Derek was a tall male with dark brown skin and large dark eyes that made him look forever young and vulnerable. His black wavy hair was parted in the middle and it had grown down just below his shoulders. An unmistakable broad blond streak grew from the center part on the left side, more golden than yellow. He wore a thin old shirt, filthy with dust, and the black dress pants he’d had on ten years ago when he’d been captured. He sat on his cot, in the corner of his prison dungeon cell, his back to the wall, his head bowed, and his arms folded as he listened.

Roland, the evil master of the house and its prison dungeons, talked and talked.

Roland’s guest was an ancient one named Rhoshamandes. And this Rhoshamandes spoke vehemently of one called “the Prince,” whom he wanted to destroy. How many of these blood drinkers were there? Others came through this house from time to time, but they never remained. Others had talked of this Prince too. Derek listened, but without hope.

Rhoshamandes was a powerful one, Derek could hear this in his voice, and in the beating of the blood drinker’s heart. Older than Roland most likely, much older, but he and Roland were friends.

This Rhoshamandes excited Roland. It was some sort of privilege for Roland that the fabled Rhoshamandes now sought his counsel.

Roland was the blood drinker who had taken Derek prisoner, luring him away from the opera house years ago, and locking him in this dungeon cell, beneath the city of Budapest. Roland was the one who came down the stairs at least once a week to drink Derek’s blood and taunt him and laugh at him.

Roland was rawboned, tall, painfully gaunt, with long straight white hair bound with a bronze clip at the base of his neck to leave a white streak down his back. He had the most cruel eyes Derek had ever beheld, and he smiled when he spoke, which made his most casual unpleasant remarks completely sinister.

Derek had had years to study Roland, Roland who appeared to live in fashionable evening dress of fine-cut dark-tinted velvet dinner jackets with satin lapels, waistcoats of bright patterned silk, and boiled shirts with cuffs and collars as stiff as cardboard. His black patent-leather boots appeared as simple evening shoes beneath the cuffs of his pleated trousers, and a great evening scarf with fringed edges was forever wrapped around his neck. He drained the blood of Derek without ever spilling a drop. He wore kid gloves so sleek they showed the bony knots in his fingers, and his cadaverous face with its large gray eyes was the picture of sarcastic disdain.