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More likely, they’d done it out of arrogance, trollishness, and an attempt to be intimidating, or even funny, and they’d run into a group of vampires with no patience for any of those things. Nick guessed, whoever did this, they had evenlessof a sense of humor for brazen members of Yi’s flock, given their entire neighborhood had recently been razed to the ground by those fucks.

So yeah, it wasn’t all that surprising that the humans who lived up here wouldn’t be anxious to talk about anything they might or might not have seen.

Nick didn’t blame them.

A full-blooded human didn’t tend to live up here at all unless they’d come to a certain cautious understanding about vampires. That didn’t mean some of them weren’t racists. Nick had zero doubt that some of them absolutely were. But most of them would have a more reality-based wariness when it came to posturing with the undead right to their faces.

There wouldn’t be a lot of cowboys among this bunch.

They might have even watched Yi’s people get taken down a notch with some element of satisfaction.Only outsiders would be this dumb,they would think to themselves.Only a fucking moron would do this now, with the vampire herds so angry and hot for blood.

Nick understood the apparent contradictions.

It was familiar, even from back when he’d been human himself.

The people huddled here, in this divided neighborhood on the edges of the Cauldron and the coven ghettos, might hate vampires themselves, but those damned vamps weretheirvampires to hate… not anyone else’s.

CHAPTER9

KNOCKING DOORS

Nick watchedyet another door start to close in their faces.

Morley hadn’t even managed to get out a question that time, or flash his badge.

The woman scowling at them from one edge of the metal panel barely took in the detective’s face before she seemed to make up her mind that she wanted nothing to do with any of it. She glared at Morley with beady, half-glazed eyes that suggested she hadn’t been asleep when they knocked, but more likely doing crazz, the current drug of the day.

Nick knew from the vamps he fought with, that most human feed-bags the I.S.F. sent to leashed vamps now did the drug. It was especially popular with those addicted to certain forms of online betting. Unsurprisingly, the betting wasalsoillegal, and involved losers having to subject themselves to humiliating displays of one kind or another, live, on an underground media feed. Sometimes those displays even included torture, or self-mutilation. The human medical emergency centers had recently seen an uptick of both things.

Game betting had become a disease in the New York Protected Area.

People got addicted to the high of it, and the slim chance they might come out rich, or famous, or both, even as the stakes grew more and more sadistic.

Crazz made them even more likely to take those bets.

Now humans inhaled the lilac-colored powderbeforethey bet on the games, and when they lost, the crazz made the penalties for losing more bearable, apparently––but also more likely that they’d seriously injure themselves. Either because the pain hurt less, or they didn’t remember eating their own shit, or masturbating in front of a few million people, or cutting off an ear, or a finger, or part of their own face, or whatever the game runner made them do, players were more likely to go too far.

As to whether this woman was one of those, Nick didn’t really want to know.

He likely wouldn’t be able to help her, even if she was.

This whole neighborhood was pretty fucking depressing, if Nick were being honest.

But really, it made sense, given the location, and despite their being only about five blocks from the furthest edge of the gated, high-security perimeter of the River of Gold. Only the very poor and very desperate of humanity would choose to live this close to a vampire ghetto.

The woman clearly hadn’t seen Nick, because she visibly jumped when Nick spoke.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” he rumbled out in a low growl.

She stopped cold, caught by the thrall in his voice, the timbre that pulled her closer to his vampire blood. She gripped the door in white knuckles where she’d already stopped closing it, and now the metal panel framed her face, right where her mouth fell open, fish-like.

She wasn’t gasping for air, but her pupils dilated even more.

Her breathing grew into shallow pants.

Luckily for Nick, the drugs didn’t negate the thrall; they strengthened it.

A harder satisfaction warmed Nick’s gut. “That’s right,” he purred at the un-showered and glassy-eyed human. “You might want to cooperate with us willingly, ma’am, or I might just feel the need to––”