Even if an attendant never gained the opportunity to be turned, regular bites from a patron boosted a human’s natural immune system, and they could live as long as a hundred and thirty years. There were reasons why Haley had gone naked onto the stage, not least of which was the opportunity to live more than half again one’s own natural life span and to die in one’s sleep of old age.

Room 219 was tucked between others in the middle of the hall. As soon as she gripped the door handle, her muscles locked up and she stood frozen, unable to make herself step into the room and yet not able to walk away, while rapid-fire thoughts snapped at her heels like feral dogs.

This “interview” could be another version of the casting couch scenario.

If there’s a bed in the room, that’s it, she thought. I’m out of here.

I think.

Stop being histrionic. Sex is merely a biological function. People have been trading sex for survival for thousands of years. You’re not a fourteen-year-old virgin. You’ve had sex before, and guess what? While none of your partners had been memorable enough to stick around, it wasn’t the end of the world. Death is the end of the world.

Think of the devil you left behind. If you leave now without exploring all your options, you’ve got to find another way to protect yourself from him. And the whole reason why you’re here in the first place is because you haven’t found another way.

Just remember—if you’re going to choose to trade sex for protection, make sure you get an agreement in place beforehand.

Suddenly angry at her own dithering, she yanked the door open and stalked inside. It wasn’t likely that sex would become part of any discussion anyway. Not with the Vampyres’ love of beauty, the glut of gorgeous people readily available to slake any appetite, and her own average, forgettable looks.

The unoccupied room was entirely bare, except for a utilitarian, conference-style folding table, four chairs, and two unopened bottles of Evian set at one end of the table.

No bed, and no monsters. Yet.

She exhaled a shaky breath and stepped inside. The same worn carpeting from the hallway covered the floor, and the crown molding in the ceiling’s corners looked cracked and in need of repair. The closet was empty, and the bathroom appeared as if it hadn’t been used in a long time.

With the hallway door closed, the air felt too stifling as the demons in her head crowded the room. She had too many phantoms populating her imagination, and too many nightmares in her memory. Dragging over one of the folding chairs, she propped open the door to the hallway. Then she took a seat at the table facing the open doorway.

Traditionally, the position was the seat of power in the room. It was a small thing to take, although she didn’t fool herself for one minute. She had very little power in the upcoming exchange. She had very little power at all, which was one of the reasons why she found herself in such a god-awful mess.

Opening one of the bottles of water, she sucked down half the contents in a few gulps. As she screwed the cap back on the bottle, a slim, elegantly dressed man walked silently into the room.

Xavier del Torro.

The bottle slipped from Tess’s nerveless fingers and fell to the floor.

The killer that stood in front of her wasn’t especially tall, perhaps five foot ten or so. His long, lean body, along with an erect posture and an immense poise, served to make him seem taller. Seen up close, he looked as if he had been turned in his midtwenties. He could still embody the illusion of youthfulness, with eyes that were somewhere between gray and green, a clear-complected skin and refined features that somehow missed being either conventionally handsome or delicate.

His turning had been a famous event in history. A younger son of Spanish nobility, he had been a priest until the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition tortured and destroyed a community of peaceful Vampyres near his home in Valencia. The Vampyre community had included del Torro’s only sister and her husband.

After the massacre, or so the legend went, del Torro walked away from the Catholic Church and approached Julian, who turned him into a Vampyre and set him to cut a swath through the officers of the Inquisition. The ten years that followed were some of the bloodiest in Spanish history.

“Good evening,” said the Vampyre. He was quiet spoken, yet his beautifully modulated voice penetrating the silence in the room was shocking. “You are Tess Graham, correct?”

As he spoke, he turned to move the chair from propping open the door.

She said, “If you don’t mind, I would like to leave the door open.”

He straightened immediately, left the chair in place and approached the table. Everything he did was utterly flawless in execution, no gesture wasted. He moved like an animal, with complete fluidity that showed just how useless the open door was as a precaution, and how silly and fragile an illusion of safety she gleaned from it.

Open door or not, nothing would stop him from doing anything he wanted. He could rape and torture her, and drain her of all of her blood, and there wasn’t a single Vampyre who would lift a finger to stop him. Or very many who could stop him, even if they wanted to try.

Cold sweat broke out over her skin. Heat from a nearby vent blew along the back of her damp neck. The small sensation felt almost violent.

Del Torro pulled out the second chair on his side of the table and sat. When he settled into place, he went immobile—truly immobile, not the mere human equivalent. He didn’t breathe, didn’t blink. His formal black suit seemed to absorb the light, and his shirt was so white, it almost looked blue.

He was perfectly immaculate in every way. Somehow it should have made him look lifeless, like a mannequin, but it didn’t. His presence was so intense the air itself seemed to bend around him. She grew hyperaware, not only of him, but of herself too—the tiny shift of her torso as her lungs pulled in air, the muscles in her throat as she swallowed, the hand she clenched into a fist and hid underneath one arm, in case it provoked the relaxed predator in front of her.

She remembered the water bottle and bent to retrieve it from the floor. Even that small, prosaic movement seemed fraught with excess compared to the silent, composed figure sitting in front of her.

How old was he? She was no history scholar and knew almost nothing of the Spanish Inquisition, but she was fairly sure it had gone on for a few hundred years before it was finally abolished, so he had to be at least four centuries old and was probably older. How many people had he killed in his lifetime?