I lean against the brick wall and try not to think about the fact that I'm trusting a stranger who wanted five hundred dollars just for a conversation. Money I didn't have but scraped together anyway by pawning my grandmother's necklace. The only thing of value I owned, and I handed it over to a vampire I barely knew on the promise of help. But I can’t wear it if I’m dead.
The minutes tick by. 11:30 comes and goes.
No one shows.
I wait thirty minutes. Then an hour.
No one is coming.
Of course not.
The poisoning is getting worse. I can feel it now, a creeping numbness that starts in my extremities and works its way toward my core. My fingers tingle. My toes have gone completely numb.When I try to flex my hands, the response is delayed, like the signals from my brain are traveling through molasses.
I slide down the wall until I'm sitting on the cold concrete, knees pulled to my chest. The alley smells like garbage and stale beer and piss, and somewhere in the distance I can hear music thumping from one of the bars. Life is going on without me. The world is spinning while I'm stuck in this alley, waiting for help that isn't coming.
How cosmically unfair is it that I survived three years of underground fighting, broken bones, concussions, opponents who wanted to actually kill me, only to die because I drank the wrong blood bag?
My vision starts to gray at the edges, darkness creeping in like a vignette.
No. Get up. Move.
But I can't. My legs won't cooperate. The numbness has reached my chest now, making it hard to think, hard to focus on anything except the spreading cold. It reminds me of hypothermia, which I learned about in a first aid class years ago. The way your body shuts down from the outside in, conserving heat for your vital organs until even that isn't enough.
Except I'm not cold. I'm a vampire. Temperature doesn't affect me the way it used to.
This is something else. This is my body giving up.
Is this it, then?
This is how Celeste Moreau goes out. Not in a blaze of glory in the ring. Not protecting someone or fighting for something that matters. Just… alone in an alley, poisoned by her own desperation and stupidity.
I close my eyes and try to remember what my mother's face looked like. It's getting harder.
"You've been asking about me."
The voice cuts through the fog like a blade, deep, measured, and utterly without warmth.
My eyes snap open.
A man stands at the mouth of the alley, backlit by the streetlights so I can't see his face clearly. He's tall, over six feet, dressed in dark clothes that probably cost more than my entire apartment. Black coat, dark shirt, everything tailored perfectly. Even from here, even through the haze of poisoning, I can feel the power rolling off him in waves.
Not the desperate, feral energy of the few young vampires I’ve met in the bars. Not the cocky aggression of the fighters I used to face. This is something else entirely. Something ancient and controlled and absolutely lethal. Like standing near a barely contained explosion.
He steps closer, and the light catches his face.
Sharp features that could have been carved from marble. Pale skin that hasn't seen sunlight in centuries. Dark hair swept back from his forehead, long enough to brush his collar. Eyes that look black in the shadows but probably aren't, probably some shade of dark brown that just reads as black in low light.
There's something aristocratic about him, like he stepped out of a Renaissance painting. Old money. Old world. Old power.
And he's looking at me like I'm an insect he's deciding whether to crush.
"How tedious," he says, his gaze sweeping over me with clinical detachment.
I try to speak, but my throat feels lined with glass. The words come out as a rasp: "You're… him."
"Maximus," he confirms, like it's the most boring fact in the world. "And you are Celeste Moreau. Former underground fighter. Turned eight months ago. No maker. No clan. Making quite a lot of noise asking for me."
He crouches in front of me, not close enough to touch but close enough that I can see his expression clearly. Bored. Vaguely annoyed. Like I'm an inconvenience rather than a dying woman.
