Page 6 of Bride

“And yet, here I am.”

“Why, hello.” Pierce’s smile gets a notch slimier as he turns to leer at Vania. His eyes start at her high heels, travel up the straight lines of her dark pantsuit, stop on her full breasts. I don’t read minds, but he’s thinkingMILFso hard, I can practically hear it. “Are you a friend of Missy’s?”

“You could say that, yes. Since she was a child.”

“Oh my God. Do tell, how was baby Missy?”

The corner of Vania’s lips twitches. “She was... odd, and difficult. If often useful.”

“Wait—are you two related?”

“No. I’m her father’s Right Hand, Head of his Guard,” she says, looking at me. “And she has been summoned.”

I straighten in my chair. “Where?”

“The Nest.”

This is not rare—it’s unprecedented. Excluding sporadic phone calls and even more sporadic meetings with Owen, I haven’t spoken with another Vampyre in years. Because no one has reached out.

I should tell Vania to fuck off. I’m no longer a child stuck on a fool’s errand: going back to my father with any expectations that he and the rest of my people won’t be total assholes is an exercise in futility, and I’m well aware of it. But apparently this half-assed overture is making me forget, because I hear myself asking, “Why?”

“You’ll have to come and find out.” Vania’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes. I squint, like the answer is tattooed on her face. Meanwhile, Pierce reminds us of his unfortunate existence.

“Ladies. Right hand? Summon?” He laughs, loud and grating. I want to flick his forehead and make him hurt, but I’m starting to feel a frisson of worry for this fool. “Are you guys into LARPing or...”

He finally shuts up. Because when Vania turns to him, no trick of the light could hide the purple hue of her eyes. Nor her long, perfectly white fangs, gleaming under the electric lights.

“Y-you...” Pierce looks between us for several seconds, muttering something incoherent.

And that’s when Vania decides to ruin my life and snap her teeth at him.

I sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose.

Pierce spins on his heels and sprints past my cubicle, running over a potted benjamin fig. “Vampyre!Vampyre—there’s a— A Vampyre isattackingus, someone call theBureau, someone call the—”

Vania takes out a laminated card with the Human-Vampyre Relations Bureau logo, one that grants her diplomatic immunity in Human territory. But there’s no one to look at it: the bullpen has erupted into a small panic, and most of my coworkers are screaming, already halfway down the emergency stairs. People trample each other to get to the nearest exit. I see Walker dart out of the bathroom, a strip of toilet paper dangling from his khakis, and feel my shoulders slump.

“I liked this job,” I tell Vania, grabbing the framed Polaroid of me and Serena and resignedly stuffing it into my bag. “It was easy. They bought my circadian rhythm disorder excuse and let me come in at night.”

“My apologies,” she says. Unapologetic. “Come with me.”

I should tell her to fuck off, and I will. In the meantime, I give in to my curiosity and follow her, straightening the poor benjamin fig on my way out.

The Nest is still the tallest building in the north of The City, and perhaps the most distinctive: a bloodred podium that stretches underground for hundreds of feet, topped by a mirror skyscraper that comes alive around sunset and slides back to sleep in the early hours of the morning.

I brought Serena here once, when she asked to see what the heart of the Vampyre territory was like, and she stared open-mouthed, jarred by the sleek lines and ultramodern design. She’d been expecting candelabras, and heavy velvet drapes to block the murderous sun, and the corpses of our enemies hanging from the ceiling, blood milked from their veins to the very last drop. Bat artwork, in honor of our winged, chiropterous forefathers. Coffins, just because.

“It’s nice. I just thought it’d be more... metal?” she mused, not at all intimidated at the idea of being the only Human in an elevator full of Vampyres. The memory still makes me smile years later.

Flexible spaces, automated systems, integrated tools—that’s what the Nest is. Not just the crown jewel of our territory, but also the center of our community. A place for shops and offices and errands, where anything one of us could need, from nonurgent healthcare to a zoning permit to five liters of AB positive, can be easily obtained. And then, in the uppermost floors, the builders made room for some private quarters, some of which have been purchased by the most influential families in our society.

Mostlymyfamily.

“Follow me,” Vania says when the doors swish open, and I do, flanked by two uniformed council guards who are most definitely not here toprotectme. A bit offensive, that I’m being treated like an intruder in the place where I was born, especially as we walk parallel to a wall that’s plastered with portraits of my ancestors. They morph over the centuries, from oils to acrylics to photographs, gray to Kodachrome to digital. What stays the same are the expressions: distant, arrogant, and frankly, unhappy. Not a healthy thing, power.

The only Lark I recognize from personal experience is the one closest to Father’s office. My grandfather was already old and a little demented by the time Owen and I were born, and my most vivid memory of him is from that one time I woke up in the middle of the night to find him in my bedroom, pointing at me with trembling hands and yelling in the Tongue, something about me being destined for a grisly death.

In fairness, he wasn’t wrong.

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