The Professional Liar

"You..." Vanya's voice was ice-cold, her fingers clamped around the glass, blue veins standing out under her pale skin. "How do you know that name?"

Martha faltered for a moment. The old woman's eyes went wide with confusion, and then she smiled gently, her trembling hand patting the back of her own hand:

"You just told me, Vanya, didn't you? You said... some man named Volkov locked you kids up in a concrete bunker..."

Martha sighed, her eyes brimming with sympathy:

"You're worn out, aren't you? You've been working the night shift every night lately, and you've got dark circles all the way down your face. You said it, you just don't remember saying it."

Vanya said nothing.

Deep suspicion flickered in her pale gray eyes. She drew back a beat while her mind worked at full power, sifting through every single word she had spoken 10 seconds ago.

Did I say that name?

A sharp, throbbing pain drove into her temples like a thousand needles all at once. The exhaustion piled up from countless sleepless nights, stacked on top of the flickering nightmares, had started to blur the line between what was real and what wasn't in Vanya's memory.

How could a gentle 60-year-old woman—someone who puttered around every day cooking container after container of hot soup, who always carefully stepped back exactly two paces to give her a safe distance—have anything to do with the vicious ghost of Siberian Shadow? The absurdity of it tore at Vanya's mind and pushed her to throw out the suspicion that had just flared in her head.

Maybe... she really had let it slip while she was exhausted.

"I guess... I remembered wrong," Vanya said hoarsely, setting the glass of milk down on the table. "I'm going back to my room."

She turned and walked quickly toward the dark hallway. But the moment she was through the door of her room, Vanya still pulled out her small notebook and quietly wrote one line on the last page.

Martha - Volkov? (Verify.)

She underlined it twice and closed the book.

She lay awake afterward with the notebook on her chest. Through the floorboards, faint and tinny, she could hear Martha's radio playing something with violins in it, and then a man reading the weather, and then nothing at all.

Victor's POV

Nineteen days.

Victor had held the shape of a 60-year-old woman named Martha Doyle for 19 days straight. It was a punishing record, far past the 72-hour limit that the cellular structure of an Ancient vampire could bear without going mad.

The near miss in the kitchen at 3:00 a.m. had sent a chill down Victor's spine—a feeling he'd thought he had lost for 900 years.

When Vanya pressed him about the name Volkov, he'd had to use the finest psychological manipulation he had to fool an exhausted killer.

He blamed her memory and turned the truth into a hallucination brought on by lack of sleep. She had accepted the explanation and gone back to her room, but Victor knew her defenses had only closed for the moment and had never actually come down.

He had known the name because he had gone looking for it.

The night after Vanya first slept with her door open, he had gone back to the castle and pulled every file in the Council archives that mentioned Siberia. Most were nothing. One was a 30-year-old intelligence report on vampire blood being smuggled east out of the Dumont farms, sold to a buyer the report called only a Russian colonel with a clinical interest.

Attached to the report was a single blurred photograph. A line of children in heavy coats stood in the snow with numbers painted across their backs. Beside them was a tall man with a clipboard.

Someone had written a name underneath in pencil. G. Volkov.

Victor had looked at that photograph for a long time, counting the small backs, looking for a four. And tonight, in a warm kitchen at 3:00 a.m., the name had simply walked out of his mouth, as if it had been waiting there.

Every morning, he had to spend exactly 40 minutes in front of the cloudy mirror to "rebuild" this shell.

The process was a nightmare of biomechanics. The muscle fibers under his skin had to contract on their own, his jaw had to shift and drop lower, and the blood vessels in his throat had to tighten to squeeze out Martha's husky voice. Every fraction of an inch of his body that changed felt like a thousand red-hot needles driven into every nerve.

The worst part was the hands. Hands had more small bones than anything else in the body, and every one of them had to be made smaller, knobbier, older, one by one, like beads being filed down on a string. By the time the fingers were done, his own face in the mirror would be gray with the effort of not screaming.

And the most horrific price was the hunger.

Maintaining Blood Armor burned energy at a terrifying rate. The hunger didn't claw at his stomach the way humans imagined; it flared up from inside his bone marrow, made his knuckles shake, and kept his pupils on the edge of flaring into a killing red whenever anyone walked past in the hallway.

On the ninth day, a boy from the second floor tripped on the stairs right in front of him.

Danny was seven, all elbows and sneakers, and he went down hard on the edge of a step and came up wailing with a bright red scrape across one knee. Victor was kneeling beside him before he had decided to move, making the soft, clucking sounds an old woman makes, reaching into the cardigan pocket for the tissues Martha always carried.

Then the smell reached him.

It went through him like a blade of light. His gums ached. Something behind his teeth pressed forward, sharp and eager, and for one long, terrible second the whole stairwell narrowed to a single bead of red sliding down a child's shin.

He cleaned the scrape with steady hands. He put a cartoon bandage on it, kissed the top of the boy's head the way grandmothers do, and sent him back upstairs to his mother. Then he walked out into the courtyard behind the building, where the temperature was 19 degrees, and stood among the frozen trash cans without a coat for 10 minutes, until the thing behind his teeth went back to sleep.

Aldric came every night.

The old butler appeared at the attic window at 2:00 a.m. and set down a bag of fresh blood that was still warm. The plastic bag carried the logo of the Manhattan Blood Bank, but Victor never asked him where he got it.

"Your color is poor, my lord," Aldric said the second night, very quietly, from the window.

"My color is 60 years old," Victor said. "Go home, Aldric."

Aldric went. But the next night, and every night after that, the bag he left on the table was heavier.

He had given himself a perfect excuse: this was blood willingly donated to hospitals, a quiet, bloodless transaction paid for in money. That logic helped him hold his position as a head of house who kept the order.

But he knew very well that he was lying to himself. That much blood, that fresh and loaded with such abnormally high levels of adrenaline, could only have come from people in absolute terror. Aldric had been hunting for him. Victor turned a blind eye because he needed it to keep this shape.

The corruption of a man who had ruled for 900 years lay less in the drinking of blood than in his willingness to shut his eyes to someone else's crimes to serve his own ends.

Victor's heart went cold as he looked at the fine goatskin invitation lying on the table. It had been sent by Seraphine Dumont. A faint scent of white lilies—a ruthless scent dressed up as purity—drifted off the handwritten ink.

"To the Honorable Victor Blackwood, Head of House,

The Council of Five Houses has officially set the tribunal for the territory of Manhattan 30 days from now. The loss of 14 mortal lives under your protection is a stain that will be hard to wash out. I would be delighted to have you for afternoon tea at the Dumont residence, so that we might discuss the most graceful possible transfer of power.

Warmly, Seraphine Dumont."

A threat wrapped in rows of sweet, proper phrases. Seraphine was always smiling. She smiled when she passed a death sentence on a traitor, she smiled while she watched her own kind burn in the sun, and that smile had never once reached her cold platinum eyes. She was using those 14 human beings to tighten the noose around his neck.

He had watched her do it for 500 years. She never raised her voice and never hurried, and the things she wanted simply came to her, one by one, the way water comes to the lowest point of a floor.

But the pressure from the Council of Five Houses worried him less than something else.

What frightened him most was the relentless rhythm playing out inside Victor's own mind at that very moment.

He was sitting on a rough wooden chair in the ground-floor manager's office, pretending to trim a few withered shoots from a potted plant. But his fingers stopped. His eyes slid, without his meaning them to, toward the cheap plastic wall clock.

The manager's office was barely bigger than a closet. It held a desk with a cracked Formica top, a television that only got four channels, a vanilla candle Martha lit every evening, and a cork board covered in notes about leaking faucets. Victor had lived in palaces on three continents, and he had never once been this aware of the walls around him.