the woman had turned around. It wasn't Lissa. She wasn't even a Moroi, just a human. Slowly, my breathing returned to normal.
Finally, a week or so ago, I'd had my first sighting. A group of Moroi women had come in for a late lunch, accompanied by two guardians, one male and one female, who sat dutifully and quietly at the table as their charges gossiped and laughed over afternoon champagne. Dodging those guardians had been the trickiest part. For those who knew what to look for, Moroi were easy to spot: taller than most humans, pale, and uber-slim.
They also had a certain funny way of smiling and holding their lips in order to hide their fangs. Dhampirs, with our human blood, appeared... well, human.
That was certainly how I looked to the untrained human eye. I was about five foot seven, and whereas Moroi tended to have unreal, runway-model bodies, mine was athletically built and curvy in the chest. Genetics from my unknown Turkish father and too much time in the sun had given me a light tan that paired well with long, nearly black hair and equally dark eyes. But those who had been raised in the Moroi world could spot me as a dhampir through close examination. I'm not sure what it was-maybe some instinct that drew us to our own kind and recognized the mix of Moroi blood.
Regardless, it was imperative that I appear human to those guardians, so I didn't raise their alarms. I sat across the room in my corner, picking over caviar and pretending to read my book. For the record, I thought caviar was disgusting, but it seemed to be everywhere in Russia, particularly in the nice places. That and borscht-a kind of beet soup. I almost never finished my food at the Nightingale and would ravenously hit McDonald's afterward, even though the Russian McDonald's restaurants were a bit different from what I'd grown up with in the U.S. Still, a girl had to eat.
So it became a test of my skill, studying the Moroi when their guardians weren't watching. Admittedly, the guardians had little to fear during the day, since there would be no Strigoi out in the sun. But it was in guardian nature to watch everything, and their eyes continually swept the room.
I'd had the same training and knew their tricks, so I managed to spy without detection.
The women came back a lot, usually late in the afternoon. St. Vladimir's ran on a nocturnal schedule, but Moroi and dhampirs living out among humans either ran on a daylight schedule or something in between. For a while, I'd considered approaching them-or even their guardians.
Something held me back. If anyone would know where a town of dhampirs lived, it would be male Moroi. Many of them visited dhampir towns in hopes of scoring easy dhampir girls. So I promised myself I'd wait another week to see if any guys came by. If not, I would see what kind of information the women could give me.
At last, a couple days ago, two Moroi guys had started showing up. They tended to come later in the evening, when the real partiers arrived. The men were about ten years older than me and strikingly handsome, wearing designer suits and silk ties. They carried themselves like powerful, important people, and I would have bet good money that they were royal-particularly since each one came with a guardian. The guardians were always the same, young men who wore suits to blend in but still carefully watched the room with that clever guardian nature.
And there were women-always women. The two Moroi were terrible flirts, continually scoping out and hitting on every woman in sight-even humans. But they never went home with any humans. That was a taboo still firmly ingrained in our world. Moroi had kept themselves separate from humans for centuries, fearing detection from a race that had grown so plentiful and powerful.
Still, that didn't mean the men went home alone. At some point in the evening, dhampir women usually showed up-different ones every night.
They'd come in wearing low-cut dresses and lots of makeup, drinking heavily and laughing at everything the guys said-which probably wasn't even that funny. The women always wore their hair down, but every once in a while, they'd shift their heads in a way that showed their necks, which were heavily bruised. They were blood whores, dhampirs who let Moroi drink blood during sex. That was also a taboo-though it still happened in secret.
I