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Chapter 1
Then
He was watching me. Always watching me. I was pretty sure that even when I slept, Lazarus had someone making sure I stayed exactly where I was meant to be.
I hadn’t asked for the attentions of a vampire lord. But somehow, between being sold into Lazarus’s vampire feeder community and trafficked for the past ten years, I’d earned that attention.
Lazarus observed me with a smile on his face as I worked a small forge in the center of his lounge filled with his vampire elite. This room, like all rooms in the main community hub, was below ground, safe from prying eyes so the human authorities in New York City above could turn their eye away from the crimes and inhumanity happening inside the community—inside all the vampire communities that had been allowed to grow and exist across the country.
I rotated the dagger I was making and slipped it back into the forge. It was small, but daggers had been my specialty over the years. The more nightsteel one used in one particular piece, the more complicated and fragile projects became. And I couldn’t afford to make mistakes.
Mistakes meant punishment, and punishment meant—more often than not—a long night of being Lazarus’s personal blood bag along with other vampires. Normally, only Lazarus fed from me. But if I messed up, he’d pass me around and, unlike Lazarus, the other vampires didn’t mind getting handsy.
My breath hitched as I thought of a feeder, an innocent sold into this community like me, who had died just this morning for rejecting a vampire wanting to feed from her. I hadn’t known Jackie very well, but any friendly face down here was a welcomed one. And now there’d be one less friendly person down here.
Don’t fuck up, I told myself as I steeled my focus.
“Good work,” Lazarus commented coolly from a few feet away. The heat from the forge didn’t seem to bother him. That, or he loved watching me work more than the fire made him uncomfortable. He’d taught me how to forge weapons. At first, I’d been just another victim down here, but with his attentions had come this job, and my life depended on succeeding at it.
So, I’d learned to forge weapons—blades made from nightsteel like this one.
A bead of sweat dripped down my temple. I reached up with one hand and wiped it away, pushing back a lock of my long blonde hair with it. It stuck to my face from the sweat.
“And this,” Lazarus said for not the first time this week as he’d entertained vampire guests, “is how we’ll be ready for any incursion should it actually occur.”
“Nightsteel,” said Val, one of Lazarus’s top vampires. She was close to him—not lover-close, but still something different was between them—and very powerful. Val was one of the few vampires I’d seen in my life with magic. She now regarded Lazarus with a cocky tone in her voice, and I could totally picture her raising an eyebrow at him and flipping her long blonde, red-tipped hair over one shoulder as she asked, “Do you really believe what the Seers are saying? Even if the demons arrive, nightsteel alone won’t be enough to stop them.”
Lazarus’s tone turned hard. I wanted to look over my shoulder and see his expression—he’d never had much of a poker face—but I kept my gaze straight ahead on the forge. “Would you prefer to not prepare and be wrong? I think it prudent to have a stock of nightsteel weapons on the off chance the Seers are right. The gods know human bullets alone won’t stop the demons.”
“The humans are just as likely to bow down to the demons in reverence and assumption they’re gods as they are to shoot them,” Cassius remarked. He was Lazarus’s right-hand vampire. He was tall, fair-skinned and broad-shouldered, and had crimson-tinted eyes. He was a massive man and had no issues throwing that stature around if necessary.
It’d been Cassius who had taken Jackie’s life after she’d refused him blood. As much as I’d agreed with Jackie, feeding the vampires was the main purpose of our existence down here. Maintaining libraries, entertaining, even forging—all of that was secondary.
“Fair assessment, Cassius,” Lazarus remarked. “But none but us have blades made from nightsteel. The deposit our people found is one of the last in the country.”
Lazarus had never spoken lies in my presence. Before my captivity, I’d never heard of nightsteel. Which was a pretty good indicator that most humans and witches hadn’t known it existed. Otherwise, our people might have created these extremely durable, magically-enhanced weapons to use against supernaturals when they’d finally come out of hiding in our world. Vampires, werewolves, and magic—it’d all existed all along, hidden for centuries, until one day decades ago, during a solar eclipse, everything had changed. Vampires could walk the world as the eclipse stretched on, and by the time the sun shone again days later, the vampires and other supernaturals had gained a place in our world.
And humans had, for the first time in a long time, become the hunted.
Things were different now. Supernaturals were equal, civil members of our societies. Except ones like Lazarus who created feeder communities that trafficked humans and witches.
“I hope you’re right,” Val cooed. “Otherwise this one’s labor goes wasted.”
“Watch yourself,” Lazarus warned sharply.
I jumped at the tone of his voice. Val meant me. But in all the years I’d forged for Lazarus, I had no idea why he’d come to value me and my skills so much. Surely, someone else could forge nightsteel if needed. I’d only learned how to do this because of him.
I straightened and pulled in a deep breath. Now was not the time to lose focus.
“She is more skilled than one would expect,” Lazarus said appraisingly. “With secrets even she does not yet know.”
My eyes narrowed, but I quickly brought my expression back to neutral before anyone noticed. Secrets? Doubtful. I had a knack for forging. That wasn’t a secret. Especially not down here in the community.
I shot a glance across the room where Willa, one of my very few friends in Lazarus’s feeding community, was sitting on a vampire’s lap. Despite being a witch and having magic, Willa’s obedience had been bought with blackmail against her family. So, instead of fighting back and escaping with magic, Willa now wrapped her arm around the vampire’s shoulder as she bent in, lapping up a few drops of Willa’s spilt blood.
Willa and I exchanged no words or expression, but I could still read every thought she was having right now because I hated this place and all the vampires in it, too. Sometimes, on the darkest days, I almost wished a vampire like Cassius would lose control and end things for me. But there was always the chance of being raised again as a vampire and nothing,nothing, could possibly be worse than that.
“Oh, come on,” came a boisterous voice from behind Cassius. “Demons aren’t coming, Lazarus. They’re rumors—stories for religions to control people. You’re paranoid.”
