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Another sip, tiny hemoglobin hit sparking bright across her palate and up behind her eyes, making her already-pixilated pupils go click, bang, zoom. And starting to smile in spite of herself, with a brief black-light flash of teeth; studying her mark a little more closely from across the crowd room, and seeing a big, black man in a big, black, button-down suit, too-careful attempts at “hipness” screaming out from his mini-dreaded scalp on down. Straightening those press conference-ready little steel-rimmed specs as he repeated, slowly:

“So . . . she’s ‘hot’. For me.”

Weighing the word, with its single unlikely syllable, as carefully as if it were some unfamiliar new scientific term. While Flynn laughed out loud like the big, sloppy-cute dolt he still was, almost forty years after Elder’d sucked him to death on the woodsmoke-scented Malibu sands. And assured Mr. Suit right on back, with a twinkle in his red-tinged eyes—

“Oh yeah, seriously. And Elder? She, I mean, she’s . . . ”

. . . the fuckin’ living end.

Later, in Elder’s private elevator—Tank-bound, with the scientist (his name had proved to be Darnell) still playing it strictly on the wide-eyed tip: Poor, boring, office-bred me, cut hopelessly adrift against the likes of exotic, downtown-dangerous you. Unlucky for him, in context, that it was only a stance; his self-delusion meant the shock of being turned would be severe, no matter how Elder chose to do it—fast or slow, sidelong or straight-on. Gentle, reassuring. Or, maybe—

—not.

“I don’t suppose I’m up to the kind of conversation you’re used to,” Scientist Darnell allowed. To which Elder replied, without pretense at preamble:

“Actually, I was hoping you could enlighten me about something. You’re going to be using string theory on the new G-Class Interplanetary, right?”

“ . . . right.”

“And how does that work, exactly?”

Darnell double-took; Elder just watched, waiting. Then started her smile sharpening, just a bit, as she saw him really see her for the first real time—assess her the way he’d judge any other unknown quantity, plunge past the “obvious” distractions of her pale, fragile, human veneer to solve for x. And get the barest hint, here and there, of some far older, less recognizable equation.

“That . . . would take a really long time to explain,” he said, at last.

The elevator touched ground, clicked in. Elder leaned to key her access code, pumping out a whiff of vampire perfume to make Darnell shiver: Morgue-cold, pheremone-choked. A black rose’s poisoned pollen.

“Really,” she repeated. And showed him her fangs.

Tightness in the chest. Tightness at the fly. And Elder’s glacial meltwater gaze, suddenly impossible to elude. Her little hand on his, claws sliding flick-quick to puncture his pulse on one bright flash of pain, one hot gout painting both their palms arterial red as he shuddered and jerked ridiculously in place, too caught even to gasp.

Six feet plus of gym-sleek bulk, all straining muscle and hammering, hemorrhaging tissue. But Elder already had him bent back over her knee by the throat, off-center-helpless as a child: Draining him quick and hard, and watching the Tank’s apparently “empty” dance-floor fill up with gyrating bodies through his dimming eyes as the change took effect, rocketing him irreversibly towards immortality. And feeling the Tank’s sound-system set her solar plexus spinning like some B-Movie mad scientist’s hoary Hypno-Wheel, a different beat spiraling outward through every knotted, venom-flooded limb—while three centuries’ worth of musical interplay clicked simultaneously by inside her head, lines piled one upon the other, like archaeological layers—

She’s sold her rod, she’s sold her reel

She’s sold her only spinning-wheel

To buy her lad a sword of steel—

Her Johnny, who’s gone for a soldier . . .

O believe me, if all those endearing young charms

That I gaze on so fondly today

Were to melt in an hour and fleet in my arms . . .

Gimme a pigsfoot and a bottle of beer

Get me gay, I don’t care

Get all your razors and your guns

We gonna be wrasslin when the wagon comes . . .

It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it

Any old way you choose it . . .