++On the culture and societies of vampires, we can only speculate. Little is known about them, for their whole species is a near-pathologically secretive one. They are observed to be fiercely territorial creatures, however, and scarcely more welcoming to one another than they are to mankind. One can imagine the predatory world they make for themselves, when free from the sight of elf and man. ++

  Chapter 33

  Cities were dead.

  Reggie had become something of an expert regarding dead things, most dead people, he imagined, were. And Lorwick was deader than him. It was a giant corpse stretching out a full horizon in each direction, sterile and still and calcified. Where was the mud? The bush growth?

  No room for any of that in those cobbles and pavements, and a tree would’ve been competing for space with the towering heights of every building. There were shadows everywhere, moonlight broken up by rooftops that went higher than roofs were meant to go. All the streets were wide. They fit too many people. Like ants swarming around a hill, covering the space all around Reggie, trapping him in a cage of meat.

  They didn’t look at Reggie. He wasn’t disguised here, so he wasn’t drawing in the naked horror of a disfigured man catching stares. He also wasn’t known. Total anonymity. He wore it like a rough blanket and felt the itching grow. Didn’t scratch. Anonymity. Not torches and musketfire. He’d take the anonymity.

  Reggie’d take it for a lot of reasons. Each of those reasons was uniformed, the way elves liked their guards, and looking meaner than the ones in Norvhan. He’d heard cities had a savagery to them that towns didn’t. But then he lived in a town, he would hear that wouldn’t he? Reggie ventured on and kept looking around, waiting to find out.

  It was day, but the shadows here were long enough that it was only day in half of any given street at a time. Reggie darted between them without any outward hurry. He could take an hour of the light, much more if it wasn’t all at once. That left him a good long while to look around and get his bearings before he needed to find a shelter until night.

  Easier said than done, because one of the most immediately crushing features of Lorwick—of cities in general, Reggie suspected— was that everything was expensive. More people, he supposed, more work done, more money generated and more people with money cycling in from elsewhere, in need of a place to stay, easily persuaded to part with more coin than it was worth to avoid the cold night.

  Reggie was no different in that regard, except that it was a hot fate he was fearful of and it was threatening to come at day. Then a thought struck him. With the city so crowded now, just after dawn, how many would flood its streets come noon?

  He soaked those streets in, tried to memorise where they widened and shortened. It was hard work. So many details. Reggie thought at one point that a section was deliberately built into the shape of a message and got distracted for half an hour scaling buildings to see it. That’d been embarrassing, and impractical. He had to stop doing stuff like that.

  Had to finish finding a suitable shelter, too. That was the more imminent problem he reckoned. Fortunately it was also the more easily fixed. A good hour before Reggie’s tolerance for the sun hit its limits, where his skin was itching and aching but not yet burning, he’d taken in enough of Lorwick that he was satisfied in sectioning himself safely away in it, and more importantly knew where to do so.

  Next to one of Lorwick’s innumerable bridges, and between several of its uncountable roads, there was an apartment. Not a nice place, a one-room shithole that reeked of bodily excretions and threatened to bake its occupants come summer. It was, however, mostly proof against light, and Reggie made sure it came with a blanket. A ratty, moth-eaten blanket that would nonetheless serve to shield whoever coccooned themselves in it from being flayed by the sun.

  As far as options went, Reggie didn’t have any. He had about a dozen shillings to his name and this was about the only place they’d last in. He begrudgingly paid up to the fat man behind the counter and headed into his new domicile.

  Come night, Reggie was growing hungry again. As far as he estimated things his body burned through about a pint’s worth of human blood every twelve hours, which itself was worth three or four times its volume in monster blood. It’d been about twenty four hours since he’d last been full and Reggie reckoned he could hold maybe twenty pints of monster blood as he was now.

  So close to half his reserves were gone.

  Wasn’t as bad as it would’ve been if he’d run around in his transformed state to save time, though not as good as it would’ve been if he’d been able to get away with not mindblasting the gate guards using Royal Presence so hard.

  But regrets were cheap and did nothing for him, Reggie needed to be practical now. He began that practicality by searching for more work. This was where his troubles began.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Lorwick did not have many Witchfinders. On its own, a good thing. They were the people who were best suited to find and kill Reggie after all. In all, not a good thing at all, because Witchfinders came and went as their work was needed. Lorwick didn’t have many of them because, despite being a city of uncountable masses, it didn’t really suffer much from monsters. There wasn’t a grimwood right next to it, as was the case with Norvhan, and its walls and guards were tough enough that even a damned wolf spider wouldn’t have been too much of a problem. There was only so much damage one creature could do when a hundred muskets and several cannons were spitting at it.

  So food was a problem. Reggie put that at the top of his list of priorities and started working on it.

  Cities really didn’t have many options in terms of eating, though. There were two lifeforms in Lorwick that dominated all the others in terms of sheer population. One, Reggie refused to feed from as a matter of course. The other…well, he’d eaten rats before. It took him about a dozen just to slightly sate himself, but at the very least hunting them was easier. Low-level exertions of Royal Presence in alleys and behind buildings meant that the critters made their own damned way to him, no chase required.

  And there really were a lot. Reggie had forced down a score or more within an hour, and he reckoned that was about fine for the time being. Three pints of blood, maybe more or less. It’d have to do. He needed money next.

  That, at the very least, was a lot easier to come by than it’d been in his old life.

  Attributes in the low 20s without a transformation meant that Reggie wasn’t beyond what normal humans could do, not yet. But it did give him a big advantage over the vast majority. Maybe ten percent would hit that level in even a single Attribute, and even among labourers it meant distinguishing himself was pretty easy.

  So finding work wasn’t hard, at least not compared to Norvhan. The people of Lorwick didn’t already see him as a demon-worshipping monster, and seemed far more willing to hire people from out of town, too. Reggie was beginning to like cities. Beginning to like them a lot. That liking stayed with him as he got to work and found yet another great advantage of his undead body.

  The functionally infinite stamina. Between that and his sheer Strength, Reggie was overcoming his lack of experience in construction and doing as much work as any two others on the site combined. He pulled a six hour shift that night and collected a full five shillings for it, with his new boss being very enthusiastic about him doing more.

  Reggie planned to oblige him. But first he needed to eat more. God, he was hungry. And running down his ichor reserves faster now he was around humans, keeping up Royal Presence to pass as one of them. It wasn’t a huge strain, he wasn’t using it at full blast, but just keeping himself innocuous and giving his body a pulse was already making him run dry much faster.

  More rats. Squeals and thrashing limbs, skin and meat ripping in his fangs, blood squirting right into his mouth and seeming to soak through every surface within it. Reggie was past being fazed by the sensations, he’d been past them even as a human, but it would’ve been nice to not experience them anymore.

  Biggest opportunity in the world, he’d gotten, and here he was stuck eating rats just as he always had. What was the lesson there?

  [Don’t shy away from mind-controlling people for your own gain!]

  Once again, Dvo had something of a point. Reggie wouldn’t be listening to it but he had to admit his own damned morals were making things more difficult than they needed to be. He took whatever satisfaction in sticking by them he could while finishing off the latest rat, then paused.

  Something ran through the alley, a sound. Brief, short. A quick scraping of leather on cobbles splitting open the night like lumber under an axe. Reggie whipped around, hissing on sheer instinct as his dead eyes stabbed into the darkness and found the culprit in a single second.

  Then he froze.

  It was a tall person, watching him. Tall and well dressed, but they didn’t move like a person ought to have. No rising in the chest, no flaring in the nostrils, no swaying in their balance. They were like…

  A corpse.

  Reggie swallowed, a human reflex leftover from life, and took a step forward because otherwise he’d have gone scrambling back. He didn’t speak. Waited for the stranger to say something.

  Wasn’t waiting long.

  “I thought I sensed something,” the newcomer said as he approached. He had blue eyes, handsome features. Almost looked like an elf. It pissed Reggie off how good-looking he was, but that was far from the biggest concern right now. “And that something turned out to be a little fledgeling eating my rats.”

  “Your rats?” Reggie asked, because he actually was the dumbest motherfucker to ever live and didn’t see much wrong with stumbling into the most obvious trap in history.

  The vampire smiled, then moved like a bullet. He closed fast and, Reggie imagined, expected to have an easy time of overpowering him in his surprise. He probably didn’t know that Reggie had fought someone faster just a day and a half ago, so it must’ve come as quite the shock when Reggie slipped to one side and kicked the vampire’s leg out from under him.

  He didn’t stop stumbling until he’d already smashed into the alley’s wall. A fast impact, fast enough that the vampire’s hard face bones left a sizable dent right in the brick. He wasn’t so much as stunned. Whirled around for Reggie, snarling rather than smiling now. His face twitched and coiled around glinting fangs, bloody froth building at the corner of his lips and promising more blood to meet it.

  Reggie hit him as hard as he could, which seemed to surprise the vampire for some reason. What, had he expected to intimidate his way out of a fair fight?

  Sorry asshole, I’ve been fighting people stronger than me my whole life.

  The impacts of knuckle on face sent sharp ripples up Reggie’s arm, rolling over the joints and whispering a warning to them. He was hitting the vampire as hard as he could manage, three, five times. The vampire recovered before blow number six and flailed out with a blind punch that clipped Reggie’s ear. He went stumbling but ignored the shock.

  Stronger, this enemy was, but not by too much. Maybe he would’ve beaten Ludvich in an arm wrestling match fifteen years ago. Maybe he’d lose. Two of Reggie would be as strong as one of him. He could work with that.

  The vampire lunged again, and made Reggie work with it.