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With a heavy sigh, I take my seat behind my desk, groaning at the feel of the soft, worn leather on my tired body. Immortality has its perks, but there are drawbacks. Over time, the body begins to wear, and although we can never age and our muscles and cells will never break down, pain seeps through the cracks. Especially when you don’t feed on human blood as often as you used to.
Enter Thalia Sinclair.
Asher leans back in his chair, one ankle crossed casually over his knee, hands behind his head. He smiles knowingly. Weylen sits stoically next to him, arms folded across his chest, expression blank. The pair of them were silent during dinner, despite itching to put our men in their place.
“She’s got fire,” Asher affirms. “The spark in her eyes is like the best hit of cocaine I’ve ever had.”
He would know. Asher spent most of his formative years as a vampire snorting it up through New Orleans. Not that human drugs have much of an effect on our kind. All they can do is give us a mild euphoric feeling, barely a tenth of what we get during a feeding, and it doesn’t last long. Mere moments.
“One that will be hard to tame,” I argue. “We should have waited before taking her. This isn’t the right time. Not with Jedidiah breathing down our necks.”
Jedidiah is the leader of a rival clan, and like me, he is an Ancient. One of the oldest living vampires still left roaming the earth. After the uprising in the mid-1900s that led to an all-out world war amongst our kind, many of the old guard were slain in their beds on the Night of the Long Knives. It takes precision and careful plotting to kill a vampire, especially an Ancient, and one vampire did it by manipulating the minds of humans.
“If we waited for your sire to not be a problem,” Asher points out. “We would never have acquired her in the first place. You heard the prophecy yourself. Now is the time.”
I want to tell him to go and fuck that damn prophecy. It’s been hanging over our heads since the three of us came together as a triad. For hundreds of years, we searched for the chosen one the witch foresaw, and with each year that passed where we hadn’t located her, our hope grew dimmer and dimmer, until there was nothing left but a wisp of smoke.
A witch’s prophecy is a fickle thing. Like the flow of time, their visions are not concrete, but ever-changing. Until one night, twenty-four years ago, when everything changed.
“We need to address the men’s behavior,” Weylen comments quietly. “They need to know that beyond that, beyond tonight, they cannot mess with what’s ours again.”
I dip my head in acknowledgment. We’d allowed the human men who work for us to be their usual crass selves as long as they didn’t touch. The three of us wanted to gauge what our little lamb would do. Her brother described her as meek and soft. The derision in his tone when he spoke of her had me white knuckling the chair I was sitting in. The pathetic asswipe doesn’t know who or what she is. Nor who her mother was.
It’s become apparent that Thalia is no wilting flower, even though she sat petulantly through dinner without making a fuss. Even when handed a steak for her meal, I saw fire in her eyes. The same fire she tried to burn me with upstairs when we were alone. The minx knew not to reproach me in front of my men, but in private, she defied me with ease.
“Go ahead,” I tell him. Weylen is aware he doesn’t need my permission. We’ve been a triad since before the American Revolution. Vampire clans were once ruled by quads, three men and a woman, but since our ranks have begun disintegrating over time, most clans have been left as triads. We don’t choose one another, just as we don’t choose to lead. Fatas, or Fate, chooses for us. No one knows how quads or triads are chosen, just that the connection is instantaneous. A sense of kinship. For some, intimate. The three of us are brothers, kin. But our fourth could be the one that brings us together.
It’s rare for an Ancient, such as myself, to have a triad. When I first encountered Weylen on the shores of the new world, we were at battle. I had never witnessed anything so primal in all my years. Even before I turned him, there was something supernatural about him. He had led his people to the shores of a new land, and on those shores, he would have died if not for my intervention. For centuries, he loathed me for my intervention, angry that I had denied him the chance to enter the gates of the great Valhalla. But Fatas is hard to resist.
“Station a few of our kind on the premises,” I say to Asher. “I don’t want the humans here when we aren’t around. I don’t trust them.”
Asher nods, already dragging out his phone. Of the three of us, Asher is by far the deadliest. He was trained to be a weapon against his own kind. Taught to hunt and kill us. I know my brother still searches for the one who turned him. The face of his sire still haunts his nightmares when he sleeps. It’s why he takes the agrodolce whenever he does. There was a time when he relied heavily on the synthetic drug to prevent his inner beast from causing slaughter.
I met him in the back alleys of New Orleans, feeding on rats. He was skin and bones. A mere shell of who he was born to be. He had fled his masters, risked it all, to be free, and all he got from other vampires was scorn, cruelty, and dismissal. Weylen and I picked him out of the slums of despair and taught him how to be a leader. A King.
All those who hurt him bled at his feet. All but the vampire responsible for his pain.
Javert.
“Fenrin reported that there has been another human death in Boston related to agrodolce,” Weylen informs us. “Another two in Bradbury.”
A derisive snort leaves me. Fucking agrodolce. The name bittersweet is a ploy. The drug promises humans a high like no other, but it wasn’t made for their anatomy. It was made to weaken vampires. A bittersweet bottle of death. The effect of the drug on vampiric anatomy allows our species to feel…human. It awakens senses that died along with our mortality.
Vampires can feel, but it isn’t the same when the blood running through our veins is cold and dead. Feeding provides a temporary boost to our bodies, keeping the skin youthful, the senses alert, and the muscles strong. But we still lack what we all desperately desire.
Warmth.
Emotion.
Our hearts don’t beat frantically when we’re afraid. We don’t blush when embarrassed. Our ears pick up everything within a certain radius. Even now, from my office on the other side of the house, I can hear Thalia’s heartbeat as clear as if she was standing right next to me. We can feel pleasure in the sexual sense, but some sensations lack heat. Like her breath against my skin. The feel of her warm skin on mine. Some things aren’t the same as a vampire as they once were. We feel anger more than sadness, looking to strike to kill before thinking of comfort or care. It’s why newly turned vampires are so dangerous. Their human emotions and tissue still linger in their changing bodies for years.
Agrodolce synthesizes those feelings for the user, but it comes at a cost. For humans, it increases their heart rate. The dopamine receptors in their brain shift into overdrive, the drug acting as a euphoric hallucinogen. In vampires, the drug is harmless, but for humans, it can have fatal consequences. I’ve kept control of the drug since I first took over the East Coast underground, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more out there for humans to get their hands on.
“Cause of death?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
“Exsanguination,” he tells me grimly. Of course. That was one of the reasons vampires sought to give humans the drug. It hits differently when taken from their blood. Something about the feeding process makes the drug more potent for our kind. What I haven’t been able to figure out is why. As far as I’ve been able to uncover, the drug bonds differently when absorbed through the bloodstream of a human, and when said human is fed upon, it leaches into the vampire’s system, synthesizing human feelings and emotion.
But that’s the problem. It isn’t real. It’s the chemical altering our brain chemistry.
