Page 41 of Roguefinder

A car horn blared, jerking me from my slack-jawed architecture gazing. A group of teenage girls took photos of a cat rolling around on a patch of stone at the base of the statue across the street. On the corner, a vendor sold a selfie stick to a woman with a crying toddler.

The sun had slipped below the horizon, and the last bands of lavender in the sky deepened to indigo.

I bit the inside of my cheek and looked at Jesse.

“What?” he asked, bemusement in his eyes.

“Nothing.” I squeezed his hand. “Thanks for showing me this.”

His expression softened. “Still worried about your toes?”

“Honestly, yes.” I gave him another squeeze. “But you’re right. It’s worth it.”

The toddler on the corner released a wail that turned heads on both sides of the street. His mother tucked the selfie stick under her arm and dug crackers from her backpack.

Jesse looked at the sky. “We should get moving. It’s another ten minutes to the opera house, and we don’t want to be late.”

I must have looked disappointed because he lifted my hand and nipped one of my knuckles. “We’ll come back and do a proper tour.”

“You’d do a tour?” I tried to imagine him walking in a group of humans armed with iPhones and zero understanding of personal space.

He grinned. He’d sworn he couldn’t read minds, and I believed him, but he’d obviously guessed my thoughts. “I’d do a tour for you.”

Damn. Why did I want that so much? Stupid, cliche shit that involved selfie sticks and Instagram highlights? The answer came right away.

I wanted them because I got to do them with him. I wanted everything with him, even the dumb stuff. Maybe especially the dumb stuff.

We kept moving, passing restaurants and the entrances to ancient temples. A marble fountain with a headless statue stood in the center of a roundabout, its water splashing into a huge basin and filling the night air with mist. Crows pecked at the ground and perched on the backs of nearby benches. Couples walked hand in hand. Car horns mixed with the sound of a thousand conversations. Two women in cocktail dresses spilled from a door and linked arms, laughing. The thump of bass followed them onto the sidewalk. The door swung shut, muting the music. The women’s breath puffed in the night air, which had dropped at least ten degrees since sunset.

I leaned into Jesse and pitched my voice low. “So the whole vampires-and-sunlight thing is true?”

He nodded. “They’re less vulnerable as they age. The most ancient masters can tolerate sunlight for a few hours, but it weakens them. Most won’t do it for that reason.” He glanced at me. “They use pets for any business they need to conduct during the day.”

Disgust was a bitter taste in my mouth. “What about scent? Can you track vampires the same way you track wolves?”

“No, and that makes them dangerous. Their bodies are dead. There’s nothing living to produce a scent. Their pets slowly shed their human signatures as they grow more addicted to vampire blood. It’s imprecise, but it can give me a rough idea what kind of pet I’m dealing with. When a master only uses them to feed, they’re weak and almost scentless. The favored pets don’t have much scent left, either, but their master has given them enough vampire blood to make them stronger than an average human.”

I wasn’t sure I was ever going to bring myself to say “pets.” Maybe Jesse was right, and some humans served vampires because they wanted to, but I couldn’t get past the addiction. If going cold turkey on vampire blood ended in death, was servitude ever truly a choice?

We were probably going to meet some of Carlo’s pets tonight—people who’d traded freedom for the promise of something that, according to Jesse, they were unlikely to receive.

He glanced at me. He’d done it throughout the day while we puttered around the rental house waiting for the meeting. Every time he thought I wasn’t watching, his expression went from worried to resolved and back again. He thought I couldn’t handle myself in front of Carlo, and he was bracing for a repeat of our meeting with Sterling.

“I can’t stress how important it is that you let me do the talking,” he said now. “Carlo might run an opera house for humans, but he’s still the same Italian nobleman he was four hundred years ago. Master vampires don’t have a sense of humor.”

“I know.” A gap between the buildings ahead of us caught my eye. It looked like an alley, the entrance tucked back from the street.

Jesse tossed me a worried look. “I’m serious, Caleb.”

“I won’t mouth off.”

“Something that might seem completely innocent to you could be a grave insult to a man like⁠—”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him sideways into the alley. I got a glimpse of widened brown eyes before I smashed my mouth to his.

For a beat, he was slack in my arms. A half-second later, the world spun and my back hit the alley wall. He caught my jaw and loomed over me, his bright gold irises cutting through the gloom around us.

“That’s a dangerous thing to do, college boy,” he said. “Jumping a bigger, badder wolf.”