screamed bloody murder and I tumbled out of her room without silencing her.”
“Why didn’t you breathe on her and knock her out?” Wester asked.
Larten shrugged. “I was drunk. I forgot about my vampiric breath. Before I knew it, a mob had formed and I was chased out of town. I was almost trapped in the open and burned alive.”
When Wester and Yebba had stopped laughing, Yebba said, “Why didn’t you flit? They couldn’t have troubled you once you hit top speed and vanished from sight.”
Larten’s blush deepened and Wester had to answer for him. “He can’t flit when he’s drunk — he loses his sense of coordination and can’t run that fast.”
The pair fell apart with laughter. Larten sniffed angrily, but his lips were twitching at the corners. Eventually he burst out laughing too. When their fit had passed, Wester trudged down to order food and ale, then the three of them waited for the sun to set, so that they could again seek excitement in the inns, taverns and gaming halls of the humans they had once been.
Chapter Two
After a few drinks downstairs, the three young vampires went in search of whatever pleasures they could find. They were adept at sniffing out all of the hidden delights of a town.
The trio gained admittance to a boxing match that they enjoyed greatly, wagering heavily on the outcome. Vampires usually didn’t bother with money, but Cubs often stole from sleeping humans when they fed. Superstitious people thought that vampires were fanged beasts who ripped open the throats of their targets. In reality they normally slipped into a bedroom, made a small cut on the arm or leg of a sleeping human, drank just enough blood to sate their hunger, then used their spit to close the wound.
Larten studied the scars on his fingertips during a rest between rounds. He had been blooded the traditional way. Seba sliced the tips of Larten’s fingers with his hard, sharp nails, then cut his own and pumped blood into his assistant. Larten was proud of the scars, though sometimes when he studied them he felt a stab of guilt. They reminded him of Seba and he wondered what his master would think of his student’s recent behavior.
Larten and Seba had parted on bad terms, but had made their peace since then. Larten worried that by gambling, drinking and stealing, he and Wester were soiling their master’s good name. Wester often had to remind him (especially when Larten had too much to drink and was in a maudlin mood) that Seba had told them to work their human interests out of their system. There were lots of other vampires going through the same thing. They were called Cubs by the older members of the clan.
The fight recommenced and the burly men closed in on one another. Larten looked up from his fingers and focused on the boxers. This was the thirty-second round, and it had been a long time since he’d seen so engaging a battle. He cheered on the stout-hearted warriors as they clashed, weary and unsteady on their feet, but determined to keep going.
The flesh of their bare fists had been torn to pieces and blood splattered every time one of them landed a blow. The ruby-red drops made Larten’s mouth water
— Wester and Yebba were staring hungrily too — and he had to warn himself to stay by the side, not dart forward and latch on to the delicious wounds.
All around, men were betting and roaring encouragement or abuse. They all had the same greedy, heated look in their eyes.
“My one’s winning,” Yebba whooped as one of the brutes landed a blow.
‘You didn’t bet on him,” Wester retorted. “You bet on the other one.”
“Did not!” Yebba shouted.
“Yes you did. He has that mark on his left arm, remember?”
Yebba squinted at the boxers, then cursed. “These humans all look the same to me,” he growled. Larten and Wester laughed and passed the disgruntled vampire another mug of ale — that was guaranteed to settle him down.
After the fight, Larten and Wester collected their winnings and took Yebba to a tavern where they found ladies to dance with. Small towns lacked the dance halls of big cities, but you could always sort out something if you splashed enough money around.
They joined a card game later. All three were drunk and they lost heavily, even Larten, who rarely tasted defeat at the gambling tables. But they didn’t mind. Money was easy to come by if you were a creature of the night.
Larten wanted to do his knife-catching trick again, but Wester wouldn’t let him. He took his friend’s knife away and held it out of reach as Larten tried to snatch it back. If they had been sober, Wester couldn’t have kept it from the faster, stronger vampire. But Larten was woozy and helpless. Wester had a knack for knowing when Larten was going to drink more than he could handle, and he stayed relatively clearheaded on those nights so that he could keep an eye on his reckless friend.
“Ish not fair,” Larten complained to a man with a monocle. “I’m Qui-h/c! I’m Quick-h/c!” He gulped ale until the hiccups went away. “I’m Quicksilver,” he growled majestically.
“Aye?” the man said, passing Larten a pinch of snuff. “I’m in the leather trade myself.”
“Not my bizzzness,” Larten slurred. “Ish my. ish my.” He pulled a face and forgot what he was trying to say, then fell facedown on the table and knew no more until morning.
Larten awoke to savage pain. He was outside in the sun and his skin was a nasty shade of red. As he blinked sleep from his eyes and tried to raise a hand to protect his face from the rays, he found that his arms were tied behind his back and he was hanging upside down. His shirt has been ripped away, exposing his torso, which had been burned as deeply as his face.
Fear flared in his heart, but he thrust it from his thoughts. He didn’t know what was going on — perhaps he had been caught feeding drunkenly — but that didn’t matter. He had to escape quickly or he would burn like a pig on a spit.
Larten set to work on the knots around his wrists. He was hanging from a thick length of rope, swinging and turning in a soft breeze, but he ignored that and kept as still as possible, except for his fingers, which danced over the knots. The long, hardened nails of the vampires were invaluable when it came to picking knots and locks, but Larten would have been able to make short work of these regardless. He had learned well from Merletta all those years ago.
Once his hands were free, he wriggled loose of the ropes binding his arms and chest. Bending upwards, he grabbed the supporting rope with one hand, tore apart the ropes around his legs with the other, hung in the air a moment, then dropped to his feet and landed in a crouch. His first instinct was to dart for the safety of the shadows, but he forced himself to scan the doorways of the sheds around him — he was in a courtyard — looking for the enemies who had strung him up.
For long, anxious seconds, Larten searched for his foes and readied himself for battle. Then he caught a scent and his nose crinkled with disgust. He rose and brushed dirt from his trousers. He dug out his watch and checked the time — it was for show, as Seba had taught him to read the time based on the position of the sun and stars — then coolly glanced at the sky and sniffed.
“My watch has stopped, Tanish,” he called. “If it’s broken, Ill have the price of a new one out of you.”
Laughter greeted this statement and four vampires lurched out of a shed. One was a sheepish-looking Wester Flack. The others were Yebba, Zula Pone and Tanish Eul, the vampire who had originally given Larten his nickname.
“The same old Quicksilver,” Tanish snorted admiringly, then hurried forward to throw a cloak over the head and shoulders of his friend and bundle him into the shadows of the shed, where a barrel of ale was waiting.
Chapter Three
