The salesgirl in the clothing store noticed, however. “Are you okay?” she asked, hand hovering over the phone near the cash register.

  Ante tried a harmless smile. “I, er, had a minor confrontation with someone. I know I look terrible, but I am fine. But I require a new outfit.”

  She relaxed slightly. “Yeah, dude. You kinda do.”

  He walked out of the mall wearing a new pair of jeans and new red T-shirt, both unreasonably expensive. But at least nobody gawked at him anymore, and he wasn’t apt to attract the attention of the police. Weaving his way through the crowds, he headed toward the Lucky Chalet.

  He stopped when he got as far as Bellagio. The fountains were not putting on a show, so there was plenty of room to lean against the railing and contemplate his next acts. He’d been confident enough, hanging halfway out of the Zortea penthouse window, but now he found himself at a loss. While he wanted nothing more than to protect Peter, that would require finding him—which seemed hopeless. Hours had passed since they’d parted. With his special talents, Peter could very well have charmed himself onto an airplane and be on his way anywhere in the world. Or maybe he’d left the city by car, but even then, there were several directions he could have traveled.

  Lee would find Peter, probably sooner rather than later. His branch of the Shadows had allies and spies everywhere, while Ante had no network to rely on. He was alone, as he had been for nearly all his existence. Usually he didn’t mind, but today his isolation was a true liability.

  “How can I protect you if I can’t find you?” he said. A nearby busker—a tall African American man in an Elvis costume—had been smoking as he waited for a bigger crowd. Now he laughed at Ante.

  Fine. If the man thought he was insane anyway, Ante wouldn’t censor himself. “We should have bought cell phones,” he told the man. “We could have kept in touch that way. We could have….” He had to think a moment to find the right word. “We could have sexted.”

  “I don’t wanna sext you, man. No offense, but you ain’t my type.”

  “Not you. Peter.”

  “Ah.” The busker ground his cigarette under a sneaker heel. “Peter. Whatta ya need to protect him from?”

  “The Shadows.”

  The busker’s expression became grim. “Shit. Those are some nasty motherfuckers. I’d stay away from them if I was you.”

  So this man knew of them. Interesting. Ante nodded in thanks. “That is good advice.”

  “And this Peter dude. Is he stayin’ away from them too?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Good luck with it.” Elvis shook out a new cigarette, lit it, and then sauntered over to the drum set nearby.

  “I will need luck,” Ante muttered to himself. It had occurred to him that staying away from Peter might be the safer option—if Lee tracked Ante, then Ante would lead him straight to Peter. But Lee would eventually find Peter anyway. When Lee did so, Ante wanted to be there, to make sure Peter didn’t have to fight without anyone on his side.

  Maybe he’d be able to think more clearly if he went somewhere quiet, like his room at the Lucky Chalet. But no. The room would smell like Peter, and that would only distract him.

  God, Peter’s blood still fizzed inside him, sustaining him. He had Peter’s blood to thank for his quick recovery from the injuries Lee gave him, and due to the relatively large size of the meal, he wouldn’t need to feed again for several days. Which was good, because anyone else would seem flat and tasteless in comparison.

  Blood.

  When he was newly risen, he’d asked Helena why vampires needed blood to survive. She’d only shrugged and told him it wasn’t worth wondering about. “It just is, Ante, and we are, and that is the way of it.” What was so special about the red fluid he’d seen spilled on so many battlefields? He’d thought about it many times over the years.

  While alive he’d barely been able to write his name. But later, despite hardships, he’d managed to amass a scholarly education and to realize what a central part blood plays in literature, in idiom. In religion, which he should have known from his days in the village church. Later, scientific readings had informed him that life on Earth had first evolved in the seas and that blood was similarly salty, as if every human carried his earliest home in his veins.

  So it was no surprise that blood was the essence of what he became. And when he killed a young man in New York and made him a vampire, Ante learned that their shared blood tied them together in a special and dangerous way. That was why Lee had long tolerated Ante’s outsider presence in Vegas, and one reason Ante had remained. It was the reason they hadn’t killed each other tonight. It was what pulled them together even when they wished to remain apart. Blood calls to blood.

  Wait. “Blood calls to blood,” Ante whispered. Wasn’t Peter’s blood—Peter’s life—still vigorous inside Ante’s dead body?

  “Where are you, Peter?” Ante whispered, first in English and then Croatian. He closed his eyes and concentrated on feeling.

  There was…. Yes.

  Mindful of the waning night, Ante hurried toward downtown.

  IT was a subtle sensation, like hearing someone far away whisper his name. But if Ante concentrated, he could feel… well, it wasn’t a pull like he had with Lee. This was a fainter connection, more like a thread of spider’s silk that tentatively linked him to someone else. At times he had to pause on the sidewalk and close his eyes in order to find the strand, but he was eventually able to follow it all the way downtown. He ended up at a grimy four-story building with a faded red-and-blue sign announcing the Conway Hotel and Apartments. The freeway loomed almost overhead.

  The lobby reeked of cigarettes and greasy food, the threadbare carpet looked as if it had last been cleaned during the Nixon administration, and the handful of slot machines stood idle. Even the pamphlet rack had an air of neglect, the few remaining brochures faded and curled. The scrawny man behind the check-in desk was sliding out of—or into—a bad meth habit, his face scarred and his teeth rotting.

  “Yeah?” he asked without turning his gaze from the TV on a nearby wall.

  “I am looking for one of your guests.”

  The desk clerk looked at Ante. “You ain’t no cop.”

  “No, I am not. He is a friend.”

  The clerk snorted and turned back to the television.

  With a small huff of annoyance—and a fleeting wish he could use Lee’s more direct tactics—Ante reached into his pocket and pulled out three twenties. He slapped them on the dirty counter. “His name is Peter Gehrardi.”

  The clerk paused only a moment before clacking away at a computer. “Spell it.” After Ante did, the man shook his head. “Ain’t here.”’

  Perhaps Peter had been wise enough to use a false name. Ante added another twenty to the stack. “He is in his early twenties. Light brown skin, black hair, very handsome. He wears a good suit and is quite charming.”

  The clerk’s eyes brightened with recognition. “Oh. Him. He’s in 307.” He snatched the money and shoved it into his jeans pocket. He returned his attention to the TV but called out over his shoulder, as a bonus, “Elevator’s busted.”

  There were times Ante had slept in stairwells—they were usually safe from daylight—and some of them had been worse than the Conway Hotel’s. But this one was pretty bad, with a pervasive stink of urine and with used condoms and drug paraphernalia scattered on the steps. The third-floor hallway wasn’t much better, its walls so filthy the original color was impossible to discern and half of the ceiling lights gone dark.

  Ante pounded hard on the door of room 307.

  It took a long time before it creaked open. Peter stood in nothing but boxer briefs, looking heartbreakingly young, his hair mussed and a pillow crease on one cheek. He regarded Ante soberly. “You’re gonna take me to them.” A statement rather than a question.

  “No. For God’s sake, Peter, why are you still here?”

  “Didn’t seem much point in rabbiting if they’re gonna find me anyway. You sure found me quickly enough.”

  Deciding not to explain their blood connection, which was temporary anyway, Ante clasped Peter’s arm. “You will not at least try to get away?”

  “You’re the one who kept telling me it was hopeless.”

  “It is. But you could buy yourself more time. Days, weeks….”

  “Why bother?” Peter wrenched his arm free and walked back into his room. Since he’d left the door open, Ante followed him inside.

  “Hey!” Peter grumbled. “Aren’t you supposed to need an invitation?”

  “A myth. Belief in myths such as this will get you killed.”

  “Everything’s gonna get me killed!” Peter shouted. “What the fuck difference does it make anyway?”

  As Ante closed the door, his eyes prickled with tears. How many decades had passed since he’d last cried? “It makes a difference. Please, believe me. Every single hour of life is precious.”

  “How can you say that? A guy who’s… what? A hundred and seventy-something?”

  Trying to find the right words for his thoughts, Ante sat on the rumpled bed. The room was predictably grim, yet a vase of fresh flowers sat bright and cheery on the dresser, and next to it was a framed photo of a young blonde woman and a small boy with huge dark eyes.

  “When I died, I was about as old as you are now,” Ante said softly. “And when I lay in the mud, I would have given anything for just one more day. One more hour. I fought to draw breaths despite my agony, because every breath was another moment of life. You see? And when Helena offered me her vein, I took it. Even this cold shadow of an existence was better than none at all.”

  Peter slowly walked over and sat beside him. “I’m sorry.”

  Ante had to chuckle. “Are you offering me condolences on my own demise?”

  “I guess I am. Jesus, this is just so fucked-up.” He dry-scrubbed his face. “And an elf? Really? Why don’t I get to be something cool?”

  “An elf is not cool?”

  “Elves make cookies and work in Santa’s workshop. Okay, I guess Tolkien’s elves were pretty good, but I don’t think prancing around with a bow and arrow is going to do me much good.”

  “Vampires can be killed with arrows,” Ante pointed out. “If the wooden shaft pierces our heart.”

  “That’s not particularly encouraging, considering I have no idea how to shoot one and my aim probably sucks.” With a heavy sigh, Peter leaned slightly against Ante.

  “You do at least now believe that you are an elf?”

  “I don’t know. I guess. Maybe. I’ve known for a few years that I’m not exactly normal, but I pretty much assumed I was human.” He ran fingers through his hair, mussing it even more.

  “Your parents never, er, mentioned any of this to you?”

  Instead of answering, Peter stood and fetched the photo from the dresser. He handed it to Ante. “Me and Mama. I was six.”

  Ante examined the picture closely. It was a snapshot, perhaps hastily taken. The colors had faded a bit. Peter and his mother stood in a parking lot next to a battered pickup truck. He wore flip-flops, jeans, and a green T-shirt with a superhero on the front. His mother was barefoot, in a long flowing skirt and white camisole. She stooped to hug him as young Peter squinted nervously at the camera. Tall, sere mountains loomed in the background.

  “She is pretty.”

  “It was my first day of school. Mama was taking a stab at ordinary.” Peter laughed softly. “I liked that school, while it lasted. We got to use about a million colors of crayons during art time, and the library lady used to come around with an alligator puppet and read us stories. I never could figure out why an alligator. But being ordinary didn’t last long. Only a few months later we moved, and she mostly homeschooled me after that.”

  “Did your mother have skills like yours?” Ante asked as he handed back the photo.

  Peter stared at it. “No. Mama was… kind of a free spirit, I guess. A hippie born a generation too late. She was into crystals and healing chants and stuff like that, but I’m pretty sure her only superpower was making phenomenally bad decisions.”

  Interesting. “What about your father?”

  “Yeah, well, part of Mama’s superpower was that she’d hook up with men she didn’t really know and fall deeply in love for about five minutes before moving on. My father was one of those. She wasn’t exactly sure who my father was, actually, although my coloring made her suspect it was this one guy she spent a couple days with. She couldn’t remember his name or anything, but she thought he was Apache. She was near their reservation at the time.”

  Peter stood and returned the photo to the dresser, carefully placing it near the flowers. Then he turned to look at Ante. “Are there Native American elves? And can elves, um, interbreed with humans?”

  “I do not know.” Eadburg had mentioned something about elves fleeing to the New World long ago. Perhaps they had intermixed with the local population. Eadburg had also said elves were good at seduction, and Ante was unliving proof that a humanlike creature could be attracted to those who were not his species.

  “Shit,” Peter said as his shoulders slumped. “So anyway, I had a really weird childhood, right? We moved around a lot, lived in cars, trailers, tents, old shacks… all kinds of places. Sometimes I’d get kind of comfortable in one spot after a couple of months, but pretty soon we’d move on.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno. All kinds of reasons. Maybe there was a concert she wanted to go to or a prayer circle she heard about. Most of the time she just told me we’d have better luck somewhere else. We never did.”

  Until he’d become a soldier, Ante had remained tied to the same plot of land his family had worked for generations. He’d been rootless since he died, but at times he still yearned for that sense of belonging, of home. He wondered whether Peter’s nomadic childhood made him feel the same way.

  “You mention her in the past tense,” Ante prompted gently.

  “Yeah. She got sick when I was sixteen. I don’t even know what was wrong with her—she just kept saying something about her chakras being out of balance or something. She wouldn’t go to a regular doctor, and all those magic rocks and shit she believed in didn’t do jack squat.”

  “I am sorry.”

  Peter smiled slightly. “Now you’re offering me condolences for something that happened fifteen years ago.”

  “A blink of an eye for me. And it surely changed your life.”

  After a grim nod, Peter rejoined him on the bed. “She loved me. God, she was the world’s biggest flake, but she really loved me, and she did the best she could for me. Sometimes we had zero money, but she always made sure I had enough to eat and somewhere safe to sleep. She’d spend hours with me in libraries, on playgrounds. We’d go on walks and then look up the names of all the flowers we saw, the different kinds of lizards and bugs and things….”

  As silence fell, Ante remembered his own mother. She had always led a difficult life, doing backbreaking work even in early childhood. When their food supply was lean, she always served her husband and children first. Although she wasn’t overly demonstrative, Ante had always felt secure in her love, and she’d wept rivers when he left to join the army.

  Perhaps sensing Ante’s thoughts, Peter took his hand, resting their interlaced fingers on Ante’s thigh. “We miss them,” Peter whispered.

  “Yes.”

  Another period of quiet, and then Ante squeezed Peter’s hand. “What did you do after she died?”

  “Whatever I had to.”

  “I understand.”

  “Since we had no money, she obviously hadn’t invested in life insurance or anything. Her people… I think they were back East somewhere, but she told me they were abusive and she didn’t even like thinking about them.”

  “So then you had nothing and nobody.”

  “I had… a GED, some books and clothes, and a pretty face.” Peter lifted their clasped hands and traced a finger over the veins on the back of Ante’s hand, making Ante shiver and reminding him that Peter was nearly naked.

  “You survived,” Ante pointed out. “That is a victory.”

  “I guess so. This… this elf stuff? It just happened a couple years ago. I mean, I was always pretty good at reading people, but nothing supernatural or anything. I just kind of went with it. It was better than turning tricks.”

  His grip was so warm and his scent intoxicating. Ante had to shake his head to clear it, and he decided to steer the conversation in a slightly different direction. “You do not seem to have taken much advantage of your gifts.” He waved his free hand to indicate the modest surroundings.

  “Well, sometimes I stay in better places. You saw. I chose this dump ’cause I figured it probably wasn’t much on the radar for the mafia vamps.”

  “It is not one of their properties,” Ante agreed.

  “No, I figure this place is probably run by zombies, judging by the state of it. Wait. Are there zombies?”

  It felt good to laugh. “If there are, I have never seen them. Perhaps they are uninterested in the undead.”

  “Hmm. I don’t know—you’ve still got braiiiiinnnnsss, right?”

  It was even better to hear Peter laugh.

  Still, Ante wanted to know more. “So you do not opt for elaborate living arrangements. Why not? Could you not use your talents to become very wealthy?”

  “Maybe,” Peter said thoughtfully. “But sacks of money were never really what I dreamed about.”

  “What do you dream of?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter, but he was clearly lying.

  It wasn’t the time to press the point. “Right now, we should probably both dream of survival.”

  “You’re really not going to drag me to the Shadows?”