Both opportunities were rare. According to the website FAQs that Tess had read, the Nightkind demesne in the United States received over ten million visa applications a year from humans hoping to be turned, while the number of newly created Vampyres each year was the tiniest fraction of that and strictly controlled by the Nightkind demesne working in coordination with the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
Probably Sanchez had already applied for a visa for his daughter and had been turned down. Clearly desperation had pushed him onto the stage.
Just as it would push Tess, when it was her turn.
The next few moments were excruciating, and not just because of the rawness of Sanchez’s pleading, although that was bad enough.
The worst was that the Vampyres did nothing.
Nothing.
Nobody moved to interrupt Sanchez. The emcee did not order security to remove him. Nobody turned to look at the pleading man or raised a bidding paddle. They all acted as if he did not exist.
A sickened anger tied her stomach in knots. This was horrendous, degrading, and it didn’t matter that cold logic said there could be no good way to handle candidates like Sanchez, or that his petition had been doomed from the start. The number of visa applicants was overwhelming to begin with. If the Vampyres gave into one Sanchez who broke the rules, they would never be able to stop the flood of others.
She didn’t know what was worse—their show of indifference or the humans who chose to abase themselves onstage.
And I’m one of them, she thought. She wiped her face with a shaking hand. How in God’s name could I have ever thought this might be a good idea?
Scratch that, I never thought it was a good idea. It was my only idea.
The reason was simple. When you pissed off the devil, you ran out of options real fast.
The buzzer sounded. With agonizing politeness, the emcee escorted Sanchez off the stage, and the next candidate came on.
The person behind Tess elbowed her with a hiss, and she eased the stage door closed to step into the wings. Her blood pounded in her ears, and her shaking breath caught in her throat. This was far worse than any kind of normal stage fright, magnified as it was by anger, revulsion and fear.
As if from a long distance away, she heard the buzzer sound. And again.
When it was her turn, she stepped forward and waited just behind the curtain for her cue. If she held herself any more rigidly, she felt like she might break into pieces.
The emcee walked toward her with a practiced smile and a sharp, disinterested gaze. Holding out a hand, he beckoned to her. She walked forward into a flood of hot lights, stopped at the X taped on the floor and faced the crowded hall. Her cold fingers curled automatically around the microphone when it was shoved into her hand.
The lights on the stage had turned the Vampyres into shadowy figures that made them seem even more menacing. She wanted to scream at them, or laugh at the absurdity of the whole scenario.
Instead, the intolerable tension fractured and she iced over with a clear, clean anger. None of them would listen to anything she might say anyway.
Not bothering to raise the microphone, she said in a calm, flat voice, “My looks are entirely forgettable, and I’m smarter than almost anyone here.”
Screw them, if they weren’t able to see what advantages there could be in any of that. Screw all of them.
• • •
On the mezzanine floor, one of the Vampyres turned from his conversation to look down at her.
He raised his paddle.
• • •
Blinded by the bright lights shining in her face, Tess couldn’t see if her words had caused any reaction. She only knew she wasn’t going to stay on the stage for one more moment. She had to go somewhere quiet to try to figure out her next move. Pivoting, she strode to the emcee “Where’s the exit?”
Giving her a strange look, he walked with her to the opposite edge of the stage, where another young woman in an aide’s uniform waited in the wings. Plucking the microphone out of Tess’s hand, the emcee moved on to the next candidate.
Despair weighed down her limbs until she felt as if she were moving through water. She asked the aide tightly, “How do I get out of here?”
Like the emcee, all of the servers and aides at the Ball were human. The woman gave her the same strange look as the emcee had, incredulity mingled with envy, and darkened with the faintest tinge of resentment. “I know candidates can’t see it when they’re on the stage, but you’ve been selected for an interview.”
Tess blinked. She couldn’t have heard that right. The words didn’t make any sense. “Excuse me?”
“Someone wants to interview you.” The aide checked the screen of her iPad then rapidly input something with a stylus. “Go down the hall to the back staircase, then up to the second floor. Remember, one flight up is the mezzanine level. The second floor is two flights up. Your interview will be in room 219. He’ll be with you shortly.”
He.
She was almost getting used to the slightly nauseous tension that clenched her stomach. “Who is it?”
Even as she asked, the aide turned away to beckon the next candidate offstage. As the woman stepped into the wings, she clutched at the aide’s hands. “This is my sixth year auditioning. How did I do? Did someone ask for me?”
Tess turned away. The only way she would find out who wanted to talk to her was by going up to the room. Feeling dazed, she went down the utilitarian hall and walked up two flights of stairs.
The building was old. During the California gold rush, it had been one of San Francisco’s premiere hotels, but it had been partially gutted and renovated in the 1920s to be used for the Vampyre’s Ball.
Away from the glittering elegance of the main ballroom, the building showed its age. Still, the upstairs was a little better than the hallway backstage. There were a few touches of faded glory, in the scratched and peeling gilding on the stairway railings, in the worn carpet, and in the crown molding at the edges of the ceiling.
The upstairs rooms had once been hotel rooms. As the thought occurred to her, she clenched both hands into fists.
Relatively few Vampyres reached enough prominence to support a household of attendants, but when they did, they set their own rules for what happened in their domain. She had heard rumors that in some households, attendants provided more than just blood and assigned work. They also traded sexual favors in return for the kind of lifestyle that a wealthy Vampyre patron could offer.
Even if an attendant never gained the opportunity to be turned, regular bites from a patron boosted a human’s natural immune system, and they could live as long as a hundred and thirty years. There were reasons why Haley had gone naked onto the stage, not least of which was the opportunity to live more than half again one’s own natural life span and to die in one’s sleep of old age.
Room 219 was tucked between others in the middle of the hall. As soon as she gripped the door handle, her muscles locked up and she stood frozen, unable to make herself step into the room and yet not able to walk away, while rapid-fire thoughts snapped at her heels like feral dogs.
This “interview” could be another version of the casting couch scenario.
If there’s a bed in the room, that’s it, she thought. I’m out of here.
I think.
Stop being histrionic. Sex is merely a biological function. People have been trading sex for survival for thousands of years. You’re not a fourteen-year-old virgin. You’ve had sex before, and guess what? While none of your partners had been memorable enough to stick around, it wasn’t the end of the world. Death is the end of the world.
Think of the devil you left behind. If you leave now without exploring all your options, you’ve got to find another way to protect yourself from him. And the whole reason why you’re here in the first place is because you haven’t f
ound another way.
Just remember—if you’re going to choose to trade sex for protection, make sure you get an agreement in place beforehand.
Suddenly angry at her own dithering, she yanked the door open and stalked inside. It wasn’t likely that sex would become part of any discussion anyway. Not with the Vampyres’ love of beauty, the glut of gorgeous people readily available to slake any appetite, and her own average, forgettable looks.
The unoccupied room was entirely bare, except for a utilitarian, conference-style folding table, four chairs, and two unopened bottles of Evian set at one end of the table.
No bed, and no monsters. Yet.
She exhaled a shaky breath and stepped inside. The same worn carpeting from the hallway covered the floor, and the crown molding in the ceiling’s corners looked cracked and in need of repair. The closet was empty, and the bathroom appeared as if it hadn’t been used in a long time.
With the hallway door closed, the air felt too stifling as the demons in her head crowded the room. She had too many phantoms populating her imagination, and too many nightmares in her memory. Dragging over one of the folding chairs, she propped open the door to the hallway. Then she took a seat at the table facing the open doorway.
Traditionally, the position was the seat of power in the room. It was a small thing to take, although she didn’t fool herself for one minute. She had very little power in the upcoming exchange. She had very little power at all, which was one of the reasons why she found herself in such a god-awful mess.
Opening one of the bottles of water, she sucked down half the contents in a few gulps. As she screwed the cap back on the bottle, a slim, elegantly dressed man walked silently into the room.
Xavier del Torro.
The bottle slipped from Tess’s nerveless fingers and fell to the floor.
The killer that stood in front of her wasn’t especially tall, perhaps five foot ten or so. His long, lean body, along with an erect posture and an immense poise, served to make him seem taller. Seen up close, he looked as if he had been turned in his midtwenties. He could still embody the illusion of youthfulness, with eyes that were somewhere between gray and green, a clear-complected skin and refined features that somehow missed being either conventionally handsome or delicate.
His turning had been a famous event in history. A younger son of Spanish nobility, he had been a priest until the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition tortured and destroyed a community of peaceful Vampyres near his home in Valencia. The Vampyre community had included del Torro’s only sister and her husband.
After the massacre, or so the legend went, del Torro walked away from the Catholic Church and approached Julian, who turned him into a Vampyre and set him to cut a swath through the officers of the Inquisition. The ten years that followed were some of the bloodiest in Spanish history.
“Good evening,” said the Vampyre. He was quiet spoken, yet his beautifully modulated voice penetrating the silence in the room was shocking. “You are Tess Graham, correct?”
As he spoke, he turned to move the chair from propping open the door.
She said, “If you don’t mind, I would like to leave the door open.”
He straightened immediately, left the chair in place and approached the table. Everything he did was utterly flawless in execution, no gesture wasted. He moved like an animal, with complete fluidity that showed just how useless the open door was as a precaution, and how silly and fragile an illusion of safety she gleaned from it.
Open door or not, nothing would stop him from doing anything he wanted. He could rape and torture her, and drain her of all of her blood, and there wasn’t a single Vampyre who would lift a finger to stop him. Or very many who could stop him, even if they wanted to try.
Cold sweat broke out over her skin. Heat from a nearby vent blew along the back of her damp neck. The small sensation felt almost violent.
Del Torro pulled out the second chair on his side of the table and sat. When he settled into place, he went immobile—truly immobile, not the mere human equivalent. He didn’t breathe, didn’t blink. His formal black suit seemed to absorb the light, and his shirt was so white, it almost looked blue.
He was perfectly immaculate in every way. Somehow it should have made him look lifeless, like a mannequin, but it didn’t. His presence was so intense the air itself seemed to bend around him. She grew hyperaware, not only of him, but of herself too—the tiny shift of her torso as her lungs pulled in air, the muscles in her throat as she swallowed, the hand she clenched into a fist and hid underneath one arm, in case it provoked the relaxed predator in front of her.
She remembered the water bottle and bent to retrieve it from the floor. Even that small, prosaic movement seemed fraught with excess compared to the silent, composed figure sitting in front of her.
How old was he? She was no history scholar and knew almost nothing of the Spanish Inquisition, but she was fairly sure it had gone on for a few hundred years before it was finally abolished, so he had to be at least four centuries old and was probably older. How many people had he killed in his lifetime?
She had no idea what she was going to say, until it came tumbling out of her mouth. “What happened earlier with Mr. Sanchez was unspeakable.”
Del Torro’s gray-green gaze regarded her gravely. “You refer to the candidate with the sick child, yes? Unfortunately, she was much too young to become an attendant and she was never a viable recipient for a visa—it’s against the law to take blood from children or to turn them into Vampyres. Those situations are always difficult, and there is no good way to handle them.”
“But nobody did anything.”
The Vampyre inclined his head in acknowledgment. “In the past he would have been taken from the stage, yet that policy caused its own outcry. In the end, it was deemed best to allow those like Sanchez the same dignity as any other candidate, although of course we can’t ignore regulations and choose any of them, no matter how sad their story.”
“Dignity?” The word shot out of her with quite a bit more force than she had intended. “Do you think there’s any dignity in that auditioning process?”
One of his slim eyebrows lifted. Amidst his stillness, that slight gesture seemed like a shout, but when he spoke he sounded as calm and unflappable as ever. “An individual has as much dignity on that stage as she chooses to have, Ms. Graham. Take yourself, for example. You went out there and did exactly what you intended to do. Those who cared to pay attention did so. Nothing more, nothing less. Nobody promised you anything more than that.”
He was right, of course, although she did not like him for saying so. They were Vampyres, not a social service agency.
With effort she tried to rein in her careening emotions, while more truth spilled out of her mouth. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m so angry.” She tried to smile but her facial muscles felt so stiff, she gave it up almost immediately. “Believe me, I’m quite aware that this is an odd and counterproductive way to start an interview.”
“You’re frightened,” he said. “For some people, fear quite naturally turns into anger.”
His voice had gentled, and that might have been the most shocking thing that had happened all evening. Embarrassment burned in her cheeks. Nothing was going like she imagined it might. She thought about denying what he had said, but of course that would be stupid. He could hear her accelerated heartbeat and no doubt smell her fear. Sitting here fully clothed, she still felt as naked as if she had stripped just as Haley had.
“I’m curious.” Del Torro cocked his head, his all too discerning gaze dissecting her. “Why are you here tonight, when it clearly distresses you so? You do not carry the scent of illness, nor do you appear to have any interest in Vampyre kink. What do you hope to gain from an attendant-patron liaison?”
Vampyre kink.
She hadn’t expected him to be so blunt, and her cheeks
burned hotter.
“I need a job. The Ball was this weekend, so I got in line along with all the other candidates.” She paused. Technically, all of that was true. She was running low on cash, and she didn’t dare access the money in her bank accounts. But if he pressed her for any more details, she was going to run into some rocky ground very quickly. She had to turn the question away from herself, perhaps back onto him. “If you don’t mind me asking, what about you? Why did you request an interview with me?”
Any other person she had ever met would have gestured or shown some flicker of response. Del Torro didn’t. He just looked into her gaze steadily. His eyes were clear, intelligent and revealed absolutely nothing.
“Your defiance intrigued me, as did your claims. What skills would you bring to a liaison—that is, assuming you would agree to one?”
Was he actually considering her for a position, or merely satisfying his curiosity? He had no tells. He was utterly impossible to read, and his restraint of manner all but unendurable. She felt completely at sea and caught on a hook, and while she twisted at the end of a line, he slowly reeled her in.
As she tried to let go of some of the tension in her aching muscles, she found herself studying him, looking for any kind of flaw. When she discovered a thin, white scar at the corner of his mouth, she stared at it. Whatever had caused the scar had to have happened before he had been turned. It should have made him seem more human, but it didn’t.
“I can speak Japanese, French and Italian,” she said. “I can also read French and Italian, along with a bit of Elvish, although I can’t speak that with any fluency yet. I like languages, so I’m working on that. And I have degrees in accounting and computer science. I have experience with managing money, and I can build a firewall like nobody’s business. My skills may not be flashy or sexy, but I’m very good at what I do.”
The skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled slightly. If she hadn’t already been staring at him so intently, she would have missed the subtle expression. “I disagree. Competence is quite sexy.”