KissingMidnight






Blackfriars Underground Station



The bodies were left on her doorstep, outside her customary exit from the maze of passages that descended deep under London to her personal nest.
The corpses had been gutted more like cattle than human beings. Worse, they’d been gutted here. The spray had turned the tunnel’s concrete into an abattoir, blotting out any scent the murderer had left.
Nim Wei looked left and right but sensed no trains coming. Illuminated by the safety light outside her nondescript steel hatch, a silvery mist swirled like a snake through the lower reaches of the Tube’s tunnel. The District Line ran straight here, its metal ribs narrowing in perfect artist’s perspective to disappear as an ink black point.
Satisfied she wasn’t going to be run over, Nim Wei stepped onto the gore-slicked tracks. She’d seen too many fashions come and go to suit anyone but herself with her choices. Tonight she was dressed like a pirate, her red silk blouse tucked into black trousers. Polished leather Hessians rose to her knees, while a red and white gypsy kerchief covered her straight black hair. In a pinch, she could have passed for a bohemian—assuming bohemians had heaps of money and skin like snow.
At the moment, she would have been satisfied to pass for nothing at all. She didn’t think it a coincidence that this gift had shown up here.
Someone was trying to draw trouble to her door.
She tossed the bodies through the hatch as quickly as she could, each one landing inside with a heavy thump. The blood she couldn’t do much about, though she smashed the safety light to render the stains less obvious to passing subway cars. The last thing she needed was some constable poking around here.
To her dismay, she recognized the humans once she was back in her own tunnel. She couldn’t recall their names, but she believed she’d bitten them about a year ago: big, ruthless brutes she’d thought might come in handy as daytime muscle. She’d lost track of them, which could happen if you’d had as many servants as she did. Humans who didn’t work close to their master—and thus prolong their lives—did have to be replaced frequently.
She saw these two had been rubbing their old bites with iron. Raw iron was toxic to upyr kind and counteracted the healing power she would have sent into the wounds. This behavior kept the signs that she’d claimed them fresh. Nim Wei wouldn’t have wanted the reminder, but some human servants relished the knowledge that they were owned.
“What have you been up to?” she murmured to the open, staring eyes, bereft now of their divine spark. She knew she hadn’t given them any jobs, and if she hadn’t ordered them to do whatever had gotten them into trouble, she couldn’t guess who had. Nim Wei was a very powerful elder. Her control over her servants would have been extremely difficult to override.
Perplexed, she stripped the closest body of its blood-soaked coat. She found nothing in the pockets, but from the corpse’s arms a partial answer came. Dozens of needle tracks darkened the veins inside the dead man’s elbow, from old and healing to as fresh as the day before.

So, she mused. You found a compulsion stronger than the one I exercised.
That, or someone else had found it for him.
Nim Wei shivered, not chill but presentiment. The door behind her back had a lock a bomb could not have broken through. All the same, she felt less secure in her little kingdom than she had a minute earlier.