++The love of back-stabbing is another commonality vampires and elves share, and as with us it makes the undead entirely more dangerous. Each vampire to survive their first few decades has, by necessity, become a devious thing indeed.++

  Book 2: Chapter 32

  Reggie had been worried the vampire would want to eat Anne, which he actually did. Fortunately he wasn’t very insistent on it. Actually he wasn’t very insistent on much. Reggie found him downright welcoming, apparently eager to talk to him in private and seeming more annoyed at Anne’s presence than anything.

  “I will shelter your thrall,” he told Reggie. “But keep it out of my way.”

  Both Reggie and Anne had the good sense not to correct him about her actual position.

  “This is my domain,” the vampire told Reggie, unnecessarily, seeming somewhat enthusiastic about the fact despite the domain in question being…shit.

  Reggie didn’t let his distaste show, of course. He just looked where the vampire pointed him and nodded along politely as he highlighted anything of particular note. A belltower, a particularly well-made section of wall, that sort of thing. Ilgran had been an impressive town, half a century ago, but Reggie couldn’t help but notice that all its positives seemed to have been left to rot for that time.

  “Do you do much to maintain the town?” he asked out of interest.

  The vampire looked baffled more than anything. “What do you mean maintain it? Oversee construction you mean?”

  “That too, but I just mean…you know, have things repaired, make sure they’re all…good. Functional.” He looked around again, aiming to study a few of the town’s citizens, but it seemed none were around this area of it. That was odd.

  “What are you implying?” growled the vampire.

  “Nothing,” Reggie said quickly. “I’m just wondering how you run this place, I’ve never met a Vampire Baron before. The Lady was…uh, well, I couldn’t exactly ask her much out of interest, you know?”

  He eyed Reggie for a moment longer, like he was looking for an excuse to be offended. Fighty people often did that, he’d found. People who were good at combat loved nothing more than proving it to anyone they could.

  But this didn’t turn into a pissing contest, fortunately.

  “What’s your name?” the vampire asked him.

  Reggie hesitated before replying. “Reginald Smith.”

  No use in lying, he decided. Ordinarily he’d be worried about pissing other vampires off by having his name associated with the Lorwick disaster, but this one had made his opinion of the Lady clear enough already. Reggie could only hope it wasn’t all a bluff. That would be bad.

  Thankfully, no sudden attack came as the vampire heard him identified.

  “Krieg,” he said after a moment. “That’s my name.”

  “War?”

  He stared at Reggie in utter bafflement. “You…you speak Deutsch?”

  “A smattering,” Reggie admitted. It was one of those old, pre-elven languages that’d been stamped out so carefully. Hard to acquire, but worth it. Some of the older books Reggie found had been printed in Deutsch and he’d learned a good deal from reading them, even if he was about a mile away from being able to converse in the language.

  But Krieg didn’t seem to find Reggie’s smattering any less impressive than he might have a profession of fluency, staring at him with new eyes.

  “I haven’t met someone familiar with that language in a hundred years. There’s no lack of people descended from its speakers in these parts, even bearing the names of their ancestors, but the language itself…thank you.” He smiled with such genuine warmth that Reggie actually felt kind of bad about not speaking it more.

  “Uh, don’t mention it,” he replied. “How did you learn it?”

  Krieg’s face darkened. “My sire,” he replied. “Who learned it from his sire, who learned it from his. I don’t know where the language originally found its way into our line, though I’ve heard rumours that it came from our very founder. A mysterious warrior from a land called ‘Teutonic’, have you heard of it in your reading?”

  Reggie wracked his brains and came up with precisely nothing. “Sorry, no.” Krieg didn’t seem surprised.

  “It was from before the elves came, that land. I was not holding out much hope.”

  Another thing lost to time. Or, rather, lost to a large number of assholes with bonfires and a vested interest in obfuscating history. What exactly was buried in the past that elves found so threatening?

  Reggie supposed he wouldn’t know for a while, if ever. But maybe there was hope. Vampires lived forever, and his sire seemed to have a few confident opinions on what things had been like before the elves showed up. Maybe that knowledge wasn’t entirely destroyed. Maybe.

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  His ruminations didn’t last long, interrupted when they came to what Reggie could only assume was Krieg’s home. He’d been expecting a castle, mainly because of the whole vampire-knight aesthetic, but it wasn’t like the place was unimpressive either.

  “Nice mansion,” Reggie grunted. And it was, sort of. Certainly a big one, bigger than the one he’d commandeered back at Norvhan. It was built onto a natural hill cresting the centre of Ilgran, maybe three stories and mostly wood. A while ago, when it was built, it might’ve been the crowning jewel of the town, but time hadn’t been kind to it. Reggie smelled wood-rot on the wind as he approached, and drawing nearer revealed more than one dimple or pit in its oaken skin.

  He studied it, and made a mental note to find out how exactly Krieg was going about running his town. He’d need to make sure of not emulating it.

  Inside the mansion it was drafty and cold. Reggie saw Anne shivering and waited a few moments before speaking to try and fix it, not wanting Krieg to think he was overly concerned with her wellbeing. Not wanting Anne to think that, either, as a matter of fact.

  “Do you have a fireplace we can light?” he asked.

  “I do, haven’t used it in years though.” Krieg seemed proud as he said it. “The cold doesn’t affect us anymore, you know.”

  “It affects me,” Reggie countered. “It’s fucking annoying.”

  They did get a fire lit, and fortunately the fireplace itself was one of the most well-preserved parts of the building. Probably all that stone. Anne relaxed once the flames were up, making Reggie realise that she’d been unable to see much without them. Human eyes, of course. Not good in general, and no good at all in the dark.

  “Now then, what brings you to my domain?” Krieg asked, taking his seat in what looked to have once been a great big throne. It was made of stone rather than wood, making it another piece of oddly well-preserved craftsmanship in the mansion, and looked too heavy for even a pair of Workers to carry together. Krieg likely hadn’t struggled much by himself, though.

  “You’re asking what specifically I’m here for?”

  “I am. Not that you’re not welcome here, it’s not often that I meet a fellow traveller in the night—at least not one who has no animosity for me. But I would know your business in my Barony.”

  Reggie felt a bit less comfortable all of a sudden, but nodded all the same.

  “Quicksilver and aqua fortis,” he explained. “Alchemical ingredients if you don’t know them. Both are found in the caves under your town.”

  Krieg smiled. “Those caves have gone unmanned for generations now.”

  “Why is that?” Reggie asked, finally trying to scratch the itch of his curiosity.

  “What use do I have of them?” Krieg grinned. “The moment my seizure of this town was complete, it became excommunicated among the elves.”

  “Excommunicated?”

  “...An old term I heard from my sire, forgive me. They cut Ilgran off from trade and association, essentially. I suspect they hope to one day reclaim it from me, the local Wardens at least. I would be surprised if anything as high as a Patrician even knows it is under vampire control.”

  That aligned pretty well with what Reggie had seen in the world, too. Elves were powerful and everywhere, but somehow no more coordinated than the vampires. If Reggie ruled the world, he liked to think he’d have his shit at least slightly together. Apparently that was expecting too much of his elven overlords.

  Not that he was complaining, it was probably the only reason he was still alive. Undead. Whatever.

  “You can still use the town’s resources though, right?” Reggie asked. “I mean…you must have plans for Ilgran, surely?”

  Krieg looked at him like he’d just suggested they go out and sunbathe together.

  “Use them for what?” He asked, genuinely perplexed by the question. It threw Reggie for a loop. What could he use a whole town’s resources for? What couldn’t he? How did you go about explaining this to someone who didn’t grasp the idea already?

  He was still chewing on that when Krieg seemed to remember how this point of discussion had started, quickly moving back to Reggie’s request.

  “I don’t know about either of the alchemical ingredients you mentioned,” he admitted. “You’re sure they can be found here?”

  “Certain,” Reggie assured him.

  “And what do you intend to do with them?”

  Reggie hesitated again. This, of course, was the difficult part of the conversation.

  Oh, nothing much. I’m just planning on producing massive volumes of explosive material that makes human beings significantly deadlier to us, then hand it out to human beings.

  Not hard to see how that particular pitch would be received by a man who’d called Anne ‘it’ not ten minutes earlier.

  “Experimentation,” Reggie replied before his hesitation could last suspiciously long. He realised only after saying it that experimentation alone wouldn’t justify the bulk purchases he was interested in. “Among other things. There’s convenient mixtures you can make with those materials.”

  “Like what?” Krieg asked.

  Like a fucking bomb to cram up your ass, you question-asking prick!

  That wouldn’t be a very useful response for smoothing this over, though. “I also partly just need it to keep my alchemists happy, it makes them work better I think,” he added, as if it were an after-thought. Which of course, just opened up a whole new can of worms.

  Because Krieg and Reggie couldn’t have had more different views on proper vampiric rule.

  Following an hours-long argument in which one side attempted to convince the other to completely ignore the wishes and wants of everyone around them, and the other side attempted not to point out how shit the first side’s domain was as a direct result of that attitude, they ended up agreeing to disagree. Following that, Reggie was shown to the area he would be resting in.

  Anne followed, and by then she was starting to show her exhaustion. Reggie realised only then that she’d been awake for close to 24 hours and wasn’t getting less tired as they went on. It was fortunate, then, that Krieg was nice enough to offer them both some place to stay.

  This didn’t put Reggie at ease though, he knew people enough to keep his guard thoroughly raised. There was no reason all the surprising pleasantries here couldn’t have just been part of a long-con to have him killed come dawn.

  And dawn was approaching.

  But that just meant that Reggie needed shelter, and now that his presence was detected he had to assume that the original room he’d been hunkered down in, and the roofed carriage he’d planned on using as an emergency sun-shield, had both been compromised. Ultimately, he was at Krieg’s mercy. He didn’t like it, but that didn’t change the facts. Better to play along. If this was a trap, Reggie could best disarm it by pretending to be a more vulnerable victim than he actually was.

  The chamber he was to be staying in was underground, surrounded by stone on all sides and, as far as Reggie could tell, had only a single entrance. That would make it impossible for any intruders to get in without being watched, if they kept an eye on it.

  …And all too easy for him to be barricaded in.