++The eldest of the vampires keep themselves hidden from us, as all their kind do. And yet experience, power and resources grant them the means to do so with such success that it is only very rarely one is ever provably encountered. These mysterious figures are not known enough to be feared, and yet I have no doubt that they are among the deadliest creatures alive.++

  Chapter 34

  A fist hit Reggie, except it felt more like a boulder. His feet left the ground and he shot back to land hard, rolling back, scrambling up to his heels and leaping to one side just in time to avoid the kick that might’ve snapped his neck had it connected cleanly. Nasty, kicks. Almost as nasty as anything at all that hit the chin. Reggie demonstrated that fact to himself by scrambling along the cobbles, tearing a loose one free and hurling it up like a shotput. It smacked right into the vampire’s jaw and bounced clean off, but bought him a second to rise.

  Another fist came for him, an avalanche with knuckles on the end. Reggie raised an elbow and felt the smashing of small bones against big ones, watched for the pain twitching along his enemy’s face. It didn’t come. Another fist hit him before he realised why, sent him sprawling. Reggie hit the ground so hard he was able to bounce himself right back to stand and keep stumbling away.

  Reggie’s temple throbbed where he’d taken a square punch. Didn’t feel like any living fist had struck it, and Reggie supposed one hadn’t. A vampire. So no fatigue, like him. Little pain, like him. Suddenly all his accustomed advantages had stopped being advantages. Better adjust fast.

  The vampire stepped forwards to adjust Reggie himself, and whichever new angle he’d picked out for the spine Reggie wouldn’t find out. He shot him a kick to the nuts before the man’s grip could find him.

  Like kicking a brick wall, but Reggie had kicked plenty of tougher enemies by now. Whatever distant phantoms of pain still lurked in those cold nerves shot up and sent the vampire back a step, snarling. Reggie smashed a fist into his exposed teeth for good measure.

  For a second, they just stood there. Two paces apart, staring, snarling. They circled, vultures with cannibalism on their mind. The vampire was stronger and faster, tougher. They both knew it. Reggie had given as good as he’d gotten anyway. They both knew that, too. This wasn’t a fight anyone was eager for anymore.

  “I didn’t know you considered those rats yours,” Reggie said after a moment. “Sorry about eating them. I didn’t know. I don’t want to fight you.” He didn’t back down, didn’t make himself weak, but starting things with an apology and an explanation seemed like the best bet here. He’d already made fighting him unpleasant, giving the guy an out without charging a bruised ego might have him decide not to put himself through that.

  “Fledgling,” the vampire spat, “you barged into someone else’s territory and started feeding without bothering to find its owner? How new are you?”

  Pretty damn new, apparently, and for once Reggie figured it wouldn’t hurt to just be open about the fact.

  “I’ve been…one of us for less than two months, my sire gave me a five minute conversation before disappearing. Most of what I know I had to figure out myself. She didn’t tell me anything about customs among our kind. I didn’t even know there were any.”

  The man stared at him, maybe in a search for deceit. Reggie didn’t show him any.

  “Come with me,” he growled after a second.

  “It’s maybe an hour until dawn,” Reggie tried, “I have to get back to my shelter—”

  —”beside the bridge, yeah, I know where you’ve been squatting. My territory again, so you won’t be going back there. Now come with me so we can sort this all out.”

  Reggie knew enough about strong-arming to recognise when he wasn’t being given a choice. He steeled himself and, with no small measure of reluctance, followed the nasty man as he led him back out of the alleyway and into the streets.

  They were walking for a while. Annoying thing about cities was all the eyeballs in them, all the human eyes and human tongues and human memories. Reggie wouldn’t last long if he moved at full speed and crossed the place in a tireless sprint. He couldn’t even run it in bursts like a person with finite stamina, not without the risk of barelling someone over.

  He bit back his frustration, trying to tolerate the dragging pace as he followed the strange vampire. It occurred to Reggie that he could be heading for a trap. He knew that.

  He followed anyway. If this was a trap, the teeth would be extra combatants. Human slaves, bound with Addictive Ichor, or even more vampires. And if this guy could gather up a force like that then he could probably haul them over to Reggie’s shelter anyway. Better to meet them now and avoid pissing anyone off on the chance that this was more than just some ambush.

  Did vampires have trials and hearings? Reggie guessed he was about to find out.

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  Lorwick sprawled out ahead of him, and the people in its streets grew scarcer as they continued. This part of the city seemed…not nicer, but certainly more expensive in its efforts to be nice. It was paved with flat slabs of worked stone rather than uneven cobbles, all the buildings stretched taller. It looked like a settlement refined, like someone had copied out the rest of the city, then hammered down all its jutting edges and sanded off its rough planes.

  The buildings were bigger, too. Most reached three stories or more, tall as trees were. Some were two or three times even that height. All were made in that same style. Cold and constant, fit to specifications Reggie could only guess at by studying them.

  It felt even more lifeless than the rest of the city. Appropriate that, considering all the undead in it. Reggie hoped he arrived at wherever he was heading soon. Better an ambush and swift death than he be allowed to start spiralling into ruminations on irony, he feared there’d be no saving him from that fate once it started.

  As if to answer his prayer, their destination approached.

  It was the biggest building yet, more like a castle than something belonging in a city. Reggie counted twelve, no, thirteen, stories to it, each one over a dozen feet apart. A big place. A damned big place.

  “This is where we’re heading,” he said aloud. For the first time since Reggie had fought him, the vampire smiled.

  “Oh yes. Feeling nervous yet?”

  Of course Reggie was, but he didn’t see any reason to let this bastard know that so he kept his face stiff and his eyes hard. They were soon on the building, soon stepping inside, soon moving up through its bowels.

  There were guards inside, and all of them looked like they were holding no great excess of friendliness. Reggie felt their eyes on him and noticed the deep suspicion. He was actually surprised not to be searched. Then they were up, on what had to be the top floor and entering the biggest room he’d ever set foot in.

  Reggie walked into a wall of power as they entered. Felt himself wince, felt as though his skin would blister at the touch of it. He had to force himself to stare at the source.

  A small woman, but she seemed bigger than a woodlouse as she stood from her great chair and stared at Reggie with eyes that seemed older than a country.

  “Walyn,” the woman said, staring at the vampire Reggie had entered with rather than Reggie himself, “to what do I owe this pleasure?” she didn’t speak with the slightest warmth. Her whole voice seemed like it was somehow barbed, an unspoken promise. What that promise was Reggie didn’t know, but it certainly wasn’t nice.

  “My Lady,” Walyn bowed his head and Reggie, acting more on instinct than knowledge, opted to do the same, “I found this Fledgling poaching in my territory. I brought him to you because he doesn’t seem—or at least claims not—to understand anything about our society.”

  Reggie felt her eyes on him now, felt them like a mountain was atop him.

  “You were poaching,” she echoed. Reggie fought the shiver that tried to crawl up his spine. Poaching. A simple word. Humans killed people for poaching, hanged them till they died. What would vampires do to punish the same crime?

  Something told him they wouldn’t exactly be nicer about it.

  “Rats,” Reggie said.

  “Excuse me?” The woman—the ‘Lady’— seemed genuinely baffled.

  “I was eating rats,” Reggie clarified, “yeah. I didn’t know they were someone else’s.”

  A smirk on the Lady’s face, and her eyes drifted over to the man named Walyn. “Taken up a new preference have you?” she asked him.

  If vampires could blush, his face would probably be crimson as arterial blood. Reggie tried not to smile. When he caught the flash of rage deep behind Walyn’s eyes, the trying became unnecessary. One slight, not even from Reggie himself, and he’d made an enemy. Just for witnessing an embarrassment.

  Reggie really didn’t like people.

  “Poaching normally carries a penalty of death, Fledgling,” the Lady told Reggie. She said it almost absently, like she didn’t care one way or another about his life. She wasn’t eager to end it, wasn’t reluctant. She’d just do it if she decided it needed doing. A chore. An inconvenience.

  So Reggie figured he had about the span of a conversation to make his death more inconvenient than his life.

  “I didn’t know the rats belonged to anyone, sorry for any offence. I’ll work off whatever the price of them was.” He talked faster than he could ever remember talking before. Something about this woman just drew it out of him, a panic, a fear, a desperation to win her over.

  Reggie realised after a moment just what he was feeling. “...Royal Presence, you have it too?”

  The look on her face was the first break in an otherwise endless confidence. Pure shock.

  For a second Reggie was worried he’d done something that would get him killed, and he started thinking of how best to make himself scarce. A sudden transformation wouldn’t catch these people off-guard, they’d be waiting for it, right?

  Or would they? How many of his powers were universal, were common?

  Inheritor Tier, Reggie, you’re something special. No time to ask Sycily about that though, the Lady was talking again.

  “How old are you?” she asked him.

  “Uh, twen—thirty six. I’m twenty one, kind of, but I spent fifteen years buried in a coma, then I dug myself out a few months ago.”

  “How long have you been a vampire, I mean,” she clarified impatiently, “we don’t count your years among the living as age.”

  Reggie noted that down. “Ah, then fifteen years or a few months. I was a vampire while underground but I didn’t wake up until I dug myself out.”

  She nodded, not surprised. Was that common practice among their kind? Wouldn’t surprise Reggie, everything else about them seemed fucking horrible.

  “A few months,” she muttered. “Walyn, that mark on your face. Crushed blood vessels. He punched you?”

  The vampire Walyn hesitated a moment before he nodded, and the Lady hummed appreciatively at that. “Growing stronger fast, then. Very well. What is your name, Fledgling?”

  “John,” said Reggie, “uh, ma’am.”

  She didn’t smile. “Lady,” the Lady corrected him, “I am a Vampire Lady. I am the Lady of Lorwick, this city is mine. The elves dwelling here think otherwise. I let them. You will let them too, is that understood? Before anything else, take heart that singular imperative. We hide the existence of our kind from the powers that be. In secrecy we thrive.”

  A lot of questions Reggie hadn’t known he was feeling were answered by that single statement, and he nodded. The Lady continued.

  “Good. Then, Fledgling, you are welcome in my domain. For the time being. But make no mistake, this isn’t charity. You will earn your place with servitude. Are we understood?”

  So once again, he was either working or dying. Reggie nodded.

  Of course he did.