Page 95 of Red Masquerade

“Forgive me if I’m being too forward,” I said.

He waved his hand, as if to push the worry away. Taking another pull on his cigarette. Always smoking, always chasing the high of that smoke.

“Do you regret it?”

Exhaling that smoke again, a cloud of white between us, the scent of tobacco permeating the air.

“I regret that I had not asked for it yet,” he said. “But I would have, eventually. And I regret that Séra had to come to terms with what she’d done.”

“You love her.”

He nodded.

“Is she Made, too?”

He gave me a look. “Did Vince not tell you anything?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t gotten much of a chance to ask.

His brow arched, then he continued. “She’s Born. She had family in the south. Louisiana. And some in France, I believe.”

“What about you?” It felt dangerous to ask these questions, prying into the life of a vampire who I did not yet know very well.

That muscle in his jaw ticked again. “They don’t live far.”

“Do they know?”

He shook his head, breathing in against the cigarette again. Putting it out against the ashtray. Lighting another.

I couldn’t imagine—couldn’t imagine such a strange existence as it is, but if I had to live amongst my human family in the meantime, to keep a secret like that from Flora, I’d lose my mind. Though I suppose I’d already altered all our lives, in a way. My family wouldn’t see me again, and already a distance was springing up between me and Flora.

Sinclair sighed. He turned to me. “What else? I know that’s not all that’s bouncing around in your head.”

I bit my lip. I had so many questions, and I wasn’t sure if Vince wasableto answer them all. “Where do vampires come from then?” I asked.

“If I knew, then I’d have the secrets to the world.” He gave me a tight smile, then shrugged. “We came about as any other species, probably. Though I suppose the only thing remarkable about us, besides our strengths and our extended lifetimes, is that we can infect others, like humans, and bring them to ‘our side,’ as it were.”

“Extended lifetime?” Those were the words that Ihad caught on.

“Yes. We live much longer than our human counterparts. All of us in this house are young. We’re still considered fledglings by some, and will be for a few decades. We can live to many hundreds of years, if the histories are to be believed.” His eyes flicked to the book discarded on the table, then back to me.

“But surely there’s a first vampire? An Adam and Eve sort of thing?” It was difficult to wrap my head around the fact that vampires had been around for centuries, and no one knew.

Or, rather, the stories of them had been disregarded as just that—stories.

Sinclair looked at me directly, an immense weight in his stare. “Do you believe in God, Helena?”

I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable at the question. Swallowing, “I don’t know.”

How could I believe when everything I knew was being flipped on its head? It was the furthest thing from my mind, believing in benevolence, when my brother wanted to wrap his fist around my throat; when monsters werereal.

“Many of us believe that we come from the damned,” he said. “That when Lucifer fell, so did his companions, and from those fallen, we were Born, millennia ago. But what do we know? New animal species seem to be discovered all the time in jungles and in deep waters. Are they newly created, dropped here on Earth in a fit of spontaneity? Or have they been here all along?”

“And what do you think?”

Sinclair grew quiet, his mind churning. With his silence, I knew it was a subject he had thought on a lot, perhaps in evening-long sessions, mulling over his species.

Whywere things the way they were? Why was I stuck on one path, if I wanted to go another? What was so fundamentally different between me and my brother that he was allowed to raise a hand at me, and I was supposed to allow it? What about my sex made me inherently one step below a man?