Sealed in Crimson Wax

On the tray lay a letter of heavy sheepskin parchment, sealed with dark crimson wax stamped with a double-headed eagle—the ancestral emblem of House Dumont. Victor picked up the letter, and he didn't need to break the seal to know exactly what it said.

Seraphine Dumont had formally filed charges with the Council of Five Houses. Fourteen poor laborers—most of them immigrants without full papers—had gone missing inside Blackwood territory over the past 18 months.

Under the Law of the Five Houses, which dated back to the Middle Ages, the head of a house bore absolute responsibility for any mass disappearance of humans on the land he ruled.

The Council didn't need proof that he had done it on purpose or by accident; letting people vanish without a trace inside his territory meant that his house was no longer fit to protect the secret order.

The full tribunal was set for exactly 40 days from now. If he couldn't find whoever was behind the vanishing of those 14 lives, the seat of the head of House Blackwood would be stripped from him, and all of glittering Manhattan would fall straight into Seraphine Dumont's hands.

Seraphine. Victor turned the name over in his mind the way he had turned the bullet between his fingers. Five hundred years old, and she still wrote her threats in the same looping, beautiful hand she had used when she was young and he had been foolish enough to find her charming.

She had sat at his table once. She had laughed at his jokes, which no one did, and admired his paintings, which no one noticed. He had understood only much later that she had been measuring the room for curtains.

"You need to restore your strength, my lord," Aldric said politely, setting a crystal carafe of dark red liquid on the rosewood desk. "It is time for tonight's feeding."

Victor didn't ask Aldric where the blood came from. He tipped the carafe, poured the thick, iron-heavy liquid into a stemmed glass, and drank it down in long swallows. The warm blood slid down his throat, instantly soothing the throbbing burn on his forehead and stirring the tissue the silver bullet had ravaged back to life.

It tasted the way it always tasted, clean and wild, like snowmelt running over stone. There was something almost green under the iron, a taste of open ground and deep forest, and it went down easily and asked nothing of him.

For the past 40 years, Victor had drunk the carafes of blood Aldric brought up every night without once questioning them or wondering where they came from.

He didn't need to know where it came from, whose it was, or how it had been collected. To him, blood was simply sustenance, the biological fuel that kept him in existence. It was a casual, unspoken understanding, the proud habit of indulgence of someone at the very top of the power structure—a total indifference to the small details beneath his feet.

He set the empty glass down on the desk and looked out through the shattered window, where the New York night wind moaned and howled through the broken glass.

At 2:15, as he had every night for longer than the house had stood, he walked out into the east hallway and stopped in front of the painting.

He had bought it from a dealer in Antwerp in 1612, because the moment he saw it something in his chest had moved, the way a sleeper moves when someone says his name. A village in snow, leaning roofs, a church tower, one lit window.

He did not know the village. He had searched for it for decades across three countries and never found it. He did not remember his mother's face, or the name of the town where he had been born, or the sound of his own voice before it was a vampire's voice.

But every night the window was still lit, and every night he stood in front of it until the feeling came, faint and far off, like the smell of bread from a house you are only walking past.

Tonight the feeling didn't come. Tonight, when he looked at the small warm square of paint, all he could see was a pale face behind a rifle scope, and a mind like a locked door. He went back to the study and sat down in the dark.

Normally, the head of an Ancient vampire house would have ordered a citywide hunt at once and sent every one of his people to comb every corner of New York and grind the person who had just put a bullet through his head into ash. But Victor didn't. He ordered his security to stand down. He let her go.

The reason had nothing to do with mercy, compassion, or any noble intention. Victor analyzed it and admitted it to himself: he had let her live for one reason only—he was bored out of his mind.

Nine hundred years was a cruelly long stretch of time. Victor had lived through countless eras, watched hundreds of dynasties collapse, and seen enormous cities burn to ash and then sprout skyscrapers. He had worn thousands of different faces to survive the centuries.

A glassblower in Venice. A Prussian cavalry officer. A nurse in a Spanish flu ward in 1918, who held the hands of the dying all night and was never once asked to sign a register. He had been all of them, and none of them had been him.

Power, money, the obedience of his people, filthy political schemes, and the lavish amusements of the world had all gone as flat and tasteless as ash. Nothing left in the world could stir curiosity in him or wake up a mind that had frozen solid.

The last time he had laughed out loud, it had been at a jazz club in Harlem in 1925, at a joke told by a trumpet player whose name he no longer remembered. He had tried to go back the next week. The club had burned down.

Until that sniper showed up.

Killer was the least interesting thing about her; she was an anomaly, a specimen that had never existed in the underworld's book of rules. The dossier Blackwood's private retrieval system had pulled together was open in front of him on the computer screen:

Vanya Nikolai, 27. Night-shift logistics worker at a shell company. No family, no friends, no relatives, and no social connections of any kind. All her personal data before age 17 is an eight-year blank with no trace whatsoever—as if she had stepped out of nothing straight into the real world.

The file listed a phone number at the bottom, flagged as secure. His retrieval system had pulled it out of somewhere it had no business being, and Victor noted that with interest and set it aside for later.

He took out his own phone, an object he used perhaps four times a year, and typed slowly with one finger. He looked at the words for a long time. Then he added his initials, as if he were sealing a letter, and pressed send.

It was the first message he had sent anyone in 11 years. He found, as the small screen went dark, that he was waiting for an answer.

A mortal girl with elite sniper skills, a stretch of past that couldn't be traced, and most important of all: a mind completely sealed against the magic of an Ancient vampire. She was an unsolved problem, an existence that provoked the curiosity he'd thought had burned out long ago.

She had not answered his message. Of course she hadn't. He found that he liked her better for it.

"A phenomenon that needs to be dissected," Victor murmured to the empty room.

He needed to be close to her. Close enough to watch the way her mind worked, close enough to find the seam in that wall of hers, if there was one.

A face she would never suspect, then. Nobody feared an old woman. Nobody looked twice at her hands, or asked why she was always there, or noticed that she never seemed to get tired.

The dossier listed an address in Queens, a run-down walk-up with a vacancy for a building manager posted on a website no one checked. Victor read it twice and smiled for the first time in a very long while.

He stood and walked to the dressing room behind the rosewood wall. The tall bronze mirror, as high as a man, reflected an ancient aristocrat who stood six foot two, with broad shoulders and a face as cold as ice.

Victor took a deep breath and began to call up the magic of Blood Armor.

The restructuring of his cells was brutal and excruciating, but it was a shaping magic he had mastered over many centuries.

The hunger arrived first, as it always did. It opened in the pit of his stomach like a trapdoor and kept opening, a hollow, burning pull that went down through his legs and up into his jaw. Every shape he pressed his bones into would have to be paid for, and it would be paid for in blood.

Under his pale skin, his joints began to give off dry, brittle cracks. His pelvis and spine contracted, dropping his height from six foot two to barely five foot three. The bones of his cheeks shifted, pushed his temples outward, and sank his eye sockets.

His smooth, taut skin suddenly wrinkled into thousands of sagging creases of age. The larynx in his throat turned on its own and rearranged his vocal cords to change the pitch of his voice. His long black hair turned to snow-white strands with a natural wave.

In two minutes, the biological shell of Victor Blackwood had completely dissolved.

The person standing in front of the mirror now was a woman in her sixties. She wore a cozy gray wool cardigan, and her face was gentle and kindly, with crow's feet around her eyes—the perfect picture of a retiree, warm and chatty and completely harmless.

He added the small things last, because the small things were what people believed. A faint tremor in the left hand. Knuckles thickened by arthritis. A smell of lavender soap and warm bread that seemed to live in the wool of the cardigan.

Victor smiled at the woman in the mirror, the corners of the mouth pressing together slightly. His throat vibrated and produced a woman's voice, husky and warm, with the plain, down-to-earth ring of someone from the suburbs:

"Hello, dear."