without knocking in low-hanging pajama pants and no shirt, flopping down on the bed next to me. He absentmindedly blew a stubborn lock of hair that persistently fell into his eye. “Happy anniversary, honey. I’m famished.”
“We need to feed,” I agreed, suppressing a grin as I returned my gaze to my phone. “But before we celebrate this most sacred of nights, we need to do some detective work. I’m concerned about the spike in disappearances near here. I want to look around tonight, see if we spot anything... amiss.”
“Anywhere in particular?” Louis asked, rolling to his side and propping up on his elbow to look at my screen.
“Let’s start in Stratford and go from there,” I suggested.
There wasn’t any pattern to the locations that I could find, except that they were all in areas of East London and all tended to be attractive young adults, which is what made the stories so newsworthy. I was hardly some immortal crusader who cared for the lives of precious humans, but if someone was siring revenants and commandeering large swathes of territory, then they needed to do it someplace else. Somewhere very fucking far away from Porcia.
I wondered idly if she’d noticed. Porcia’s attitude to revenants was she would leave them alone so long as they left her alone. In centuries, there had only been one she’d befriended.
My mind went to the worst-case scenario, as it always did where she was concerned. Porcia could always return to her main estate in East Lothian if the situation worsened, but it was more of a retreat she’d used over the ages than a permanent residence. There weren’t enough local humans to feed from without eventually drawing attention.
Louis rolled to his back, pushing his messy blonde hair out of his eyes again. “You think they’re turning them?”
“At first, yes. Now I’m not so sure. The first disappearances, if they were changed, would be experiencing bloodlust about now. There would be signs of their presence. Weakened humans walking around, reeking of venom,” I responded absently, skimming through the article for clues. Just thinking about the process made me shiver, and the noise Louis made in the back of his throat made me assume he was remembering his transition, too.
Time hadn’t dulled the memory at all. It had been days of endless misery, pain like I had never experienced. Until the fog had cleared, leaving room for nothing but hunger. After I had fed and finally taken a good look at what I had become, I’d realized nothing about myself had been the same.
My face and body were improved, more aesthetically appealing. More alluring. For weeks, my focus had been almost single-mindedly on blood, except for the small part of my brain that wondered if Porcia was okay.
That had never disappeared. She was still my first thought when I woke up, and my last before I fell asleep.
No one had noticed my death — I was a mere lowly slave — but Porcia’s, just one day earlier, had been a shock to everyone. Destroyed by grief after losing her husband, her untimely death had been a tragedy. She was mourned.
In the beginning, when I’d finally found her again, that was why I never approached her. She was a grieving widow, what would she want with me? An unworthy slave. I’d lived in her household for years and she’d never noticed me. I wasn’t worthy of her, not even when we’d both been changed into creatures of darkness. I could watch her, protect her. Covet her, but from afar. She needed a loyal guard, not an obsessed lover, and Porcia’s needs always came first.
“I don’t think there are baby revs running around either,” Louis said eventually, frowning as he contemplated the idea. “They would go to her. They wouldn’t be able to help themselves. She draws them in. We’d have noticed.”
“I hope so,” I muttered. The more reclusive Porcia became, the harder it was for us to watch over her. We couldn’t enter her club, she would notice our presence without question. What we could do, we did from afar.
Whenever there were uprisings, disputes over territory, revenants who got carried away with siring, I had ensured none of it ever touched Porcia. She should remain unsullied, untainted by the politics and disputes of revenants.
If I had to get my hands dirty again to keep hers clean, I would, without question. Female revenants were more possessive, more alluring, and easier for us to fall prey to. They were queens, and