Ephraim Solomon's Story

The night was cool and clear, the stars overhead a spray of glittering lights that would have been more than sufficient illumination for either of the two vampires walking casually down the sidewalk, street-lamps notwithstanding. Their steps were almost silent, though the ones belonging to the blonde made some noise, his patent leather shoes thudding with an air of subtle authority. The ebon-haired man’s were completely noiseless, something that his brother had told him multiple times was not a normal sort of human thing. Nevertheless, it was something he often forgot to change.

Ephraim and Virgil were out this evening for a little reconnaissance on this town that called itself River Lake, the newest of several temporary homes for their coven. It was a little smaller than the leader would have ordinarily liked—strangers were easily-recognized in places like this. But they’d needed somewhere relatively remote to settle: the last encounter with agents of the Shadow Court had been a near thing, even as strong as they were. They just didn’t have the numbers to be in constant open warfare with an organization of thousands. He’d given the rest permission to come and go from the manor they occupied as they pleased, but not before impressing upon them that anything that would normally be slightly suspicious would be doubly so in such a small place.

It was better that they were seen in groups of no more than two or three for the moment, and though he and Virgil looked almost nothing alike, and got along about as well as oil and water, there was a certain similarity to their features that let them pass as family, which seemed a bit less odd than two unrelated strangers wandering about. So far, they’d been able to identify several of the central buildings and businesses in the town, and on this, their second night of exploration, Ephraim intended to spend more time exploring the commercial and residential areas both.

He was consumed enough in his thoughts that he didn’t notice the incoming human woman until it was too late, though Virgil took hold of his shoulder and pulled him back just enough that he wouldn’t bowl her over and send her to the ground. Her shoulder just clipped his bicep, and she murmured some kind of apology before continuing onwards. He was slightly less able to keep walking, and it wasn’t until Virgil raised one gracefully-arched eyebrow at him that he even realized he’d frozen in place. His eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring just slightly, as if to take in more of the fleeting scent.

“Did you smell that?” He asked in a low rumble, slightly below the hearing range of ordinary humans. With his senses, however, Virgil would pick up on the words easily.

His brother blinked at him, smiling slyly. Ephraim had never been particularly fond of that look—it meant Virgil was plotting something, and that usually ended badly for whomever he was plotting against. For all his might, he lacked his twin’s subtlety, even if nobody else knew him better. “The human?” he replied, voice just as soft, but carrying a musical note to it that Ephraim’s did not naturally have. His own was much more like gravel, if one wanted such a comparison. “Of course I did; I’m hardly a nose-blind fool, Ephraim.” His tone carried disingenuous hurt, as though the query had wounded him, but there was mischief in his eyes, almost silvery in the sparse lighting of the street. Ephraim shook his head, dislodging a few dark hairs from their places and flinging them in front of his golden ones.

“No, I mean… it was… different.” He didn’t know how to explain it, but the smell had been particularly alluring. Of course, that happened sometimes; vampires did have preferences, naturally, such as Virgil’s well-known proclivity for those in euphoric states. But Ephraim had never had any such discriminatory palate, and so this was rather foreign to him. He’d fed plenty recently, but he was suddenly discontent with his last meal all the same.

“I see,” Virgil replied mildly, thinking it over for a minute. “Shall I follow, dear brother?” It could prove to be a problem—while Ephraim was as good as any at resisting his baser urges, it would be very difficult should the woman start bleeding for some reason, and it might be beneficial to know who she was and where she lingered if he was to avoid such a circumstance. Besides, he was curious. Ephraim never got so worked up over such a small thing as a human, though of course, ‘worked up’ for Ephraim was hardly as bad as it would be for anyone else. Getting any kind of reaction out of his brother was notoriously difficult; Virgil was used to being the only one capable of achieving such a thing.

The man addressed seemed to consider this for a moment, and then he nodded succinctly, allowing him permission to do this if he chose. He, on the other hand, intended to stay away for the moment, and would finish his survey of the residential district before finding Virgil again. Perhaps in the meantime, one of the others would have something to report.

Virgil may well profess on occasion to be a dutiful brother, but it was only a fool that took him at his word when he did. Ephraim, for all the other things that he was, counted as no fool. Even so, there were times when his brother did legitimately act out of some form of fraternal concern, and if asked who in the world actually mattered to him, Virgil (should he answer honestly) would have to but his twin at the top of the very short list. That they were family was only part of it—while Ephraim did not know it, he had a certain way of inspiring loyalty in those scant few who ever saw beneath the anger painted in broad strokes over his exterior.

It would be disadvantageous for Virgil to point this out to him, and so of course he did not. Much more fun to be a creature entirely of his own whimsy, who helped when he did only because he decided he felt like it. Let himself remain inscrutable, unpredictable, and entirely free of such maudlin things as loyalty. Loyalty was for people who needed protection. Virgil required none. He and his brother were both entirely independent entities, fully capable of surviving whatever the idiots who ran the Court threw at them. That Ephraim had gathered himself a coven somehow at all was a subject of no mean amusement for his brother.

The scent, he tracked easily, and he would admit that there was something appealing about it, but he was affected not nearly so strongly as his dear brother was. It led, after a few winding turns and a misdirect down an alley of some sort, to the front door of a pretty little establishment called Delilah’s Gourmet, if the painted sign out front was anything to go by. How very quaint. Still, if this was where that woman was, it would behoove him to go inside.

Surprisingly, the shop seemed to keep night hours. How very convenient for him, a creature who could not walk in daylight. Raising one elegant hand, Virgil pressed his palm to the frame of the door and pushed gently, the portal yielding with the merry tinkling of a bell. Ah, now this place was simply darling, now wasn’t it? He smiled upon sight of the clear glass cases filled with pastries, the wooden tables and the rural décor. It was hardly the sort of place in which he usually found himself, but one of Virgil’s merits was that he could make himself appear to belong anywhere, without once relinquishing his hold on his otherworldly grace or overabundant charms.

So it was with no reservations whatsoever that he strode inside, observing that the sign here asked him to please seat himself, promising that service would be prompt. There was also a counter for take-away purchases, but he’d made up his mind to linger, and thus selected a table beside a window, one that offered a view of the night-darkened world outside. The place was… yes, homey was the colloquialism for it. He could see the woman from earlier at the counter, which likely meant that it was her place of work, as she was behind it rather than in front. Yes, lingering was the best option, if he wished to discover the nature of the shop’s proprietor.

Picking up a menu, he gave it a cursory glance, surprised a bit at the level of sophistication offered in some of the pastries themselves. Not many people seemed to know how to produce a good crepe anymore. Of course, this only reminded him of how long it had been since he’d last seen France, and he sighed a bit wistfully, features schooling themselves into the very picture of elegant nostalgia. It wasn’t something he had to think about doing, anymore—the expressions required simply came by themselves, in the most graceful forms they had. It was partly a function of his species, partly simply his own demeanor.

Best not go with the crepes. He was not here to reminisce.

She may have thought herself silent and unnoticeable, but few people ever were to him. He understood better than such young things how to move with the world around him, to make himself nothing more than another feature of the environment. He was already so suited to blending with shadows, from his coloration down to his customary silence—it hardly seemed like a talent to waste.

“Lilia,” he said without turning around, still upkeeping his pace about the town. “It is not conventional behavior to follow someone without speaking to them, especially not if they know you’re there.” There was a note of gruff chiding in his tone—he did not want the more odd of his coven’s mannerisms to stir up suspicion before they had the good reputation to protect themselves from it, and had she been stalking anyone but him, this would definitely have gotten her some weird looks, and probably more than a little suspicion as well. This, they could not afford.

Stopping for a moment, he turned to look over his shoulder at her. Her attempts to gain height on him or look over his shoulder were vain—he was an exceedingly tall man, and his posture did not slouch unnecessarily. The look he gave her through the corner of his golden eye was eminently neutral. Ephraim was hard to read on the best of days, but he did not seem overly displeased. At least, not yet. “There is little point in following me—you would be better served trying to get to know the town, and ingratiating yourself with the people here.” That was something the other members of his coven would always be better at than he was—Ephraim intimidated people even when he did not intend to.

With that, he checked to make sure that there were no humans in the vicinity, then looked up, gauging his jump, and leapt, landing silently on the rooftop and crossing it in a low crouch to avoid silhouetting himself against the sparse moonlight of the silver crescent in the sky.

In this way, Ephraim stalked the streets a bit less conventionally than he had in Virgil’s company—admittedly, part of the goal of it was to slowly acclimatize the humans here to their new neighbors, to allow themselves to be seen out and about in conventional, perfectly ordinary settings, thus dispelling any suspicion about their newfound presence. It would get around eventually that this large family had bought the mansion just outside of town, a building which was once overgrown with weeds and vines and falling apart at the seams. With a week or so of hard nighttime work and some input from each of the new occupants, it looked very different now. Virgil had done the gardens, he’d had Morgan and Arya arrange the interiors for the most part, and to Lilia, he’d given the task of selecting the home’s new color—as long as it wasn’t something outrageous. They all had at least three rooms to themselves: a bedroom, a living space, and a bathroom, and in addition, Ephraim had claimed an office and a library on the top floor.

It was important that they feel at home here, which was why he never brought in outside contractors to do the work—unless it was something none of them had skills in. Thankfully, the plumbing and electricity had been intact here. Ephraim did not seem like the kind of man to think about details of such a nature, much less the psychological comfort of his coven members, but leadership changed people, and on a practical level, it only made sense to want them to be at home. Their lives were not always easy, and he knew that. He did what he could to make them happy, though he would ever deny any such inclinations under a near-impenetrable layer of gruff distance.

As of now, he traveled via rooftop, silent and nearly inscrutable even as a silhouette, the dark colors he wore and the attendant darkness of his hair making him difficult to pick out against the moonlit rooftops. Golden eyes were faintly aglow, gifting him with the night-vision of his kind and making it possible to pick out colors and details clearly even in the murky shadows next to buildings and the like. He was leaping between a pair of rooftops when he caught sight of the man bleeding out in the alley. Normally, he might have left something like that be—he could not afford to cast suspicion on himself or any of his coven members by being near the scene of what had been a violent crime. But there was a smell on the air, one he recognized only dimly, and that was enough to draw his attention.

Landing soundlessly in a crouch, Ephraim straightened to his full height and approached the man, who was now groaning softly in his pain. He would not survive the night—the blood he’d lost already was pooling around him on the dirty cement of the alleyway, and though Liliath might have been able to save him were she right here, she was too far away to make a difference. Through clouded eyes of indistinct brown, the man looked up at him, and blinked slowly a few times, as though to clear his vision.

“Never thought… Reapers were real,” he admitted with a half-dazed smile. “I was… sort of expecting a—ungh—a white light.” Ephraim parsed that statement for a moment, and shook his head.

“You might get one,” he said dispassionately. “You’re not dead yet. But if you want me to be Death, I could be.” The offer was clear: the man was in a lot of pain, and the vampire was offering him mercy, a swifter end than the one he currently experienced. He stood still beside the dying man, unwilling or perhaps unable to move until he knew what he would be doing with the motion.

The man coughed, sending a spray of blood onto the hand he tried to cover his mouth with. It might have been a fine, pink mist once, but he was too far gone for such subtlety now—his end would not be much longer in the coming, and he was faced instead with liquid gouts of the stuff. Ephraim’s control was great enough that he didn’t feel much temptation to indulge. “Please,” he said, nearly choking on the word, and Ephraim nodded, casting his eye about for something to use. Simply plunging his fist into the man’s chest wasn’t exactly going to seem inconspicuous, and the same went for strangling him when he was clearly bleeding out already. The idea was that the death should at once be merciful and also not look too different from what had already happened.

Exhaling softly through his nose, the vampire picked up an empty bottle from the ground and shattered it over his knee, raining the jagged pieces down over the dying man. He was left with a large, sharpened point, which would achieve his purpose just fine. “If you have last words, I will hear them.” But the man shook his head, indicating that he did not, and so Ephraim lowered himself into a crouch, careful to avoid any of the puddles of blood, and placed the ragged shard of bottle gently against the homeless man’s chest. With a sharp motion, he pushed, and the exhale that followed was a death rattle as the glass pierced his heart. Taking the fellow by one shoulder, Ephraim turned him over, so that he was laying on the shards of glass and the bottle both, and for once he was glad he tended to wear gloves. Standing again, he left the man there and removed the leather coverings from his long-fingered hands, dropping them in a public waste disposal quite far from the scene.

Shaking his head to himself, he ventured into the nearest building. This one happened to be a family-owned general store, and he supposed the man running it now was used to the late-evening shift, because he looked up from the counter and smiled at the new customer entering. Ephraim didn’t need to be here, but it was better if he pretended if he did, and had some excuse to be out and about after such an event as the murder that had just taken place. Nodding to the old man, he performed the customary exchange of names and small talk, though his answers were gruff and abbreviated, something which didn’t seem to bother the senior citizen much. Bailey’s General the store was called, and he could only presume that the old man was Mr. Bailey. Whatever the case, Ephraim occupied himself browsing for a while, trying to find something plausible to buy that wouldn’t be entirely useless. He did hate waste.

For a few minutes, the only sound worth noting was the sweeping of the old man’s broom over the wooden floor of the store. Ephraim made no noticeable sound when he moved, though his search was proving fruitless. The items here were mostly those for consumption, and unlike several of his coven members, he’d lost all appreciation for human cuisine several centuries ago. He wasn’t sure if they still ate from habit, nostalgia or a genuine enjoyment of taste, but personally his diet was nothing but blood and coffee, unless he really needed to do otherwise for the sake of at least appearing human. That in mind, he decided to just pay for a bar of chocolate or something. At least it would give him a plausible excuse to leave—

The old man leaned out the doorway of his store to wave at someone at exactly the same moment Ephraim was hit by another wall of the same scent he’d detected earlier. Sometimes, he swore that someone sat around, thinking of all the most uncomfortable things to put him through, then executed them one by one, as though simply traversing the world and trying to keep his makeshift family from the hands of the Court wasn’t difficult enough.

The thought made him angry, but he was careful enough to keep it off his face, and when the person owning the scent stepped into the store, he studiously kept his head down, still pretending to browse. Apparently, this woman—Senka was her name—knew the old man quite well, and he surmised that she must own some kind of business, likely the production of foodstuffs, for which she required supplies at such an odd hour. It explained why the general store was still open, anyway. These small deductions kept him occupied, at least until he heard his own name, and then his head snapped up sharply, dark brows narrowing over honey-colored eyes in an obvious expression of displeasure.

This seemed not to faze Mr. Bailey in the least, and Ephraim sighed through his nose. He was used to people being more intimidated by him than they knew how to handle, but something about that old man seemed rather immune. Probably a good thing, honestly—the last thing his coven needed was a reputation like that. He wanted them to be ignored, not feared. Fear made people pay attention, and they couldn’t afford that, especially not now that a murder had taken place. It would probably be all the town talked about for a week at least, and he didn’t want anyone deciding to put that news in the same breath as anything about that family moving into the old house just outside the bounds of the village. He should probably go along with this, much as it displeased him to be some stranger’s manual labor.

The elderly store owner disappeared into the back of his shop, and the woman in question approached him, offering sympathy he did not need. He took an absent moment to study her, because he was curious as to why it was that she smelled the way she did. He could detect nothing obviously special about her—she was comely enough, nothing extraordinary, but Ephraim wasn’t the kind of man who cared about how a person looked in the first place, at least not to the degree that other people seemed to. Her posture and mannerisms bespoke a middle-class upbringing, lacking the studied refinement of the wealthy and the downtrodden carriage of the poor both. He could pick out nothing that would explain the scent. Not that he really knew what to look for—this was supposed to be a rare phenomena that did not occur but once in a few million humans.

Unclenching his jaw, which had reflexively tightened as if in protest to the strong urge to bite, he replied evenly, a testament to long, long years of honing his self-control. “That will not be necessary. He is right: this is not the best time of night for anyone to be alone.” He kept his irritation to a minimum, and it came off a bit like resignation, without actual bitterness. It wasn’t as though a few bags of flour would be difficult to transport over any distance, and this might just help his family in a small way, so he was willing enough to do it.

At that point, Mr. Bailey returned with two bags of flour, which Ephraim hoisted onto a shoulder with no discernible difficulty, keeping them there with an arm like a steel bar for all that it would yield. When he tried to offer payment for the chocolate, the old man waved him off, saying that his helping this Senka woman was a personal favor to him, and that more young men ought to be as Ephraim was. The incredible irony of the statement was enough to draw a snort from the vampire—he was much older than this human, even if he didn’t look it. Regardless, he did not fuss over it, and pocketed the bar of chocolate, using his free hand to hold open the door for Senka. Not because it was polite, but because she knew where they were going, and he did not. Speaking of which—

“Where are we going, that requires a hundred pounds of flour?”

Honestly, it almost couldn’t be more fun if he’d planned it. Virgil had always liked to think of himself as the kind of man for whom luck and chance bent their own rules—it was certainly fortuitous that he was as he was, and his life was arguably quite charmed, even despite all the moving around and the occasional bout with the idiots who called themselves the Night Court. He was a powerful immortal being, and rarely if ever suffered the repercussions of that. Granted, there were some annoying rules in place about not killing humans or spilling the secret, but Ephraim’s little hangups were overall a small price to pay. He didn’t even miss the sun, really.

And life seemed intent always to provide him with ways to amuse his ancient mind. The foibles and innate absurdity of other people never ceased to draw his attentions, and he watched with great amusement as Morgan’s grip tightened on the table, the cracks in the wood lost to the general din of the atmosphere. The cause, as it happened, was surely the bleeding staff person, and Virgil had to admit, it was a rather tempting smell, as far as they went. Morgan was doing quite well for someone with scarcely more than a century’s worth of experience. It was a little disappointing. He’d been hoping for more obvious signs of distress. Perhaps the table would shatter…?

Blissfully unknowing as humans tended to be, their lovely young waitress returned with their orders, and Virgil maneuvered his sleeve so as to make the cracks concealed, because as much as he loved toying with people, he was smarter than that, and now was not the time to be dealing with the questions. His maneuvers were, as always, quite subtle. “Ah, thank you, my dear,” he said, both for himself and on behalf of Morgan, who wasn’t in much condition to be talking to anyone. “Please don’t mind him; he’s feeling a little dizzy from his acquaintance with the pole earlier. He’ll be quite all right in a few minutes, I suspect.” With a graceful gesture, Morgan used his free hand to bring the cup of tea close to his nose and inhaled delicately. It was a blend of moderate quality, but the nearby presence of so many unique humans made it positively mouthwatering.

Some people took sugar in their tea. Virgil was known to occasionally flavor his with blood. Call him eccentric, but it did compliment the bitterness ever so well.

And Morgan likely would be all right quite soon, so he wasn’t even lying. At least, not entirely. A new pair of smells, one vastly more familiar than the other, entered the shop, and Virgil smiled to himself. Ephraim had not been able to avoid the woman from earlier after all. Fate really did love Virgil, even when she hated absolutely everyone else. He’d expect nothing less, really. He realized that the young woman was asking him if he required anything additional, and there were so very many ways to answer the question that Virgil was quite nearly giddy with the possibilities. In the end, he tilted his head slightly to the side and fixed her with a look. This was one he’d perfected over many years, and it was designed to say, quite simply, I know something you don’t want me to. In this case, the falseness of her smile was obvious. “Well, since you asked, I’d immensely prefer it if that expression of yours was genuine. Alas, I do not believe that is something I can request, is it?” He used just the barest brush of his empathy to coax her into relaxing a little bit, as while the stress was interesting, he was unfortunately able to feel it as well, along with a healthy dose of Morgan’s bloodlust. Frankly, everyone was lucky that he was so used to this—else there might be more than one vampire struggling with control, and Virgil wasn’t always one to resist the most exquisite temptations.

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Ephraim had to admit, he didn’t really understand why she felt the need to compensate him. He wasn’t doing this because she had asked him—the fault for it lay with the old man, if indeed there was any fault to be found. But he didn’t make a comment on it, choosing instead to carry his burden in relative silence. She didn’t see the need to fill the space of their walk with chatter, something which he duly noted and appreciated. Humans tended to be in a hurry to do and say everything. He supposed it might have something to do with their short lifespans, but whatever the case, it generally irritated him. He was, therefore, suitably relieved that such tendencies were not present here.

The staring, he could have done without, but he was long used to it by now. Occasionally, he would meet someone’s eyes, and they would generally shy away from that, but this too was normal. When he wasn’t making active effort to allure (and he didn’t—that was definitely something closer to Virgil’s method), he tended to intimidate instead. Not that he tried to do that either. It was just some compound effect of the way he looked, the way he moved, and the way he dressed, only one of which he really had much say over.

The woman—he was bad with names—led him through the back door of the shop she professed to run, and he set the materials down in the spot she’d indicated. He could smell the fact that someone was bleeding inside the store, and that it was neither Virgil nor Morgan, who were both nevertheless present. Virgil, he wasn’t worried about. Well, no more than usual, anyway, and worried was hardly the appropriate word. Morgan might be more of a concern, as he was still quite young. There wasn’t much he could do about it now.

The smell, he noticed, was but one of several particularly-interesting ones in the place, and it seemed that all the humans in it had one, though none quite like the woman’s. Senka. He remembered that, for some reason. Perhaps the word was tied to the scent in his psychology. Ephraim suddenly understood why Virgil was here. The potential for eventful happenings in this place would have been far too great for his brother to pass up, and Ephraim wasn’t sure whether to be angry at him for dragging Morgan along, or just resign himself to being glad that Arya wasn’t also present.

Once the bags were placed where he had determined they must go, he looked around the appropriate room. There were stainless steel work counters here, and several supply shelves. The establishment was quite clearly outfitted to handle a lot of business, though he knew little of such places generally. Not particularly inclined to stay any longer than he needed to, he slipped unnoticed back through the door he’d used to enter. He was not interested in receiving compensation for his work, trivial as it was, and the bakery did not need three vampires darkening its doorstep tonight. Turning southward, Ephraim headed for the mansion he and the others had purchased, trusting that the others would be back in due time.

Flanked by his brother on one side and the much less-annoying Morgan on the other, Ephraim stopped at the border to the obvious celebrations and frowned. The general misanthrope in him was really not looking forward to this, but he had to acknowledge Virgil’s logic: part of coming to be an accepted part of this town was participating in the events that one would expect everyone to participate in. And he had to try and be nice about it, too. Ephraim wasn’t incapable, exactly… he just found attempting to be friendly and outgoing when he was not to be exhausting and more than a little annoying as well.

Well, perhaps he’d simply let the more sociable among them do most of the work and simply try not to make things more difficult than they had to be. He was capable of this much, at least. Speaking of making things more difficult… Arya was around—he could smell her. If anyone was going to cause the wrong kind of problems, it was her. Sometimes, he wasn’t exactly sure why he allowed her to stay, but she wanted to, and though it may seem a bit against type for someone like him, he didn’t prefer to turn people away from his doorstep. Especially not the useful ones. Regardless, she was just as likely to be a pain this evening as Virgil was, and less likely to do it in a way that could be easily dealt with. His brother knew where the boundaries were, and only crossed them when there was something to be gained. Arya did that sort of thing because it was fun.

“Well,” he said flatly, taking in the happy-looking humans (some of them dressed in truly absurd fashions) and the shining lakeshore. “Don’t have too much fun.” He shrugged the vague dismissal—he was the leader, but he didn’t often give commands as such. They could come and go as they pleased unless there was some pressing circumstance that required their presence, and tonight, there was not. Tugging a bit at the sleeves of his black duster, Ephraim shoved his hands in his pockets and set off slightly to the left. He had smelled something most curious. There was another vampire in the area, and he intended to find out what that was about.

He chose to ignore the fact that the Senka woman and several of her staff were in the area as well. He didn’t need the distraction.

Virgil, on the other hand, was perfectly fine with distractions of all kinds. Whereas Ephraim had simply worn his usual all-blacks, his brother had decided to go with the spirit of the event, and wore an interesting garment referred to as a yukata, which were made for both men and women. It was a little hard to tell which his had been made for, given his slender stature, but given his height, it was probably a male’s, even despite the flamboyancy of the design. The majority of the garment was kingfisher blue, but the threading about it was a bright silver, the pattern reminiscent somehow of water lilies. He was less interested in the other vampires he could smell and more in the delicious humans, but neither was he always so straightforward as Ephraim, and he did not make immediately for his targets, such as they were.

“So stern… how dull,” he said of his brother, mostly to Morgan, who was also present. Then, in a rare moment of similarity, he also shrugged, and tipped his head back to glance at the sky. “I think I’m going to go wander a bit. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, dear Momo!” he trilled with a sideways look and a smirk. They both knew there was very little Virgil wouldn’t do, if he felt the fickle desire, so it was hardly a restriction at all. Perhaps that in itself was the point.

He tracked with all the accuracy, but none of the obviousness, of a bloodhound, homing in on that smell which was assuredly inhuman. Virgil had not informed him of any other members of their species in this area when he’d first scouted it for their settlement, but then, they had been on something of a schedule. The Shadow Court was not always very patient, and they had numbers enough to be annoying if his coven didn’t keep themselves under the radar. There were certain things they would not dare attempt, but they had grown somehow bolder recently, or perhaps simply more frightened.

Ephraim was not the cause. He and the majority of those he kept about himself had not altered their attitudes towards the Court in any significant way in decades, and he still wanted absolutely nothing to do with them. He was willing to leave their agents alone if they did the same. Morgan was far too young to have drawn this much ire or concern, and he doubted any of them really considered Arianrhod a threat of any kind. She wasn’t, really, because it was not in her nature to be. That left Virgil or Arya, and the latter cared about as much about the Court as she cared abut the dirt on her shoe. She was too… unstable to be political. Virgil was basically the opposite.

It was probably safe to assume that this, like so many of Ephraim’s annoying misfortunes, was his brother’s fault. It was also probably true that Virgil did not make the amateur mistake of not noticing another vampire in the proximity, but simply chose not to tell him about it. Old suspicion and mistrust ran deep in Ephraim’s character, and as a result, he found himself with an insuppressible desire for answers.

It only complicated matters that as he seemed to gain ground on the vampire he was looking for, he also drew closer to the human he would much rather avoid. Someone, somewhere, was laughing at him, and it was probably Virgil. Whatever the case, Ephraim was not happy about it.

As if thinking of him summoned him, his brother fell into step beside him again, hands folded into the sleeves of that ridiculous garment he was wearing. “Explain,” the golden-eyed twin demanded tersely, though he did not look at his twin. He didn’t need to—Virgil’s amusement was obvious.

“A useful tool that pretends to think for itself, dear brother mine, and no cause for your concern.” The cutting side-glance he got in return for suggesting that Ephraim was concerned only made him chuckle. “But if you want to know the details, perhaps it would be best to ask his friend, no?” And indeed, the two were walking into view of said friend at this very moment, now in the company of someone else, the initial vampiric scent in the area but having dispersed. This far into the grounds, it would be difficult to pick back up again, even for him, and Virgil knew it. Ephraim was tempted to do it anyway, just to defy what his brother seemed to consider a well-orchestrated piece of mischief, but in the end, that would only be behaving as childishly as Virgil did, and he did not make a habit of being so.

Virgil flitted away in that ridiculous way he had, and Ephraim sighed though his nose. He was caught in the impossible dilemma of either trusting his brother—a thought with dubious wisdom at best—and interacting with a human. That in itself was not particularly awful, or at least not any worse than interacting with anyone else, but… well, he had little choice. She di not, however, seem to be alone, and he watched as the man in question yanked on her arm, causing Senka to take a step back. She looked… not afraid, but apprehensive, or uncomfortable, perhaps? He was not good at discerning one emotional expression from another, honestly.

“Senka,” he said, mostly in a flat monotone. His eyes flickered back and forth between one and the other, and there was a slightly drawn-out pause before he spoke again, just as calmly. “Is there some kind of problem here?”

Virgil’s smile seemed only to gain its peculiar stolen kind of brilliance in greater measure at the question. An angel, was it? He’d been called many things, some of them even complimentary, but in a thousand years, that one was distinctly-new. Not because it had never been thought—he doubted very much that, given his particular stature and coloration, no one had ever made the connection—but certainly, he’d never had it said to his face before. How perfectly, delightfully frank. Ephraim was like that, but he never thought or said nice things. His brother was also protected from the dangers of being so painfully honest in a way that this girl most decidedly was not. However had she survived in the world?

“I’m afraid not,” he replied with some subtle mirth. It tinged the edges of the statement only barely, while the rest of it had a feigned melancholy to it. The words were meant to be ambiguous in their underpinnings, and so they were. Only he’d bother to tell the truth in such an unclear manner. From his sleeve, he withdrew a hand, and it traveled upwards, his first two fingers alighting on his lips as though contemplatively. What he was thinking about was in no way obvious, however.

The unnecessary apology, he’d ignored, much more interested in the fact that what he’d intended to convey with his words had gone right over the girl’s head. It took a particular kind of mind to genuinely take his statement to be about the scenery—either she was more than a bit slow or very, very naïve. The first would have interested him not at all. The second, well… that was another matter entirely, wasn’t it? What did one do with someone who seemed unable to see the world as it was? It was a bit like examining something under a microscope, or in a glass cage, contemplating what experiment should be conducted for the furthering of his ends. Perhaps she was fortunate that he didn’t see much point in ruining her rose-colored perceptions at this point—a cynic could show him nothing he did no already know. An innocent, though… he did not often encounter one of those.

With a quick glance down at the presented hand, Virgil extended his own, but not to shake it. Oh, certainly not—in the time he considered most his own, manners demanded something very different, and he did relish in the unexpected. Closing his fingers gently over her palm and his thumb across the top of her hand, he crossed his free hand over his chest and bowed over the hand, giving her knuckles the faintest calculated brush with his lips. It was quite the olfactory rush, and his keen ears could hear the thrum of the pulse at her wrist, but his face did not betray that, not in the slightest. Indeed, his expression was still innocence and light when he unbowed himself, releasing her hand slowly. “A pleasure, Miss Hollins. Virgil Solomon, at your mercy. I am familiar with your delightful establishment, though I daresay my last visit may well have been different were you present.” Perhaps, perhaps not. It had been quite fun as it was, especially watching Morgan squirm as he had. The poor lad—he was just too easy.

And Virgil, alas, had no mercy to speak of.

The girl sneezed, and Virgil cocked his head somewhat to the side, taking a moment to gauge the temperature. Ah, yes, it was slightly below a certain comfortable threshold for humans, wasn’t it? The vampire shrugged, but it was not an indifferent gesture. Rather, it dislodged the outer layer of his ensemble from his shoulders, and he caught it in one of his hands. It left him in only the yukata proper, but of course, cold was little obstacle to him. If the idea was to win over the populace, well, he’d be the first to admit that he wasn’t terribly concerned about it. But he knew well enough the benefits of having people believe the best of you, and it was with this in mind that he settled the wide-sleeved garment over the young woman’s shoulders. “I would be a poor kind of man indeed if I allowed that, now wouldn’t I?” he mused, entirely rhetorically. “I do believe I bypassed a purveyor of hot beverages on my way here; would you care to partake?”

Evading the squad sent by the Court had not been easy, but she’d done it. It had been Lenore’s turn to throw off the pursuit of her coven this time, and it was a duty which she took very seriously, using decoy vials of the members’ blood to create a false trail, manufacturing paperwork and airline tickets, and so on. The goal wasn’t to make the Court’s agents think anything in particular, only to obscure the truth with alternative possibilities. They would be found eventually—they were always found. What mattered was that it wasn’t so soon that they would have no time to recover. Perhaps this time, they would even be able to settle for a few decades or so. It was unwise to remain in one area for more than ten or fifteen years, because eventually it became impossible to hide that they were not aging, but lately, the Court had been finding them even sooner than that.

It wasn’t that they couldn’t handle a truly nomadic life, only that it was hardly a life at all. Sometimes, she did not understand why Ephraim did not simply choose to stand and fight them—it was well within their capabilities to do so. The Court would have to mobilize more of its resources than it should be wiling to risk to pose a threat to the twins, and even then… it was hard to say what the result would be. That was probably why he never pushed it; he had no interest in knowing, not when it could get one of the others killed.

He was really quite a bit kinder than he generally gave himself credit for. Lenore released a breath, straightening her shirt absently. She wasn’t exactly in formal festival attire, or at least not compared to some of those humans she’d seen so far, but the jeans, leather jacket, and red shirt were not inappropriate for the setting, either, so it would do. She needed to find Ephraim and Virgil eventually, and make her report, but right now, she would be quite contented if she could simply see any of them. It had been a good two months since they’d parted ways, and she found no shame in admitting that she’d missed them.

The town was still wholly unfamiliar to her, so Lenore simply wandered, picking up occasionally the scent of this or that Coven member—Ari and Morgan seemed to be the closest, but so was a peculiar human scent, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to interfere with… whatever was going on. She couldn’t tell from just the smells alone. Ephraim was further off, but she tracked him anyway, because Virgil and Arya were further still. The tall woman wound her way through the crowd with a sort of easy grace that she’d had even as a human, but refined simply by observing Virgil—he could touch everyone or nobody in a crowd as he moved past, depending on what he wanted, though she erred always on the side of decorum, slipping past those who stood or strolled with the ease of a fish in a river. What on earth was Ephraim doing around so many people? He hated people, generally speaking. There was another strange human-smell around as well, and she caught sight of his retreating back over the heads of the crowd, a human woman walking in parallel.

An intended victim, perhaps? It was most unlike him to select one from a crowded place such as this—Ephraim preferred a bit more of a physical challenge when possible, and tended to go after hunters or those hiking, making their injuries easily ascribable to accidents. This was not his method, so she was left to conclude that perhaps he was here for another reason. Blinking, she shook her head and decided to leave that alone for now. He would doubtless have detected her presence by now, and she would leave him to make his own decisions about what to do about that.

Turning instead to a vendor, she ordered a cup of tea, scrunching her nose faintly when what she received was a teabag in hot water, but she would drink it all the same. Waste was not something she liked, however inconsequential the matter. Wrapping her hands about the paper cup it came in, Lenore picked a spot against the side of one of the stalls and leaned comfortably, embracing the opportunity for a small respite. Like any of her kind would, she gained substantial attention for her mere presence, but she was used to ignoring such things by this point. Humans were naturally curious, and their aesthetics were generally similar—vampires had adapted to that. This fact was neither here nor there, really. She was a little curious herself, honestly, particularly about these odd scents she was picking up. The woman with Ephraim had one, as did someone—a male, she thought—near Ari and Morgan. Virgil was at least in the vicinity of another, probably much more overt about his interest in such a smell than she would ever be, and there was yet one more, wandering seemingly without aim through the shifting mass of the crowd somewhere nearby.

How very peculiar.

Virgil had decided that he liked the sound of her voice—it had something faintly musical about it, none of that high-pitched, whining nonsense that came out of some people he’d met. An unfortunately-high proportion, if he were to think about it any more than he already had—but he wouldn’t. He was having far too much fun to spend much extra time considering things that didn’t merit his attention anyway. The girl had decided to use his first name, and had of course naturally requested that he eschew the formality in her case as well. Such were the common manners of the day, of course.

He was well-aware that he came across as a bit… archaic, but that was simply one more part of the persona he’d assumed. It certainly wasn’t the only one he had; Virgil wore faces like other men wore shirts: for exactly as long as it was convenient and comfortable to do so, after which point he would shed them for new ones that better suited his designs. This one was as close to what he’d used to be as he ever got anymore, and that was because only a minimum of acting was really necessary around the members of his dysfunctional little “family.” Even humans didn’t require guises particularly exotic—it was enough for him to lay on the manners and the charm, and that was as he preferred things.

She really was a little darling, wasn’t she? Precious, in all honesty, and such an unusual thing, with the light pink tinge to her face and the completely oblivious earnestness to her words. He could have easily given things a very different tone by turning on the various and sundry interpretations of service and ‘good times,’ but it would rather defeat his purpose. He wasn’t a vulgar man unless he had to be. There was a line between this and sensuality that was to be walked, and he spent most of his life balancing on the wire suspended between them. More fun to be had that way.

“I assure you, Calleigh, I will be quite fine,” Her concern for his condition was amusing in its own right, given how little he had cause to notice the temperature around him, but of course, he did not expand the explanation to its full breadth. There was something to be said for having secrets, and simply refusing to invite questions in the first place.

As for his speech patterns… well, there was a reason he chose to use them when he could very well use more modern parlance. There was a certain elegance missing from the recent couple of centuries, and Virgil considered this a genuine and disturbing loss. He felt no particular compulsion to be forced into a certain kind of behavior by the temporal situation, and so while he blended from time to time, he did allow himself certain liberties. It also had the occasional benefit of appreciation, as now. He softened his expression slightly, she cheer in his smile melting into something with a more tender aspect to it, and he sighed slightly under his breath, barely audible. “Well, that is one way of taking it, I suppose.” His tone suggested that he was a bit flattered, and he looked from her extended hand to her face with a slight furrow to his brow, as though contemplative.

“I’d not like to presume…” he started, but then the smile returned, a small thing, with just the faintest edge of slyness, and he took her hand with the wrong one of his; instead of holding it directly, he used his gentle grip on her fingers to thread her arm through his own, another old-fashioned gesture not used nearly often enough. Her palm, he placed on his forearm, reducing the distance between them to a bit less than half a foot. “But that should be much warmer, should it not? The least I can do is act as I sound, I believe. I’d hate to disappoint you, after all.” And indeed, though the manner of dress was all wrong, they did look rather like something from another century at the moment, considering. It was thus that they set off for the nearest of many beverage stands in the area.

“So, Calleigh, if you do not mind my asking, how did you come to be in this rather charming town?”