She was face-to-face with what was without a doubt the greatest astonishment of her life. Some of the richest and most ancient Keepers were Asian. There had been—oh, easily a hundred of them.

She slumped against a wall. Had man somehow done this, simple, weak little man?

Keepers could be hurt by man—witness her mother and father—but they couldn’t be destroyed by man, not this way. They owned man!

She looked from empty wall to empty wall and fully grasped the fact that the Asian Keepers must have been destroyed. If even one was left alive, this book would be safe.

When she grasped this enormous reality, something so rare happened to Miriam that she lifted her long, tapering fingers to her cheeks in amazement.

Far below the crazy streets, in the fetid ruin of this holy place, a vampire wept.

TWO: Blood Nocturne

TWO

Blood Nocturne

The samlor moved with what now felt like maddening slowness through the sighing showers of rain, down the empty streets, while Miriam listened to the tremble of her own heart and smelled the air for danger.

What odor did she seek? The acid stink of a dead Keeper, perhaps, or the oil of a policeman’s gun?

How could a human policeman kill one of them? The idea was absurd.

Yet the book had been destroyed. No battle among the Keepers, no matter how violent, would have resulted in the destruction of a Book of Names. Keepers fought for love and herds, but only occasionally, and never that hard. Not even in their days in the sun.

Miriam longed now to spend the night beneath the whirling fan, sucking deeply on her pipe, but thousands of years of hunting brilliant and dangerous prey made her too wary now even to consider such repose.

“Airport,” she’d told the samlor driver. She’d pulled the plastic curtain across the front of the cabin and sat in the stuffy interior smoking and watching the rain pelt the driver’s back, trying not to dwell on the scent of his blood.

The ride to the airport was a long one, and toward the end the creature had slowed to a slumped, struggling walk. If this had been another time, she would have whipped him.

She might be a rebel, but just now she felt an absolute, burning loyalty to her own kind. They had a right to life, just like any other creature. More of a right—this whole earth and every single creature living on it was their property, and much of it—including man—was their creation.

They had given man everything—his form, his mind, his life itself. It was the Keepers who had originally bred the crops that man had been taught to cultivate, the grains and the fruits of the land, and the dumb beasts that he had been given to eat.