Page 43 of Thrall
“A helping hand straight into that brat’s jaws?” L. Roman said.
“Well,” Hiro said, “that’s some kind of conclusion, isn’t it?”
“I’m not joking,” L. Roman said.
“Neither am I.” And abruptly, Hiro really wasn’t joking anymore. For the first time, Lucy saw a shadow cross his youthful face. The barest hint of his age. “At least they’ll go with eyes open. Isn’t that better than those poor girls got?”
The silent standoff that followed went on long enough that Lucy’s back foot slid a little closer to the door. She still felt reasonably sure that no one here wanted to hurt her—but she didn’t want to be here if they decided to hurt each other, either. Finally, Hiro uncoiled.
“I didn’t mean to go behind your back.” He really did have a poetic lilt to his voice. “But this place has been good to me. I wanted to leave it with a farewell gift, of sorts.”
L. Roman’s anger shifted into something remarkably sulky. Hiro laughed. “Goodness, what a spectacle. Have you at least introduced yourself to our new friend, or have we given her a preview of our dinner table conversations before we even shared basic pleasantries?”
“She’s not a friend,” L. Roman said. “She’s the little prince’s next meal.”
“With that attitude, she will be.” Hiro’s smile gentled as he turned back to Lucy. “Forgive our manners, dear. Hiromasa Minamoto. The disagreeable one is Laurentius of Rome. And I assume you don’t go by caller number thirty-two?”
“I…Lucy,” she managed. Her brain was moving at a crawl, and her tongue was moving even slower. “And by ‘Rome,’ you mean—”
“Laurentius of the Roman Empire, to be more exact,” Hiro said. “Had you guessed already, with that ridiculous alias of his? ‘L. Roman.’ You won’t be surprised to hear that he’s not a man of much flair.”
“I thought we weren’t subjecting her to our dinner table conversations,” Laurentius of Rome said moodily.
Lucy shifted her weight under the renewed force of Laurentius’s annoyance. Hiro lightly patted her shoulder. “Oh, don’t worry, he’s not as threatening as he feels. When you’re as old as he is, every baby vampire in a five-mile radius can sense you coming—I’m not surprised that even a thrall can feel it. He won’t actually do anything with all that displeasure. He’ll just glower about it.”
Lucy smiled weakly, and didn’t point out that Hiro felt nearly as old. “So you two…work here.”
“That’s my name on the door, isn’t it?” Laurentius said.
“She didn’t mean any offense, beloved,” Hiro said. “This time last week, she didn’t believe vampires were real. Now there’s six of them on one campus. That’s what you meant, right, Lucy?”
“…Yes,” Lucy said, taken aback. Actually, it had been what she was thinking almost word for word.
“Ah, sorry about that,” Hiro said. “You have particularly loud thoughts, no offense. But anyway—there’s a bit of a location bias here, believe it or not. College campuses have lots of dark offices and windowless rooms. Usually some kind of subterranean system for steam heating. No one’s terribly interested in what you do outside of academia. And you can usually count on employment records to switch to a new system every few decades. Laurentius here is about to celebrate his tenth work anniversary—for the third time. It’s not the worst place for our kind to be.”
Lucy nodded, taking everything in.Tryingto take everything in, anyway. “So you were here before Vanya.”
“Correct,” Laurentius said, biting hard against thet. “And it should have been very clear to him that this campus was already spoken for. But Ivan is a child. And he has a child’s appetite.”
“Quite the old-fashioned appetite, too,” Hiro said. “You don’t usually see someone so young hunting out in the open like this.”
“You don’t?” Lucy said. It seemed to Lucy to be one of the few things one could count on, where a vampire was concerned.
“Hunting is fun, if you’re into that sort of thing,” Hiro said. “But it’s messy. It creates a paper trail, especially in this lovely little surveillance age we’ve found ourselves in. And why go out and hustle for your next meal when there’s a whole world on the internet full of fantasists dying to be bitten by a vampire? Kids these days will payyouto feed from them. Why risk getting caught?”
“And not that he cares,” Laurentius added. “But when you share your territory with others, hunting puts a target on their backs as well. I’ve survived four angry mobs in my lifetime. I’m not anxious to summon a fifth. That’s why we’re leaving, as soon as the semester is over. He’s getting bolder. And we don’t want to suffer the consequences alongside him.”
“But this is your territory, isn’t it?” Lucy said. “You’re older than him. You can’t chase him off?”
“My feelings exactly.” Hiro’s laugh wasn’t so musical that time. “Itisour territory. I’m not keen to give it up to some gluttonous child. But brute strength is the province of young men, even for vampires. My beloved here wouldn’t be a match for him. Not with his old vegetarian bones.”
“A vampire of my age doesn’t have much of an appetite,” Laurentius said, as if to head off any accusations of altruism. “Rabbits suit my purposes fine. Significantly less small talk involved than with Hiro’s customers.”
The rabbit corpses were his. One question mark explained, at least. “So you feed from humans?” Lucy said to Hiro. “Can’t you stop him?”
“Oh, I’m a lover, not a fighter,” Hiro said. “Even becoming nature’s perfect killing machine didn’t change that.”
“Even if we were a match for him, it wouldn’t be within our power to evict him. Bureaucratically speaking, that is,” Laurentius said tartly. “Our boy has an advocate.”
