Epilogue #2
The side door let out into the dry, cooling breath of the desert, and for a moment the ordinary ugliness of the industrial block felt almost elegant under the Vegas evening.
The warehouse exterior remained exactly what I had designed it to be—unremarkable, forgettable, armored by understatement—save for the terracotta planters along the brick path where bougainvillea spilled dark blossoms over their rims and desert sage silvered in the failing light.
The sky had gone the deep bruised violet particular to desert evenings, that strange suspended color between heat and night, while the distant Strip burned on the horizon like a smear of electric vice too far away to offend me properly.
Low industrial buildings hunched on either side of the street, all corrugated metal and loading bays and neglected asphalt.
Nothing about the block suggested a supernatural court operated in its midst. That, too, pleased me.
My two-man detail fell in a few paces back the instant I stepped outside. Good men. Silent. Trained well enough to protect without performing protection for my vanity. Taras came beside me, hands in his trouser pockets, his posture loose in the deceptive way competent men wore it.
We had casually been discussing the Elder Council because their behavior of late continued to force my father and me to pay more attention to them than we had patience for.
“If the elder from Monterey says ‘collective stewardship’ to justify one more petty territorial incursion,” I said, “I will make it my mission to show him the collective quality of a shallow grave.”
Taras’s gaze remained on the path ahead. “That may be interpreted as a hardline position.”
“It is a truthful one.”
“He has constituency.”
“He has delusion.”
“He also has votes.”
“Then the votes are ill-bred.”
Taras exhaled softly through his nose, which in him passed for laughter if one was charitable. “You do understand that your visible contempt is not always politically useful.”
“My hidden contempt is apparently insufficiently educational.”
We moved past the largest planter near the corner of the path, a broad terracotta thing planted thick with desert sage at the base and bougainvillea climbing a concealed trellis in a spill of dark leaves and late-season blossoms. The brick beneath my shoes still held some of the day’s heat.
Somewhere out on the boulevard, tires hissed.
“I attend those sessions,” I said, “because leaving lesser minds unsupervised encourages innovation.”
“An attitude that explains much about your popularity.”
“Popularity,” I said, “is for entertainers.”
That was when the figure lurched out from behind the planter and collapsed directly into my path.
She did not stumble so much as fail.
One second the walkway ahead was clear. The next, a body emerged from the shadow in a wavering half-step, struck the edge of the brick with one knee, and went down hard enough that I heard skin meet grit. My guards moved instantly, one from each side, fast and efficient, and already reaching.
I stopped them with a single raised hand.
Both men halted at once, though not without readiness hardening every line of them. Taras stopped beside me. I felt rather than saw his attention sharpen.
Only then did I step forward.
A woman. Auburn hair in long, matted tangles that might once have held wave or softness and now only held neglect.
Her clothing hung from her rather than fit—a thin shirt, dark with dirt at the collar and hem, and shredded trousers that had been too loose even before whatever had happened to her began devouring her from the bones outward.
She was so emaciated that the shape of her collarbones cut sharp through the fabric like blades pressing from within.
Her wrists—Christ—her wrists were raw, abraded all the way around, the skin reddened and broken in narrow bands that needed no great imagination to interpret.
Fresh restraint. Recent enough that I felt my pulse change.
She pushed up on one trembling hand and failed to rise. Dust marked her cheeks. Her breathing came shallow and uneven, as if even the act of crossing whatever distance had brought her here had cost more than she possessed.
I crouched.
Her face lifted.
Hollow-cheeked. Mouth dry. Navy eyes too large in the ruined thinness of her face, glassy not with fever exactly but with the compounded exhaustion of hunger, fear, and whatever terrible vigilance had kept her moving when any sane body would have shut down.
Human, I thought at first glance. Or close enough to it that no supernatural trait announced itself ahead of the misery.
“Help,” she whispered.
The word scraped out of her as though her throat objected to being used again.
“I have you,” I said.
It was not comfort. It was fact.
Her gaze searched my face with desperate, disbelieving concentration, as if she were trying to determine whether I was real or merely the final hallucination available to a body collapsing in public. Then her lips parted again.
“Blood slave.”
Everything in me went still.
Cold did not belong naturally to my kind, not in the human sense. Yet my blood turned with such abrupt chill that for one beat the desert evening might as well have been winter.
Blood slave.
Not blood donor. Not willing feeder. Not one of the more modern evasions lesser predators sometimes used when they wished to commit atrocity while preserving the veneer of commerce. Blood slave was the old term. The honest one. Ownership. Captivity. Human body made into storehouse and property.
Outlawed.
Not merely by law but by principle. By family decree.
By the foundations my father had laid in blood and discipline more than a hundred years earlier, when he decided that any vampire who needed chains to feed deserved neither territory nor title.
We had built order on that line. We had enforced it.
Hard. Publicly. Repeatedly. The practice was not only illegal in Kozlov’s dominion.
It was an insult to the very idea of civilization among predators.
Something changed in my face then. I knew it because Taras, from just behind my shoulder, went quiet in that specific manner he reserved for the instant before violence became probable. One of the guards shifted his weight and then thought better of it.
My jaw locked. I felt it happen. I did not move much. I did not need to. Stillness, in men like me, often frightened more effectively than overt threat.
“Who?” I asked.
The question came dangerously soft.
Her lashes fluttered. Fear moved through her at once, visible and immediate.
Not because of me, I thought, though I would not have blamed her if she feared every supernatural thing she saw.
No. This was trained fear. The kind that heard a question about ownership and braced for punishment before reason arrived.
“It—” She swallowed and winced at the effort. “Please.”
Not now, then. Not here.
I altered course without hesitation.
“You are safe,” I said.