6. Chapter 6
Bastien
The door closes behind her, and I look at my hand. It isn’t steady. There’s a tremor at the base of my fingers. Small. But there. I have held this hand steady through duels and deathbeds. It has never moved without my permission.
It just did.
I sit down in the chair she was sitting in. The leather holds the shape of her. I’m warm, actually warm, wrist to jaw, from what I took. The fire at my back has no connection to it.
Blood doesn’t do anything. Not like that.
Every time I have fed, blood has merely filled me.
Hers did something. The first pull came up carrying a charge.
It ran down my throat and out through every vein.
My senses tore open. The candle flames flared at the edge of my sight.
Her heartbeat filled the room. When she shifted in the chair, I heard the silk move against her skin.
Power. Hers. It came through the blood straight into me.
And then it was gone.
I already can’t remember the taste.
I reach for it, and it slides away, the same way her face slid off my memory in that corridor.
I remember everything since my rebirth in this form.
But twenty minutes ago is gone. Every pull tonight was the first pull.
Even now, sitting here, wanting to remember, it aches low in my gut, the same place hunger sits.
Again.
I want it again.
I stopped myself tonight. That’s the part I keep returning to. I reached the point I’d set for myself, and my mouth stayed on her throat past it—one second, two—before I made it stop. Appetite has never argued with me in my entire existence. Tonight it argued.
That’s new.
I don’t care for it.
Her fight made it better. Her body gave in. She didn’t. Jaw locked. Eyes on the ceiling. Silent until she couldn’t be. I felt it against my mouth. I felt her hating it. The hating made it sweeter.
I enjoyed that. It doesn’t trouble me.
So what is she?
The Sangrey line. Vasile watched my face when he said the name, and now it sounds less like sales talk. I’ve fed on witches. I’ve fed on wolves. None of them lit up the drink. None of them hid from my own memory afterward.
Chemistry. Some quirk of a rare bloodline meeting what I am. Good. Chemistry can be dosed and priced, and money is the one thing I’ve never run short of.
“Clever,” I say to nobody. “They have a source that’s addictive, and they’ve built it so you can never have enough.”
Every dealer’s dream.
I leave it there. I don’t ask what else it could be.
Vasile is in the office with the false window, mid-sentence to an assistant. Whatever he reads in my arrival ends the sentence. The assistant is gone before I’ve fully entered the room.
“My lord.” He comes toward me. “I trust the evening was—”
“We’re discussing terms. You said we would.” I don’t sit. “Reserve her. Sole use, not priority. No one else drinks from her, or puts her in a session room, while this arrangement stands.”
A pause, a fraction long. He expected a satisfied client. This is something else, and he’s repricing it while I watch. “Of course, my lord. The house would be delighted to arrange a standing—”
“That’s not a request for the calendar. Private sessions, at my convenience. She’s not to be fed from, or shown to anyone else while I hold it.”
“Absolutely understood.” His hands find each other. “There is—my lord will forgive the operational note—she’s on the draw schedule. Daily extraction, standing quota. Her line’s yield is committed, as I mentioned. The schedule is not within—”
“Take her off it. I don’t pay for watered-down drinks.”
He blinks. “My lord, the quota.”
“I tasted exactly what your draw schedule has done to her, Vasile. She was half-drained before I ever touched her.” I let that sink in.
“Lord Val-Serein—” he begins.
“You sold me an evening with your rarest stock and served her to me half empty. I’ll forgive it once.
It was worth it. It won’t be worth it twice.
Whatever her quota earns you, bill it to me on top, and stop bleeding her between my visits.
Her condition, going forward, is the product. Food. Warmth. Whatever mortals need.”
“But my superiors—”
I cut him off again. “If your superiors have difficulty with any of that, they may bring it to me. I’d enjoy the conversation.”
He’s counting, and not only money. I watch it move through him while his face holds its warmth.
A client with a standing appointment for the rarest thing in the house doesn’t stay one client.
He brings his circle. He brings his rivals, out of spite.
Somewhere behind his eyes, tonight’s story is already being drafted for whoever holds his position above him.
“Naturally, my lord.” He spreads his hands. “An arrangement of this scope… The rates would need to reflect—”
“Name them. I don’t haggle. Haggling is for people who care what things cost.”
He names a figure that would embarrass a small government. I give a nod that makes it boring.
The rest we do at his desk. He produces a leather folder and a fountain pen worth as much as his suit. He writes while he talks.
“Sessions from dusk, my lord?”
“From dusk. I’ll send word ahead on the day.”
“Of course. The room you used this evening…shall the house keep it for you?”
“Yes. And I want her brought to me awake and unhandled. No sedation. No escort gripping her arms. She walks in on her own feet.”
His pen pauses. “The handlers are standard for—”
“Not for her. They wait down the hall. What happens in that room is not the house’s business.”
“Privacy absolute.” He writes it. “And her maintenance… You said food, warmth. The ward has a standard provision—”
“The ward’s standard provision is exactly what left her like that. Double it. Better food, warm blankets, whatever it takes to put color back in her. Add it to my account, and don’t itemize it. I don’t need a receipt for kindness.”
A short laugh gets away from him before he can dress it up. He writes. “Draws suspended, effective tonight. I’ll walk the order down myself. My lord, may I say, the house rarely sees a client with such…attention to the asset.”
“I have no interest in a half-dead blood source. And Vasile…” I watch the pen stop. “If her name spreads, I’ll know who shared it.”
“Understood, my lord. Fully.”
He blots the page, turns the folder for my signature. I sign it and don’t look at the number.
He walks me to the door, offers his hand, remembers himself, and bows low instead.
“The house is honored, Seigneur de Val-Serein. Truly. I believe you’ll find her…” he selects the word with care, “singular.”
“I found that out myself.”
The night outside is cold, heavy with diesel and pine. After that building, the air is almost clean.
Yves has the car door open before my foot leaves the last step. He’s the only one I trust enough to bring somewhere like this. His face asks nothing at all.
“à la maison, mon seigneur?”
“Oui. à la maison.” I settle into the seat as he takes the route home.
The compound passes the windows, armed guards on the fence line and at the gate. I should be paying attention. I don’t.
“Yves,” I say.
“Yes, my lord?”
“I bought myself an amusement tonight.”
“Very good, my lord.”
Floodlights swing past the glass. Then wire. Then trees. A standing appointment, at a figure I’ve already forgotten, for sole use of a vein no one else will touch.
The tremor is gone. The warmth goes with it, mile by mile. I reach after the taste anyway, testing whether it comes back if I approach it sideways.
It doesn’t. Tomorrow at dusk, it will.