Thomas Hao was the Master of San Francisco. That’s all I’d known about him the last time we met. But it turned out that he was something of an enigma, even by vampire standards. Like Blackwood, the vampire I’d helped kill in Spokane, Hao ruled without other vampires in his city. Unlike Blackwood, Hao was the opposite of crazy. He’d never had a large seethe, but a couple of years ago he’d shooed the few vampires he controlled out to other seethes and remained in San Francisco alone. No one knew why, though there were lots of stories about Thomas Hao, about what happened when someone made a move against him. I’d seen him hold off two very powerful, very old monsters all by himself.

There was no question that Thomas was a very dangerous vampire. But he was also a man of principle and logic, not driven by ambition. It wasn’t just me who thought so. As vampires went, Hao was almost a good man. I liked him.

It didn’t take long to find his room. We got on the elevator that smelled of him and hit every button on the way up. His room was on the top floor. We followed Thomas’s scent down the hall.

“There is a fae here, too,” I whispered. I’d first scented her downstairs, and her track followed Hao’s too closely for coincidence.

Adam nodded and knocked softly at the door where Thomas’s scent had led us. No need to bother the neighbors, and a vampire would hear us.

“A moment,” said Thomas’s voice. It would not have carried to human ears, so he wasn’t expecting room service.

The vampire opened the door and regarded us for a moment. He was dressed in a brown silk button-down shirt and black jeans. His feet were bare, and his hair was damp. I never had been able to read his face, but I could read his body language. Whoever he’d been expecting, it had not been us.

He was not a big man, but in vampires, that didn’t mean much. His hair was cut short and expensively. He smelled of the fae woman whose scent trail had paralleled his, as if he might have been touching her just before he answered the door.

He stepped back and gestured us in, closing the door behind us when we accepted his wordless invitation. His room was a suite with a pair of chairs and a couch in the living area and a view that, in the daylight, would be of the Columbia River. There was a door toward the back of the room, and it was shut.

“Please,” he said to us, “take a seat. May I get you some refreshments? If you do not enjoy alcohol, there is soda, I believe, as well as water.”