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The blood was still warm in my mouth when I smelled honey bread.

I had taken very little. Four swallows, perhaps five. Tamsin had tilted her head against the brick and let out a breath, and I had drawn back at once, the way I always do, and licked the small wound closed with the care of a man returning a borrowed book. It is not a romantic act. It is nine winters of an arrangement between two adults who like each other and have never once pretended it was anything else.

I had not expected the alley to smell of anything but snow and garbage.

But there it was, drifting down from behind a stack of crates thirty feet away: something sweet and dark and warm from the oven. It was the last happy afternoon of my human life, with a boy’s heartbeat hammering inside it like a fist on a door.

“Maks?” said Tamsin, very softly, her hand still knotted in my coat. “You went stiff.”

“Do not turn around.”

“That’s what people say right before I turn around.”

“Tamsin.”

She stayed where she was, because she has known me for nine winters and she knows the voice.

I lifted my head. I did not decide to. The whole of my body did it for me, the way a compass needle swings, and I looked toward the crates, and I knew that behind them, hunched into his hood, was a young man with hazel eyes and a scar through one eyebrow who had just watched me drink from a woman’s throat.

He had heard me.

More than that. In the dark, with no thought at all, I had let my eyes go red.

Wonderful, I thought. Eleven hundred years.

I walked toward the crates. Slowly, so that it was not a chase. A chase would have been the worst thing. I could hear his pulse, a rabbit’s pulse, ridiculous in a man of that size, and hear the breath he was holding, and smell the cold sweat coming off his skin, and underneath all of it, still, that terrible bread.

My mouth had begun to ache. My fangs had not gone back. There was a hunger in me that had nothing to do with the four swallows, a low, unreasonable hunger, and it said: reach out. Just reach. He is right there.

I stopped six feet from him.

I could have lifted the crates with a finger. I could have taken him by the collar and had my answers in a heartbeat. He would not even have had time to shout. I would have called it containing a problem. I have called worse things by kinder names.

But I have a rule about dark alleys, and it is the oldest rule I own: I do not hunt what is afraid of me.

So I breathed, and I counted seven breaths in.

And I turned around and walked back the way I had come.

Tamsin was watching me with her arms crossed. In the light of the fire-escape bulb she looked a little green and a little furious and, I thought, not at all surprised. She waited until I reached her, and then until the sound of a motorcycle came ripping out of the lot two streets over and faded into the city.

“Well,” she said. “That went fine.”

“Do not.”

“Was that the one? The tall guy who threw me a look in the bar? The one who bribed Marcus?”

“Tamsin—”

“Because I saw him, Maks. Hood, baseball shoulders, the walk of a man who’s never once been told he’s not the main character. I said to myself: there’s a hockey player. I said, he’s following the Russian. I said, this will not end well for the bar’s insurance. “ She pushed off the wall. “Come inside. You’re the color of a candle.”

I let her take my arm and lead me through the staff door.

The Sable is a place I would be embarrassed to explain to a human, and I have never had to. It is not a nightclub, though it looks like one. It is not a brothel, though it has been called one by people who should know better. It is a room with a bar and red lamps and very good wine, and a rule, engraved on a brass plate above the register in six languages, that reads No one is prey here.

There is one in every city that matters. The owners are old and very rich and do not care to be named. The staff are human, mostly, and paid well, and know exactly what walks through the door. The guests are my kind and the people who choose to share their evenings with us. What happens in the back is nobody’s business. No one has ever been hurt in a Sable. The ones who tried are no longer welcome anywhere at all.

Tamsin manages the Halden house. She is thirty-four, blonde, and a former veterinary nurse who describes her career change as “moving from things that bite because they’re scared to things that bite because they’re polite.” She has a laugh like a drawer of cutlery. She does not tolerate self-pity, dramatics, or unfolded napkins.