The crowd gleamed with wine-stained teeth and wide corporate smiles. The laughter rang too loud to be genuine.
Sophia tugged at her sleeve, adjusting the cuff over the red square pulsing faintly beneath her skin, and tried not to breathe through her nose. The place reeked of sweat-dulled cologne and damp carpet.
Human conferences. God.
So far, she'd smiled through small talk with a biotech exec who said "synergy" three times in one sentence, and gotten cornered by a woman named Charlotte – or Lottie, as she kept correcting – who referred to haematology as "an eerie little field," as if Sophia hunted ghosts for a paycheque.
She checked her teeth in her compact mirror and squinted at her reflection in the warped glass. Her gums were a little red; she'd brushed too hard that morning, trying to scrub out the coffee stains. Her under-eyes looked worse. They were ringed in a familiar grey-purple haze from staring at the ceiling all night.
Sophia blinked a few times. Her lashes looked good, at least. Neat and defined.
She snapped the mirror shut and let her gaze drift around the room. She saw a man nearby, turtle-necked in biotech-blue, who had a keyring clipped to his bag – a photo of two toddlers in wellies pressed behind scratched plastic. His fingers twitched over it every few seconds.
A messily welded pipe ran along the ceiling overhead. She followed the seam with her eyes, all the way down to the far corner of the room. Next to the refreshment table laid a bowl of pink cakes, individually wrapped in crinkled plastic.
Starstuff.
They tasted like chemical air freshener baked into a sponge, wet and gritty in a way that made her gag. Her mum called them "delightfully synthetic," and always ate them with a cup of green tea and a data pad in her lap. Said it reminded her of the base.
The grief had already festered in her throat and sunk into her chest. She felt a clutch near her heart, like someone had tugged on a string threaded through her ribs.
Sophia turned away, pulled a tissue from her coat pocket, and blew her nose as quietly as she could. She held the tears back down, crumpled the tissue in her fist, and checked her teeth in her compact mirror again. They looked the same. Same reflection.
Same tired, tight mouth.
Her glassy eyes stared back, warped in the compact's curve, then vanished as her gaze caught on something else.
Someone else.
Her eyes landed on the refreshment table, or rather, the small crowd that had begun to orbit around it. A man stood in the centre of it without appearing to notice. He was tall, with long dark hair falling in loose waves, tucked behind one ear.
A ripple of heads turned with that same vague confusion, one after the other, unsure why they were looking and unwilling to stop. Sophia squinted. His right hand cradled a glass of wine, but the index finger was bandaged, wrapped in plain white gauze. It wasn't much, but it didn't fit.
He hadn't moved, either.
That was what unsettled her. Not the face – even striking ones were just faces ultimately – but the stillness.
Sophia traced the edge of her compact mirror. Its rim was faintly damp with sweat from her palm. A dull heat prickled across her forehead, and she swiped at the beads gathering there.
Her fingers brushed over her sleeve, and pressed over the red patch hidden under the fabric. The warmth of it pulsed faintly, reacting to a presence.
Vampire, her blood murmured.
・・・・・
Adam noticed the girl watching him from across the room. He could feel her pulse ticking against his teeth. Her blazer was too stiff and her cheap shoes were too tight. She didn't belong here either, not really. But she was trying.
He used to admire the way lowbloods dug their nails into human bullshit, desperate to make their mark on their world. Now it just made him feel old.
His pupils flared for a second as he caught the tang of iron curling through the air. Someone here had been Threaded recently. It didn't smell fresh, a few days old? Maybe a week or two. London was full of it now – the Threaded, half-Threaded, the spun. You could spot them a mile off; purpling collarbones, too-wide eyes, the way they spoke in metaphors that didn't make any sense. Most of them flaunted it like a mark of glamour. The ones that survived, anyway.
People pressed in around him without realising it, their bodies radiating heat, their voices trying to rise above each other. He could smell the nerves on half of them.
Nearby, a woman with crimson red lips leaned toward another, whispering something that ended in a laugh just under her breath. The copper flush in her throat sang to him louder than the music in the background.
His stomach twisted. The shitty human wine was too sour to help him forget it. It sat on his tongue like vinegar and disappeared before it did anything useful.
His gaze cut through the sea of heads, back to her. The girl with the too-tight shoes. She hadn't looked away yet. Of course not. Lowbloods always sensed him first for whatever reason.
He adjusted his cuffs and tried to focus. House Meraka liked its monsters clean-shaven, cufflinked, and full of remorse. He could still hear Valen's stupid voice in the glass meeting room – smug and weightless: "We can't have the public thinking we're running a zoo."
It hadn't sounded like a threat. It didn't need to. Not after the tribunal.
So he stood still. Smiled. Sipped the sour wine. Let the humans circle around him like a gallery piece; vaguely impressive, mostly decorative, and absolutely not allowed to move too quickly.
He didn't need to feel the leash to know it was still there.