Neither of us talk for a moment. I’m grateful he’s driving. It keeps him from watching me.
Finally I say, “You must be very lucky.”
Lamb tilts his head, waiting.
“To have found the only vampire in Las Vegas who’ll listen to your speeches.”
He bursts into laughter.
Lamblivesat the Katherine. He has a flat near the top, clearly decorated with his own furniture. (There’s no black leather. And no black cockatiels.) There’s a sitting area at one end and what looks like a bedroom behind a cloudy glass wall.
I sit on an antique sofa covered in turquoise jacquard. Lamb sits near me in a chair built of elaborately carved wood. It looks very old; everything here does. He’s taken off his jacket. “So,” he says, “I gather you weren’t given a choice.…”
I know what he means. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me, as your new friend.”
“I wasnotgiven a choice,” I say, brushing a white rabbit hair off my trousers. “Were you?”
“I predate choice,” he says, pushing his hair out of his face with both hands.
“How so?”
He lets his hair fall. “I predate everything. All my people understood was war and hunger, and demons who came in the dark.”
“Is that what happened to you? Did a demon come in the dark?” I’m not used to thinking of vampires like this, as fellow victims.
“It’s what happened to my brother,” he says. “Then my brother came for me.”
“Because he wanted a comrade?”
“Because he wasthirsty.Because he’d already killed ourparents. I put a table leg through his heart before he could finish me off, too.”
We’re both quiet.
“I’m sorry,” I say finally.
“It wasn’t his fault—he had no one to teach him. He had no community.” Lamb leans forward, his forearms on his thighs. “The culture that we’ve built here is hundreds of years in the making. We’ve lifted ourselves up. What happened to you—what happened to me—that isn’t our way anymore.”
“So you don’t Turn people?”
“Rarely. Most of us don’t want the chaos and competition. Almost no one wants the responsibility.”
“Then why don’t you stop the Next Blood?”
“There’s been talk.…”
“Just talk?”
“It’s difficult to persuade our kind into a war,” he says. “The longer you live, the more you value your life. You start treating yourself like a precious antiquity.”
“Are you sure you’re not just sitting back, waiting to see if the Next Blood can figure out how to steal magic?”
Lamb smiles, grimly. “If I thought they’d share it, I’d consider it. But they have no interest in us or our history. They don’t even identify as our brethren.”
“They don’t identify as vampires?”
“Oh no, they’re the next stage ofhumanity.Go on, tell me—why do they have your friend?”
