Neither of us talk. It doesn’t seem like Lamb is even paying attention to me. But then the waiter takes my empty plate, and I meet Lamb’s eyes again. I think I might be beaming. He’s smiling, but his eyes are sad.

  “Baz,” he says, “how old are you?”

  I don’t have a lie ready. “Twenty.”

  “Right. And I’m thirty-four. How old are you really?”

  I look up at the lights, at the acoustic tile ceiling. “Twenty.”

  I hear him exhale.

  “Right,” he says. “Let’s talk about the Next Blood.”

  * * *

  The restaurant is nearly empty. The waiter has brought us coffee with cardamom and evaporated milk. Lamb has shifted again, into a brand-new persona. He’s not the charming Las Vegas enthusiast I met at the party. And not the terrifying vampire I met in the shadows. He’s quieter now and so serious, he seems almost gentle.

  “Power down your phone,” he says. “And set it on the table.”

  I reach into my pocket—praying that Simon isn’t presently going ballistic. I push the power button and set my mobile on the table. Lamb barely glances at it. I don’t know if he suspects something or if he’s just taking precautions. He sets his own phone next to mine.

  “The Next Blood,” he says, “are physically like us, but they’re culturally something very different. They’re a group of wealthy men and women, mostly men, who discovered our way of life.… Well”—he can’t help but roll his eyes—“they act like they discovered it. And then decided to acquire it. They sought out our brethren, demanding to be Turned.

  “It’s not our way to Turn someone on request.” He looks in my eyes. “As you know. But someone of our kind must have been blackmailed or seduced. They Turned one of the infidels, and that one Turned the others. And on and on…”

  Lamb looks disgusted. “The Next Blood treats being one of us like being in a social club. Like the Rotary. They even have a board of directors that reviews new members.” He waves his hand, like he can’t believe any of this. His voice gets a bit higher. “It’s like getting approved by the condo board. They see our lifestyle as an extension of their success—as if they have earned the undying, and earned the right to share it. They’ve doubled our numbers in San Francisco, just in the last year.”

  I’m horrified. Which Lamb approves of.

  “Not a one of them pays any attention to social mores or tradition. They don’t wonder why we’ve spent millennia building a different path. No, they’re the next wave, the Next Blood. They don’t care about history—they’re too busy curing cancer and reinventing the Internet.”

  He takes his sunglasses off his head and sets them on the table.

  “They threaten our safety and our freedom, Baz. What happens when the Bleeders realize that no one in Silicon Valley is ageing? By that time, will there be any Bleeders left to notice?”

  “What—” I stammer. “What about the mages?”

  “Those magicians are really under your skin, aren’t they?”

  I shrug.

  “Well, it’s like I told you, the Speakers largely ignore us. They seem to ignore each other, too; I’m not sure they even know what’s happening—though they’ll find out if the Next Blood get their way. They’re intent on acquiring magic next.”

  “You can’t acquire magic,” I say. “You have to be born with it.”

  He rolls his eyes again. “The members of the Next Blood see it as a genetic challenge. These people are craven, they’re already injecting themselves with placental blood—they were doing it before they were Turned!”

  He leans in. “That’s the worst of it for me. They don’t even drink, Baz—they transfuse. They won’t touch anything that hasn’t been tested, frozen, and stored. I’ve heard they’ve started pasteurizing.…” Lamb’s voice has got less gentle. His eyes have taken on a steely glint. He’s sneering at me like—

  “Nicks and Slick,” I swear. (Bunce is a terrible influence.) “You think I’m one of them!”

  Lamb lowers his chin. It’s a challenge.

  I start laughing. I can’t stop. “Seven snakes!” I choke out. “Eight snakes and a dragon!”

  “What is this,” he asks, “are you stalling? Or hysterical? You know the terms of our treaty, the punishment is severe—”

  “Lamb, no! I am hapless and ignorant and out of my depth, but I am not that.”

  He narrows his eyes to slits.

  I stand up. “Take a walk with me?”

  * * *

  I saw it on my way in. A pet shop, in the same strip mall as the restaurant. I know that Simon and Penny must be watching me. I hope they notice that I’m holding my hand in the thumbs-up position at my side. (That’s their idiot sign for “all’s well.”)

  I buy a rabbit. I tell the shop owner that I have one at home, and I’m familiar with them. And then I walk with Lamb around the corner, behind a skip.

  “Anyone could be watching,” he says. “It’s broad daylight.” Lamb caught on to my game as soon as we walked into the pet shop. He looks disgusted with me—but also a little curious. I used to share a room with that look.

  “Block me,” I say.

  He stands closer.

  I break the rabbit’s neck in my hands and suck it completely dry. (I don’t spill a drop on its white fur or my cuffs.) Then I toss it into the skip.

  Lamb looks utterly put off. “Oh, Baz,” he says in dismay. “No wonder you’re so pale. You’re malnourished.”

  I laugh. “But I’m not one of them.”

  “No,” he says, eyeing me with one brow aloft. “You’re a starving child from an oppressed nation who has barely met himself. But you are not one of them.”

  Lamb’s still blocking me from view. Crowding me against the wall and the bin. I feel the rabbit’s blood rising in my cheeks. My fangs haven’t quite retracted.

  He’s close enough to make me feel my height advantage.

  “Help me,” I whisper. “Tell me where to find them. They have my friend.”

  51

  SIMON

  “He’s getting in the vampire’s car,” I say. “We have to stop this.”

  Penny grabs my arm. “He gave us the thumbs-up signal, Simon. We have to let him go.”

  “I wouldn’t expect a vampire to drive a Prius,” Shepard says. Like we have time for aimless musing.

  I open the truck door and jump out. “Give me my wings back!”

  “Simon”—Penny’s being fierce—“get back in. We’ll follow them.”

  The Prius is leaving the parking lot. I suppose I don’t need wings. I start running after it.

  After a few seconds, my wings burst out of my back. And then—I disappear.

  I mean, I’m still here. I’m flying above the Prius, I can see it below me. But I can’t see my own hands.

  I wonder what spell Penny has cast, and when it will wear off. I don’t take my eyes off Lamb’s car.

  52

  BAZ

  I know I promised Snow that I wouldn’t leave with Lamb. But I think I might have finally broken through with him. (Lamb.) What was I supposed to do—insist that we continue our conversation next to the skip?

  I assume Simon and Penelope are right behind me. I’ll call them again as soon as I get a chance.

  Lamb’s got his sunglasses back on. He cuts his eyes towards me without turning away from the road. “Have you always been…”

  I raise an eyebrow. “A picky eater?”

  He laughs. “Yes.”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  He grimaces. “But why?”

  Because I didn’t want to kill anyone, I think. But that argument won’t work with him. Instead I say, “Because I didn’t enjoy being bitten.”

  He glances over at me, turning his head this time. “Then someone was doing it wrong.”

  I shuffle in my seat. “It just feels barbaric to me. Why should I turn on humanity? I was born one of them.”

  “It’s the natural way of things,” he says. “It’s the circle of life.”

  “There’s no circle,” I say. “We don’t die. We aren’t born. We don’t reproduce.”

  “We do,” Lamb insists. “We were. We can.”

  It’s my turn to be put off. “Vampires have children?”

  “Someone made you.”

  “My parents made me. A vampire killed me.”

  He sighs. “Then allow me to say how much I enjoy the company of your ghost.”

  I look out the window. I don’t see Shepard’s truck in the mirror.

  “It might not be the circle of life,” Lamb says. “But it is the food chain. I didn’t see you feeling sorry for that pig we had for lunch. Or the rabbit you had for dessert. Everything eats something else.”

  I swing my head towards him. “What eats you?”

  He raises an eyebrow, giving me a taste of my own medicine. “Existential despair.”

  I laugh out loud.

  His eyes rest on me for a moment before turning back to the road. And when he speaks again, his voice is soft. “You won’t feel so close to them, the Normals, once you’ve outlived your ties to mortality.… Someday, your parents will be gone. Your lovers will be gone. Everything left from the time when you bled will fade … and fall … and disappear. And then you’ll realize that you’re something different. There’s no unbecoming, Baz. There’s no sidestepping your true identity. All the rabbits in the world won’t change you back. They’ll just leave you thirsty.”

  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.

  * * *

  Lamb lives at 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 was not given 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 was thirsty. Because he’d already killed our parents. 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 of humanity. Go on, tell me—why do they have your friend?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Agatha.”

  Lamb’s eyebrow twitches. “Ah.”

  I stop myself from saying, “It’s not like that.”

  “What do they want from her?”

  He’s going to find this out anyway, if he helps me—“She’s a magician.”

  His hands drop between his knees, and his blue eyes are wide. “Talk about starcross’d lovers!”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Lamb rubs his chin. “So … your girlfriend is one of their Speaker guinea pigs.…”

  “There are others?”

  He shrugs. “Well, there must be.”

  I feel sick to my stomach. I scoot to the edge of the sofa. “Lamb, please, I’m not asking you to get involved. Just point me in the right direction.”

  “You wouldn’t get anywhere near them,” he says. “They have guards, guns, archers.…”

  “Just tell me what you know.”

  “You’ll be killed, Bazza.”

  “I’m not a precious antiquity, remember?”

  “You are certainly not an antiquity.”

  Suddenly—from one breath to the next—Lamb is sitting next to me on the sofa. Before I can even react, his lips are by my ear. I wait for him to bite me—can you be Turned twice?

  “There’s something in the room,” he says, voice so low only a vampire sitting right next to him could pick it up. “Can you hear its heartbeat?”

  I close my eyes. Can I? I hear my own heart, faint and always a few beats slow. I hear Lamb’s, a similar dirge. Ah … there. I can hear it—and I recognize it.

  “Simon,” I say, my eyes flying open.

  In that moment, Lamb’s empty chair lifts up and slams down into the floor. One of the wooden legs seems to tear itself off and fly towards Lamb’s chest. His fangs are out. He grabs the leg midair and raises it like a club—

  “No!” I shout, catching Lamb’s arm.

  Just as the door to his flat flies off its hinges.

  Bunce is standing there, with the Normal, holding out her purple gem.

  “Hands in the air, bloodsucker, or I’ll burn this whole city to the ground.”

  53

  SHEPARD

  The vampire holds the stake in the air, giving Penelope some thousand-year-old stink eye. She doesn’t budge. He drops it.

  I can hear Simon flapping around.

  Baz dodges in front of Lamb, holding his hands out to the room. “Snow, I swear I’ll throttle you.”

  “What is this, Baz?” Lamb sounds more confused than threatened. “Are you in league with these mages?”

  “No.” Baz is still blocking Lamb from an invisible Simon. “Not ‘in league.’ They’re my friends, they’re trying to protect me—which I do not require. What part of ‘thumbs-up’ don’t you people understand?”

  Simon shouts back: “What part of ‘Don’t leave with him’ don’t you understand?”

  “I’m fine!”

  “You’re in a vampire’s bedroom!”

  “I am a vampire!” Baz says. “And this is a studio!”

  “A vampire,” Lamb says, then looks at Penelope. “A mage…” He looks at me. “A…”

  “Bleeder,” I say, waving. “Name’s Shepard.”

  Lamb nods and looks over Baz’s shoulder, where Simon is disturbing the atmosphere. “And what is this?”

  “His boyfriend!” Simon snarls.

  Huh. I wasn’t sure. I mean, I wondered.…

  Baz covers his face.

  “Boyfriend?” Lamb repeats. “What about Agatha?”

  “There isn’t a simple explanation for any of this,” I cut in, smiling. “But there is an entertaining one. And I swear, no one here means you any harm.”

  A vase topples off a table near the spot where Simon is flapping.

  I keep smiling. “Maybe we could all sit down and talk?”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, we’re all sitting on Lamb’s couches. Well, except for Simon, but that seems fair. He did break the only other chair. Lamb keeps looking over at the pieces and frowning, like he’d really rather fix his fancy chair than deal with any of us.

  Lamb’s much less vampirey-looking than Baz. (I’ve been thinking that Baz must come from a long line of vampires—a Transylvania original, with that long black hair and widow’s peak. But I guess that isn’t how vampirism works.…) Lamb’s got a soft face and a head full of soft, shiny hair. He looks exactly like you’d expect an English person to look if you’d only seen them in Jane Austen movies—sort of pencil-drawn and pretty. He’s pale, of course, and gray around the eyes. But he’s not as gray all over as Baz. Not as drained and ghostly.

  If this is what a vampire is supposed to look like, then maybe Baz is a vampire with an iron deficiency.

  Lamb’s definitely not scared of us. Even though we have magic and numbers on our side. He’s treating us like four kids who just confessed to throwing a baseball through his window.

  Baz is making our case: “I was telling you the truth. Agatha is my friend. We’re just trying to find her.”

  Lamb frowns some more. “How can you be friends with mages? They hate us.”

  “We grew up together,” Penelope explains. “We didn’t know Baz was a vampire for years.”

  “I knew,” Simon says.

  Baz shakes his head, rolling his eyes. “Literally nothing you say is helpful.”

  Lamb looks right through Simon. “Did you grow up with them, too, invisible boy?”