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Now it changes almost nightly. Rooms taken like tokens from her kills, their doorways rendered powerless by death, their contents hers to take. Like this green dress, this purse of coins.

That night, home is a manse that belonged to a wealthy merchant with a long-dead wife, a soft bed, and heavy curtains. Sabine is halfway there, thinking of the well-stuffed mattress, the way she’ll sprawl across it, when three men stumble out into the road.

Three men, linked together like old friends, a half-drunk bottle passing from hand to hand. And even though Sabine prefers the lives of women, can still taste the girl’s blood on her tongue, she is not one to waste an opportunity. She falls in step behind them, hunger knocking in her chest.

That is the maddening thing about the hunger: it is always there.

It quiets, or grows loud, varies in scope, in scale, but never disappears. She drinks as though dying of thirst, but she might as well be a barrel shot through with holes. Incapable of being filled. The life leaks right out again. The hunger redoubles in its wake. It clings to her, even in sleep.

Her dreams are vivid, bloody things.

Sometimes she wakes with her teeth sunk into her forearm, mouth filling with the rotting iron tang, but her own blood seems to hold no nourishment. Nothing but a memory, a ghost of someone else’s taste.

Ahead, the three men turn down a narrow road.

And so does she.

One begins a song, and the others take it up.

Their steps ricochet against the stones.

Their voices echo on the alley walls. They make so much noise, and she makes none, and so they do not notice her.

As she follows, she amuses herself by guessing how the next few minutes will unfold.

Perhaps she will kill them all. Perhaps she won’t.

Perhaps she will get their attention, just to see what they will do.

She could wait until they separate, and take them one by one, or simply trail behind them like a ghost, savoring the knowledge that their lives are hers to end.

Sabine is still deciding, when an odd thing happens.

One man slows and peels away, fumbling with the front of his trousers, overcome by the sudden need to piss. He half stumbles to the nearest wall and braces himself, groaning in relief as urine splashes on the stones.

But there is nothing odd in that.

No, it is the other two.

As Sabine watches, one of them sheds his inebriated swagger, easy as a body shedding layers in the heat, revealing a sober stride, a different breed of boldness.

Between one step and the next, he is transformed.

His companion doesn’t notice, but she does.

Watches, rapt, as the man runs a hand through his loose curls, then turns toward his drunk compatriot, and sinks his teeth into his throat.

She stiffens in disbelief. Delight.

Sabine, who has only once been the victim of such an act, and ever after the assailant, now finds herself spectator. Witness to the intimacy of the embrace, the head bent low, the mouth against the curve of skin, the arms that fold, viselike, around the man’s body, the gasping absence of a scream.

In an instant, the singing dies, the smell of piss overtaken by the scent of blood.

She cannot taste the life, but she can see it fleeing, the expression slipping with the color from his face.

She feels a phantom pain, as if she’s the one whose heart is failing.

A phantom pleasure, too, her own mouth aching as the stranger drinks, and drinks, and drinks.

The third man remains oblivious, still humming as he puts himself away, fastens his trousers and turns back toward his companions.

The melody dies on his lips. He is too drunk to understand the scene in front of him, but fear is a primal thing.

It slicks the air around him as he stumbles back, twists round, movements made slow and sloppy by the night’s festivities.

He staggers, and she can hear his heart thudding with a single, urgent word.

Away. Away. Away. Away.

The man does not give chase, so she does, or means to, but she has hardly moved when another gets there first.

A woman.

She peels away from the alley wall, like a shadow freed from the surrounding night, her skin dark, her hair darker still. Sabine doesn’t know how she didn’t see her before, but now that she has, she cannot look away.

The woman is doll-like, small and curved, with jet-black eyes and hair that floats around her face, a halo of tight curls.

She steps into the third man’s path as he stumbles for a second time, goes down, and as he struggles to his feet she catches him, draws him up like a lover, her expression lovely, gentle, sweet.

“What’s wrong?” she asks, the scent of violence heavy on the air as he clutches at her and stammers out, “Diablo.”

Her face, contorting with concern as she looks past him. At the first man, still feasting on his friend. And then past him still, at her. Sabine. The woman’s eyes are bright with mischief as she says, “But sir, there are no devils here.”

Her tone is so earnest that for a second, his fear seems to fumble, gives way to confusion, even hope, as he turns to follow her gaze. Sees what the woman sees. Opens his mouth to scream. But it’s too late. She has already torn open his throat. Blood courses in a bright, metallic stream.

Sabine watches the woman drink until the sound of a body falling, dead weight against the cobblestones, tears her gaze away. The man stands over the drunkard’s corpse, wiping an arm across his face as his dark eyes land squarely on Sabine.

His mouth draws into a bloodstained smirk, and for the first time in ten years, Sabine feels herself retreat.

A step—only a step—her limbs moving before her mind, instinct taking hold before she thinks to smother it.

But in that step, he moves, blocking the alley’s mouth as if she means to flee.

As if the thing washing over her is fear, instead of fascination.

Sabine bristles at the thought.

She turns back in time to see the woman vanish, the body in her arms dropping lifeless to the street. By the time it hits the ground, the woman has reappeared, her face now inches from Sabine’s, her black eyes glowing faintly, like windowpanes at night.

“Hello, little shadow.” Her voice is soft, and strangely gentle, that same unnerving sweetness she directed at the man, so at odds with the manic gleam, the sharpness of her teeth.

“Where have you been?” she coos, her lips stained dark with blood—in that moment Sabine wants to kiss her, just to taste it. And even though she can hear the minds of others, when their thoughts are loud enough, she is still shocked when the woman leans close and whispers, “Go ahead.”

Sabine stiffens, and the woman laughs, a bright and airy sound.

“Does she speak?” asks the man, his voice a low rumble, like far-off thunder, and yet it carries, reaches Sabine and rolls right over her.

Before the woman can say anything, she turns toward him and answers for herself. “She does.”

“Oh, Hector.” The woman’s hand trails between her shoulders, a touch that makes her shiver. “Can I keep her?”

Sabine prickles. She was thrown by their appearance, but she will not let herself be tossed around. “I am not a pet.”

“No,” says the man. Hector. “You are not. Come, Renata.”

The woman pouts a little. But she doesn’t leave. Instead, she reaches out and touches Sabine’s face, cool fingers cupping her cheek, and to Sabine’s horror, her body betrays her once again, this time by leaning in. Those night-sky eyes, black and flecked with stars, fix on her, and hold.

“Not yet, perhaps,” she says. “But I can taste your longing.”

Sabine wants to knock her hand away, to tell her she’s wrong, that the only longing she feels is that relentless hunger, a need for blood, and nothing else.

But it would be a lie. And Sabine knows that this stranger can feel the truth, messy as it is.

That she is glad—glad her husband is dead.

Glad he can no longer storm her bed, her body, glad she does not have to fear a seed, a growing womb, a child.

Glad that she is free of Andrés, and his family, free of that old life, free of age, and illness.

But sometimes, when Sabine is sinking into sleep, or waking from it, she skirts a dream, a life where she did not leave León alone that night. And she fears she left something important in the darkened shop.

That sometimes, when she walks at night, Sabine imagines the widow at her side.

And she feels a deep, simmering rage, because it does not seem fair that the only two choices she was given were to be alive and bound, or alone and dead.

And no matter how much life she drinks, it does not seem to touch that other thirst, that want for company, and—

The woman brushes her lips against Sabine’s.

A ghost of a kiss, carrying the taste of blood, the air of promise.

A ghost of a kiss, and yet, the first one she has ever welcomed—wanted—and if she had a pulse, it would be racing. Even still, something quickens in her, and she feels herself lean closer, hungry for—

“Renata,” calls the man again, and just like that, the mouth is gone, she is gone, Sabine left standing there, alone again, licking the blood from her lips as Renata slides her arm through Hector’s, lays her head against his shoulder. They stroll down the alley. Away from her.

Sabine feels the night tip. The ground no longer steady.

Wait, she thinks as they reach the mouth of the alley. Renata looks back over her shoulder, her smile crooking like a finger.

And Sabine follows.