She had not fed like that in a very long time. Mother Lamia always did. Sometimes her feedings would last for days. But Miriam’s human lovers had not cared for it and had felt awful for the victims when she did it.

Sarah, for example, could only bear to see Miriam do the quickest of kills. She herself struggled to live without killing, taking her nourishment from blood bank goop and pleading with Miriam for frequent transfusions that left both of them dizzy and bitchy.

Miriam went to the door. The way she felt now, she’d like to take a big, blood-packed human straight up to that chamber. Full or not, she’d spend a couple of days on it, using all of mother’s old techniques.

They were the Keepers, not the kept. No matter how brilliant, how numerous, or how violent, mankind remained first and foremost, their damned property!

She pushed at the door. Locked. She shook it three times, making the very precise movements that were designed to dislodge the tumblers, in the event you had no key. Keepers did not have private property. All belonged to all.

It opened. She stepped in, treading softly in the footsteps of her lost past. A profound silence fell, a Keeper silence. Overhead, the great beams that had been so rich a brown in mother’s day now were glowing black, as if they had turned into iron. The tanning vats were empty.

She went across the echoing floor of the factory to the narrow stair. Mother had hauled their victims up these very treads, Miriam following along to watch and learn.

How silent it was here, more silent than any human place. This was still a lair, oh, yes. But where was its inhabitant? Would he not be at least a little curious about the stealthy noises down below, the unmistakable sounds of another Keeper entering the sanctum?

“Hello,” she said, her voice uttering the sibilant, infinitely subtle sound of Prime for the first time in many a long year.

He was much smaller than she remembered, and as dirty as a coal-scuttle, a creature that had not bathed since the French court had filled its tubs with milk. His eyes were tiny and narrow, and he had the pinched face of a bat. He came forward wearing the tattered remains of a hundred-year-old frock coat, otherwise as naked as at his ancient birth. He was hungry, hissing hungry, as shadowy and insubstantial as a ghost.

A wound opened in his ghastly face, bright red and dripping. He uttered a sound, horribly eager, and she realized that he thought her human. She was so radically different looking from other Keepers that he believed her one of the kept.

His skeletal hands snatched her wrists, enclosed them in a Keeper’s iron grip. Then his eyes met hers. The bright glow of eagerness flickered, faded. He had realized his mistake.