Complextro remixes of pop songs blasted through Damon's earbuds as he strutted into the abandoned apartment complex he called home. He nodded to the guards at the door and ignored the clique of fledglings loitering in the lobby. Most of them weren't actually fledglings anymore, but they were still young enough to clump together, and Damon made a point to avoid the Coven members who hadn't been vampires for at least fifty years. They tended to ask him questions he didn't like answering.

  The not-so-fledglings whispered and gawked as Damon passed, but he valued the dirt on the bottom of his shoe more than their attention. They muttered theories to each other about where he'd been, like he couldn't hear them perfectly well despite his earbuds.

  One said, 'I bet he's not even that old. Raphael just keeps him close because he's… useful.'

  'I bet you wish he were making himself useful to you instead,' said another, wiggling her eyebrows.

  The urge to roll his eyes was strong, but Damon resisted it. Showing any of them even a crumb of attention entailed them following him around like yappy little dogs that liked humping his leg. How Alexei and the fledglings ogling him like a piece of meat existed in the same universe, let alone a similar age group, Damon didn't know. He would have made a successful escape to his flat if not for the manicured hand that yanked his earbuds out as he walked past the front desk.

  'Look who finally found their way back home,' said Jeanne, the Coven's brown-haired receptionist. 'You're like the world's least effective homing pigeon.'

  'Good evening to you, too,' said Damon.

  She looked him up and down. 'What's got you all dressed up? Or should I ask who?'

  'Very funny.' Damon leaned his back against her desk.

  'The heartless part of your heartless playboy routine is faltering.' Despite her harsh words, Jeanne's lyrical French accent always made her worth talking to.

  Damon returned her once-over, taking in her square-necked burgundy dress and matching tights with a black turtleneck underneath and black knee-high platform boots. 'And your fashion choices haven't improved since the 70s.' The colour blocking alone was offensive.

  'Oh, you want to talk about fashion choices?' said Jeanne. 'Let's discuss that grimy old jacket you've been wearing nonstop since the 90s.'

  'I got it in 2002, actually.' He'd been going through an acrylics phase at the time, so it was inevitable that the jacket got stained. It had been a decent look for about a decade before the damage graduated from trendy street-wear to just sad. Still, its pockets were deep enough for a whole notebook, and it was good at shielding him from the sun.

  Jeanne examined her clear-polish-coated nails. 'It's sad that you remember that.'

  'You're just jealous that I can pull it off.' Damon made the deadly mistake of making eye contact with one of the fledglings as he surveyed the lobby. She was pretty enough: red hair, redder eyes, and a smattering of freckles across her nose that had yet to fade from lack of sun. Her face turned the same colour as her eyes before Damon realised what he'd done.

  Jeanne pulled at the collar of his shirt, smirking as the poor girl's face turned to a shade of red so deep it was nearly purple. 'You could wear a plastic bag and people would fall head over heels for you. That doesn't make it fashion.'

  Damon batted her hand away and said, 'It's grunge.' The last thing he needed was a love-struck fledgling thinking he was dropping hints. He'd have turned his back on them and avoided the trouble altogether, but he preferred being stared at to his face.

  'You are too pretty-boy for grunge,' said Jeanne.

  Attempting a withering glare at the fledgling, Damon said, 'That doesn't mean it's not grunge.' She looked away, but Damon could tell it hadn't fixed the problem. The clique started whispering amongst themselves again.

  'Not on you, it's not. It's just confusing.' Jeanne poked Damon in the middle of his back. 'And don't think I don't see what you're doing. I know your tricks. Who's the poor soul that's caught your attention?'

  The list of things Damon wouldn't have done to be back at Madame Lycelia's, basking in Alexei's presence, was very short. His green eye—the same colour as a hill covered in blooming olive trees—had watched Damon like it was trying to pry his ribs open and search around his chest. Everything about Alexei dug through flesh and bone: his sharp copper-and-cedarwood scent; his body that twitched toward every noise like a cat's; his rough palms and scored skin.

  'I haven't a clue what you're talking about,' said Damon.

  Jeanne rolled her eyes. 'You put more than five seconds of effort into that outfit. Don't play dumb.'

  No matter what Damon did, how far he dialled himself up, Alexei had remained unflappable. If anything, he'd responded with fear instead of attraction.

  'I thought femmes were supposed to be sweet.' Damon closed his eyes to get a glimpse of Alexei's brows scrunched tight and the blood pulsing violet through his sallow skin. Damon hungered for the halfbreed's erratic heartbeat. He wanted it under his fingers, his teeth, to feel its unreliable rhythm falter beneath him.

  'Stereotype much?' said Jeanne. 'Answer the question.'

  'It was for a job.' Damon reopened his eyes. The fledglings spooked like meerkats seeing a predator, retreating in on themselves as Damon caught them staring.

  'Whatever you say, gorgeous.'

  Damon felt her gaze run down his skin like oil.

  'You're not being a very good lesbian.'

  'And you're too sad and old to be a good fuck.'

  If their eavesdropping imparted any knowledge on the fledglings, Damon hoped it was that. He was too cynical for their particular brand of naivety. He'd gotten this far without becoming a sire, physical or emotional. Playing the manipulative father was Raphael's forte.

  'Ow.' Damon clutched at his cold chest. 'The betrayal. It burns.'

  'You disgust me,' said Jeanne, but Damon heard the playful snark dancing across her lips.

  'I have that effect on people.' Damon glanced at the redheaded fledgling.

  Jeanne tapped Damon's shoulder, and after he turned to face her, she said, 'By the way, Raphael wants to see you.'

  Damon flopped onto the desk. 'Ugh. Stake me.'

  'Get on with it, princess,' said Jeanne, shoving the limber weight of Damon's body away.

  The trek up to the building's top floor was a slog, but it had been at least a decade since the elevators were operational. He stopped in his own room—just opposite Raphael's—to change into clothes he didn't mind getting charcoal dust on, before pushing into Raphael's.

  The Coven didn't bother with locks for the individual units. It was a bigger faff to find a locksmith willing to walk into a den of the undead than it was to live like the odd, dysfunctional family they were. Raphael, as their de facto leader, was naturally the patriarch, and Jeanne was the cool cousin everyone wanted to befriend. Damon was the freeloader who showed up at their house and paid his rent in chores.

  And right now, Damon was paying big time. Gone were Raphael's conservative, antiquated Roman robes. They lay discarded in a pile of gold and red on the floor like a sparkly bloodstain. The narrow hallway into the studio apartment didn't save Damon from a crisp view of Raphael's pale arse as he pushed in and out of a cooling corpse, his mouth drawing out what little blood remained, any noise of pleasure lost in its waxy skin.

  Damon leaned against the doorframe and kept steadfast eye contact with the wall as he waited for Raphael to finish. Damon preferred his bodies alive and warm, or at least undead.

  Fabric rustled from within the room, and Raphael said, 'Since when are you so prudish? She wanted to be a vampire.'

  Mercifully, Raphael had covered himself, but he left the corpse splayed out on the bed. What little remained of its blood sang no songs to Damon, not the mouth-watering tune of humanity nor the intricate melody of the undead. It smelled of iron, sweat, and a stomach-turning saccharine sweetness. Damon was familiar with that sweetness. He'd been the harbinger and the victim of it many times over.

  'Yes, well, she's already dead,' said Damon.

  'I can hear that,' said Raphael. He couldn't feel the changes in her blood like Damon. No one could. Not anymore. Still, Raphael needed only to listen for her still heartbeat and absent breathing. 'If you care so much, force the turn on her yourself.'

  No one, not even a vampire, could chase off that scent once it had settled in. At least, no one except Damon. So long as her remaining blood was still liquid, if he drank even a drop, he could force her body into guaranteed undeath. It would require vampiric blood as any siring would, but someone this far gone would need a lot of it. If he'd cared, he could have saved her.

  'No thanks,' said Damon. The subjectivity of what 'saving' entailed was one thing; Damon's disinclination towards responsibility was another. He had enough trouble with fledglings that he had no culpability for salivating after him. The last thing he needed was one of his own.

  'Then don't complain.' Raphael, robed once more, slunk to meet Damon in the doorway. 'To what do I owe this intrusion?'

  Damon shrugged. 'Jeanne told me you wanted to see me, and I made the mistake of believing her.' He never should have befriended her. She only ever pranked him. Everyone else got snark without the deception. Although calling what they had 'friendship' was a misnomer. She didn't want to have sex with him, so her presence was more tolerable than the rest of the population. That didn't qualify them as friends.

  'Have you made any headway with the Wolf?' said Raphael.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The memories of their night in Madame Lycelia's flooded Damon's mind. Every razor-sharp glance, stuttered breath, and clumsy attempt at touch felt like progress. But was it, really? For the first time in his long life, Damon was unsure how someone felt about him. One second, Alexei was melting under his touch, and the next, the Wolf was checking the room for exits. But Raphael didn't care how complicated the feelings were, only that the Wolf had them, so Damon said, 'Steady progress. He doesn't trust me yet, but that's to be expected.'

  Raphael scowled at Damon. 'Just fuck the answers out of him.'

  Damon scowled right back. 'It's not that simple.'

  'It's never been more complicated than that before,' said Raphael, his eyes narrowing.

  'Well, it is this time.' It was relatively true. Trying his usual tricks on Alexei would probably end with a stab wound. It didn't matter if Damon was enjoying the challenge or not.

  Raphael crossed his arms. 'Then find something else to whet your appetite. I don't need you getting attached.'

  Damon's fangs tingled with the urge to hiss, 'Is that a suggestion or an order?' He could manage his own appetite: case in point, his choice to walk off instead of sinking his teeth into Raphael.

  Raphael's final quip, 'Don't be childish,' echoed down the halls behind Damon as he strutted away.

  Each footfall on the eight flights of stairs to the lobby was like the ground-shaking thump of a bass drum. The rhythm didn't falter once as Damon stomped back towards Jeanne's desk.

  She batted her long black lashes at Damon and said, 'Outfit change, princess?'

  Popping a hip and crossing his arms—causing an uproar of whispering from the fledglings—Damon said, 'I was going to enjoy some me time, but I had to come down here and chew you out.'

  'You don't have to.' Jeanne's smirk was unfaltering, her intense almond eyes unapologetic.

  'I bloody well do. I don't need you sending me up there when Raphael is in the middle of feeding. You're lucky he was nearly finished.' The scene had been unpleasant enough, but Damon hated having to enforce his authority more. Chastising Jeanne was eating into the time Damon wanted for putting the angles of Alexei's face down on paper.

  'Fine,' said Jeanne, 'but you deserved it for 1888.'

  'That was a century and a half ago.'

  'Your debt has yet to be settled.'

  As they bickered, the fledglings drew closer, coming alive like magnets drawn to the gossip.

  'You're never getting your gold star back.' Damon snarled, flashing an appropriately threatening amount of fang. 'That's not my problem.'

  'It is when you're the one who took it,' said Jeanne.

  No matter how much he played into the drama, Damon couldn't deny that he was glad the fledglings would have something to talk about other than his attention. 'Don't act like you were some blushing virgin. You begged me to fuck you.' Besides, it was good for them to know that no matter how pretty his face was, Damon's cock was still great at doing what cocks did best: cocking things up.

  'Careful. The kids are listening,' said Jeanne.

  Despite his age, Damon had never once claimed to be a good influence. 'If you don't want your dirty laundry hung out to dry, don't make it my problem.'

  Jeanne rolled her eyes. 'You really are in a mood tonight.'

  'Walking in on Raphael's skinny white dick has that effect.'

  Jeanne looked down at her brown skin, then at Damon's, raising her eyebrows. His Mediterranean tan hadn't faded a day since he died. Jeanne's skin, on the other hand, had lost all the warmth that her Jordanian birth had gifted her in one-tenth of the time. However, their complexions, as dead as they were, remained darker than Raphael's, which was the colour of bleached eggshell.

  Jeanne sighed. 'I didn't need that mental image.'

  'You're welcome.' Damon turned to leave, but Jeanne caught his hand.

  For a moment, she looked mildly remorseful. 'While you're here, there is actually something you need to take care of.'

  Under her cool fingers, Damon was yanked back into the disastrous night they'd shared. Jeanne, drunk on fresh freedom from her sire, had crawled her way into Damon's bed. He'd known better, but that had never stopped him before. Raphael had thought it was a good idea, so he'd gone through with it.

  In the end, Raphael had her loyalty, and Damon had a friendly-adjacent relationship with her, both of which were contingent on Damon keeping his mouth shut. He didn't understand how so many of the people he slept with didn't realise he'd never had any feelings for them when they inevitably joined the Coven and watched Raphael continue to orchestrate the same chain of events with someone else. Alexei was an admittedly unique target, but he was just the next victim in a long legacy of depravity.

  'What do you need?' The words came out with far less bite than they should have.

  'There's some raccoon-looking guy who asked specifically for you sitting in Henry's old room,' said Jeanne. 'He was being a prick, so I made him wait.'

  If Damon had known how much of his eternal death he'd spend bouncing between orders, his sire still would have turned him, but Damon would have been even less happy about it. 'Did he say what he wanted?'

  Jeanne poked Damon between the eyes. 'You, genius.'

  Damon pinched the bridge of his nose and said, 'You are a shit receptionist.' Jeanne's bad attitude was supposed to keep people out. She probably had a reason for letting this guy in, which meant more work for Damon. 'I'll handle it.' Damon pushed off the counter. The fledglings scuttled back like insects exposed to the sun as he walked to the first-floor flat they'd converted into a meeting room.

  'You know you love me,' Jeanne called.

  Damon scowled over his shoulder, but the expression sloughed off his face when he turned back around.

  Henry's room hadn't smelled like Henry in a few years, but the guest's scent was like hearing heavy metal when you expected classical. He reeked of leather, tobacco, and iron. Damon's nose wrinkled.

  Raccoon-looking was a remarkably good descriptor for the vampire lounging in an upholstered brown chair. His black hair was teased and tortured into a shape that defied gravity, strips of colourless skin shone beneath his black button-up shirt(of which exactly one button was buttoned), and behind a pair of small, circular sunglasses and enough smudged black eyeshadow to make his face, with its hollow cheeks and sharp jaw, look like a skull wrapped in cellophane, sat the brightest pair of vermilion eyes Damon had ever seen.

  It was a look, not one Damon fancied, but certainly a look. Unwilling to feign enthusiasm or grace, he said, 'What do you want?' Damon didn't know this kid, nor did he have any interest in getting to. His blood reeked of youth. Not as fresh as the fledglings, but enough to be a pain. Damon would guess he was under one hundred but over seventy-five, most of that time spent dead, given his smooth skin and lean body. Worse still, his blood swirled with a nauseating depth that indicated only one thing: a pureblood.

  The stranger stood, his heeled boots clicking against the floor as he said, 'I suppose there's a reason this coven isn't known for its hospitality.' He spoke with a thick accent.

  'If you wanted an induction sales pitch, you should have asked for our coven leader, Raphael, not me,' said Damon. How this vampire had ended up in New Harbour, Damon didn't know. He couldn't have been in the city long. Raphael wouldn't have missed a new pureblood, and certainly not one with this much spunk.

  'Oh, I have no interest in joining. I'm just here on behalf of my sire to let you know he's arriving in town.' The pureblood flashed his fangs. 'You know, the polite thing to do.'

  Of all the things Damon might have deduced from the kid's appearance, loyalty to his sire wasn't one, nor was it something Damon valued. 'Again, politeness and formal introductions are Raphael's job. What do you want?'

  'I heard a little rumour about a vampire that walks in the sun. Funny, right?' The pureblood walked slow circles around Damon like a carrion crow. 'See, we both know that's not possible, but your name kept coming up. Damon, Damon, Damon.' A smile twisted on his death-paled lips.

  The scent of bloodstained leather and cheap cigarettes whirled into a suffocating tornado around Damon. The individual notes were all familiar, but together they became a sucker punch to the face. Damon kept his words clipped so as to smell as little of it as possible. 'I walk under the sun, not in it.'

  The pureblood barked out a laugh. 'I know that. You flirt with death just like you flirt with anything that moves.'

  Damon's eyes narrowed, his head spinning to keep the pureblood in his field of view. 'Who did you say you were, again?'

  'Really, I should be asking you that, no-last-name Damon. You've done such a good job of covering your tracks, but we both know that nothing stays buried forever.'

  'Do we?'

  'Perhaps your memory is going with old age,' a toothy grin widened across the pureblood's face, revealing a maw of crooked teeth, pointed from the canines all the way back to the molars, 'Damaenetos.'

  Damon's blood churned around the pair of moonlit circles marring his neck like the eye of a storm, and the fine hair on his body stood to attention. 'Who sent you?'

  Raphael may have liked to throw Damon's past in his face—although Raphael rarely thought it the offence it was—but he respected Damon's desire for discretion. No vampire in the Coven, New Harbour, or any of the cities they'd lived in prior had learned of Damon's sordid history from Raphael. So much time had passed that, for the last few hundred years, Damon had thought himself almost free of it. And yet here was this stranger, scuttling onto his doorstep and taunting with it.

  'I go where I want when I want, and right now, I'm rather enjoying being right here,' said the pureblood.

  Oh, how Damon would make him regret those words, not that they were true. Damon didn't need haemokinesis to hear the kid's blood singing true beneath his lying mouth and know that no one who remained close to their sire so long after turning was ever under their own control. Still, he listened for the cacophonous screeching of the kid's blood as it rebelled against the confines of his small frame. All of that power trapped in such a young body. Damon almost felt sorry for him, but sure enough, the eye of his storm was deep in his midgut, right through the artery.

  No one like this kid died. They were killed, and luckily for Damon, death wounds that didn't involve the slow numbing of fangs in flesh were excruciatingly traumatic for vampires. Behind his back, Damon slit the pad of his thumb open on one of his nails. A jagged lick of blood shot across the floor. That animated ounce of blood was more Damon than the golden hair on his head, the eyes in his skull, his tanned flesh, or even his bones. For Damon, the hardest part about turning hadn't been coping with the hunger or the killing, but learning to control his body through the blood in his veins like a puppet master pulling the strings, his muscles reduced to auxiliary memories of his human life.

  The lick of blood hit home, sticking like a pin in the kid's death wound.

  The kid's blood stilled, and his vermilion eyes bulged. For a second, Damon wondered if he'd gone too far, but the kid's blood roared back to life, and he cackled hysterically like a hyena. The shadows in the room came to life, churning and spiking with him.

  'Oh, that's a nifty little trick. I bet it works wonders on the feeble members of your coven, but you're going to have to be more creative if you want to hurt me.' The shadows writhed, thickening into a pitch black haze as the pureblood stalked toward Damon. 'Exploiting someone's death wound is so cliché.'

  Distantly, Damon heard gasps echo from the main lobby. He sucked his lick of blood back toward his body, but kept it free. Still, he didn't have time to retaliate before a thick tendril of shadow wrapped around his neck. Its hold was tight enough to squeeze the life out of a human.

  'You were turned by a pureblood,' said Damon, not bothering to struggle against the stranglehold. 'Congratulations. Did you just come here to gloat?' In Damon's experience, few vampires were entirely intact upstairs, but something extra was definitely wrong with this kid. No one shrugged off a prick to their death wound.

  'It is worthy of congratulation, not that you seem to understand that.' The kid snarled in Damon's face. 'You squander your power and let it fester unused.'

  'I use it plenty.' The lick of Damon's blood hovered at the base of the pureblood's head, ready to pierce through his brainstem and take him out should the need arise.

  'You know, when I heard about—how should I say—your relationship to your sire, I thought you'd be more interesting, but you're just as complacent as everyone else.'

  Damon's eyes narrowed, and he said, 'I don't know what you're talking about,' but he recognised the decades-old bloodlust festering in the pureblood's vermilion eyes. He'd stared it down in the mirror, coming up with excuses to ignore it, for far longer than he should have.

  The shadow receded from Damon's neck, but the pureblood still hissed in his face like a snake ready to strike. 'Theogenia used her power, the power she so graciously passed on to you, but you are ungrateful. Such a waste.'

  His sire's name struck Damon like a blow to a death wound he didn't have. Not even Raphael dared utter it in his presence, because, in that very instant, he was worlds, millennia away—human again in all the worst ways. He slept so little those few years that Damon didn't know which parts of her were real and which were his mind's rancid manipulations. His memories didn't discriminate between genuine and fabricated. The feeling of her cold hands on him, her teeth in his skin, her sultry voice as she called for him (Come, Damaenetos. Serve me.) was the same in both.

  'Finally got through to you, did I?' The kid's voice was a mercy as it snapped Damon back to the present. 'Don't worry. I may not understand what endears you towards this filthy little place, but your secret is safe with me. For now.'

  Still sinking in the mud of his memories, Damon barely found the lucidity to speak as the pureblood stalked for the door. 'Care to at least tell me who I'm being threatened by?'

  Stopping in the doorway, the kid looked back, giving Damon one final peek at those brilliant vermilion eyes as he said, 'Kajiyama Kakuji.'

  Damon's last thought as the pureblood sauntered off was of those eyes. Had they not been embedded in such a vile little creature, he might have liked to paint them.