Boone stared at the Brother’s somber face. “You’ve done this a lot, haven’t you.”
“Done what?”
“Broken bad news to people.”
“Yeah, son, I have.” The Brother exhaled long and slow. “And I’ve been on the receiving end of it, too.”
A ll things considered, getting summoned away was probably for the best.
As V resumed his form a good ten blocks from where Boone was getting treated, he took a minute to catch his breath in the cold. Granted, he wasn’t breathing hard at all. And he needed to hustle to his destination. But . . . shit. Seeing that kid find out the why and how of his father and stepmahmen being dead? After he’d been the one who turned the gathering into the Brotherhood?
The kid felt responsible. You could see it in his face.
It was heartbreaking. Even for someone like V who prided himself on having a meat locker for a pericardium.
Taking out a hand-rolled, he lit up and strode down the snow-packed sidewalk. On the exhale, smoke wafted forward on the wind that was hitting his back, a bright white cloud in the cold. After another two draws, he was better calibrated. Good timing, too. The place he was looking for was only three hundred yards away. And given the number of humans in that wait line? Getting himself properly nicotine’d was a goddamn public service.
Still, being sent on this “errand” was so much better than taking Boone back to the kid’s house. V sucked at sympathy. What was that saying? It was just a word between “shit” and “syphilis” in the dictionary.
Okay, fine, he wasn’t that bad.
But yeah, that young male? V totally felt for him. Plus, come on, demonstration of that trainee’s loyalty to Wrath aside, V knew from crap fathers. The Bloodletter, hello.
Whatever, time to truck with the humans, V thought as he licked the lit end of the hand-rolled and put the stump into the ass pocket of his leathers.
As he approached the line of shivering, stamping, huffing humans, the men and women milled in their places, their eyes latching on to him through their masks, the women’s bodies warming with arousal, the men’s retracting like they didn’t want his attention. Underneath all those coats and jackets, he could see enough of their costumes. Neo-Victorian. Black, like they were allergic to color. Lots of high heels, even on the dudes.
The bouncer at the door puffed up his sizable chest like he was looking forward to telling Vishous that he wasn’t allowed in the place. That he had to wait like everyone else. That he wasn’t nothing special—
V reached into that pea head and tripped a bunch of wires.
Like magic, the bouncer dropped the I’m-in-charge-here-not-you act and leaned to the side to open the way in. “Right through here.”
Thank you, motherfucker.
Striding past the guy, V entered the club’s anteroom. Oh, look, they had a coat check. And what do you know, the big-breasted, puff-lip’d attendant was staring over at V like she wanted to take his pants and check them in with her hands and her tongue.
He kept right on going.
The facility was an old shirt-making factory converted into absolutely nothing at all. The space’s retrofitting for the event was happy hands at home, from the sound system’s cobbled-together collection of woofers and tweeters to the strung-up lights that hung from the ceiling by bungee cords and strings to the random lasers that shot through the dim space with all the coordination of free radical electrons.
After years of monitoring humans on the internet, he was well familiar with the characters the people were playing. Pyre’s Revyval was a popular tabletop role-playing game, and the world building and vampire-based characters of it had long metastasized out of the pages of its rule book and away from those eight-sided dice that were used to determine character motivation and strength.
As he moved through the crowd, looking for some staircase that went to a lower level, he wanted to shove people out of his way. About a year ago, he had set up an emergency calling service for the vampire species, a 911-style clearinghouse for everything from crimes to medical problems. Manned by volunteers, the callers were screened and help was assigned as necessary. The incident he was currently responding to had been logged in about twenty minutes ago. A female had phoned with the report of a body on the lower level of this place. She had refused to give her name, but