++It is easy to pity the vampire. Easy and tempting. They are deadly creatures, abominations to be sure, and yet they do not choose to be so. One wonders how it feels, to experience their Crimson Cradle. One wonders how it feels to succumb to their infernal nature. How long does it take. I have studied enough of the younger beasts to be sure they do not always emerge from their graves a monstrosity. No. So how, then, does it feel to be degenerated into one?++

  Chapter 51

  Lorwick was well behind in Reggie’s wake, but he was distracted as he ran away from it. He’d had the prescience to grab his gun before he went, that and a sack of shot and powder, but one pretty damned important detail had entirely slipped his mind before he headed off.

  If all my stuff is gone, won’t they suspect I was the one who killed Walyn and just did a runner?

  No time to go back now, if Reggie made his presence known in Lorwick again he’d be met with, at best, an interrogation. He suspected he wouldn’t be able to hold out against the Lady’s Royal Presence on full blast, nor that his story would survive if he returned after a conveniently timed absence following the killings. His odds of running into something deadlier than he was probably weren’t high enough to outstrip his chances of dying back there.

  He thought. Maybe. That was the thing with gauging risk, it was kind of reliant on knowing things. And nobody had told him shit.

  Still, Reggie was moving faster now, at least. He was fully transformed and rushing at a dead sprint, trusting in his undead flesh to sustain it. The terrain could’ve been nicer but Reggie still fancied that he was doubling or tripling a horse’s gallop. Day was still an hour or so away when he reached his destination.

  Not Norvhan, the castle he’d been shown near it. The structure seemed undisturbed, which Reggie took as a hopeful sign that there’d been no swarm of Circumscribers killing Ludvich and Ajoke in his absence.

  No guards outside, not that he could detect. Nothing around the immediate interior. The whole place was as abandoned as he’d ever seen it.

  More abandoned, actually, because it looked like Ajoke had cleared out as well. It had only been about a week and a half since Reggie fed her his ichor, which meant that she was possibly still looking for him. Though he’d been told the effects were diminished on those of a higher Tier than the vampire supplying the blood, he didn’t think Ajoke was that powerful. Ludvich definitely wasn’t. They both remained practical and intelligent despite the addicting effects of his blood, which meant they’d both probably figured out working together would be the best way to find him.

  Hopefully that upped their odds of staying alive. Reggie couldn’t worry about it right now, though. He had other things to concern himself with, more immediate ones.

  The biggest was how exactly he’d go about renovating his new castle.

  Reggie had gotten a lot of thinking done as he moved his way through the cityscape and countryside; thinking about oppression, rebellion, about unions and compromise and practicality. He’d come to something of a drastic conclusion, but also the only one that made sense to him.

  Everyone was insane. Everyone but him, and maybe Ajoke. Everyone who saw people that treated them as less than human and thought about how they might negotiate better terms. It was shit that crazy people did, surely? Well if it wasn’t, the world’s definition of crazy was a bit fucked.

  But then so much about the world was fucked. Reggie had been slow in working it out, slow in most things like usual, but he’d gotten there in the end. Even an idiot like him could see what needed doing to fix things.

  Ten, maybe twenty million dead elves. That would be a start. A bargaining chip, an example to let everyone know he was serious. It would be proof that he could get things done, and then he’d get to the doing. But first he needed the ability to do things.

  For that, came the compromises. His own this time, not other people’s. Norman had been right about one thing, you couldn’t come out of a successful revolution smelling like roses. He’d been a cunt for taking that to be justification for betraying Reggie and the other lunatics, but not wrong about the core premise.

  No. Reggie had been keeping himself weak and placid by refusing to feed from people, by refusing to use his blood for servitors, for shackling himself off from doing all the things that made vampires—his kind, now, he had to remember—so dangerous. He’d not achieved anything in Lorwick and barely anything in Norvhan, that cunt Eryqai had probably been replaced already.

  Time to switch tactics then.

  Reggie made his way through the castle and committed its layout to memory. He’d always had a good memory in life, and it was much better now that there weren’t shrieking demons distracting him as he tried to use it.

  Walls, check. Ceiling, check. Floor, check. Parapats and battlements and shit…on second thought, he’d have to come back after getting a few books on old architecture to make sure everything was up to scratch. For the time being, though, the place looked like it was not imminently falling down. That was about as good as things got for him, these days.

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  Reggie secured a sleeping space for himself down in its crypts, blocked off by a slab of marble about a foot thick and big enough to cover a whole door frame. Must’ve weighed a literal ton. He lifted it aside, rather than slowly pushing it, just to show himself he could. Transforming was good for other things than just combat, apparently.

  But once he’d verified the interior was safe enough to rest in, Reggie was left with a new conundrum. He wasn’t sure what to do next. He paced around and thought, waiting for some sudden explosion of inspiration to hit him. It didn’t. The idea of ‘doing whatever it took’ to actually improve the world was a good one, it sounded nice. The problem wasn’t with things sounding nice, though. He’d been over this.

  Could you not just find somewhere to live in peace? Sycily asked him. I don’t want to see you die in some crusade.

  [I do!]

  Reggie smiled.

  “Sorry,” he whispered to Sycily, “but there’s no peace for me, not with the world like this.”

  “Still hearing voices I see,” a voice rang out behind him. Reggie immediately reached for his gun and whirled, firing the heavy musket right at the doorway and peering through burned powder-smoke to see…nothing. The figure was unharmed. When the debris cleared out from between them, he was able to see her holding a single hand out.

  The lead ball was pinched deftly between two fingers, snatched from the air like a falling leaf.

  “It’s nice to see you too, Reginald,” the woman grinned. Reggie just stayed where he was and stared, tongue-tied.

  Well, that was to be expected. What exactly did you say to the person who ended your life and brought you back into existence as an undead monster?

  “You,” he spluttered at last, winning about negative ten points for originality.

  “Let’s skip the shocked disbelief,” she sighed, “I’m in no mood for it. I came to see you because I think you’re finally starting to understand your place in the world, is that right?” she moved into the room on footsteps that barely seemed to touch the floor, gliding more than walking like she was made of everything reptilian and all things dead.

  “I’m still working on that,” Reggie said slowly, still staring at her. She was behind him then. Just behind him, still walking, speaking with a tone that sounded almost like she was humming. Reggie hadn’t seen her move, preternatural senses or not. She’d just disappeared from sight and emerged elsewhere at the same moment.

  “Do you know why I chose to sire you?” she asked.

  Reggie spun around and sort of spasmed, never having been one to deal with surprises well and, certainly, not now of all times. His heart would’ve been racing if it still beat at all, but his sire just looked at him with unbroken amusement.

  “I don’t know. Boredom. Curiosity? You wanted to see what would happen.”

  She frowned at that. “Well obviously, but you can be more specific.”

  “Would you just tell me?” Reggie sighed. “I’m so fucking tired of…all this. This bullshit. All the knots and hitches everywhere, slowing me down, getting in my way, sealing me off from necessary information. Just tell me, for once.”

  His sire’s face fell, and she sighed back at him.

  “You’re no fun. Young ones like you, always in such a rush. Fine. There’s something terribly wrong with this world, isn’t it?”

  Reggie met her gaze, nodded. “We were fine. We were free, then the elves—” she started laughing, stunning him into a moment of silence. “...What?”

  “I was alive back before the elves and System came here,” she told him, “and we were not free. In fact, the elves treat us better than we did each other. That ìràwà woman you know, Ajoke? People like her were our property. Owned, beaten, raped, killed. If you want to find a moral high ground in our history, you can save yourself the search. There isn’t one.”

  That gave Reggie pause. For a single moment.

  “Okay, yeah, that makes sense.”

  She eyed him. “You’re not surprised?”

  “Uh, not really? People are dicks.”

  His sire giggled.

  “I do so like turning new people,” she hummed, “they have such interesting ways of seeing the world. Even without making new Lineages.”

  “I’m a new Lineage?”

  She ignored his question.

  “Do you think the whole world is your enemy?”

  “More or less,” he shrugged, “because it is.”

  She nodded. “The unions say they want to eat the rich. You’ve heard that?”

  “I have.”

  “Eat the rich,” she echoed, “funny saying. Good though, isn’t it? Sort of primal. Intense. Gets across exactly what it wants to. Do you want to eat the rich?”

  Reggie thought about that. “Not much difference between them and everyone else, is there?”

  She smiled. “No, I suppose there isn’t. Not for you.”

  “A lot of people might die in Lorwick because of what I did,” Reggie continued. It hit him then, hit him hard and cold and constant like an avalanche crushing him against the floor.

  “Actions have consequences,” his sire told him. “Regret it?”

  Reggie thought about that.

  “The vampires will be in danger. That’s a step towards progress, a chance at least.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she pointed out.

  “...Yes, I regret it. I…I got angry. I got people killed because of it, probably. I overwrote someone’s freedom and turned him into a…fucking slave.”

  “Vampires often kill people. We almost always enslave them. It’s in our nature.”

  “Why did you make me one?” he snapped. There were tears on his cheek, except not really. Blood. Reggie’s body did like reminding him what he was, didn’t it?

  “Because I don’t like elves,” she said, “and I remember a time when they weren’t crushing humanity beneath their boot, when we had our own problems and were free to do our own evils.”

  “We,” Reggie frowned, “you still consider yourself a human?”

  She smiled. “An interesting slip. Regardless, I don’t like the world and want to see it disrupted. Humans can’t do that. Too many rules, too much hesitation. One monster can do things a million heroes can’t.”

  Reggie didn’t say anything. He was thinking again, looking back to the things he’d done in Lorwick. Regrets? Yeah, he had regrets. Working with the union. Falling for their tricks, letting himself be wasted on pointless compromise.

  “I’m a monster now?” he breathed, because try as he might Reggie just couldn’t muster any guilt for what he’d done in that alley.

  “Sure.” His sire shrugged. “Thousands of years have passed since I was turned, Reggie. I don’t really care what a monster is. Mostly it’s just a word. Anyone can be one if they want. And monsters get things done.”

  She wasn’t wrong. Eat the rich, that’s what the unions had said. Eat the rich.

  Well, Reggie was going to eat.