Chapter 2
ALEXANDER
Alexander Damianos was shit at pretending to be human when he was hungry.
The students seated in front of him in the seminar room were looking at him expectantly, wondering why their professor had paused in the middle of a sentence about utilitarianism and the hierarchy of pleasures.
Alexander was usually better at maintaining the kind of idle fidgeting that mortals always did unthinkingly, avoiding freezing into the predatory stillness that gave away that he was something… else.
“Professor?” One of the girls – he couldn’t be bothered to remember her name, not when hundreds of years’ worth of students blurred together in his head. “Are you alright?”
He was fine. He was just starved, and what he’d been about to say, which had been on the very tip of his tongue, was proof that he probably wasn’t fit to be teaching while he was this hungry.
He couldn’t go on and tell them that he’d spent most of 1856 in bed with the philosopher they were discussing, the man using Alexander’s bare back as a writing desk.
He thought, if memory served, that the passage they were talking about had been written somewhere between his left hip and the dip of his back, while he fed idly from the philosopher’s ankle.
Something, though, told him that Oxford wouldn’t take kindly to him telling all this to his students. They could do maths and would undoubtedly be concerned that their professor was speaking as though he’d been fucking a man who’d been dead for almost two hundred years.
It was the truth, but sometimes the truth was better kept locked in the shadows.
Alexander cursed himself for not waking up earlier to eat when he knew full well what the morning was likely to hold for him. It had been entirely predictable and thus entirely his fault that he’d failed to account for it, either out of hope or willing ignorance.
It took more effort than he would have liked to shake himself out of the fantasy of sinking his teeth into the jugular of one of the students in the front row.
That would definitely cause him to lose his job, and Alexander didn’t think that would leave him happy at all, not when having this job at all was the cause of the row with his father that had interrupted his breakfast.
“Yes, apologies.” He cleared his throat and gestured to his head vaguely. “Late night.”
That earned a chuckle from some of the students, who likely thought that Alexander was referencing some raucous party or orgy or the like, the kind of debauchery that Oxford students either claimed they engaged in to seem interesting to their peers or, less frequently, actually partook in.
He took a deep breath and reminded himself to twitch, to fidget his fingers the way he’d seen so many humans doing, the way his students were doing now as their perfectly mortal hearts beat blood throughout their bodies.
He could hear each beat of every one of their hearts. His mouth watered. He shoved down the want, though, and continued.
“But my lapse in concentration doesn’t mean that you’re afforded the same.
” He turned back to the chalkboard, flipping the chalk in his fingers before writing a few of the philosopher’s more confusing turns of phrase down for his students to see.
He could already tell which of the fifteen of them would be progressing from the MPhil to the DPhil, and he had an eye on a few of the particularly bright students to supervise.
“So now you need to tell me what was meant by this” – a tap on the chalkboard for emphasis brought up a puff of dust– “and this.”
It was easy enough from there to spend the rest of the class session calling on students in turn, letting them give answers that ranged from the perfectly serviceable to the surprisingly brilliant.
It took the latter, though, to pull any modicum of his attention.
His phone was heavy in his pocket, and though he had it toggled to silent, he could imagine the irate string of messages that would have been coming in from his father over the last hour.
Vladimir Damianos was not, even at the best of times, a patient man.
Alexander knew his father professed to love him, but even after all these centuries he wasn’t quite sure whether it was him as an individual, or him as the idea of an heir and scion of the family, raised to do his father’s bidding perfectly.
Well – not so perfectly, as it turned out.
Which was why his father had spent the morning screaming at him while Alexander cringed and took it, his stomach too twisted in knots to enjoy the blood sitting in front of him in a many-faceted crystal goblet that caught the light, sending ruby shadows across the tablecloth.
He’d gripped the stem and turned it between his thumb and forefinger every time his father had paused for breath, but by the time Vladimir had stormed out of the dining room, Alexander would have been late for class if he didn’t get his arse in gear and drive right then.
He’d raced down the country lanes and scared a fair few sheep, and then navigating the twisted, one-way streets of Oxford had taken most of his concentration, all of which had allowed him to forget, at least for an hour, just how fucking miserable he was, living his travesty of a life.
Driving fast was one way to try to outrun the depression and helpless frustration that he’d dealt with for the last several hundred years, once the weight of his father’s expectations had grown too much to bear with a smile.
One of the students in the back cleared his throat and looked at his watch meaningfully, pulling Alexander’s once-again-diverted attention. The sounds of creaking wood had intensified, and he realised belatedly that it was nearly ten past the hour, and that he was keeping the students far too long.
“Ah, to get carried away by learning.” He paired his sigh with a wry smile and hoped that the students bought the romanticism of getting caught up in the topic, and didn’t all drop his class – which, again, would likely not make Oxford happy.
If he was fired from his position, he’d have nothing to do but be berated by his father all day until he found something else.
“Shoo, the lot of you, and I’ll see you next week with all of Bentham and Mill read, yes? ”
A chorus of voices parroted back some variant of yes, professor, which Alexander knew to be half shit but which he took gracefully anyway.
It was only when the last student had cleared the doorway that he leaned against the ancient wooden desk at the front of the room, propping himself up with a hip while fishing his phone out of the breast pocket of his tweed blazer.
There was nothing from his father, which was in truth far more threatening than a string of angry messages.
Vladimir lost all sense of modern technology when he was furious.
He was likely sitting in his study penning angry missives to Alexander with a quill and ink, all of which would be sent by carrier pigeon to Alexander’s room in the manor, a totally unnecessary annoyance because they had email now.
His sister, however, had filled the digital void with a string of irritated messages.
Maria (11:05): Father is furious. What did you do now?
Maria (11:08): You better answer me you utter wanker.
Maria (11:15): I’m going to leave a dead pheasant in your bed if you don’t tell me what I’ll be walking into at lunch. Am I dealing with more than just ferreting out whoever is defying father and draining those humans?
Alexander chewed on his lip, the tips of his fangs pressing into the skin.
He tried to will them to retract, but with the way his stomach was growling – and the way his ever-present anxiety was building to a fever pitch – it was a futile effort.
His oldest sister wasn’t joking with her threat, and he groaned inwardly at the thought of having to discard another entire set of bed linens and then sleep in one of the spare bedrooms at Rothburn until the smell of dead bird wore away.
Still, he couldn’t blame Maria for wanting more knowledge of what she might be facing with their father.
She was the perfect daughter, but she’d always earned their father’s ire by the simple virtue of not being a son.
Vladimir was quite stuck in the social mores of the 1300s, and he’d never seen Maria as more than a pawn to be married off to one of the more loyal branches of the Damianos clan.
Alexander might be the one who had inherited his father’s power of compulsion, but that alone shouldn’t have been a differentiating factor, not when Maria was far cleverer than him, and had much more of a stomach for ruthlessness besides.
It meant that she was often the punching bag when Alexander did something to piss their father off, and he could hardly blame her for wanting to go into a confrontation with Vladimir at least prepared with the knowledge of what her brother had done.
Something told him that his father was upset about more than just whoever was making a mess of the Oxford police department – punishing rogues was something they’d had to do quite a bit of over the years, with Vladimir’s strict policy of only killing those mortals who wouldn’t be missed, or assiduously covering up the fact that victims were drained of blood if they were likely to be found.
Sticking bodies in burning cars was a fairly popular option to help hide the lack of blood in their victims, which was the last thing that Vladimir needed. He profited from staying hidden.
Alexander (11:21): Relax, Maria. I was teaching.
The reply came instantly, a string of expletives that Alexander blinked away. She would have gotten the message then, and she could fill in the litany of complaints that Vladimir had thrown at him over breakfast.