Wayward Son (Simon Snow, #2)(73)

I laugh out loud.

His eyes rest on me for a moment before turning back to the road. And when he speaks again, his voice is soft. “You won’t feel so close to them, the Normals, once you’ve outlived your ties to mortality.… Someday, your parents will be gone. Your lovers will be gone. Everything left from the time when you bled will fade … and fall … and disappear. And then you’ll realize that you’re something different. There’s no unbecoming, Baz. There’s no sidestepping your true identity. All the rabbits in the world won’t change you back. They’ll just leave you thirsty.”

Neither of us talk for a moment. I’m grateful he’s driving. It keeps him from watching me.

Finally I say, “You must be very lucky.”

Lamb tilts his head, waiting.

“To have found the only vampire in Las Vegas who’ll listen to your speeches.”

He bursts into laughter.



* * *



Lamb lives at the Katherine. He has a flat near the top, clearly decorated with his own furniture. (There’s no black leather. And no black cockatiels.) There’s a sitting area at one end and what looks like a bedroom behind a cloudy glass wall.

I sit on an antique sofa covered in turquoise jacquard. Lamb sits near me in a chair built of elaborately carved wood. It looks very old; everything here does. He’s taken off his jacket. “So,” he says, “I gather you weren’t given a choice.…”

I know what he means. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me, as your new friend.”

“I was not given a choice,” I say, brushing a white rabbit hair off my trousers. “Were you?”

“I predate choice,” he says, pushing his hair out of his face with both hands.

“How so?”

He lets his hair fall. “I predate everything. All my people understood was war and hunger, and demons who came in the dark.”

“Is that what happened to you? Did a demon come in the dark?” I’m not used to thinking of vampires like this, as fellow victims.

“It’s what happened to my brother,” he says. “Then my brother came for me.”

“Because he wanted a comrade?”

“Because he was thirsty. Because he’d already killed our parents. I put a table leg through his heart before he could finish me off, too.”

We’re both quiet.

“I’m sorry,” I say finally.

“It wasn’t his fault—he had no one to teach him. He had no community.” Lamb leans forward, his forearms on his thighs. “The culture that we’ve built here is hundreds of years in the making. We’ve lifted ourselves up. What happened to you—what happened to me—that isn’t our way anymore.”

“So you don’t Turn people?”

“Rarely. Most of us don’t want the chaos and competition. Almost no one wants the responsibility.”

“Then why don’t you stop the Next Blood?”

“There’s been talk.…”

“Just talk?”

“It’s difficult to persuade our kind into a war,” he says. “The longer you live, the more you value your life. You start treating yourself like a precious antiquity.”

“Are you sure you’re not just sitting back, waiting to see if the Next Blood can figure out how to steal magic?”

Lamb smiles, grimly. “If I thought they’d share it, I’d consider it. But they have no interest in us or our history. They don’t even identify as our brethren.”

“They don’t identify as vampires?”

“Oh no, they’re the next stage of humanity. Go on, tell me—why do they have your friend?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What’s his name?”

“Agatha.”

Lamb’s eyebrow twitches. “Ah.”

I stop myself from saying, “It’s not like that.”

“What do they want from her?”

He’s going to find this out anyway, if he helps me—“She’s a magician.”

His hands drop between his knees, and his blue eyes are wide. “Talk about starcross’d lovers!”

“I’d rather not.”

Lamb rubs his chin. “So … your girlfriend is one of their Speaker guinea pigs.…”

“There are others?”

He shrugs. “Well, there must be.”

I feel sick to my stomach. I scoot to the edge of the sofa. “Lamb, please, I’m not asking you to get involved. Just point me in the right direction.”

“You wouldn’t get anywhere near them,” he says. “They have guards, guns, archers.…”

“Just tell me what you know.”

“You’ll be killed, Bazza.”

“I’m not a precious antiquity, remember?”

“You are certainly not an antiquity.”

Suddenly—from one breath to the next—Lamb is sitting next to me on the sofa. Before I can even react, his lips are by my ear. I wait for him to bite me—can you be Turned twice?

“There’s something in the room,” he says, voice so low only a vampire sitting right next to him could pick it up. “Can you hear its heartbeat?”