Prologue
A bouquet of roses, lying upon a mahogany coffin, hides the stench of death. Tall, misshapen candles decorate every corner of the room. I stare at their flames, white and blue, while the vampire rummages through an old chest of drawers.
She turns to lock her crimson eyes with mine. “Don’t move yet, darling,” she says.
“I won’t.” My voice is listless. Entranced. Her red eyes give her the ability to twist a human’s will however she pleases. When she first saw me at the party downstairs and caught my scent, she wasted no time in making me follow her, as though she was in a rush. As though she won’t live forever.
Her room’s décor is the opposite of the downstairs club’s. Dame Danger is an industrial mess, all pipes and neon lights. But here the room has thick velvet curtains, a red Persian rug over a wooden floor. She doesn’t hide her vanity: Framed portraits of herself fill every wall. Her striking features, chestnut hair, and thick red lips, unchanged through centuries, appear on each canvas. “Ah!” she says. “Finally.” She draws out a dagger. A golden blade with a crystal hilt embedded with flowers. “Now we can begin.”
I stare at the weapon, my heart pounding.
“Begin what?” I whisper.
My back is pressed against the wall. I stand exactly where she told me to—in the very same spot, I imagine, as all her past victims. She closes the distance between us and places the cold crystal in my hands, drawing my fingers tight around the hilt. Then she leans down, presses her nose into the crook of my neck, and inhales. “Delicious,” she whispers.
My blood, Type-S, is extremely rare, only one in ten thousand humans are said to have it. And with its scent alone, it can make a satiated vampire thirsty again.
My fingers tremble around the dagger. I know what comes next. I know what happened to her previous victims. She leans back just enough for her red eyes to meet mine again, and they glow bright before she commands: “Slit your throat.”
I lift the blade to my neck, and her pupils dilate. Her lips part. She has fangs, razor sharp, but she doesn’t want to use them. Perhaps this is her MO: Instead of biting and sucking from small puncture wounds, as most vampires do, this one wants me to slit my own throat and provide her with a heavy flow of blood so she can gorge without tiring herself.
Police sirens fill the street below. They’re too far away. No one will hear me if I scream.
Luckily enough, I don’t needto.
“I’d rather not,” I say.
She’s frozen, bent to drink from the wound I’ve yet to open. She stares up at me, confused. “What?”
“But thanks for the dagger,” I say, my trembling hands relaxing. I slice just beneath her chin and the blade hits bone. She clasps her neck, speechless as blood sprays from the gash. I kick her, and the same smile she used on me when she assumed I was easy prey appears on my lips now.
If she was a Heritage vampire, the kind of vampire who is born instead of made, her open neck might heal in a matter of minutes. But as a Convert, someone who used to be human, it’ll take days.
At a first glance it can be hard to tell what kind of vampire you’re facing, because they look identical except for the fact that all Heritage vampires stop aging when they turn thirty, while Converts are frozen at whatever age they were sired. Dame Danger here doesn’t look a day over twenty.
“Callisto sends its regards,” I say, before sliding out the weapon hidden in the bustier of my dress. A slit throat won’t kill a vampire, but a stake most certainly will. I slam it through her chest, hearing ribs crack before it pierces her rotten heart.
Like all vampires, she leaves no corpse behind. Just smoke and dust.
I stretch my arms above my head. A low buzz fills my right ear after I tap on my silver earring. “You really expect me to believeshewas dangerous?” I say.
“Just get out of there,” Penny, my supervisor, replies.
I blow out the candles and pull open the velvet curtains. A full moon hangs above London’s jagged skyline. The window opens with a creak as the old Victorian building protests at my strength. Wind blows my short black hair, and I jump out. “Seriously, these missions are getting too easy,” I say. I know I shouldn’t complain. But hopefully Penny will get the hint. Understand that I’m ready.
Ready for her to tell me the truth.
A black car comes to a halt beside me. Penny rolls down the window. Her red hair is in a tight bun, a grey scarf wrapped around her neck. “Hurry up,” she says. I climb in beside her, twirling my new dagger between my fingers. “And I told you not to take anything from the crime scene.”
I roll my eyes. “It was agift,” I say, slouching back onto the leather seat. “It would be pretty heartless of me to throw it away after killing her, don’t you think?”
Penny doesn’t deign to respond.
Penny’s base isin an abandoned convent an hour west of the city, halfway up a hill and hidden by a forest. From the outside, thereappears to be nothing here but ruins: stones with dried-up weeds hiding what centuries ago was a holy site. She parks in the driveway and waits for the base’s security system to recognise her car. A single lamppost flickers on through the fog, signalling it’s safe to get out.
We make our way across the cloister, a well at its centre, half hidden by a coat of ivy. Most of the convent got blown to rubble during the Second World War, though it had been lying empty for centuries at that point. Luckily, the refectory, as well as three narrow bedrooms, survived the blast. Callisto uses it as a satellite base, big enough for five hunters, at most, but it’s just the two of us out here.
“Did the rescue team save anyone from the party?” I ask. I work alone, and my job is to kill, not save. But Penny has promised me there is always a rescue team from Callisto to get the human survivors out of each blood party I dismantle.
