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The words hang in the air between us, absurd and impossible. I stare at him, waiting for the punchline, but his expression remains earnest.

“I’m not your son,” I say flatly.

“I beg to differ.” He steps closer, his movements fluid and precise. “Your transition at thirty-five. Your extraordinary strength for a newborn vampire. You’re the product of an ancient, powerful bloodline.” He reaches out, his fingers hovering just above my face though not touching it. “And of course, there are the physical similarities. Your mother’s coloring, perhaps, but my features. My jawline. My eyes….my hunger.”

I turn my face away from his hand. “My parents were Michael and Eleanor Callahan,” I say through gritted teeth. “Decent, loving people who raised me to be nothing like you.”

“Ah, yes. Them Callahans.” Dmitri circles the gurney slowly, each step measured. “Childless. Desperate. So grateful when the adoption agency offered them a healthy three-year-old boy, no questions asked. They never knew what you really were, of course. That was the point of the experiment.”

“Experiment?” I repeat, dread coiling in my stomach.

Dmitri stops at the head of the gurney, looking down at me with something like pride. “Nature versus nurture. Would vampire nature assert itself even without knowledge or preparation? Would blood truly tell, even when raised by humans in complete ignorance of your heritage?” His smile widens. “And the answer, it seems, is yes. Blood always tells in the end.”

No. I can’t be related to this man, can’t be this monster’s son.

“You’re lying,” I say, but the conviction has drained from my voice.

“Am I?” Dmitri produces a small silver case from his jacket pocket. From it, he withdraws a yellowed photograph whichhe holds before my eyes. A woman holding an infant, her face young and beautiful despite the exhaustion evident in her eyes. “Your mother,” he says softly. “Natasha. She died shortly after this was taken. Childbirth can be difficult for our kind. Mentally. She couldn’t hack it; she hacked away at herself.”

I stare at the photograph, searching for any resemblance to the face I see in my mirror each morning. The shape of the eyes, perhaps. The line of the nose. But nothing conclusive, nothing that proves this isn’t an elaborate deception.

“Why?” I manage to ask. “Why give me up? Why monitor me from afar if I was your son?”

“Science,” Dmitri replies simply. “Knowledge. Our kind has existed for eons, but there is still so much we don’t understand about our own nature. Your life has been one long case study in the immutability of blood.” He returns the photograph to its case. “And I must say, the results have been fascinating.”

“You’ve been watching me my whole life,” I say, the realization washing over me in a wave of violated privacy. “Following me. Monitoring me.”

“Of course. Every milestone, every achievement, every failure. Your boxing career. Your marriage. Your military service. All of it collected and analyzed.” Dmitri’s expression softens slightly. “I’m proud of you, Victor. Despite your human upbringing, you’ve shown the strength and resilience of your true bloodline.”

A horrible thought occurs to me. “Catherine,” I say, her name barely audible. “You were monitoring our marriage? You didn’t?—?”

“An unfortunate necessity,” Dmitri interrupts. “You needed to be free of attachments, needed to be in Los Angeles for the next phase, to come home to us. Your wife’s death accomplished both.”

For a moment, the world goes white with rage. I strain against the restraints with every ounce of strength I possess, metal creaking under the pressure. “You murdered her,” I snarl, my voice unrecognizable even to myself. “You murdered my wife.”

“She washuman,” Dmitri says dismissively. “She would have died eventually. We merely accelerated the inevitable. These are tough lessons all vampires have to learn.”

“She was everything to me!”

“And yet here you are,” he observes, “already forming an attachment to another. To Lena Reid. Life continues, even for those like us who exist outside of it.”

At Lena’s name, a different kind of fear cuts through my rage. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”

“Nothing, yet.” Dmitri resumes his circling of the gurney. “She escaped our grasp during the unfortunate altercation at the Crimson Clover. Fled with Van Helsing and his little band of dissenters.” His mouth twists in distaste. “You were the consolation prize. Even though you yourself can’t open the gateway.”

“The gateway to where?” I ask tiredly.

“To our king. To the Red Realm.” Dmitri’s eyes take on a distant, almost dreamy quality. “The true homeland of our kind. A place where we need not hide what we are, need not restrain our true natures to accommodate human weakness. Where we don’t have to sit idly by and watch humanity bring out the worst in each other, watch this planet crash and burn.”

The madness in his voice is evident now, a zealot’s fervor. I think of the ritualized murders, all part of some deranged scheme to open a portal to another world.

“You’re insane,” I say quietly. “You murder,tortureinnocent people just so you can leave this world.”

Dmitri’s expression hardens. “I am a visionary. The humans’ time on this planet grows short. They poison the air, the water, the soil. They slaughter each other by the millions in their endless wars. The next century will see them destroy themselves completely. There is no turning back for them, they’ve dug their own graves and history will continue to repeat itself because no one ever learns. They are simply too dumb.” He leans closer. “We can survive them, Victor. We can return to our realm, rebuild our civilization there. But only if the gateway is opened. That’s the only way we can go in.”

“And for that, you need Lena,” I say, understanding dawning. “Because of her blood type. She’s AB negative, isn’t she?”

He grins, straightening up. “The rarest of the rare. And rarer still in a vampire. She would be the perfect final sacrifice. Perhaps even the key to opening the gateway permanently, so that we can come and go as we please.”