Page 7 of A Steeping of Blood (Blood and Tea #2)

“I know nothing else, I swear,” Coll said. He tried for a feeble smile. “Sha—shall we go get warm, then?”

There was more to his answer. Jin heard the however in his tone, heard the way he was abusing Jin’s kindness, and so, his patience shriveled into the cold again.

Jin sighed and rose, glancing back over his shoulder when he heard a sound at the door to the schoolroom, instinctively concerned Arthie had found him. But Arthie had her ways, and Jin knew all of them. He glanced over his shoulder again.

Almost all of them, anyway.

The fright returned to the courier’s face, nothing compared to the ugliness thrashing inside Jin. A writhing thing of rage and pain, betrayal and the need to do something . He picked up his umbrella, twirled it. He waited. One beat, two. Coll remained silent.

Jin slammed the umbrella into Coll’s foot.

There was a sickening crunch before the courier screamed.

He could very nearly hear Flick’s gasp. That was positively diabolical!

she would say if she were here, but she wasn’t here to keep him tame.

And Coll worked for the EJC, the shipping conglomerate working side by side with the empire, stealing land, resources, and artifacts, uncaring for the ruin they left in their wake.

Pity was hard to scrounge.

Jin bent to meet Coll’s eyes. “I heard this was the same foot you used to kick your daughter when she didn’t dance to your tune.

Oh, don’t look so surprised. I’m a Casimir, Coll.

Can’t expect me not to know. Is that why you’re back with Mummy?

Because your wife had enough?” He moved his umbrella to the man’s other foot, resting the point over his laces. “Care for another?”

It was a question he would ask patrons in Spindrift with a pot of tea in his hand.

“No! Please, no, Mr. Casimir!” Coll shouted.

“After the woman didn’t show, I took the package to the address myself, and it was empty, yeah?

Completely empty. A big old warehouse with nothing in it?

I thought, hmm, that’s bonkers. It looked like they left in a hurry too.

Rubbish everywhere. But I wanted to get paid, so I looked around and just when I gave up, I found a scrap of paper on the floor with another address. ”

To empty out an entire warehouse and move locations was strange, unless one was in danger of being caught, unless…

the ledger , the Ram’s personal agenda where she recorded her every move, from names to transactions.

It was missing for far longer than Jin and the others had taken possession of it.

Of course she would be making strides to change locations and distract from whatever her own notes might reveal.

Jin could only hope that didn’t extend to his parents.

“And?” he asked.

“It was the address to their new place. They’re—they’re doing something in there. Something bad.”

Jin paused. “In where?”

“I heard crying. No, no. What’s the word—keening? I heard keening,” he continued, gasping along the way. “Like the people inside were in pain. That’s how I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there.”

The missing vampires? Jin didn’t know, so he glanced to his right before he caught himself. He had been looking for Arthie. To share a glance in which they would have an entire, wordless conversation.

He ignored the pang in his chest.

“Was it a laboratory?” Jin asked.

Coll shook his head in tiny spasms. “It was a—an EJC shipping warehouse.”

Jin’s hope spiraled again. He forced his thoughts afloat to keep them from drowning.

Shipping warehouses didn’t store, they shipped. There wasn’t room for storage when White Roaring’s ports were so busy, cargo moving in and out within days, sometimes hours.

If Coll delivered liquid silver to a shipping warehouse, that meant… that meant it was being sent out of White Roaring.

“Are you certain it was a shipping warehouse?” Jin asked.

Coll nodded. “I saw them loading a container and coming back with empty carts. They were shipping all right.”

Jin bit the inside of his cheek. It was no wonder he hadn’t found his parents. They weren’t even here . Ettenia might not have been large, but he could count on one hand the number of times he’d left White Roaring.

“Where are the goods being shipped? What city?” Jin asked.

The courier was rocking back and forth as tears streaked down his freckled face.

There was a time when a sight like this would stir pity and sympathy.

That was before Spindrift was burned to the ground, before he’d seen death sweep across a room, before he’d woken up in a pool of his own blood and the streets had turned angry.

Jin set the umbrella on the man’s foot once again.

“I don’t know where! Delivering the silver was the extent of my job, a’right?”

Just as Jin knew that was the extent of what he’d get out of the courier.

“Good man.” Jin circled behind Coll, slicing a knife through the ropes binding his wrists. “Much obliged.”

Jin picked up his things from the dusty table he’d dragged over to their interrogation area.

Coll wasn’t the first one he’d bound to a chair in his search for his parents.

And there were no limits to what he would do to find them.

When Jin was dying and Matteo had come asking if he wanted to be turned, Arthie following swiftly after to complete the deed, Jin had only agreed because of his parents.

And Arthie. Because she needs me , said a voice. He buried it deep.

Coll looked up at him. “What about my foot?”

“What about it?” Jin asked. “You’ve got another, haven’t you? And I’m getting hungry now, so I suggest you leave.”

Coll stood on trembling legs with a muffled cry. He took a single, hobbling step and turned back to Jin. “I—”

Jin bared his fangs.

It was the cure Coll needed. He sprinted with the vigor of a man half his age and with two working legs, huffing out the door without a backward glance.

And then Jin was alone.

“Now what, sister?” he asked in the silence.

Arthie didn’t reply.

He sighed. He almost wished, just then, that she would outsmart him as she always did and step through the doors with that devilish glint in her eyes.

He ran his tongue along the points of his fangs, and a thought he’d been avoiding snuck through the noise in his head once more: What did Flick think of him?

She had been raised with a strong dislike for vampires.

She was the daughter of the woman weaponizing vampires.

No. That was unfair to Flick. It was why she’d chosen a name of her own.

To be her own person, to draw some semblance of a divide between herself and her mother.

Jin didn’t think she’d fully realized why herself.

If his mother was both head of the criminal EJC and monarch of the colonizing monstrosity otherwise known as home, he’d probably do the same.

Flick! That was it. She was the one he needed.

Flick had been tasked with protecting the Ram’s ledger that night.

If there was any way to find out which city the silver was being sent to and where his parents were being kept, it was there.

There was always the chance the Ram might have moved them, but if Coll could sleuth and find what he needed, Jin could do the same.

He might not know what Flick thought of him, but there was only one way to find out.

He slid his tinted specs over his eyes and popped his collar, opening up his umbrella as he stepped out into the evening fog. He kept his head low, ignoring the mobs.

“To the Athereum!” people were yelling.

“Join our cause, lad,” someone shouted at him.

Jin pretended not to hear. Someone who should not be in possession of a machete was waving it around, and Jin narrowly avoided a slice through his sleeve.

Beside him, a woman pumped a wooden stake in the air.

Jin kept his mouth closed and his fangs out of view, surprised by a sudden rupture of fear in his veins.

He could die for no fault of his own. He could die because of a description of what he was. He could die because of someone’s misplaced anger, because they believed a lie, and it was a harrowing thought indeed.