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“I understand,” she whispered. “It’s in your blood. That’s why I allow you to file your teeth, to dress like them—”
“Allow me?” He shook her off and stood. “I’m an adult.”
She snorted. “You’re not even a century old.”
“I’m old enough to understand that nothing will ever change if we don’t challenge it. Why should we be forced to hide away, to live like savages?”
“The only change is you’ll be dead.”
“And this”—he gestured out toward the settlement—“this is living? We can’t leave or work. We don’t have electricity or internet—”
“We don’t need those things.”
“It’s not about need. It’s about being part of civilization, about having rights. Fuck—I can’t even go and get a job flipping burgers at a diner.”
She stared at him sadly. “I understand. You want what they have. But what they have isn’t so great, believe me. And they will never accept you, Michael. You have Colony in your blood too.”
“Yeah, don’t I know it.”
The bitterness in his voice filled her with a familiar ache. He walked to the door and grabbed his coat.
“Where are you going?”
“To do what you asked.” Mockingly: “Don’t I always do what my dear mother tells me?”
“You’re fucking supposed to.”
“Did you?”
She blew out a thick cloud of smoke. “I killed my mother, ripped out her throat and drank her blood.”
He smiled, a hint of cruelty in his beauty. “Don’t give me ideas.”
The lodge shook as the door slammed shut behind him.
18
“You really think the boys faked that video to incite a cull?”
Last night, on the phone, Nicholls had been disbelieving and dismissive, but Barbara sensed he’d had some time to sleep on it. This morning he seemed in a more reflective mood.
She nodded. “Yes, sir. I do. Or at least, to stir up trouble with the Colony. We presumed Marcus filmed his own death. But we never actually see that. Why? Because the whole thing is a set-up. One of the other boys pretends to be a vampyr. They film what looks like an attack. Maybe Marcus lets himself get roughed up a little. Then they go tell people there’s a dangerous vampyr on the loose and the town immediately starts calling for a cull.”
“But Marcus ended up dead.”
“Yes, sir. But I think that happened later. Maybe Marcus really did leave his phone. Maybe the plan was for him to stay at the cabin a while and follow later. But at some point, after Jacob and Stephen left, he was attacked and killed.”
“It still seems like a hell of a coincidence.”
“It does. But it also explains a lot of the inconsistencies. The jacket, the timings, the tattoo. I’m also willing to bet if we dig into that phone, we’ll find deleted versions of the video they didn’t use.”
Nicholls rubbed at his mustache. “You think the boys came up with this on their own?”
“That I don’t know.”
“If you’re right, we have no physical description of Marcus’s attacker and no real time of death.”
“No, sir.”
