“Nis only brings it up every fucking night,” Leo replies. His voice is stronger, closer.
“Right, well. It’s important that you know what kind of debt I am in. Maybe it’ll help you understand my perspective a little bit more.” Orfeo slides the cigarette out from behind his ear.
“I became a vampire in nineteen seventy-six when I was eighteen years old. At the time, I was addicted to drugs, living in a squat, and stealing car radios to make a living.” He taps the faint, thin scar through his eyebrow. “This was once a wound so deep and so big that it almost ended my life. After that accident, I became even more reckless.”
Leo snorts, shakes his head. “Jesus.”
Orfeo flashes a rueful smile. “One night, after a party on the banks of the Tiber River, I was drunk and high, trying to get myself and my friend Davìd home. I remember almost nothing from that evening. As hard as I try to dredge up those memories, I find nothing. But it was reported that mymotorinocollided directly into the back of a car. Davìd was riding behind me.”
Leo’s features twitch with imagined pain. “No helmets?”
“Obviously,” Orfeo replies, bitterness thick on his voice. “I’m sure I was comatose almost immediately. When I came to, I was in the arms of a man…a beautiful man. Unlike anyone I’d ever seen. White, straight teeth. Thick blond hair. I’d never been intimate with a man before. I’d never even thought about it. But there he was, over me, kissing me…”
I brace against the surge of anger that rips through me. The streetlamp across from Hades House flares, then dims.
“That was my creator, Paolo. Davìd was there too. Dead as anything. His skull…It was like a smashed apple. I remember sobbing. Then, Paolo found a spark of life.” Orfeo’s mouth twists into a cold smile. “For a moment, a brief time, Paolo loved us. His new toys. And I thought being in his coterie was better than heaven.”
“Vampires are sick that way,” Leo says. He’s stopped smoking his cigarette. It hangs limp in his fingers at his side.
Orfeo laughs. “You know, it’s not normal for a coterie to hate their creator? Even when they are being abused. It is against ourvery nature. Your creator is everything—a father, a mother, a lover, a god.”
His features twist, moisture jumping into his eyes. Gathering in dark, inky pools. I ache with the desire to reach out to him, to pull him to me.
“That’show horrible the abuse became. There are years of my young vampire life I will never remember. I let my soul abandon my body in order to survive. I held on to nothing but the memories of my life as a child. My mother’s cooking. My father’s laughter. When Alfo and Paolo became business partners, I saw an opportunity.”
“Because Alfo’s a money-hungry piece of shit,” Leo interjects.
“Exactly. I knew I could appeal to him, and we were desperate to be free. But he wouldn’t kill a vampire for free. He required one of us, of my coterie, to come back with him and work off the blood debt for the next one hundred years. I volunteered.”
Leo stays silent for a long moment—too long. All of my emotions are trapped in the air around us, vibrating alongside my spirit. Energy flickers and snaps; for the first time ever, I feel my physical body twitching to reconnect.
It’s all too much.
Speak, I want to scream.Speak.
“Man, you are the worst vampire I’ve ever met. You’re supposed to be a selfish carnal beast. Why thefuckwould you do that?”
Orfeo snorts. “You’re right. I am not like other vampires. I never have been. I still have a flicker of humanity inside me, and that is my downfall. I agreed because I knew I could survive it. This was my life before vampirism too. Men like Alfo. Drugs. Parties. Violence. That could not be said for my brothers and sisters. Some were too young to travel safely, their bloodlustwould have made them a liability. And Davìd was a diabetic as a human. Do you know what that looks like in a vampire?”
Leo shakes his head. “I don’t.”
“Extreme sensitivity to blood. He must feed deliberately, or he risks death—banishment. Painful, quick banishment. And I…loved him too much, felt too much guilt over his death.”
Leo drops the extinguished cigarette from his hand and blows out a breath. “So, why are you telling me all of this?”
“Because we need to vanquish Alfo.”
What?
Leo mimics my reaction. “What? Why?”
“What do you mean why? Leo, he’s brought us to this town of a few thousand people, right in the center of these humans’ universe. Now he’s dragging every vampire from the tri-state into the mix. The humans are already suspicious. How many women have gone missing in the last week alone?”
Leo stays silent, eyes fixed on the concrete as he chews his lip.
“Alfo thinks that because he can control me, he can control all vampires. But he’s wrong. And if he keeps dragging more creatures to this town, he’s going to draw the attention of authorities and—worse yet—he may open a portal.”
That word triggers something in Leo. His shoulders tense, his brows dive into a frown. “Open a portal,” he repeats under his breath.
