out after work. I was still in my jeans and a long-sleeved fleece pullover. Being dead meant you didn’t really sweat or anything, so I wasn’t going to bother showering.

I grabbed the duffel bag I always kept under my bed. I hadn’t needed it in years, but I still always kept a rotating array of clean clothes in it. As well as some cash that wouldn’t be nearly enough for my trip.

I could tell Karhi wasn’t in the house. It was past eight, so he may have been at a board meeting for one of the companies he had his fingers in. That was usually what he was up to this early in the morning.

I left the room and put the bag down by the front door on my way to Karhi’s room.

It was a simple room. A huge four-poster bed with hand carved wooden posts, covered in a staggering number of pillows, sat in the center of the room. The walls were just bookshelves except for the one that had a pair of French doors in it and an area where there was a door into his walk-in closet.

My focus was his closet.

One side of his closet was lined with suits, dress shirts, dress pants, and shoes. The other side was T-shirts, V-necks, and jeans.

But what I wanted was the safe hidden in the wall in the back corner behind all the suits. It was where he kept some fake IDs and passports for me if I ever needed them. He had given me the combination in case I ever needed to put something in it.

He never thought I would know what to take out of it.

I reached past the IDs and maybe $200 in cash for the false wall at the back of the safe that was actually built into the wall of the closet. I had noticed it when he showed me the safe.

I pulled out the back wall of the safe. There were two guns and his own identity papers. I didn’t want those.

I wanted the rest of the cash he kept up there.

I grabbed the bills and put the guns and documents back, leaving the two hundred in small bills in the main part of the safe. I put the false wall back in and looked at how much cash I had. Someone had taught me what the colors meant for the different straps on bill bundles. Thirty-four thousand. That was more than enough.

I went back into the living room and jammed the money in the bag.

If Karhi wasn’t home, and he was at a stockholder meeting like I thought, it meant the car was here. There was usually a car sent for him for those meetings because that’s what rich fucks did, I guess.

I looked up at the mail holder by the door and his car key was indeed still on a hook. But taking that key wasn’t the right idea. I didn’t want him to notice it was missing.

I went into the kitchen and reached to the basket on top of the fridge. There were a few nuts and bolts and his spare car key up there. He wouldn’t notice that missing for a while.

I locked up the house and took the elevator downstairs.

Karhi’s building was the type of wealthy that I had never imagined I would even be allowed inside of. The floors in the lobby were marble with veins of gold. A water fountain to one side of the lobby took up the full first two stories of the building. The wealth on display in the lobby alone made me uncomfortable.

But I never had to be in it again. I could go back to what I was used to.

I dialed Swanskin’s on my phone as I left the elevators.

“Hello?”

“Niqui,” I said.

“Sloane, what’s up?”

“I know this is super short notice, but I have to go somewhere. And I highly doubt I’m going to be back any time soon, if ever.”

“Does this have to do with that Apache girl from yesterday?”

She meant Corvine. “No. Remember I told you about the family I left behind?”

“Yeah.”

“They need me. I’m really sorry that I’m doing this to you, but I have to go. I—”

“You suck,” she sighed. “But I get it. You need to go to your family. It’s okay. But let me know you’re okay when all is said and done, alright? Even if you’re my now-fired employee, I like you enough.”

I smiled. “Thanks.”

We hung up.

I exited the lobby into the parking garage.

Karhi’s black Jetta was parked at the top of the garage. Opening the door, I knelt to the ground and ducked my head underneath the steering wheel.

It took me a minute to disable the GPS because it had been so long since the last time I’d done it. I got off my knees and climbed into the seat, hitting the push-to-start button.

“I’m sorry,” an automated voice said from the car speakers. “We cannot find your location. Please call—”

I turned it off. I put the car in gear and backed out of the space. Unfortunately, disabling the GPS meant no Sirius XM, but I was sure I’d find a way to fill the time. I had a lot of anxiety about going home. I could definitely think about that for the twenty-five-plus hours it would take me to drive to Phoenix.

This was not going to be fun.

Karhi Emelyn

“I don’t understand how a fledgling refuses to drink blood,” Karhi complained, slamming down his mug on the countertop.

“Hey,” Carry snapped, putting a cloth coaster down and moving his mug to it. “Don’t chip my counters.”

Karhi scowled but he ran his fingers over the granite to make sure he hadn’t damaged the countertop. It was fine.

He had gone over to Carry and Onyx’s place after his argument with Sloane. Their apartment was much larger and more open than his. A penthouse suite on the top floor, it was primarily an open rose marble floor plan with a spare bedroom and master bedroom off of the sides.

The kitchen separated the foyer from the living room, just a hexagon of counters and appliances enclosing the kitchen space. Low-backed stools were spaced evenly around the kitchen, allowing for people to sit while others worked in the kitchen.

Karhi sat at one of the stools, Onyx next to him. Carry stood cutting up strawberries to make a daiquiri. Karhi didn’t get the point of making drinks for the sake of making drinks if there was no blood. He had asked for blood instead.

“It is weird though, isn’t it?” Onyx asked. She was sketching on a pad of paper. “But also, maybe it’s not? Ilona starved all of us our first year. We were always thirsty.”

“Lunette didn’t starve her children,” Karhi replied, picking up his mug to drink. “They still drank anything and everything.”

“I wouldn’t use Luna as an example because too many of her fledglings went into frenzy,” Carry replied. “But . . . I would still agree because our fledglings also drank anything and everything.”

“The other day, she collapsed from not eating.”

“Yeah, you told us.”

“Did I tell you I had to open up a vein and feed her directly?” Karhi ran his hand through his hair in frustration.

Carry grimaced. “It was that bad?” She tossed the remaining strawberries in the blender and moved to grab the rum from her liquor cabinet.

“Yes!”

“Did you make sure she drank when she got home?” Onyx asked.

He rolled his eyes, but he nodded. “She didn’t give me shit about it. For once.”

“Maybe use a lighter touch,” she said, shading in something in her drawing. “Did you make her feel bad for eating?”

He scowled. “No.” He paused for a second. “I did point out that she always has to do something while drinking. Asked if it was so she didn’t have to focus on the blood.”

“If you think she hates drinking blood,” Onyx said, “don’t. Point. It. Out.” She rapped his shoulder with her pencil to emphasize each word.

He swatted at her to make her stop. “What the hell, Onyx?”

“Don’t punish the behaviour you want to see! You want to open another vein because she doesn’t drink again for a week?”

He sneered at her, but she was right. “Fine,” he grumbled.

“If you two just finally dealt with all that sexual tension, maybe you’d get along,” Carry said, putting the lid on her blender and starting it.

“Carry!”

She smirked at him, leaving the blender running to drown him out.

He seethed. Onyx and Carry always sided with Sloane. They told him that he was the one who decided to sire her into a vampire. He was the one who had chosen the most stubborn, childish human as his first fledgling ever. He was the one who had to act like an adult and take responsibility because he was over five hundred, and she was nineteen.

Oh, he hadn’t told them.

When Carry finally stopped blending, Karhi said, “She’s nineteen, Carry.”

Carry stopped in the middle of lifting the pitcher off the blender motor, staring at him slack-jawed. “What?”

Onyx looked up from her drawing, eyes wide. “I thought she was at least twenty-five.”

He rubbed his face. “I did, too, when I turned her. But recently she pulled that out when she was angry at me, and I do not know what to do about that.”

“Ooooh, you’re going to have to go on trial,” Onyx said. Her tone was far more amused than it should have been.

“How close is she to twenty?” Carry asked. She paused. “Wait, is that even illegal?”

He threw up his hands in uncertainty. “I have no idea. Twenty is the age of adulthood for us, but eighteen is the age for humans. Age of consent for humans is lower than eighteen, so, is the age of consent for us lower, too? But usually, consent means sex, and that’s not even what I mean.”

“Isn’t it?” Carry asked, raising an eyebrow.

He glared at her. “No. The power dynamic between a sire and fledgling makes everything imbalanced.”

“Ilona—” Onyx started.

“I don’t care what Ilona does,” he growled. “I wouldn’t ever use her as an example for anything except how to not treat your fucking children.”

Onyx looked away, going back to sketching. Carry, on the other hand, eyed him for a moment before smiling. “I’m glad to see your general rule of sleeping with anything that can consent doesn’t extend to your fledgling.”

He rolled his eyes. “She can’t consent. Things could be different if the fledgling-sire connection didn’t mean you could literally control your fledgling to do whatever you wanted. But as it is, no. The minute she hits her year mark and is a full-fledged vampire, she gets to live her life and get the hell out of mine.”

“If you can get that far.”

He made a noise of irritation in the back of his throat, clicking the ball of his tongue piercing against his teeth. “I’ve never heard of this. If the courts find out, will I get arrested for turning an underage-overage human?”

“That would be a question for Luna,” Carry replied.

He gave the ceiling a long-suffering look. “She’s going to be pissed when she finds out.”

“You cleaned up plenty of her fledgling messes. She can buck up.”

His phone beeped. He checked it to see a text message confirming that his order was ready.

He drained the rest of the blood from his mug and stood up. “I’ll talk to her. But right now, I have to go pick up more blood.”

“Don’t you usually get it delivered?”

“Yeah, but someone went through my whole stash this past week because she has no concept of maintaining her blood levels. She keeps starving herself, which means we went through almost my entire supply for the month to stabilize her. I had to order again so soon that Azlea told me I had to go pick it up myself.”

“Oooh, fun,” Onyx said.

Karhi grimaced, leaving.

Azlea and Thirn only lived a few buildings away from Carry and Onyx, but he still drove to avoid having to carry the blood bags back to his car.

They lived in the tallest residential building in Minneapolis, the Carlyle, on the top two floors. It was a long way up on a single elevator that only went to their apartment.

He stepped out of the elevator into a hallway painted a minty green. The carpet was plush, and he sunk into it when he stepped out.

The door in front of him looked like it belonged to a different time. The hallway was modern, with carpeting and paint and small, polished wood end tables on either side of the elevator doors.

The door was constructed of wood, lines of dark russet and pale cream circling to meet in the centre. Where the different colours met sat an old, burnished iron knocker polished to a dark shine.

He hit the knocker against the door three times. As always, the sound that emanated was far too deep and resonant for iron on wood.

“Come in!”

Karhi pushed open the door and entered into the dead of winter.

The room stretched out before him. Stalactites of ice gripped the cavernous ceiling menacingly with sharp tips. From their thick bases, big, fat snowflakes fell, blanketing the floor before him with snow. The snow drifts rose and fell as if wind had whipped them around the room. Some drifts came up to his waist.

He had known to expect it before coming in, but it was still a marvel. He hadn’t felt even a draft coming from under the door. Magic cloaked the room.

Every wall except the one he’d walked through was made of glass. From the outside, the windows were mirrored, but from the inside Karhi could see the Mississippi a block away.

Ice columns as wide as he would be with outstretched arms grew from the floor. Some were as low as Karhi’s knees, others twice as tall as him.

A small woman stood barefoot on one of those columns. Azlea.

She was as pale as the snow that surrounded her, her crimson lips standing out in stark contrast. Her hair fell to her waist, all the pale blues and greens of glaciers. She wore a white dress that looked like cloth, but Karhi suspected it was made of woven ice.

“Karhi!” she cried out, jumping down and running to meet him. Her dress moved just stiffly enough to give credence to his theory.

She stopped short just before she reached him, eyes wide. She peered up at him, almost two heads shorter than he was.

An uneasy feeling crept up his spine. “What?”

“You . . .” She tilted her head and sniffed. “What is that smell? It’s milky.”

His brow furrowed. “What smell?”

She leaned forward until her face was against his chest. She inhaled. “You smell like sandalwood . . . but the milk. And the lavender.”

A light went on in his head. “The lavender is probably my fledgling.”

Azlea stepped back, her eyebrows high on her forehead in surprise. “Tuhkanharmaa? A fledgling? Since when?”

He took a step back from Azlea. “Do not call me that,” he said coldly.

She put her hand over her mouth in chagrin. “I’m sorry. Old habits.”

He nodded stiffly and chose to move on. “Answering your question, since this past December.”

“Is that why I haven’t seen you?”

“I was busy.”

She looked to the back of the room. where a spiral staircase made of shards of ice the size of him rose to the ceiling. “Thirn!” she called. “Come down here!”

“No! If Karhi wants to see me, he can come up himself!” The voice sounded congested and huffy.

“He’s grouchy. This really isn’t his season. Come.”

She took Karhi’s arm and pulled him with force she shouldn’t have had for how tiny she was. They started up the stairs. Halfway up, the ice turned to stone.

If downstairs was what happened when winter was allowed to ravage a room, upstairs was what happened after winter passed and summer was well underway.

All of the colours of the season gripped the room. Pale green spruce and sweeping fire orange beech skirted the walls and windows. The paw-like leaves of oak swooped down from above over maples burning with red and tangerine. Flame maples, red twig dogwood, and boxwood hugged the ground between the trees creating a thick, brush-like forest.

Anywhere that was bare, creeping thyme grew, sprouted with purple flowers. A gentle breeze blew through the trees. The roof was open straight to the night sky here.

A colourful brick walkway from the stairs led to boulders the size of wrecking balls embedded into the ground. A man as tall as Karhi sat against one of these rocks. Shoulder-length blonde hair reflected strange green and red highlights, and vermillion eyes shone with white and yellow glints. He wore a business suit that normally looked like a second skin on him, he was so comfortable in it.

Today was abnormal because he didn’t look like he could be comfortable anywhere or in anything. His nose was red, his red eyes blood shot. His entire visage created a nightmare of blood staring at Karhi.

“Hello, Karhi,” Thirn said, voice flat and nasal. He sneezed, grabbing a tissue from the box on the ground next to him. A pile of crumpled tissues sat on his other side.

“Hello, Thirn.”

“Thirn!” Azlea cried out excitedly, letting go of Karhi to flutter over to her . . . husband? Karhi had never been entirely sure what their relationship was. “Karhi has a fledgling!”

Thirn’s eyebrows rose from behind the tissue he’d brought to his face. “You?”

Karhi nodded.

Thirn blew his nose. “I want to move to Hawaii,” he said, giving Azlea an unpleasant look.

Azlea waved a dismissive hand at him. “Tell us about your fledgling, Karhi. When will we meet her?”

“I doubt you will,” he said. “She hates vampires.”

Thirn grimaced. “One of those self-loathers?”

He threw up his hands in frustration. “I guess? Not like the religious, self-righteous types. You know why I’m picking up blood so soon after getting it from you? She keeps starving herself.”

Thirn’s eyebrows went up. “A vampire starving herself?”

“I don’t know if it’s because she hates that she drinks blood, or if it’s because she genuinely forgets—”

Thirn scoffed but the sound quickly devolved into a coughing fit. “Fledglings do not forget to drink blood,” he said when he could breathe again.

Karhi shrugged. “I have to monitor her intake. And, you know, I’ve heard that’s normal for a fledgling, because you have to make sure they don’t gorge themselves or kill too many people or whatever. But I don’t think this is normal. I have to monitor her intake to make sure she drinks enough.”

“Did she go into frenzy from not drinking?” Thirn asked, blowing his nose again.

“No. She passed out. I had to open a vein and feed her.”

Thirn and Azlea exchanged glances.

“I’ve never heard of that,” Thirn said. “A starved vampire not going into frenzy?”

“And you’re restocking on blood because she consumes more than she should after starving herself?” Azlea asked.

Karhi nodded slowly. “Yes . . . why?”

“You should talk to your sister, Lunette,” Thirn said. “You clearly know starved vampires need to be given blood directly from another vampire when they get too weak.”

Karhi knew first-hand, and he didn’t want to think about it. His first year as a vampire had been torture. Literally. “Yes,” he said stiffly.

“Of course you do. Ilona is your sire. But the second part, which you may not know since this second half was likely lost on you early in your second life—when they’re back to drinking blood, they can’t drink too much. It’s a shock to their system and can actually kill them.”

“She . . . drank two bags of blood in one go right after I revived her last week.”

They stared at him.

“That isn’t normal?”

“No,” Thirn said. “It is not.”

Karhi stared at them. He had definitely not known that. He had never been interested in siring anyone before. His siblings had sired their fair share, but Onyx, Carry, and Zeren hadn’t sired any in decades, maybe even centuries. And Lunette had put a soft ban on herself from siring anyone since the last incident with her fledglings about thirty years ago. That had put a damper on the campaign for the vampire courts trying to recruit her to make new vampires for them as a Producer.

“What’s her name?” Azlea asked.

“Sloane Briallen.”

Everything in the room stilled. The breeze stopped and an uncomfortable silence fell over them.

“Briallen . . .” Thirn said, looking at Azlea.

“That’s what the smell is,” Azlea murmured, looking to Thirn. “You’re stuffy, but I can smell it. It’s like . . .”

Thirn looked at Karhi. “The irony,” he said. “And you have no idea what you’ve done, do you? The danger you’ve put yourself in?”

“I doubt she has any idea, either,” Azlea shook her head.

“Mmm. True.”

Karhi bristled. Years of listening to his sire talk about him as if he wasn’t even there had left a bad taste in his mouth when anyone else did it. “What are you talking about?”

They glanced at each other before Azlea said, “All we can tell you is to be careful. Both you and she need to be careful.”

“Why?”

“It is not our place to get involved,” Thirn said.

Azlea waved a hand in front of Karhi. His stomach and vision lurched.

When they settled, he realized he had been transported out of the building. He spun around and saw his car parked on the street where he had left it. The back seat was filled with packets of blood.

The muscle in his jaw jumped as he clenched his teeth. What the hell had that been?

Looking up at the building, the top floors looked normal with walls and windows. There was no indication that the roof opened up to the sky.

It was quiet, and nothing stirred.

Frustrated thoughts ran through Karhi’s mind as he arrived in front of the door to his apartment, carrying the boxes of blood Azlea and Thirn had teleported into his car. He set the boxes down, fumbling for his keyring in his pocket.

He hooked them onto his finger and pulled them out, immediately dropping them. He cursed, stooping down to retrieve them.

As he did, he saw a white envelope set neatly against his door. He hadn’t been able to see it behind the boxes.

Curiosity blunted his anger. There was nothing written on the front, just a white, crisp envelope.

He picked it up off the ground and set it on top of the boxes.

He unlocked the door and hauled the boxes back into his arms, making sure the envelope stayed on top. Walking into the house, he found Sloane asleep on the couch, the credits for Top Gun playing in the background.

He almost tripped when he saw her, just barely keeping the boxes in his grasp.

He had never seen her asleep out here before. She always locked the door to her bedroom and tended to sleep when he wasn’t home. She preferred going out during the day.

He fumbled the boxes but kept them all squarely in his grasp, biting his tongue before he could swear. He knew that awake-Sloane was generally unpleasant. Just-woken-up-Sloane probably wasn’t much better.

He glided to the kitchen and set the boxes down. He doubled back to close the door.

As he started to close the door, he heard Sloane sigh. He looked over to see her readjusting herself. She was leaned against one side of the couch, a fleece blanket pulled around her. Her long dark brown hair covered her face, stark against how pale her skin was. Even for a vampire, she was pale.

Absently, he pulled at the ball of his tongue piercing with his teeth. Asleep, she looked almost . . . pleasant. Like she wouldn’t punch him in the mouth for being annoying.

Her eyes opened and she sat up, scrubbing her hair away from her face.

Karhi shut the door behind him, and she started, looking over at him. Her green eyes were alert, as always. If not for her messy hair, she wouldn’t have even looked like she had just woken up.

He felt her uncertainty when she looked at him. She wasn’t sure if he was still angry at her or not.

Right. She had punched him in the mouth. And then two people of unknown magical origins had told him she was dangerous. And then they teleported him downstairs without his permission and didn’t give him a single explanation.

He looked away, stalking to the kitchen. “You should sleep in a bed,” he muttered.

He had expected her to say something along the lines of, “Well then, don’t be a fucking creep and watch me sleep”, but she didn’t say that. Instead, he heard her stand up, murmuring, “Yeah, he’s right.”

She went to her room and shut the door. He heard the lock click into place and then he heard her climb into bed.

He shook his head and started to unload the bags, setting the envelope to the side.

“Dangerous, my ass,” he muttered.

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.

My mouth was dry, tongue like sandpaper. “What?” I said. “What did you say?” Vaguely, I could hear the heart monitor picking up speed next to me.

The deputy looked uncomfortable. He stood in the doorway of my hospital room, in his blue pants and his blue shirt and his stupid blue hat, a gun and taser holstered at his side. He was barely a couple years older than me. I remembered him dully as a senior when I started high school. Kyle Dunphy.

His forehead was slick with sweat, and he licked his lips nervously. The lights in the room made him look like a ghost. But then again, hospital lights made everyone look like a ghost. Foreshadowing, some would call it.

To my right, Leah was taking her turn to sit with me, attention rapt on the deputy. Her hands were knotted anxiously in her lap, frizzed blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail.

“We have to call off the search,” Kyle said again.

“Call off the search?” I echoed quietly. As if I hadn’t heard him the first time. “Why?”

“We can’t keep our resources on this,” he said, looking between me and Leah. “We’ve already gone far past the usual amount of time for search and rescue. It’s been over a week, and we haven’t found a trace of Mickey and Bell.”

Anger washed over me, hot and bright against my skin as I sat up. I fought back another wave of dizziness that threatened to overtake me, leveling a glare at the man in front of me. “You just want to give up?” I demanded. “Mickey and Bell are a part of this community, Kyle. Mickey used to babysit your baby sister.” Next to me, I saw tears rolling down Leah’s cheeks.

“I know, Sloane,” he replied. There was an edge to his voice. Whether it was guilt or annoyance, I couldn’t tell. “And the community will continue to organize search parties. But we are all exhausted.” He motioned towards me. “You’re exhausted.”

He meant me, in this room, sitting in my hospital bed, having collapsed from dehydration and malnutrition two days before. A banana bag and a saline bag flowed down a tube into my elbow, a blood pressure cuff on my arm to monitor my blood pressure every two hours, and a pulse-ox on my finger to monitor my heart rate. I was supposed to be let out today, with strict orders for bed rest for three more days.

“Exhaustion doesn’t mean you give up,” I hissed. “I’m not going to give up on my brothers, Kyle.”

“We’re not asking you to.”

“But you’re asking me to accept that you, our proud boys in blue, won’t help me anymore. You are asking me that.”

He didn’t respond.

“Sloane,” Leah said softly.

I ignored her. “I fucking knew I couldn’t trust you. The minute it gets hard, you give up. Just like cops always fucking do. Fucking lazy pigs,” I spat.

“Sloane!”

“It’s okay, Leah,” he said. I could see the heat in his eyes; I had made him angry. Good. “She’s just having a hard time.”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here!” I shouted, throwing the blanket off my legs and leaping out of bed. My head pounded, and I fought back another wavy of dizziness.

“Sloane!” Leah stood up, grabbing my arm.

I saw Kyle put his hand towards his taser.

“Oh, big man going to tase an eighteen-year-old girl in a hospital? Is that what we’re going to do?” I screamed. I wrenched myself from Leah’s grip, yanking out the IVs from my arm. “Fuck you, Kyle.” I grabbed the IV cart and launched it at him.

Even with how dizzy I was, and how my head hurt, and how dehydrated I’d become, I was still strong.

Kyle dodged the cart, but the bag of saline still hit him in the head, and he shouted out in pain. The cart clattered to the floor. I could hear the drone of the heartbeat monitor from where I had pulled the pulse-ox off.

Leah shouted, trying to pull me back. “You can’t throw things at him!”

“Why not?” I shouted, lunging at Kyle. Leah’s grip was tight this time and I drew up short, wrenching my arm in its socket. My vision lurched, my stomach rolling with it.

Two nurses pushed past Kyle to see what was happening. When they saw the IV on the ground, they glanced at each other.

“Sloane, I’m going to have to charge you with assaulting an officer,” Kyle said tightly, reaching for the cuffs on his hip.

“Oh,” I said, black spots filling my vision. “Are you gonna . . . cuff . . . a sick person . . .”

I heard Leah scream my name before everything went black.