Aeslinn’s element was earth and all that came from it, and he had worn his riches blatantly. There had been so many diamonds on his shoulders and dripping down his midnight robes that they had reminded me of icicles in the dead of winter, crusted thickly. A gleaming circlet on his brow had held more diamonds, some as big as my thumb, and the whole had sparkled so brightly in the candlelight that I had barely been able to look at him.

It had been a memorable outfit, even more so because I’d learned to pay attention to clothes. They were a whole separate language in vamp circles, with people wearing everything from their history and status to their family affiliation on their backs. They didn’t need to—they had auras for that—but it didn’t stop them, and almost nothing they wore was meaningless.

Every piece of jewelry told a story; every color was carefully chosen. A coiled serpent on a bracelet one week, winking at the world with tiny, obsidian eyes, had ruby ones the next. A slight change, and yet it meant something. You might not know what, but if you were smart, you were watching, you were listening, and you were trying to figure out if it was a good sign or a bad one for you and your house.

Other times, you knew exactly what it meant. Zheng-zi, a newly minted senator, had been unaffiliated, a wild card, for his first few months on the North American Senate. No one had known which way he and Senator Cheung, his close associate, would fall. The jury was still out on Cheung, but Zheng-zi had recently started wearing the red and black of House Basarab, proclaiming his alliance without saying a word.

So, I couldn’t help but wonder, what did Aeslinn’s clothes say?

He’d obviously just come from a hunt, so maybe it made sense that he would be dressed down. Except that he was a king, and they rarely cared if they splattered their velvets or soiled their fine leathers. There were always more where those came from, and ruining an outfit or two was better than failing to keep up the image. A king needed to look strong, powerful, and wealthy. He needed to stand out from other men…

But what about a god?

The thought came out of nowhere, but I didn’t immediately dismiss it, because it felt right somehow. What about the gods? Had they dressed to impress, or was that for us mere mortals?

I thought back to my early training, and the endless books on Greek mythology that my governess had pushed on me. A classical education demanded reading the classics, but I’d been a less than attentive student, so in desperation, she’d brought in picture books. As a result, I had a mental Rolodex of hundreds of murals, wall friezes and marble depictions of the ancient pantheon to draw on.