"I mean the animals," the silver-haired man hisses. "The fleas that infest the mud."
Okay. Wow. So we’re dealing with some serious Hatfield and McCoy classism here. Rich plantation owners hating the swamp folks. It tracks. It’s a common enough narrative in the south, but the venom in his voice... it’s visceral. It sounds like he wants to hunt them for sport.
"Right," I say, backing down. "No Christmas lights. Got it. I guess I’m just used to the city. Chicago is lit up like a circuit board this time of year."
"Chicago," Matilde muses. "So far away. And yet, you found your way back to the vein."
She stands up. The movement is fluid, silent. She picks up her crystal flute. It’s filled with a dark, viscous red liquid. Wine, I tell myself. It’s just a heavy vintage.
"A toast," she says.
The others stand in unison. The sound of their chairs sliding back is the only noise in the room. I scramble up on my feet, my knees knocking against the table leg. I grab my own glass. It’s filled with the same dark liquid.
"To the Duval line," Matilde says, raising the glass. Her eyes lock onto mine. "To the purity of the blood. And to the return of the lost sheep to the slaughter."
Purity of the blood? Slaughter?
My brain stutters on the word.Did she just say slaughter?
"To the blood," the others echo, their voices a low, harmonious drone.
My hand is shaking. It’s a tremor I can't control, a vibration starting in my elbow and running down to my fingertips. The mainspring is wound too tight. The torque is too high.
I try to bring the glass to my lips to fake a sip, but my grip spasms.
Crr-ack.
The sound is sharp, like a gunshot in a library. The delicate crystal implodes in my hand.
I gasp, dropping the stem. It hits the table, sending the dark wine spilling across the white tablecloth like an arterial spray. But mixed with the wine is something brighter. Brighter red.
I look at my thumb. A shard of crystal has sliced deep into the pad. A single drop of my blood wells up, perfectly round, defying gravity for a split second before it falls.
Drip.
It hits the table.
The smell hits me instantly. It doesn't smell like iron. It smells electric. It smells like nature and sugar and something ancient.
The reaction is instantaneous.
The polite, statuesque veneers of my "cousins" shatter faster than the glass.
The woman with the ink-black hair inhales sharply, her head snapping toward me. The sound she makes is wet, hungry.
I look at the silver-haired man. His eyes are gone. The whites, the irises—they’ve been swallowed by a black tide. His pupils have dilated to cover the entire surface of the eye. It’s biological horror. It’s a shark rolling its eyes back before a strike.
And then the teeth.
The gum line recedes, the jaw unhinges slightly, and long, needle-sharp fangs descend from the upper row. It’s mechanical. It’s a weapon deployment.
"Matilde?" I whisper, backing away. My legs hit the chair.
Matilde isn't looking at the spilled wine. She’s looking at my bleeding thumb. She smiles, and her mouth is full of razors.
"The glass is broken," she says softly. "The blood is spilled. We can sample the feast and wait for The Truce of the Longest Night to end to savor the full delicacy."
She leans across the table, her spine elongating, her fingers curling into claws that dig into the wood. She looks at me not as a relative, but as livestock.
